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There is evidence that our risk attitudes towards monetary gambles change depending on the absolute probability of obtaining a payoff. In this study, I investigate our moral risk attitudes about various scenarios -- concerning harms or benefits, and interpersonal or intrapersonal tradeoffs -- and examine whether the same effect exists. (Note: This is an updated study from the one at https://osf.io/y3vwr. Reasons for updates given below.)

First study in a project to map the patterns of moral beliefs regarding the use of artificial intelligence for environmental ends. Research Question: Agentic intention is an important factor in moral judgments, with intentional (foreseen) harms being judged less morally permissible than accidental (unforeseen) ones. Will this pattern replicate across different moral agents (human vs. AI) and how will harm and unfairness be judged when they are in aid of environmental gains?

This is a test of the test-retest reliability of moral decisions, with an additional point of asking people not only is an action appropriate but if they would perform the action.

In this study, we will examine the effects of short educational videos about ethical issues on viewers' ethical reasoning and intellectual humility.

The full preregistration document can be found in the project main folder or through this link: https://osf.io/7qz92

To test accounts of harm moralisation, Royzman & Borislow (2022) designed six vignettes [Royzman, E.B., & Borislow, S.H. (2022). The puzzle of wrongless harms: Some potential concerns for dyadic morality and related accounts. Cognition, 220, 104980]. In all of them, an agent acts intentionally and with foresight to further their interests in a way that results in harming a person. For instance, in the Dating story, Jen dumps her boyfriend, Greg, so as to better pursue her career. After reading the story, participants are asked (along with some other comprehension questions) (a) whether, in acting the way they do, the protagonist acted selfishly (“put their interests first”) or not and (b) whether the protagonist’s act is morally wrong. Royzman and Borislow claim that a combination of a positive answer to (b) and a negative answer to (b)—that is, the modal response combination in their dataset—falsifies several accounts of harm moralisation. In this project, we dispute this conclusion.

Real life moral decisions are special, as decision makers face two normative standards on their choices simultaneously: Not only do they need to choose what is rational given probabilistic uncertainty over outcomes, as in all kinds of decisions, but also what is right given their moral point of view. However, risk, i.e. probabilistic uncertainty, in moral decisions has received limited attention to date (but see Meder et al. 2019, Shou et al. 2020,). For instance, the two most famous moral dilemma studies (Greene et al. 2001, Awad et al. 2008) assume that moral decisions would be taken under certainty. In other cases, such as when authors have introduced the condition of risk to moral decisions, they do not (fully) consider the distinctly moral drivers for sensitivity to risk in moral decisions (Meder et al. 2019, Shou et al. 2020, Kortenkamp & Moore 2014, Tsalikis 2008, Fleischhut 2013). In this study, we aim to fill this gap by introducing probabilistic outcomes next to other well-known factors to sacrificial moral dilemmas and studying a moral explanation of their influence. First, we address the question whether probability of outcomes at all represents a relevant factor in moral decision-making, compared to other well-known influential factors, such as dilemma emotionality and number and age of involved parties. Second, we check whether the general pattern of neglecting probabilities in high-affect decisions that has been proven for other types of decisions (Pachur et al. 2014), also applies to the moral domain. Third, we test whether participants consider probabilities in moral dilemmas differently according to their moral profile. This last step is particularly relevant, since moral theories suggest a distinct treatment of probabilities: Consequentialists have a moral reason to include probabilities in their moral judgments, while deontologists should stick to a moral rule irrespective of outcome probabilities or at least irrespective of probabilities below a certain materiality threshold (Hansson 2013). The multi-factor design of the current study also allows to check which other factors, if not probability, might drive deontologists’ decisions under risk. To address these questions, we examine moral dilemmas in a conjoint survey experiment (Hainmueller et al. 2013; Bansak et al., 2019), where respondents face a choice about moral acceptability of inflicting harm on one person to save a number of people. • RQ1: [p relevant at all?] How does probability affect decisions in moral dilemmas next to other morally relevant factors? • RQ2: [general patterns of considering p] Does p-neglect in high-affect decisions also exist in the moral domain? • RQ3: [moral patterns of considering p] Does decision makers’ moral point of view influence the way/ extent to which they consider probabilities?

This is a follow-up in a series of studies investigating how different different types of entity are perceived to be capable of different components of moral agency - intentional action, right/wrong action, and responsibility. This specific study seeks to investigate (1) which kinds of mental/social capacities are attributed to different kinds of entity, and how those attributions (2) predict attributions of the three components of moral agency.

This scoping review is meant to survey existing literature regarding moral values in medical AI development.

This is a project about how participants classify (or misclassify) categories of false speech. We will study experimentally whether providing participants with the opportunity to comment and express themselves alongside a binary question (“Is this speech a lie or not?”) produces more accurate results than merely asking participants to answer the binary question with no opportunity to comment. We will also study the effects on accuracy of exposing participants to a moral frame, with and without the opportunity to comment. The moral frame is introduced by exposing some participants to a moral evaluation of the speaker’s speech act and giving some of those participants the opportunity to comment on the moral evaluation. Each participant will view five different vignettes, each involving one of the variants of false speech in which we are interested: a. Mistaken Statement—henceforth “Mistake”; b. Instructed Insincerity—henceforth “Instructed”; c. True, Sincere Deceptive Statement—henceforth “Deception”; d. Lie; e. True, Sincere Deceptive Statement to Protect a Confidence—henceforth “Confidence”. Each vignette depicts a different social scenario in which the false speech is made: 1. Friends, 2. Doctor-Patient, 3. Workplace Review, 4. Sports Practice Attendance, 5. Job Promotion. So, there are five vignettes illustrating each type of false speech, one for each social scenario, yielding twenty-five variants. Each participant sees a vignette illustrating each of the speech type variants once and a vignette illustrating each of the social scenarios once. The order of presentation on each of the two dimensions is randomized. So, for example, a participant might see (1d) Lie—Friends, Instructed—Doctor-Patient, (3a) Mistake—Workplace Review, and so forth. A participant will never see any context or speech type more than once. Each participant will be placed in one of four frames that remains constant for that participant across all five vignettes that she is presented with: A (neutral frame, binary classification only); B (neutral frame with opportunity to comment); C (moral frame, binary classification only); D (moral frame with opportunity to comment). This represents the between-participant aspect of our design: each participant sees the same classification question or pair of questions for all five vignettes she sees: A, B, C, or D.

This paper outlines a relatively un-noticed fallacy—in the sense of a “mistake in reasoning”—concerning the attribution of motives. It is this: when an agent has multiple motives to perform an action (each of which may be individually sufficient, and each of which she may consciously entertain), it is a mistake to conclude without further evidence that the worst motive (morally speaking) is the main motive. For obvious reasons, it is hereby dubbed the “worst motive” fallacy. We outline the fallacy and present experimental results confirming that we are indeed systematically inclined to commit it.

Manipulation of justice/injustice to determine whether this influences beliefs about God as moral authority.

How and why does morality, religiosity, and political ideology, vary within and between cultures? To what extent does moral, religious and political variation reflect differences in individual experience, as opposed to differences in shared cultural history? And how do these variables relate to one another? The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ predicts that: moral values reflect expected value of the corresponding type of cooperation; and that political conservatives value existing cooperative relationships more than liberals do. Previous research also suggests that religiosity varies as a function of existential insecurity (and may be mediated by morality). Here we gather data on: morality, religion and politics; individual expectations about the value of cooperation; and a range of national-level social, ecological and economic variables, from samples of ~300 participants in 40 Indo-European language groups (N≈12,000). We analyse this data using cultural phylogenetic techniques and multi-level modelling.

This study aims to see whether describing what a prospective patient learns in terms of knowledge vs. understanding affects how free, autonomous, and informed they take their subsequent consent to be. Subjects will be divided into four groups based on whether they're told they know vs. understand how a side-effect might be brought about and whether they know vs. understand that side-effect.

Our study concerns the origins of public support for spending on climate mitigation policy. Focusing on the UK, we seek to explain why support for such spending remains high, despite much of the benefit going to other countries who are more geographically exposed to the negative effects of a changing climate. This is puzzling in an academic sense, given a lack of public support for comparable spending on issues like foreign aid. We propose two frameworks for understanding public support: risk and altruism. Under the first, respondents' support is a function of their perception that the UK is at risk from climate change. Under the second, support stems from a desire to help those in other countries more exposed. We use a survey experiment to try to prime both the risk and altruistic components of climate change, and see how support varies accordingly. We anticipate that our findings will make an important contribution to the academic literature on climate change support, but will also be of interest to policymakers seeking to maximise public consent for spending going forwards.

We are interested in determining whether the extent to which--including the number of behaviors and the duration of those behaviors--individuals took steps to mitigate their exposure to the COVID-19 coronavirus will affect their perception of the normative relations amongst individuals engaging in collective action (e.g., going on a walk together).

The study asks how much harm is justified in reaching a given immigration goal and squares those identified levels of harm with what specific enforcement of immigration regulations U.S. citizens would support. Attitudes of the public towards immigration regulations is elicited in a survey and survey experiment conducted on a U.S. national sample with quotas proportional with respect to gender, age, and education.

Test whether the consideration of (in)justice influences beliefs about God as a supreme moral authority, and whether the personal need for structure moderates this effect.

Some normative theorists appeal to the notion of basic needs. They argue that when it comes to issues such as international development, justice to future generations, basic rights or limits of development our first priority should be that everybody is able to meet these needs. But what are basic needs? In a series of studies we attempt to inform discussions about this question by gathering empirical evidence about ordinary speakers’ intuitions about the concept of basic needs. Study 1 is an explorative study that employs a free-listing task and an explanation task. The purpose of this study is to acquire a first rough sense of ordinary speakers’ intuitions about the concept that can then inform the materials and hypotheses of further studies.

The moral judgment and decision-making literature has been traditionally focused on two theories from moral philosophy: consequentialism and deontology. Contractualism, a third influential family of moral theories, has been mostly neglected, despite its importance for the field of normative ethics. A recent paper (Levine et al., 2018) provides preliminary empirical evidence that subjects’ judgments of moral acceptability are better explained by contractualist thinking than consequentialism or deontology in a hypothetical moral dilemma. In this study, we design a new incentivised moral decision task to investigate whether subjects also act as contractualists when their decisions have actual monetary consequences for them and other participants. We also examine judgments of moral acceptability in this new task. This study is a replication of the experiment pre-registered as "Contractualism - Pre-study" from the same project with a larger sample size.

Moral psychologists often take inspiration from normative theories developed in moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of how people actually make moral judgments and decisions. Two types of such theories have been extensively studied in the literature: consequentialism and deontology. Surprisingly, a third influential family of ethical theories originating in the social-contract tradition, contractualism, has been largely neglected by psychological investigation. This study is part of a larger project which empirically investigates the role played by contractualist concerns in moral judgment and decision making. In this experiment, we try to replicate results from the treatment condition of "Contractualism - Main study" using an alternative study lay-out in which participants are presented with only three options (instead of eight, corresponding to the three scenarios) and enter the number of tickets that they want to give to the second player (from 0 to 5) in a text box that appears if and only if they select the third scenario. We do not display end balances for each option.

Moral psychologists often take inspiration from normative theories developed in moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of how people actually make moral judgments and decisions. Two types of such theories have been extensively studied in the literature: consequentialism and deontology. Surprisingly, a third influential family of ethical theories originating in the social-contract tradition, contractualism, has been largely neglected by psychological investigation. This study is part of a larger project which empirically investigates the role played by contractualist concerns in moral judgment and decision making. In this experiment, we design a modified version of the footbridge trolley dilemma and study moral acceptability judgments in this new scenario.

This poster presents the results of our survey of 257 US-based researchers in receipt of federal funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore the following questions: What citation behaviors are endorsed as practices that researchers should engage in? What citation behaviors do researchers report engaging in? What citation behaviors do researchers report that peer researchers engage in? How do participants��� self-reports of citing behavior compare with their other-reports and endorsed norms?, The current project was funded by a Lucas Faculty Excellence grant, 2021-2022 and Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS, UL1TR001422), {"references":["Baccini, De Nicolao, & Petrovich. (2019). Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: A country-level comparative analysis. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221212","Mohammad Hosseini & Bert Gordijn (2020). A review of the literature on ethical issues related to scientific authorship. DOI: 10.1080/08989621.2020.1750957","Penders, B. (2018). Ten Simple Rules for Responsible Referencing. PLOS: Computational Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006036","Wright and Armstrong. (2008). The Ombudsman: Verification of Citations: Fawlty Towers of Knowledge? http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1941335"]}

There is evidence that our risk attitudes towards monetary gambles change depending on the absolute probability of obtaining a payoff. In this study, I examine whether the same effect obtains for our moral risk attitudes towards rescue scenarios. I measure subjects’ moral judgments about rescue attempts with two different probabilities of success, so as to determine if this effect exists. My research questions are as follows: 1. Are our moral risk attitudes in rescue scenarios influenced by the absolute level of the probability of success of a rescue attempt? a. When choosing between a probabilistic rescue with a low probability of success, and a sure rescue that is guaranteed to rescue the same expected number of lives, will subjects be risk-seeking? b. When choosing between a probabilistic rescue with a high probability of success, and a sure rescue that is guaranteed to rescue the same expected number of lives, will subjects be risk-averse? 2. How does the success probability of a rescue attempt influence our judgments of its moral permissibility (whether we are allowed to choose some rescue attempt), and our judgments of moral requirement (whether we are required to chose a rescue attempt)?

The study will investigate predictors of compliance with pandemic guidelines and the stability of relevant measures across multiple timepoints during the pandemic. The study has a longitudinal design, with the first time-point of data having already been collected and analyzed for other purposes. This preregistration applies from the second time-point onwards. We plan to collect wave 2 in December 2020. The timing of wave 3 has not been yet decided, but we aim to collect it some time after the mass-vaccinations have been started (at least 3 months from wave 2) The starting point (time-point/wave 1) of the project is a sample collected for an unrelated experiment in late September 2019, prior to the coronavirus pandemic. Several moral psychological and other trait measures as well as demographic data were collected for this sample. Thus, the first sample provides a point of comparison point to the current pandemic situation, and allows for both examining potential changes in traits across two very different situations in the world and lagged analyses of traits measured prior to the pandemic and reported behaviours measured during the pandemic.

This is the preregistration for the generalizability test of the USA results to other sites.

Moral psychologists often take inspiration from normative theories developed in moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of how people actually make moral judgments and decisions. Two types of such theories have been extensively studied in the literature: consequentialism and deontology. Surprisingly, a third influential family of ethical theories originating in the social-contract tradition, contractualism, has been largely neglected by psychological investigation. This study is part of a larger project which empirically investigates the role played by contractualist concerns in moral judgment and decision making. In this experiment, participants provide moral acceptability judgments about a set of realistic scenarios designed to elicit contractualist concerns. For each scenario, participants are randomly allocated to one of three conditions: agreement, disagreement, neutral. In the agreement condition, one character (the affected party) explicitly expresses agreement with a particular action. In the disagreement condition, one character (the affected party) explicitly expresses disagreement with a particular action. In the neutral condition, the affected party remains silent about the action of interest.

This study tests the impact of embedding short ethics modules covering core concepts and methods of Value Sensitive Design (VSD) into computer science courses at the undergraduate level. The study will be conducted at Northeastern University (NU), where Ethics Institute instructional staff have been teaching ethics modules based on VSD as part of various courses run through NU’s Khoury College of Computer Science since the fall of 2019. The main research question is whether these embedded VSD modules are having a positive effect on certain ethically relevant attitudes.

Moral psychologists often take inspiration from normative theories developed in moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of how people actually make moral judgments and decisions. Two types of such theories have been extensively studied in the literature: consequentialism and deontology. Surprisingly, a third influential family of ethical theories originating in the social-contract tradition, contractualism, has been largely neglected by psychological investigation. This study is part of a larger project which empirically investigates the role played by contractualist concerns in moral judgment and decision making. In this experiment, we use the same economic game as in "Contractualism - Main study". We test whether asking participants to engage in reasoning of the form of virtual bargaining before selecting their preferred scenario leads them to make decisions that are more characteristic of contractualism. We also test whether asking participants to imagine that they are P2 and to rank options in order of preference accordingly (as P2) before selecting their preferred scenario (as P1) leads them to make decisions that are more characteristic of contractualism.

The goal of this project is to perform a meta-analysis on educational efforts to promote a responsible conduct of research from 1990 to early 2020. Unlike previous reviews that were exploratory in nature, this review aims to test twelve hypotheses on successful training strategies. Some of these assumptions have been suggested by the findings from previous reviews. We want to test their robustness. Other hypotheses stand in contradiction to the assertions of previous reviews because we question their assumptions. This review is not only innovative in the way that pursues the verification of falsifiable assumptions though. Additionally, it applies a stricter understanding of what comprises a course on the responsible conduct of research. From 66 studies included in a previous meta-analysis on the responsible conduct of research (Watts et al., 2017), only 28 studies fulfil our definition, because the remaining studies did not concern questions of research conduct but only pertained to professional behavior (e.g., as military officers, nurses, or engineers). Unlike another previous review, we also excluded studies that only concerned academic integrity. There is some overlap between correct citation and the responsible conduct of research. However, citation prevention is primarily technical and is too narrow to be considered representative of RCR training. Despite our narrow focus on RCR training, we identified 72 studies for inclusion through a combination of different search strategies – a number that justifies a quantitative meta-analysis and promises new findings, due to our focus on the testing of hypotheses and the inclusion of 24 studies that have not been considered in previous reviews.

This is an exploratory experimental philosophy project on what properties are found necessary and/or sufficient for moral patiency (the right to be treated as moral subjects) to be granted to robots.

For the norming surveys, we will use a within-subjects design. Participants will be asked to rate and rank a list of common tasks to determine gender typicality, intellectual demands, and complexity. By asking participants to rate, on a Likert-scale, these variables for each task, we will gain information about these tasks that will enable us to test, in the second design, whether the gender typicality of task affects allocation to gendered robots.

A systematic review protocol setting out the research questions, objectives and methodology.

This protocol describes an in-progress scoping review, influenced by the method of critical interpretive synthesis, to assess the existing literature on the appropriate role of the state in designing and implementing population health policy to influence individuals' health-affecting practices.

A dogma accepted in many ethical and legal frameworks is that the reasons that lie behind conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare cannot be evaluated or judged by anyone other than the objector herself, because conscience is individual, autonomous, and inaccessible to any outside evaluation. In this paper I argue that this view is mistaken: physicians have an obligation to reveal and explain their reasons for CO and that these reasons may be evaluated either ex ante or ex post. In arguing for my claims I refer mostly to the Polish context and I defend some novel claims that have not been analyzed extensively in the debates on CO. First, I introduce a moral threshold requirement: CO is justified only if the reasons behind a refusal are of moral nature and meet a certain threshold of importance. Second, I highlight the similarities between CO in healthcare and the regulations concerning military refusals, including an emerging practice of granting the right to selective CO status to professional soldiers, that places the burden of proof on a petitioner for CO status. My argument highlights the special status of refusing to kill human organism (military conflicts, abortion, assisted-suicide), and shows that certain other common forms of CO do not warrant accommodation (e.g. emergency contraception).

Moral psychologists often take inspiration from normative theories developed in moral philosophy to construct descriptive accounts of how people actually make moral judgments and decisions. Two types of such theories have been extensively studied in the literature: consequentialism and deontology. Surprisingly, a third influential family of ethical theories originating in the social-contract tradition, contractualism, has been largely neglected by psychological investigation. This study is part of a larger project which empirically investigates the role played by contractualist concerns in moral judgment and decision making. In this experiment, we conceptually replicate "Contractualism - Main study" from the same project using tokens instead of lottery tickets.

An experiment concerning moral judgments about the allocation of scarce medical resources has been performed as part of the 2021 Swiss MOSAiCH panel. We plan to investigate the roles of deontological rules (duties) and consequences as predictors of moral judgment.

Hibua Lamo is a cultural system that binds communities in North Halmahera. It is a form of conflict resolution among the communities by harmonizing interests between conflicting groups as well as binding the groups into a new relationship bond. It was tested by riots of Moluccas, including North Halmahera. This study shows that there is a difference context of emergence between Habermas's thought and local knowledge of Hibua Lamo. However, based on the Habermas's perspective of communication ratio, Hibua Lamo at least get the spirit to a new birth. Based on the new understanding, Hibua Lamo now exists to rely on communicative ratio which is able to withstand annexation of market system and the state, and also to tie the communities in North Halmahera through peace consensus.

In this project, we will conduct a comparative study to establish a refinement and condensation of existing intellectual humility scales. Several such scales have been published recently, but they have not yet been included in an omnibus analysis that would enable the best and most distinctive items in each to be selected. This study will be conducted with a large, diverse sample of Anglophone adults and will involve a study of test-retest reliability, a confirmatory factor analysis, an item-response theoretical analysis, and an analysis of discriminant and convergent validity. We will also construct new items as needed to ensure that inter-group conflict is included in several items.

The aim of this study is to determine the relative effectiveness of arguments versus narratives in motivating participants to donate a bonus payment to charitable organizations. Participants will be divided into five conditions, then given a set of attitude questions about charitable donation, a charitable donation opportunity, and a narrative transportation questionnaire. There will be two control conditions, a narrative condition, an "ineffective argument" condition, and an "effective argument" condition. We predict more transport and donation, and a more positive attitude toward charity, in the narrative condition than in the control conditions. We predict that the "ineffective arguments" will not statistically beat control in donation or charity. We predict that the "effective arguments" will perform similarly to the narratives.

Although Study 1 provides evidence in favour of the deflationary view via the strong correlation between measures of moral wrongdoing and injustice, it is not ideal for testing the deflationary view, as it does not manipulate the presence of absence of injustice.. To test the deflationary view, what is needed is to manipulate injustice directly. To do so, we employ a partly data and partly theory driven approach. We rely on (a) participants’ reasoning as evidenced in their responses to the injustice follow-up question in Study 1 and (b) considerations based on accounts of injustice. We adopt four of the stories used in Study 1 (namely, Dating, Chess, Fired, and Boxing) and create two conditions: the first one (like the stories in Study 1 and the studies of Royzman and Borislow, 2022) does not feature injustice (Condition A), while the other one does feature injustice (Condition B).

Hvordan relaterer det moderne menneskes splittelses- og fremmedgørelsesproblematik sig til norsk black metal, radikalisering, kroppen, 'Kongens Fald', 'The Square', Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan og m.m.? Dette teoretiske essay præsenterer først en diagnose for en kropsløs, kultiveret og intellektualiseret samtid, hvor mennesket er fremmedgjort fra samfundet og sig selv. Med afsæt i Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan samt læsninger af blandt andre Johannes V Jensens Kongens Fald (1900) og udviklingen i norsk black metal (fra 1991 til i dag) afsøger det dernæst alternativer til den ’radikaliserede’ og samfundsomstyrtende handling, der ofte præsenteres som vejen ud af fremmedgørelsesproblematikken. Vores alternativ til dødskampen mellem kropsløs rationalisme og revolutionsromantisk livsfilosofi går via Kant og kunstens ’som-om’ og præsentes som 'principperne for flersprogethed' og 'det flækkede øjenbryns princip'. | Forfattet af: Tobias Gemmerli & Marianne Stidsen

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to explore the moral permissibility of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement through the lens of Buddhist ethics and to examine what relevance Buddhist ethics can bring to the western discourse of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement. This will also help to bring about a more global perspective towards this particular bioethical issue.Methodology: This project has a two-pronged methodology: a literature review of the western bioethical discourse on pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement and a qualitative analysis of the participants, Buddhist monks and nuns, who were interviewed.Results: The moral framework that emerged from the interviews coincided with the framework that was derived from the literature review. Buddhists also seemed to prefer alternative forms of cognitive enhancement such as mediation and education to the biomedical or pharmaceutical. However, they saw little inherently wrong with the pharmaceuticals themselves so long as they are used in moderation and all other contexts are considered.Conclusions: What this project brings to the discussion of the bioethical issue of pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement is a consideration for another alternative form of enhancement, primarily meditation. It also brings in a new moral framework that is not found within the West. By considering ethical issues from a Buddhist lens this develops a more global perspective on the issue, which is certainly needed, as it is possible that pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement will likely not remain as a bioethical issue that is only found in the West.

Space colonization, the goal of establishing permanent and self-sustaining human habitats beyond Earth, is not only a technological challenge: Colonizing space will confront humankind with a set of political, moral, and security challenges. If the outcomes of those challenges are negative, space colonization will either fail completely (political challenges), or we will commit potentially immense moral damage (moral challenges), or we will expose humankind to enormous security risks (security challenges). In order to minimize these risks, we need to start crafting policy blueprints today that are aimed at steering space colonization in a desirable direction.

The subject of the thesis - the universal value of human rights and democracy - is highly topical in view of the 'democratic imperialism' of the current (dd 2002) US-government. While leaving aside the problem of the acceptability of war as a means to promote democracy (e.g. the second Gulf War), the thesis focusses on a philosophical, moral and pragmatical defence of the universal application of democracy and human rights. Only if this defence is successful can the discussion on the means and tactics of democratic imperialism begin.The originality of the thesis is its defence of the universal value of both democracy and human rights. Whereas the defence of the universality of human rights has a long tradition, there is as yet almost no literature on the universal desirability of democracy. The defence is partly philosophical, ethical, political, legal and practical. It draws on the history of philosophy and ethics, as well as on political science.

Progress in artificial intelligence makes the technology increasingly relevant to military applications. In particular, autonomous weapons could be of great military use: Autonomous weapons could achieve goals more effectively and more efficiently than humans or human-operated weapons. In this policy brief, the potential impact of implementing autonomous weapons on the behavior and decision-making of the military is discussed. The most probable positive impact, greater adherence to humanitarian law on the battlefield, is outweighed by the most probable negative impact, a disruption of the military chain of command and the security risks that follow from that disruption. This creates a strategic paradox: Even though autonomous weapons could help the military achieve goals more effectively and more efficiently, autonomous weapons would strategically undermine the military by disrupting the chain of command and by creating a great security risk.

Teknologi informasi telah menjadi bagian dari kehidupan masyarakat saat ini. Telah lahir tipe-tipe masyarakat baru sehubungan dengan perkembangan teknologi, salah satunya adalah masyarakat internet. Masyarakat internet adalah mereka yang setiap saat menggantungkan pemerolehan informasi dan komunikasi melalui media internet. Internet telah merasuki kehidupan masyarakat internet. Tentau saja internet berdampak negatif dan positif. Yang diharapkan adalah dampak positif semakin besar dan negatif yang makin berkurang. Solusi terhadap harapan itu adalah dengan menemukan media penyeimbang bagi internet. Media penyeimbang itu menurut penulis adalah internet itu sendiri. Di dalam internet telah disediakan banyak sekali layanan-layanan yang dapat dimanfaatkan. Salah satunya adalah weblog yang tersedia secara gratis. Penulis mengajukan solusi tentang “teoblogi” sebagai bentuk penyeimbang moral terhadap teknologi informasi dan komunikasi internet. Dengan memperhatikan pendapat Jacques Ellul tentang penyeimbang moralitas dan juga Alvin I. Goldman tentang nilai epistemik, maka penulis dapat membahas tentang teoblogi ini. Setelah pembahasan, penulis menemukan bahwa teoblogi dapat menjadi penyeimbang moralitas dalam masyarakat internet. Hal itu dimungkinkan dengan beberapa syarat, yaitu sasarannya hanyalah masyarakat internet, posting tulisan yang dilakukan secara terus menerus di dalam weblog, munculnya blog-blog teologi baru (teoblogi) sehingga semakin banyak hal yang dapat diberikan secara positif kepada masyarakat internet.

Tulisan ini dilatarbelakangi oleh kegelisahan melihat berbagai persoalan yang terjadi di kalangan gereja termasuk Gereja Masehi Injili di Halmahera (GMIH), maupun masyarakat secara umum. Persoalan itu antara lain menyangkut kemiskinan, lemahnya fungsi komunikasi gereja, globalisasi yang membuat masuknya modal asing disertai tekanan berbagai koorporasi yang mengakibatkan eksploitasi diberbagai bidang, hal mana membutuhkan kemampuan gereja untuk menyikapinya. Gereja dengan demikian membutuhkan refleksi kritis kontekstual dalam kerangka memperkuat elemen-elemen bergereja agar mampu menjawab tantangan ke depan. Mengkaji ulang pemahaman gereja terhadap kemiskinan dan fungsi sosial komunikatif, khususnya di GMIH menjadi tantangan tersendiri untuk ditelusuri. Dua usulan dikemukakan demi pekerjaan kontekstualisasi berteologi ke depan di kalangan GMIH. Pertama, gereja (termasuk GMIH) dengan kekuatan sumberdaya manusia dan dana sudah sepantasnya mulai memberdayakan jemaat-jemaatnya lewat kegiatan-kegiatan di dunia bisnis demi menjawab tantangan persoalan kemiskinan . Kedua, GMIH sudah saatnya lebih intensif keluar dari ruang privat religiusnya, bergabung bersama entitas privat lainnya, berdiskursus secara rasional komunikatif demi menghadapi tekanan pasar dan negara dengan segala ketidakadilannya demi memperjuangkan kesejahteraan rakyat kecil termasuk di dalamnya jemaat-jemaat kristen yang mempercayakan hidup untuk dinaunginya. Dengan melakukan dua hal ini, GMIH telah keluar dari belenggu primordialnya dan berjalan di jalan pembaharuan, jalan keadilan.

In 1986, Wilson and Ruse argued that with a better understanding of evolutionary biology, one can apply principles of biology to the study of moral philosophy, and that there are no "extrasomatic moral truths". This paper attempts a defense of moral objectivity based on three analogies between mathematics and ethics. An objection to this defense based on dissimilarities between the two fields is examined and found wanting, but a more powerful objection based on denying the independent existence of mathematics forces a direct examination of Wilson and Ruse's argument. It is found that their conclusion is too sweeping to follow from the arguments they present, but that the possibility it might be correct still exists.

This paper explores how Ockham adopted a maxim found in the medieval ius commune -- namely, that people should not be deprived of their rights without fault or cause -- and made it a cornerstone of his political philosophy. In addition, because Ockham's grasp of law is sometimes questioned, I contrast his use of the maxim with two of the greatest medieval lawyers, Hostiensis and Innocent IV. As I show, there are important differences in how they and Ockham made use of this maxim.