Characteristics Associated With Individuals’ Caring,Just, and Brave Expressions of the Tendency to Be a Moral Rebel

Extending previous research on the characteristics associated with adolescents’ general tendency to be a moral rebel (Sonnentag & Barnett, 2016), the present study examined the roles of moral identity and (general and situation-specific) moral courage characteristics on 3 (i.e., caring, just, and brave) expressions of the tendency to stand up for one’s beliefs and values despite social pressure not to do so. Results revealed that general and situation-specific moral courage characteristics are important motivators of individuals’ caring, just, and brave expressions of the tendency to be a moral rebel, especially when they possess a relatively strong moral identity.     

Stress reactions following acute situations involving moral challenges among health care professionals

Many health care professionals have to make morally difficult decisions during acute, stressful situations. The aim was to explore the applicability of an existing qualitatively developed model of individual reactions among professional first responders following such situations using a quantitative approach. According to the model, the interaction of antecedent individual and contextual characteristics affect the immediate emotional reactions to acute, stressful events involving a moral dilemma. Continuous coping efforts and the quality of social support will also affect the long‐term positive and negative reactions to the event. The participants (n = 204, about 50% response rate) represented three Swedish health care professions stationed at a university hospital and a regional hospital: Physicians (n = 50), nurses (n = 94) and “others” (n =60, mainly social welfare officers and assistant nurses). Except for the personality dimension emotional stability which was measured using an established instrument, all measurement scales were operationalizations of codes and categories from the qualitative study (ten scales altogether). Four multiple regression analyses were performed with long‐term positive and negative reactions in everyday acute and morally extremely taxing situations respectively as dependent variables. The outcome showed that long‐term positive reactions covaried with much use of the coping strategies Emotional distancing and Constructive emotional confrontation and a perception of a well‐functioning Formal social support. Regarding long‐term negative reactions, higher age and little use of Emotional distancing accounted for much of the variance. Immediate emotional reactions also contributed significantly. Conclusion: the results largely supported the model concepts and their assumed relationships.     

A semantic challenge to non-realist cognitivism

Abstract

Recently, some philosophers have attempted to escape familiar challenges to orthodox nonnaturalist normative realism by abandoning the robust metaphysical commitments of the orthodox view. One such view is the ‘Non-Metaphysical Non-Naturalism’ or ‘Non-Realist Cognitivism’ proposed by Derek Parfit and a few others. The trouble is that, as it stands, Non-Realist Cognitivism seems unable to provide a substantive non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. The paper considers various strategies one might use to address the challenge. There is a rich field of views that are cognitivist and non-realist. But the paper is skeptical of the prospects of Non-Realist Cognitivism.     

德行领导与员工不道德行为、利他行为:道德推脱的中介作用

以道德推脱理论为基础,运用问卷调查法,通过对776名员工的调查,探讨了德行领导对员工不道德行为和利他行为的影响及道德推脱在这一影响中的中介作用。研究发现:(1)德行领导会抑制员工不道德行为的产生、促进员工利他行为的出现;(2)道德推脱会促进员工不道德行为的产生、抑制员工利他行为的出现;(3)德行领导通过道德推脱的完全中介作用负向影响员工的不道德行为,通过道德推脱的部分中介作用正向影响员工的利他行为。     

Collectivizing Rescue Obligations in Bioethics

Bioethicists invoke a duty to rescue in a wide range of cases. Indeed, arguably, there exists an entire medical paradigm whereby vast numbers of medical encounters are treated as rescue cases. The intuitive power of the rescue paradigm is considerable, but much of this power stems from the problematic way that rescue cases are conceptualized—namely, as random, unanticipated, unavoidable, interpersonal events for which context is irrelevant and beneficence is the paramount value. In this article, I critique the basic assumptions of the rescue paradigm, reframe the ethical landscape in which rescue obligations are understood, and defend the necessity and value of a wider social and institutional view. Along the way, I move back and forth between ethical theory and a concrete case where the duty to rescue has been problematically applied: the purported duty to regularly return incidental findings and individual research results in genomic and genetic research.     

Public concerns about violent video games are moral concerns—How moral threat can make pacifists susceptible to scientific and political claims against violent video games

Public discussions about the harmfulness of violent media are often held in the aftermath of violent felony. At the same time, we know little about whether and how experiencing real‐life violence impacts the way laypersons perceive and evaluate debates about virtual violence. In Study 1, we provided data indicating that both real‐life violence and violent video games are perceived as morally threatening by people who regard nonviolence to be an important moral value (i.e., pacifists). In Study 2, we hypothesized and found that when pacifists perceive threat from the presence of real‐life violence, they are especially susceptible to scientific and political claims indicating that violent video games are harmful. Our findings are in line with the value protection model and research on the psychological consequences of threat. Implications of the present findings are discussed with regard to a better understanding of the violent video games debate in the general public.     

How individual was conscience in the early-modern period? Observations on the development of Catholic moral theology

This article investigates how the notion of individual conscience has to be understood within the early-modern development of Catholic moral theology. It highlights that 16th-century Catholic theologians continued to understand conscience mainly in Thomist terms as a rational judgment. Yet they also came to investigate more deeply questions of intention and individual circumstances that might interfere with the perfect execution of moral reasoning. Particular emphasis is given to the question of probabilism and whether this new method of analyzing moral agency provided a stepping stone towards a more individualized conception of conscience, as some intellectual historians have contended. The article argues that whilst probabilism sharpened the awareness for problems of conscience, this development cannot be disconnected from the culture of counsel of conscience, inscribed into the fundamentally Thomist definition of it.     

LANGUAGE AS A VALUES‐REALIZING ACTIVITY: CARING,ACTING, AND PERCEIVING

A problem for natural scientific accounts, psychology in particular, is the existence of value. An ecological account of values is reviewed and illustrated in three domains of research: carrying differing loads; negotiating social dilemmas involving agreement and disagreement; and timing the exposure of various visual presentations. Then it is applied in greater depth to the nature of language. As described and illustrated, values are ontological relationships that are neither subjective nor objective, but which constrain and obligate all significant animate activity physically, socially, and morally. As an embodied social activity, conversational dialogue is characterized in terms of values, pragmatics, and presence rather than in terms of syntactic and semantic rules. In particular the nature of dialogical arrays is explored, and the hypothesis that language is an action system, a perceptual system, and a caring system is explored. Language expands horizons and makes it possible for humans to realize their calling as culture makers and caretakers.     

Affect in Ethical Decision Making: Mood Matters

Ethical decision-making research has centered on Rest’s (1986) framework that represents a rational, nonaffective model for ethical decision making. However, research in human cognition suggesting a “dual-processing” framework, composed of both rational and affective components, has been relatively ignored in the ethical decision-making literature. Examining dual-processing literature, it seems affect might be an important factor in decision making when a person’s mood is congruent with the task or situational context frame. Given that ethical decisions are serious and complex tasks, it is proposed here that inducing a negative affective state might produce mood congruence, reinforce the salience of emotion for ethical decision makers, and lead to differences in decision processing. Evidence is presented documenting differences in the decisions made by ethical decision makers in a negative affective state as compared to those in either a positive or neutral affective state.     

What is the Problem with Fundamental Moral Error?

Quasi-realists argue that meta-ethical expressivism is fully compatible with the central assumptions underlying ordinary moral practice. In a recent paper, Andy Egan has developed a vexing challenge for this project, arguing that expressivism is incompatible with central assumptions about error in moral judgments. In response, Simon Blackburn has argued that Egan's challenge fails, because Egan reads the expressivist as giving an account of moral error, rather than an account of judgments about moral error. In this paper I argue that the challenge can be reinstated, even if we focus only on the expressivist's account of judgments about moral error.