On April 29th Ms. Deidre Kelly successfully defended her Ph.D. Dissertation titled “A Dual-Process Account of Moral Judgment: What Psychopaths Can Teach Us About Morality”. The Chair was Dr. Jason Etele, and the External Examiner was Dr. Verena Gottschling and the Internal Examiner was Dr. Ivan Zinger. The Committee consisted Dr. Andrew Brook, Dr. Adele Forth and Dr. Jim Davies.
By showing that in psychopaths, deviations in both emotions and reasoning differentially affect moral decision-making when compared to moral decision-making in non-psychopaths, Deirdre Kelly was able to develop a new model of the elements that go into, or can go into, moral decision-making in general, a model that reflects the range of factors that can be involved more adequately than any previous ones. The examining board was of the view that the dissertation contained materials for a number of publishable papers.