Date: March 27, 2026 (Friday)
Time: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Bertram F. Malle (Professor, Cognitive and Psychological Sciences (CoPsy) Department, Brown University)
Morality is not one thing. It is a collection of phenomena that populate a dynamic and contoured landscape. This landscape is founded on normative systems, which include primarily norms, but also values and rights, and nowadays institutions. But for these systems to have their proper impact, humans also evolved individual-level capacities; and only with these capacities can people learn, follow, and enforce norms. Morality, then, is the union of group-level normative systems and individual-level capacities. I will give an overview of what we know about normative systems and five core capacities: moral behavior, moral judgments, moral sanctions, moral emotions, and moral communication.
Bertram F. Malle earned his Master’s degrees in philosophy, linguistics and psychology at the University of Graz, Austria and his Ph.D. at Stanford University. Since 2008 he is Professor at the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. He received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Outstanding Dissertation award, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and he is past president of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology. Malle’s research has been funded by the NSF, Army, Templeton Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and DARPA. He has distributed his work in 130 articles and several books, on the topics of social cognition (intentionality, mental state inferences, behavior explanations), moral psychology (cognitive and social blame, guilt, norms), and human-robot interaction (moral competence in robots, socially assistive robotics).
Moderator: Benjamin Chen, Associate Professor & Director of Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=105318.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.