With the promulgation of the Autonomous Driving Act in summer 2021, Germany took the worldwide lead on regulating self-driving cars. This Article discusses the (non-)regulation of moral dilemmas in this act. To this end, it clarifies the role of the so-called trolley problem, which influenced the report of the German Ethics Commission that paved the way for this act in particular and the relationship between philosophical reasoning, empirical studies, and the law in general. By introducing the international legal community to the (non-)regulation of moral dilemmas in the German act, the Article critically reviews the German goal, which is to serve as a European and international role model. This will be preceded by a discussion as to why self-driving cars should be allowed as well as the moral dilemmas they cause which should be regulated by the law.

Conventional monotheist religious believers commonly believe that God will sometimes assist them, will be on their side. God, in other words, they believe, is an asset. Conceptually an asset is anything (such as a person or an object) that can assist one, something that is prima facie good to possess or to have on one's side, that is likely to or can assist one to make one's life go better, overall. Having assets can have weighty implications, including moral ones. I argue that here the implications are quite surprising, and indeed paradoxical. In particular, the religious will have in certain circumstances good reasons, and sometimes even moral obligations, to give up their interests for those who lack such assets, namely secular non-believers. The claim is not that religious people actually see things in this way but that, normatively, given their beliefs, many of them should, in the sense of the subjective ‘ought’. This can be relevant both in this world and concerning the next. Moreover, in many situations plausible religious replies are not sufficient to block the move. This topic has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever been seriously analysed philosophically.

In the sacrificial moral dilemma task, participants have to morally judge an action that saves several lives at the cost of killing one person. According to the dual process corrective model of moral judgment suggested by Greene and collaborators (2001; 2004; 2008), cognitive control is necessary to override the intuitive, deontological force of the norm against killing and endorse the utilitarian perspective. However, a conflict model has been proposed more recently to account for part of the evidence in favor of dual process models in moral and social decision making. In this model, conflict, moral responses and reaction times arise from the interplay between individually variable motivational factors and objective parameters intrinsic to the choices offered. To further explore this model in the moral dilemma task, we confronted three different samples with a set of dilemmas representing an objective gradient of utilitarian pull, and collected data on moral judgment and on conflict in a 4-point scale. Collapsing all cases along the gradient, participants in each sample felt less conflicted on average when they gave extreme responses (1 or 4 in the UR scale). They felt less conflicted on average when responding to either the low- or the high-pull cases. The correlation between utilitarian responses and conflict was positive in the low-pull and negative in the high-pull cases. This pattern of data suggests that moral responses to sacrificial dilemmas are driven by decision conflict, which in turn depends on the interplay between an objective gradient of utilitarian pull and the moral motivations which regulate individual responsiveness to this gradient.

This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations are independent and operate in parallel, and so some scenarios elicit emotions prior to moral evaluations, some elicit moral evaluations prior to emotions, and some elicit them at the same time. Third, deontic evaluations depend on inferences, either unconscious intuitions or conscious reasoning. Fourth, human beliefs about what is, and isn’t, moral are neither complete nor consistent. The article marshals the evidence, which includes new studies, corroborating these principles, and discusses the relations between them and other current theories of moral reasoning.

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling the truth always and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What does telling a white lie signal about a person’s pro-social tendencies? To answer this question, we conducted a two-stage 2x2 experiment. In the first stage, we used a Deception Game to measure aversion to telling a Pareto white lie (i.e., a lie that helps both the liar and the listener), and aversion to telling an altruistic white lie (i.e., a lie that helps the listener at the expense of the liar). In the second stage we measured altruistic tendencies using a Dictator Game and cooperative tendencies using a Prisoner’s dilemma. We found three major results: (i) both altruism and cooperation are positively correlated with aversion to telling a Pareto white lie; (ii) both altruism and cooperation are negatively correlated with aversion to telling an altruistic white lie; (iii) men are more likely than women to tell an altruistic white lie, but not to tell a Pareto white lie. Our results shed light on the moral conflict between prosociality and truth-telling. In particular, the first finding suggests that a significant proportion of people have non-distributional notions of what the right thing to do is, irrespective of the economic consequences, they tell the truth, they cooperate, they share their money.

The CNI model of moral decision-making is a formal model that quantifies (1) sensitivity to consequences, (2) sensitivity to moral norms, and (3) general preference for inaction versus action in responses to moral dilemmas. Based on a critique of the CNI model’s conceptual assumptions, properties of the moral dilemmas for research using the CNI model, and the robustness of findings obtained with the CNI model against changes in model specifications, Baron and Goodwin (2020) dismissed the CNI model as a valid approach to study moral dilemma judgments. Here, we respond to their critique, showing that Baron and Goodwin’s dismissal of the CNI model is based on: (1) misunderstandings of key aspects of the model; (2) a conceptually problematic conflation of behavioral effects and explanatory mental constructs; (3) arguments that are inconsistent with empirical evidence; and (4) reanalyses that supposedly show inconsistent findings resulting from changes in model specifications, although the reported reanalyses did not actually use the CNI model and proper analyses with the CNI model yield consistent findings across model specifications. Although Baron and Goodwin’s critique reveals a need for greater precision in the description of the three model parameters and for greater attention to properties of individual dilemmas, the available evidence indicates that the CNI model is a valid, robust, and empirically sound approach to gaining deeper insights into the determinants of moral dilemma judgments, overcoming major limitations of the traditional approach that pits moral norms against consequences for the greater good (e.g., trolley dilemma).

The standard attribution of ought implies can rules out the possibility of Kantianism permitting the existence of moral dilemmas. Against this, I argue that Kantianism both can and should permit the existence of moral dilemmas. This new take on moral dilemmas should be of particular urgency to those hoping to radicalize Kant, I argue, because the work of oppression theorists shows that moral dilemmas are particularly likely to strike those who are already most vulnerable. The insights of oppression theory also suggest that the heretofore overlooked social and political implications of moral dilemmas are just as philosophically significant as the metaethical and ethical implications.

The moral foreign-language effect (M-FLE) translates into more utilitarian choices, even when given the option of self-sacrifice. We explore the M-FLE in 85 children, who were presented with seven moral dilemmas varying in utilitarianism, aversiveness, and whether they allowed the option of self-sacrifice; 42 answered to the dilemmas in their native language (Spanish), and 43 in a foreign language (English). Participants were more utilitarian and willing to sacrifice themselves when using their foreign language. Educational and developmental implications are discussed, especially in the context of bilingual education.

A sample of 641 participants were presented with four decision-making tasks during the first stages of the COVID–19 lockdown in Spain: The dictator game, framing problems, utilitarian/deontological and altruistic/egoistic moral dilemmas. Participants also completed questionnaires on mental health status and experiences related to the COVID–19 pandemic. We used boosted regression trees (an advanced form of regression analysis based on machine learning) to model relationships between responses to the questionnaires and decision-making tasks. Results showed that the psychological impact of the COVID–19 pandemic predicted participants’ responses to the framing problems and utilitarian/deontological and altruistic/egoistic moral dilemmas (but not to the dictator game). More concretely, the more psychological impact participants suffered, the more they were willing to choose the safest response in the framing problems, and the more deontological/altruistic were their responses to moral dilemmas. These results suggest that the psychological impact of the COVID–19 pandemic might prompt automatic processes.

The traditional debate about moral dilemmas concerns whether there are circumstances in which an agent is subject to two obligations that cannot both be fulfilled. Realists maintain there are. Irrealists deny this. Here I defend an alternative, methodologically-oriented position wherein the denial of genuine moral dilemmas functions as a regulative ideal for moral deliberation and practice. That is, moral inquiry and deliberation operate on the implicit assumption that there are no genuine moral dilemmas. This view is superior to both realism and irrealism in accounting for moral residue and other crucial phenomenological dimensions of our experience of moral dilemmas.

Psychopathy is a personality type characterized by both callous emotional dysfunction and deviant behavior that affects society in the form of actions that harm others. Historically, researchers have been concerned with seeking data and arguments to support a neurobiological foundation of psychopathy. In the past few years, increasing research has begun to reveal brain alterations putatively underlying the enigmatic psychopathic personality. In this review, we describe the brain anatomical and functional features that characterize psychopathy from a synthesis of available neuroimaging research and discuss how such brain anomalies may account for psychopathic behavior. The results are consistent in showing anatomical alterations involving primarily a ventral system connecting the anterior temporal lobe to anterior and ventral frontal areas, and a dorsal system connecting the medial frontal lobe to the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus complex and, in turn, to medial structures of the temporal lobe. Functional imaging data indicate that relevant emotional flow breakdown may occur in both these brain systems and suggest specific mechanisms via which emotion is anomalously integrated into cognition in psychopathic individuals during moral challenge. Directions for future research are delineated emphasizing, for instance, the relevance of further establishing the contribution of early life stress to a learned blockage of emotional self-exposure, and the potential role of androgenic hormones in the development of cortical anomalies.

This article has several and concurrent purposes. The first is to offer conceptual clarification about the notion of incommensurability and how it can be meaningfully understood in various contexts. Secondly, the purpose is to advance the substantive position that something important is lost when incommensurability is rejected in the law as a matter of principle. Third, the aim is to bring to fuller awareness the practical difficulties that a judge facing a potentially incommensurable conflict would encounter when judging it. Finally there is the claim, against the backdrop of contemporary theories of procedural democracy, that tragic incommensurability cannot be wholly neutralized by the procedures aimed at the generation of consensus, nor dissolved through the harmonic integration of all the values that law is supposed to protect.

Based on a comparison of studies of patient desires regarding end-of-life care and of the actual course of end-of-life care, this article concludes that there is a significant discrepancy in the United States between the kind of care most people want and the kind of care they in fact receive. The article offers a case example to illustrate one type of dilemma commonly encountered in end-of-life care. It then introduces and describes the practice of advance care planning. Use of advance care planning, it is argued, can prevent moral dilemmas and improve end-of-life care.