moral

Jon Cruddas has been the MP for Dagenham since 2001, and for the Dagenham and Rainham constituency since 2010. During the course of a 35-year career in the Labour party, he has become one of its most respected intellectual figures, standing for the deputy leadership in 2006 and chairing the party’s policy review under Ed Miliband. His new book, A Century of Labour, is a sweeping historical survey of the party’s ideas and personalities since its formation. Cruddas lives in London with his wife, Anna. He will be standing…

Is a frozen embryo a child?The Alabama Supreme Court says yes. In ruling this month that three couples who lost frozen embryos in a storage facility accident could sue for wrongful death of a minor child, the court wrote that the “natural, ordinary, commonly understood meaning” of the word “child” includes an “unborn child” — whether that’s a fetus in a womb or an embryo in a freezer.Hospitals and clinics across the conservative state have since paused in vitro fertilization services as they scramble to figure out the…

Average moral expansiveness scale (MES) scores per country. Higher numbers indicate greater moral expansiveness. Credit: Kirkland et al. (2022) A cost-of-living crisis, the ongoing impact of COVID, climate change, and numerous global conflicts and refugee crises. When it feels like so many people are doing it tough, how do we decide where to direct our compassion? …

At the end of the second world war, around 250,000 German refugees were left stranded in Denmark. What responsibility, if any, did Danes have, after five years of brutal Nazi occupation, to look after them? That’s the question at the heart of this intelligent drama-thriller from Anders Walter. It’s a film that’s as morally complex as it gets, with some nailbiting moments; I watched a couple of scenes through my hands. What’s really interesting is that it doesn’t strike a triumphant note anywhere; no scene of flag-waving…

I wrestled with how to approach this review. On the one hand, The Alternative brings together an appealing range of ways people across the west are imaginatively and determinedly contesting the givens in today’s capitalism. There is an ache for better – for more just ways of organising the way we work and adding more meaning to our lives. You can’t help but applaud Nick Romeo for showing the workable alternatives to capitalism and the moral driver behind them – everything from the way companies are incorporated to how…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Researchers have developed a new experiment to better understand what people view as moral and immoral decisions related to driving vehicles, with the goal of collecting data to train autonomous vehicles how to make "good" decisions. The work is designed to capture a more realistic array of moral challenges in traffic than the widely discussed life-and-death scenario inspired by the…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A new study, published in PLOS ONE, has uncovered a remarkable connection between individuals' musical preferences and their moral values, shedding new light on the profound influence that music can have on our moral compass. The research, conducted by a team of scientists at Queen Mary University…

November 20, 20233min readResearch on morality shows that it can counterintuitively impede peace and progressBy Joshua Rottman I have spent my career studying moral decision-making. Through my own research and that of my colleagues, I have become acutely aware of how moral motivations and justifications warp our thinking in dangerous ways. Morality can sustain misunderstandings and inflame brutality, particularly when people hold discordant values.A tricky term, morality can’t be neatly defined. This is partially because…

Mean truth ratings by number of times viewed, with mixed-effects linear regression predictions. The x-axis indicates the total number of times an item was seen in the experiment, regardless of its exact presentation schedule. The number of views includes all exposures to a headline—including exposure to the headline during the final rating phase. Dots indicate mean truth ratings. Error bars indicate standard errors of the mean. The black line indicates…

Difference in average proportion of moral foundation use between Democratic and Republican primary candidates on Twitter. Left plot compares 2016 Republican candidates and 2016 Democratic candidates; right plot compares 2016 Republican candidates and 2020 Democratic candidates. Credit: PNAS Nexus (2023). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad189 New research from Professor Manos Tsakiris, from the Department of Psychology reveals how…