This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American We often view moral judgments with suspicion ...

New research suggests that the human mind is disturbingly flexible about moral judgments. An international team led by UCLA anthropology professor Daniel Fessler studied members of seven disparate ...

Imagine a CEO wants to profit from a venture that, by the way, involves emitting pollution toxic to the environment, but she doesn’t care because the goal is profit. Is the CEO intentionally harming ...

North Augusta mother Debra Harrell, who had let her nine-year-old child play at a nearby park while working, was recently arrested. Who is able to condemn this mother? On what grounds? Psychologists ...

Moral rules are rigid. The 10 Commandments of the Bible’s Old Testament, for example, include unambiguous prohibitions, such as, “Thou shalt not kill.” Similarly, Kant’s categorical imperative is ...

Recent research on morality (e.g., studying moral reasoning with trolley dilemma, footbridge dilemma, or the issues of intention vs. outcome) or on its neurological bases has added new literature in ...

New research in Psychological Science has found that the physical notion of cleanliness significantly reduces the severity of moral judgments, showing that intuition, rather than deliberate reasoning ...

Moral dilemmas—balancing one right action against another—are a ubiquitous feature of 21st-century life. However unavoidable, though, they are not unique to our modern age. The challenge of ...

Our lives are surprisingly packed with morally loaded experiences. We see others behaving badly (or well), and we behave well (or badly) ourselves. In a new study, researchers used a smartphone app to ...

The American Enterprise Institute celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. To commemorate the occasion, The American will periodically revisit some of its scholars’ books and republish some of their ...