scholarly journals Virtue, habit and neuroscience

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (Extra 295) ◽  
pp. 501-510
Author(s):  
Jose Ignacio Murillo

Neuroscience has much to offer to our understanding of human action, including its ethical dimensions. However, while neuroscience has been applied to questions of personal identity, emotion and moral decision-making, its implications for the classical notion of virtue have hardly been considered. This likely has much to do with the way in which the classical notion of virtue, together with closely related concepts of nature and habit, has been forgotten or distorted within the context of modern thought. As a consequence, the standard neuroscientific concept of habit as automatic and routine behavior is fundamentally opposed to teleological activity and thus cannot be reconciled with the classical concept of habit that is essential to virtue. The recovery of the classical notion of virtue in contemporary philosophy invites us to rethink the neuroscientific concept of habit in light of a different view of human behavior for which plasticity is not just indeterminacy but rather openness to freedom and growth.

2021 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2110100
Author(s):  
Enrico Berti

From the perspective of the Aristotelian notion of ‘Form’, the author explores the history of the concepts of mind and soul focusing on their ontologized version, as entertained by conventional science. He concludes that current neuroscience lacks the conceptual wherewithal required to deal with the meaning of mind and soul and with agential consequences such as free will and moral decision making. [GEB]


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred W. Kaszniak ◽  
Cynda H. Rushton ◽  
Joan Halifax

The present paper is the product of collaboration between a neuroscientist, an ethicist, and a contemplative exploring issues around leadership, morality, and ethics. It is an exploration on how people in roles of responsibility can better understand how to engage in discernment processes with more awareness and a deeper sense of responsibility for others and themselves. It draws upon recent research and scholarship in neuroscience, contemplative science, and applied ethics to develop a practical understanding of how moral decision-making works and is essential in this time when there can seem to be an increasing moral vacuum in leadership.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kappes ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel

From moral philosophy to programming driverless cars, scholars have long been interested in how to shape moral decision-making. We examine how framing can impact moral judgments either by shaping which emotional reactions are evoked in a situation (antecedent-focused) or by changing how people respond to their emotional reactions (response-focused). In three experiments, we manipulated the framing of a moral decision-making task before participants judged a series of moral dilemmas. Participants encouraged to go “with their first” response beforehand favored emotion-driven judgments on high-conflict moral dilemmas. In contrast, participants who were instructed to give a “thoughtful” response beforehand or who did not receive instructions on how to approach the dilemmas favored reason-driven judgments. There was no difference in response-focused control during moral judgements. Process-dissociation confirmed that people instructed to go with their first response had stronger emotion-driven intuitions than other conditions. Our results suggest that task framing can alter moral intuitions.


Nurse Leader ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooklyn Aaron ◽  
Avery Glover ◽  
Evelina Sterling ◽  
Stuart Downs ◽  
Jason Lesandrini

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