Contrasting role morality and professional morality: implications for practice

Abstract The notion of role morality suggests individuals may adopt a different morality depending on the roles they undertake. Investigating role morality is important, since the mentality of role morality may allow agents to believe they can abdicate moral responsibility when acting in a role. This is particularly significant in the literature dealing with professional morality where professionals, because of their special status, may find themselves at odds with their best moral judgments. Here I tell four stories and draw out some distinctions. I conclude that role morality is a genuine and useful distinction. However, I suggest that the purported distinction between role morality and professional morality is over-determined. Therefore, alleged conflicts between the demands of role and profession (such as the different pressures on Pinto designers as employees and as engineers) are not conflicts between different kinds of demands, but rather conflicts arising from divergent roles that most workers will encounter regularly. Another analytical perspective is to look at moral choices at work in terms of power and the ability to bring about change. Finally, I draw the implication that we should stress moral awareness at a fairly abstract level for all employees and reinforce the moral primacy of individual choice.     

Mysteries of morality

Evolutionary theories of morality, beginning with Darwin, have focused on explanations for altruism. More generally, these accounts have concentrated on conscience (self-regulatory mechanisms) to the neglect of condemnation (mechanisms for punishing others). As a result, few theoretical tools are available for understanding the rapidly accumulating data surrounding third-party judgment and punishment. Here we consider the strategic interactions among actors, victims, and third-parties to help illuminate condemnation. We argue that basic differences between the adaptive problems faced by actors and third-parties indicate that actor conscience and third-party condemnation are likely performed by different cognitive mechanisms. Further, we argue that current theories of conscience do not easily explain its experimentally demonstrated insensitivity to consequences. However, these results might be explicable if conscience functions, in part, as a defense system for avoiding third-party punishment. If conscience serves defensive functions, then its computational structure should be closely tailored to the details of condemnation mechanisms. This possibility underscores the need for a better understanding of condemnation, which is important not only in itself but also for explaining the nature of conscience. We outline three evolutionary mysteries of condemnation that require further attention: third-party judgment, moralistic punishment, and moral impartiality.     

Help-giving and morality

A model for the counselor's definition of help is presented as an aid to the exploration of questions of morality. Morality as a professional issue raises questions of counselor control as it relates to the meaning of help.     

危机与道德

金融危机的种种问题，目前已经引起了各个方面的讨论与关注。令我们关注的．是这次危机中凸显或暴露出来的道德问题。一面是由那些所谓金融家们造成的危机．一面是这些金融家们仍然要拿高薪水、高奖金。这一点，甚至遭到美国总统的批评，认为是可耻的行为。     

论网络道德

网络社会的崛起和发展深刻地改变着现实社会,也产生了所谓“网络道德问题”。网络本身的工具性、虚拟性特征是产生网络道德问题的客观原因。网络道德的核心是网民利益,基本原则是资源共享。而智慧、克制和爱心,则是网络道德的主要内容。     

Tribal morality and civilization

The present paper attempts to clarify the cognitive conditions which make it possible to define so‐called reality from five individual criteria and a confrontation to the paradigms of the community. Reality unfolds from potentially infinite reiteration, but can actually be caught only through finite operations. Our access to discoveries and increased knowledge depends upon abduction which enables us to probe the viability of unlikely hypotheses. Man becomes autonomous through using abduction; that is to say through interacting within the family and the constraints of social ecosystems which built his identity, and his conflictual access to the construction of reality.