Moral disagreement and procedural justice: Moral mandates as constraints to voice effects

Procedural voice is a widely used and effective means to reduce or eliminate conflict. Moral disagreements, however, are particularly inflammatory, divisive, and difficult to manage. The current article reports two studies that demonstrated the unique challenge that moral disagreements pose. Specifically, the studies tested the extent to which procedural voice affected justice judgements, group climate, and decision acceptance when people perceived decisions to have moral implications. Results indicated that when people's outcome preferences represent strong moral convictions, outcomes were the primary determinant of perceived fairness and related judgements, irrespective of whether people had voice in the decision‐making process.     

Possessing Moral Concepts

Moral discourse allows for speakers to disagree in many ways: about right and wrong acts, about moral theory, about the rational and conative significance of moral failings. Yet speakers’ eccentricities do not prevent them from engaging in moral conversation or from having (genuine, not equivocal) moral disagreement. Thus differences between speakers are compatible with possession of moral concepts. This paper examines various kinds of moral disagreements and argues that they provide evidence against conceptual-role and informational atomist approaches to understanding our moral concepts. Conceptual role approaches fail because they cannot account for shared concepts among speakers with different commitments to the practical and conative ramifications of moral judgments. Informational atomist views fail because speakers need not be locked on to the same moral properties to share moral concepts.

Pursuing moral outrage: Anger at torture

Moral outrage—anger at violation of a moral standard—should be distinguished from anger at the harm caused by standard-violating behavior. Recent research that used experimental manipulation to disentangle these different forms of anger found evidence of personal and empathic anger, but not of moral outrage. We sought to extend this research by assessing anger at a more extreme moral violation: torture. If the person tortured is a member of one’s group (nationality), anger may not be over the moral violation but over the harm done to one of “us.” In an experiment designed to create the necessary appraisal conditions, we found clear evidence of identity-relevant personal anger (anger when a person from one’s nationality is tortured) but little evidence of moral outrage (anger even when a person from an identity-irrelevant nationality is tortured). Implications for understanding moral emotion and moral motivation are discussed.     

政治文明的伦理分析

政治明不是一种孤立的明,它与道德明有着十分密切的关系,它们有着共同的契合机制和互补机制;从西方政治明的发展来看,始终没有离开理性主义、制度主义、个体主义等伦理精神;政治要真正实现明,必须使政治意识要宽容、政治制度的制衡、政治行为要有序。     

The effects of interpersonal relationship and character gender on adolescents' resolutions of moral dilemmas

An experimental study using two forms of the Defining Issues Test [Rest, J. R. (1979). Revised manual for the Defining Issues Test. Minneapolis: Moral Research Project, University of Minnesota.], modified to present either a high degree of relationship among characters or a low degree of relationship among characters, was conducted with 114 college students. The gender of the characters in the dilemmas was also systematically varied. Both male and female students evidenced principled (Stages 5 and 6) reasoning more often when dilemma characters were male than when story characters were female. Participant gender and relationship condition were significant factors in the frequency of Stage 4 reasoning. Male students in the low-relationship condition evidenced Stage 4 (“Law and order”) reasoning most often when story characters were male, while male students, like female students in all conditions, showed Stage 4 reasoning more often when female characters were presented in the high-relationship condition. The degree to which moral decisions were supportive of an affected character revealed more support when story characters were female than when they were male. Results indicate that even in hypothetical situations, moral judgments vary with the gender of the person being judged and to some degree with the relationships among those involved in the dilemma. These findings are consistent with a view that multiple, equally valid approaches to moral judgment might exist and affect the development of male and female students differently.     

重建世界的人文精神--牟宗三儒家式的人文主义

牟宗三对世界人文精神的重建,乃是出于他对人类精神趋下的时代悲情和他对人文主义精神的信念,顺康德的精神路向,本儒家的心性之学,绍续和改造西方近代人文主义,完成于“三统并建”的学说之中,旨在把宗教、哲学、科学和艺术统一起来,表现为“儒家式的人文主义”。它既特别重视人性、个性与人格,又强调道德主体是其根源和基础。牟要以儒家的理想和价值来安置人性、个性与人格,固然是要使个人免于泛滥为自然主义、浪漫主义与工具主义的牺牲品,然而其更深层的基本的关怀和用心,乃在于从他所主张的“道德的形上学”的高度为人提供一个安身立命之本．使人成为一个具体的全面的发展的人。     

Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues

In this paper, I address the what, the how, and the why of moral phenomenology. I consider first the question What is moral phenomenology?, secondly the question How to pursue moral phenomenology?, and thirdly the question Why pursue moral phenomenology? My treatment of these questions is preliminary and tentative, and is meant not so much to settle them as to point in their answers’ direction.     

Learning from Tolstoy: Forgetfulness and Recognition in Literary Edification

Philosophers have often applied a distinctively epistemic framework to the question of how moral knowledge can be derived from fictional literature, by considering how true propositions, or their argumentative support, can be the cognitive fruits of reading works of fiction. I offer an alternative approach. I focus not on whether readers fail to assent to the truth of a proposition or fail to provide it rational support. Instead, I focus on how readers fail to accord a truth (which they already accept) adequate importance in their web of beliefs about living a good human life. This is a form of ignorance, but in the form of neglect, or failure to pay proper regard – which is one sense of the term ‘forgetfulness’. I argue that works of fictional literature may, at times, stimulate audience members to overcome their own particular forms of forgetfulness in this respect. And I use Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a case in point.

Using Cases with Contrary Facts to Illustrate and Facilitate Ethical Analysis

There has been increasing interest in developing practical, non-theoretical tools for analyzing ethical problems in public health, biomedicine, and other scientific disciplines so that professionals can make and justify ethical decisions in their own research or practice. Tools for ethical decisionmaking, together with case studies on ethics, are often used in graduate education programs and in continuing professional education. Students can benefit from opportunities to further develop their analytical skills, to recognize ethical issues, and to develop their moral sensitivity. One practical approach for illustrating and facilitating ethical analysis uses cases with contrary facts and circumstances, an approach which complements rather than replaces theoretical approaches to moral reasoning. Cases with contrary facts and circumstances are presented in two or more alternative ways so that the facts, circumstances, or framing of one version runs counter to that of the other version (s). Cases with contrary facts, together with practical steps for identifying and analyzing ethical issues, are likely to be useful tools for illustrating and facilitating ethics analysis and stimulating the moral imagination. The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.     

Third party assisted conception: an African perspective

The central importance of reproduction in all human cultures has given rise to many methods and techniques of assisting reproduction or overcoming infertility. Such methods and techniques have achieved spectacular successes in the Western world, where processes like in vitro fertilization (IVF) constitute a remarkable breakthrough. In this paper, the author attempts to reflect critically on assisted reproduction technologies (ART) from the background and perspective of African culture, a culture within which human reproduction is given the highest priority but which also exhibits a highly ambivalent attitude to modern technology-assisted methods of reproduction. The author considers the ethical crux of reproductive technologies to be linked to the issue of the moral status of the human embryo and argues that a morally significant line of demarcation cannot be drawn between embryos and other categories of humans.