Emotion as a source of moral understanding in conservation.

Drawing on ethnographic research in an upper-class district in Turkey, this article examines social and spatial experiences of young low-wage service workers who travel daily back and forth between their homes in low-income neighbourhoods and their jobs in gated communities, upscale shopping malls and corporate offices. The paper argues that the significance of upper class districts or gated communities for urban inequality lies not in the sites themselves, nor the lifestyles of their elite inhabitants as commonly treated in the literature, but rather in the ways in which they relate to the outside and outsiders. Within this framework, the paper analyses the district’s effect on urban spatial segregation and urbanites’ sense of place in society. While resentment and reaction to inequalities and upper class customers are prevalent in young workers’ narratives, workers’ class subjectivities are also marked by a sense of mobility and liminality between the upper middle classes in their work district and their families, friends and neighbours back home. This sense of socio-spatial ‘in-betweenness’ is reinforced by being young, hence a sense of temporal liminality between youth and adulthood. The study contributes to the understanding of urban inequality at the intersection of spatial, emotional and temporal experiences of urbanites.

An Infatuation with Titles:Hereditary Privilege and Liberty in the Ear of the American Revolution Trevor Burnard (bio) Michal Jan Rozbicki's exploration of the meanings of liberty in 18th-century British North America is a major achievement. His assertion that we need to look at how Americans understood liberty as relational, with one person's liberty making sense as a privilege extended to them and not to others, is an important challenge to existing readings of the American Revolution. It most notably challenges the influential theses of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood that see the American Revolution as a transformative event, with American understandings of liberty undergoing a sharp break as a result of a revolutionary explosion dominated by politically reformist, egalitarian ideals.1 Wood's interpretation of the American Revolution is usually attacked from the Left, as being overly genteel and insufficiently appreciative of the views of anyone outside the ranks of the northeastern elite.2 Rozbicki challenges Wood and Bailyn from the other direction. Using theoretical insights from European scholarship, especially Reinhard Kosselleck's understanding of conceptual history, Pierre Bourdieu's work on how social and economic capital are acquired through symbolic practice, and historians of science's understanding of how Kuhnian paradigm shifts occur, Rozbicki suggests that American understandings of liberty evolved in the late 18th century; they were not, in his view, transformed. The concept of liberty remained less a concept with one core meaning than a multivalent idea, liberty being a "metaphor for a cluster of specific immunities and entitlements existing along a continuum, with different portions of this spectrum available to different social ranks, and with their fullest enjoyment exclusive to members of the uppermost elites" (11). It is an immensely helpful definition. It helps us see the continuities in thought about the meanings of liberty between colonial and Revolutionary America; provides a useful conceptual tool for understanding how Americans could insist on their own egalitarianism while being deeply committed to various forms of racial, gendered, and class inequalities; and explains contemporary American fascination with royalty and inherited status, especially in politics, where office sometimes seems inherited rather than earned. Because the United States has preserved its Constitution in aspic, it continues to run its politics based on assumptions current in the 18th century rather than the 21st century, with rank and privilege continuing to be politically very important.3 Click for larger view View full resolution A detail from a 1905 photograph of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, Monticello. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-D4-18443]. I think, however, that Rozbicki could make an even stronger case if he reconsidered the social position of the group that he credits with the most agency in expanding the cultural space for liberty in the Revolutionary era, a space that later got taken up by ordinary Americans clamoring for an extension of privilege to themselves. Rozbicki believes that by the mid-18th century colonial America had a "genuine, creole upper class confidently claiming to be free and independent" (54). Bitter about how their claims to colonial self-rule were rejected by a British metropolitan class who saw this upper class or gentry (Rozbicki uses these terms interchangeably) as provincial upstarts, they broke away from Britain in order that they might create a new society in which they formed the apex with all the privileges of liberty that could only go to the "uppermost elites" (75). Another way of putting this, in terms that people in the 18th century might recognize, is that the colonial American gentry became, through the magic of revolutionary war, an American aristocracy. The leaders of the new American nation raised themselves one rank in the social hierarchy, with United States senators being analogous to British peers. John Adams was explicit in his belief that a hierarchy of distinctions and separate orders of monarchy, aristocracy, and commoners were essential for any functioning society. Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy, Adams argued, were both "institutions of admirable wisdom and exemplary virtue in a certain stage of society in a great nation." Eventually, he believed, the United States would be mature enough to have both institutions, which was reason to invent...

According to a widely accepted conception, philosophy is essentially a second-order discipline raising second-order questions about the procedures and products of first-order reasonings (concepts; principles; theories etc.). While this conception has considerable prima facie plausibility and, carefully put, contains a grain of truth, it also invites serious misunderstandings that may be detrimental to an adequate understanding and public image of philosophy. To work out the grain of truth while avoiding the misunderstandings, I begin by asking: What is philosophical understanding? In answering this question, understanding in philosophy is compared and contrasted with everyday understanding, on the one hand, and scientific understanding, on the other hand. While philosophy itself is a scientific practice in a wide sense, in contrast to normal understanding within a special scientific discipline (physics; chemistry; biology; psychology; etc.) philosophical understanding is characterized by a particular critical attitude and particular principles of rational acceptability.

The role of empathy in morality is a subject of ongoing scientific debate due to the lack of systematic reviews and meta-analyses on this topic. To address this gap, we conducted a PRISMA-based systematic quantitative review to investigate the role of empathy in moral judgements, decision-making, and inclinations using trolley problems and variants, which are popular types of moral dilemmas that explore utilitarianism and deontology. We searched for articles in four databases (PsycINFO, Pubmed, WorldWideScience, and Scopus) and performed citation searches. Out of 661 records, we selected 34 that studied the associations between empathy and moral judgements, moral decision-making, and/or moral inclinations. Six meta-analyses and systematic reviews of these records consistently showed small to moderate associations between affective empathy and these moral parameters, particularly in personal moral dilemmas involving intentional harm (although some approaches highlighted more complex associations between these parameters). Regarding other empathy domains, most studies found limited or insignificant links between cognitive empathy domains and moral judgements, decision-making, and inclinations. We discuss the nuances and implications of these results.

Doing harm is a moral violation, but helping a family member is morally obligatory. In this study, participants encountered this ethical dilemma through stories featuring their sibling (i.e., brother) as either the perpetrator or victim in various moral scenarios. Subsequently, they provided their moral judgements (i.e., moral acceptability and perceived transgression) and made decisions (i.e., willingness and difficulty to disclose what the agent did to the police) regarding the perpetrator. The manipulation of family membership was integrated into the moral scenarios, which were crafted based on whether the perpetrator had malicious intent and whether those intentions resulted in a harmful outcome (i.e., intentional harm, failed attempts to harm, accidental harm, and a harmless/baseline). While we initially expected that individuals would exhibit favouritism towards their brother when harmful intent or outcomes were absent, our findings revealed that both agent/victim identities (brother/stranger) and intent-outcome-based moral scenarios had an additive effect on both measures of moral judgement. This suggests that the family favouring effect was observed across all intent-outcome scenarios, with a slightly more pronounced effect when the brother accidentally harmed a stranger compared to a stranger accidentally harming the brother. Regarding moral decisions, participants demonstrated a willingness to disclose what they witnessed regardless of their familial relationship with the agent or victim, but it was universally perceived as a difficult decision to make. Together, our results underscore the context-specific nature of moral judgements and decisions, emphasising the significant impact of family members when they are involved as moral characters.

As its title suggests, Nigel Biggar’s In Defence of War offers a strong response to pacifists who argue that the use of armed force can never be morally justified. However, though it is cogently and convincingly made, this argument is not really the heart of In Defence of War. Indeed, it constitutes only one chapter of the book, which is primarily dedicated to the defense of a particular kind of extremely pleased that several soldiers with battlefield experience have found empirically plausible my claim in chapter 2 that the use of lethal violence can be motivated, not at all by hatred, but by love—even for the enemy. So, there you have what the author thinks that In Defence of War is about. But as with life, so with books: authors are not always the best judges of what they are doing.

Neuroimaging studies on moral decision-making have thus far largely focused on differences between moral judgments with opposing utilitarian (well-being maximizing) and deontological (duty-based) content. However, these studies have investigated moral dilemmas involving extreme situations, and did not control for two distinct dimensions of moral judgment: whether or not it is intuitive (immediately compelling to most people) and whether it is utilitarian or deontological in content. By contrasting dilemmas where utilitarian judgments are counterintuitive with dilemmas in which they are intuitive, we were able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of intuitive and counterintuitive judgments across a range of moral situations. Irrespective of content (utilitarian/deontological), counterintuitive moral judgments were associated with greater difficulty and with activation in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that such judgments may involve emotional conflict; intuitive judgments were linked to activation in the visual and premotor cortex. In addition, we obtained evidence that neural differences in moral judgment in such dilemmas are largely due to whether they are intuitive and not, as previously assumed, to differences between utilitarian and deontological judgments. Our findings therefore do not support theories that have generally associated utilitarian and deontological judgments with distinct neural systems.

Amicus Brief Martha C. Nussbaum ii. summary of the argument This brief argues that the law requires reformation to protect our modern scientific and philosophical understanding that many animals can live their own meaningful lives and that the Court should reform the law in this case.1 Modern science demonstrates that elephants are complex beings that can form a conception of the self, as observed by Judge Fahey, form strong social and emotional bonds among themselves and others, and that the Zoo's conduct harms Happy in both physical and intangible ways. Furthermore, this brief argues that the lower courts in Lavery I and II applied the wrong philosophical framework to the question of whether certain non-human animals should be considered legal persons. Instead of animal rights being based on the capacity to engage in a social contract and to bear legal duties, the proper framework for animal rights is the capabilities approach, which asks how the law can help animals like Happy not only live but thrive. Accordingly, this brief explains the importance of this appeal, the Court's opportunity to reform [End Page 15] the field of animal law, and the potential to release Happy from a life of captivity, ensuring she lives the rest of her life in a manner that respects her capabilities. iii. argument 1. This Case Matters Because It Is Time to Reform the Law to Protect Our Modern Scientific and Philosophical Understanding That Many Animals Are Capable of Living Their Own Meaningful Lives Modern science now recognizes a very important fact about many animals, including elephants. They are not merely biological units that simply need food and a suitable environment to survive and maintain a viable population. Today, scientists view many animals as beings capable of living their own meaningful lives. Early Indian and Roman cultures understood the complexity of animal lives and the implications of this complexity surrounding the humane treatment of animals; public awareness of this fact is widespread today. Almost all ancient Greek and Roman philosophical schools attributed complex forms of cognition and numerous emotions to animals,2 a precursor to our current laws against cruel practices to animals. What philosophy and, more recently, science have understood but the law has not, is that elephants are sentient beings who can feel emotion, foster relationships, create communities, and form a conception of the self. Our current legal system fails to respect species-specific, central capabilities. Although each of the fifty states has animal cruelty laws,3 these laws protect only a small number of animals and fail to constrain, to any meaningful extent, the widespread infliction of suffering. They ban only the intentional, purposeful suffering of some animals, and fail to recognize the impact that captivity, lack of relationships, and solitude cause a creature like Happy. This Court has the opportunity to create legal precedent that provides these living creatures the legal right to thrive and survive in ways that coincide with their specific capabilities, and prevent not only the infliction of physical pain, but emotional and psychological injury as well. 2. The Magical Lives of Elephants Elephants are cognitive, complex creatures with distinct societies, emotions, and lives. They form societies that foster the wellbeing of each member, in which their emotions and development from childhood through adulthood are readily apparent.4 A combat staged between humans and elephants in 55 B.C. by the Roman leader Pompey paints a prime example of these complex emotions and connections with other animals, namely humans. Surrounded in the arena, the elephants perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, the elephants then "entreated the crowd, trying to win its compassion with indescribable [End Page 16] gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation."5 The audience, moved to pity and anger by their plight, rose to curse Pompey—feeling, wrote Cicero, that the elephants had a relation of commonality (societas) with humans.6 However, this connection with humans cannot be substituted for true, similar companionship from other elephants, which Happy has lacked for almost two decades. Elephants' ability to connect with other elephants and animals may be attributable to their long life spans; they are the most...

<p id="p00005">Reputational concern has been suggested as an important determinant of human cooperative behavior and moral judgment in social interactions. Previous studies have demonstrated that reputational concern influences behavioral and neural responses during prosocial behaviors and decision-making, such as moral decision-making. Moral decision- making is a typical social decision-making process involving trade-offs between the self and others. It refers to the process in which individuals make optimal choices under the guidance of social systems and norms according to their own value orientations when faced with a variety of possible dilemmas and conflicts in behavioral choices. Emerging studies have shown that social distance modulates behavioral and neural responses during moral decision-making. However, little is known about how reputational concern and social distance interact to affect moral decision-making, particularly regarding the underlying cognitive neural mechanism of moral decision-making associated with proscriptive morality (i.e., harmful behavior). <break/>In the present study, we adopted the “shock-benefit dilemma” task and event-related potential (ERP) technology to examine temporal processing of the interactive influence of reputational concern and social distance on moral decision-making when faced with harmful dilemmas. Participants were instructed to complete a series of alternative dilemmas in an anonymous or public context. After being instructed whether their decisions were going to be made public to the target person, participants decided whether to deliver a certain intensity of painful electric shocks toward the targets (i.e., friends, acquaintances, or strangers) to receive money. A choice not to shock the targets meant that they would forego the benefit. Behavioral and neural responses were recorded while the participants made their decisions. The experiment consisted of 360 trials, including two blocks of anonymous and public situations and 120 trials with friends, acquaintances, and strangers. <break/>The results showed that participants administered fewer electric shocks to friends than to acquaintances and strangers, which suggested an obvious “egoistic altruism” decision tendency in anonymous situations. Participants spent more time and experienced greater disgust in dilemmas involving acquaintances relative to those involving friends and strangers, which showed an obvious “acquaintance effect”. However, these differences were weakened in public situations. As for the ERP results, the dilemmas involving acquaintances elicited a larger P260 component, which is associated with emotional responses, and late positive potential (LPP, 300~450 ms), which is associated with cognitive reasoning. However, these differences in ERP indices disappeared in public situations. <break/>The aim of this study was to explore the interaction between reputational concern and social distance in behavioral and neural responses during moral decision-making involving harmful dilemmas. The results supported the hypothesis that individuals follow the egoistic altruism moral principle to conduct moral decision-making involving reputational concern and social distance. These findings suggest that the uncertainty of acquaintance relations induces stronger negative emotions and cognitive load during moral decision-making, and reputational concern effectively weakens the aversion and dilemma conflict brought about by self-interest tendencies and interpersonal uncertainties.

Over the past decade, moral judgments and their underlying decision processes have more frequently been considered from a dynamic and multi-factorial perspective rather than a binary approach (e.g., dual-system processes). The agent’s intent and his or her causal role in the outcome–as well as the outcome importance–are key psychological factors that influence moral decisions, especially judgments of punishment. The current research aimed to study the influence of intent, outcome, and causality variations on moral decisions, and to identify their interaction during the decision process by embedding the moral scenarios within an adapted mouse-tracking paradigm. Findings of the preregistered study (final n = 80) revealed main effects for intent, outcome, and causality on judgments of punishment, and an interaction between the effects of intent and causality. We furthermore explored the dynamics of these effects during the decision process via the analysis of mouse trajectories in the course of time. It allowed detecting when these factors intervened during the trial time course. The present findings thus both replicate and extend previous research on moral judgment, and evidence that, despite some ongoing challenges, mouse-tracking represents a promising tool to investigate moral decision-making.

Cross-cultural research in moral judgements (e.g., whether to sacrifice one person to save several others) often focuses on differences regarding the instrumentality of harm, i.e., whether the death of one person is an instrument to save several others (instrumental) or is an incidental side-effect (incidental). Less cross-cultural research exists on differences regarding one’s own involvement, i.e., whether one’s own life or only the life of others is at risk. The present study investigated the influence of both factors on moral judgements in a European (Austrian) and an Asian (Mongolian) culture. Austrians and Mongolians read moral dilemmas and chose whether (or not) they would carry out an action that sacrifices one but saves several others. Afterwards, they rated the moral acceptability of that action. Both cultures chose utilitarian actions (sacrificing one to save others) less often in instrumental than in incidental dilemmas. Thus, instrumental harm is universally regarded as worse than incidental harm. In instrumental dilemmas, Mongolians chose more utilitarian actions than Austrians, indicating that Mongolians more likely act in favour of group welfare. In instrumental dilemmas, Austrians chose more utilitarian actions when their own life was at risk than when only the life of others was at risk. In incidental dilemmas, the opposite was observed for Mongolians. Thus, Austrians more likely act in favour of self-interest, whereas Mongolians perceive it as more unvirtuous to harm others to save oneself. Results on moral acceptability ratings and decision times further support those cultural differences. Thus, culture may convey certain moral decisions.

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to identify moral judgment according to nursing students' personality types and demographic variables. Method : Study data were collected from 2001 to 2004. Study subjects were 123 senior nursing students in a university. The data were collected by a structured questionnairre and analyzed by descriptive analysis and ANOVA. Results : The moral judgement mean score of nursing students was .851. The demographic variables of nursing students such as religion, parents' education, background, economy status and birth order were not statistically significant related to the moral judgment scores. Although personality types were not statistically significant related to the moral judgment scores, the moral judgment scores of nursing students who were upper class were higher than nursing students who were low class in 'dominance', 'sociability', 'responsibility', 'reflectiveness' and 'conformity' among personality types. Oppositely, the moral judgment scores of nursing students who were low class were higher than nursing students who were high class in 'masculinity', 'impulsiveness' and 'superiority' . Conclusion : It is necessary to an effective ethical education considering to nursing students' personality type and we believe that the results of this study will enhanced our efforts in amending effective ethical education and improving the ethical decision-making skills of nursing students.

The sense of agency, the feeling of being the author of one's actions and outcomes, is critical for decision-making. While prior research has explored its neural correlates, most studies have focused on neutral tasks, overlooking moral decision-making. In addition, previous studies mainly used convenience samples, ignoring that some social environments may influence how authorship in moral decision-making is processed. This study investigated the neural correlates of sense of agency in civilians and military officer cadets, examining free and coerced choices in both agent and commander roles. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm where participants could either freely choose or follow orders to inflict a mild shock on a victim, we assessed sense of agency through temporal binding-a temporal distortion between voluntary and less voluntary decisions. Our findings suggested that sense of agency is reduced when following orders compared to acting freely in both roles. Several brain regions correlated with temporal binding, notably the occipital lobe, superior/middle/inferior frontal gyrus, precuneus, and lateral occipital cortex. Importantly, no differences emerged between military and civilians at corrected thresholds, suggesting that daily environments have minimal influence on the neural basis of moral decision-making, enhancing the generalizability of the findings.

Moral decision-making is a key asset for humans’ integration in social contexts, and the way we decide about moral issues seems to be strongly influenced by emotions. For example, individuals with deficits in emotional processing tend to deliver more utilitarian choices (accepting an emotionally aversive action in favor of communitarian well-being). However, little is known about the association between emotional experience and moral-related patterns of choice. We investigated whether subjective reactivity to emotional stimuli, in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance, is associated with moral decision-making in 95 healthy adults. They answered to a set of moral and non-moral dilemmas and assessed emotional experience in valence, arousal and dominance dimensions in response to neutral, pleasant, unpleasant non-moral, and unpleasant moral pictures. Results showed significant correlations between less unpleasantness to negative stimuli, more pleasantness to positive stimuli and higher proportion of utilitarian choices. We also found a positive association between higher arousal ratings to negative moral laden pictures and more utilitarian choices. Low dominance was associated with greater perceived difficulty over moral judgment. These behavioral results are in fitting with the proposed role of emotional experience in moral choice.

Recent research has begun to elucidate the neural basis of higher order social concepts, such as the mechanisms involved in intergroup relations, and moral judgments. Most theories have concentrated on higher order emotions, such as guilt, shame, or empathy, as core mechanisms. Accordingly, psychopharmacological and neurobiological studies have investigated the effects of manipulating serotonin or oxytocin activity on moral and social decisions and attitudes. However, recently it has been determined that changes in more basic emotions, such as fear and anger, might also have a significant role in social and moral cognition. This article summarizes psychopharmacological and fMRI research on the role of noradrenaline in higher order social cognition suggesting that indeed noradrenergic mediated affective changes might play key – and probably causal – role in certain social attitudes and moral judgments. Social judgments may also be directly influenced by numerous neurotransmitter manipulations but these effects could be mediated by modulation of basic emotions which appear to play an essential role in the formation of social concepts and moral behaviour.