Individual Moral Responsibility Research Articles

ANALISIS PERDAGANGAN INTERNASIONAL MELALUI MODEL POLITIK HECKSCHER-OHLIN TERHADAP KEPENTINGAN EKONOMI NASIONAL PESPEKTIF HUKUM EKONOMI ISLAM

This research analyzes international trade through the Heckscher-Ohlin political model towards national economic interests from an Islamic economic law perspective. This research uses qualitative methods with a text analysis approach. The data used is secondary, regarding the relationship between international trade, economic policy and national economic welfare. The research results show that the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) theory is the main basis for studying the economics of international trade. This theory emphasizes differences in the scarcity of production factors between countries as the main factor influencing trade patterns. The main production factors in this theory are labor and capital. This difference in the scarcity of production factors encourages specialization in production, which helps increase the efficiency of resource allocation. Comparative advantage is basic in HO theory, where countries focus on producing goods they are able to produce at lower costs. This analysis also carries the HO Theory with Islamic economic law, which emphasizes the fairness of wealth distribution, business ethics, integrity, social welfare, balance and social justice, as well as individual moral responsibility in international trade. By combining these two approaches, international trade can provide sustainable economic and social benefits and is in accordance with Islamic ethical values.

Reconciling Moral Responsibility with Multiplicity in Conway’s Principles

ABSTRACT Anne Conway’s commitment to the moral responsibility of creatures, or created beings, is seemingly in tension with her unique metaphysics. Conway is committed to individual moral responsibility. Conway insists that an innocent person ought not be punished for someone else’s sin. Interesting recent work highlights a unique aspect of Conway’s position that creatures are multiplicities: not only are creatures integrated into the larger whole of creation, but also their parts are mutually integrated into one another. The latter, which I will call ‘ontological overlap,’ renders the boundaries between creatures unclear. However, creatures must be distinct enough from each other to provide a proper subject for individual moral responsibility. This contribution suggests that Conway’s account of vital power can resolve an apparent tension between ontological overlap and individual moral responsibility and, more broadly, that Conway has a relational metaphysics of moral subjecthood.

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Individual moral responsibility for antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance (AR) is a major threat to public health and healthcare worldwide. In this article, we analyse and discuss the claim that taking actions to minimize AR is everyone's responsibility, focusing on individual moral responsibility. This should not be merely interpreted as a function of knowledge of AR and the proper use of antibiotics. Instead, we suggest a circumstantial account of individual responsibility for AR, where individuals do or do not engage in judicious antibiotic behaviour with different degrees of voluntariness. Furthermore, we suggest a notion of responsibility as a virtue, in which individuals have the opportunity to develop a sensitivity towards the AR theme and, consequently, are capable of engaging, actively and voluntarily, in judicious antibiotic behaviour. The development of such sensitivity depends on the creation of adequate circumstances, that is individual capacities and availability of resources.

Проблема колективної моральної відповідальності: тематичний аналіз колективістської педагогіки Антона Макаренко

The article seeks to address a fundamental gap in collective moral responsibility research by exploring a collectivist rather than the dominating individualist perspective on the relationship between a private individual and the collective whole. In particular, it presents a qualitative case study of ideas of outstanding Ukrainian teacher, methodologist and theorist of education, founder of the pedagogical school Anton Semenovych Makarenko and his collectivist pedagogy as a major educational paradigm implemented within the context of the Soviet state and society. The analysis of the concepts of collective experience, communist personality, collective, distribution of powers, responsibility, and discipline contributes to a better understanding of the nature of individual and collective moral responsibility. At the same time, the article argues that a consistent implementation of the collectivist worldview results in an essentially flawed misbalanced relationship between an individual and the collective of people. In the Soviet context, such misbalance is evidenced in the phenomena of the cult of personality and state paternalism. As a consequence of identifying responsibility with discipline, the individual personality is deprived of its moral and utilitarian autonomy, devalued, and forcibly assimilated by the collective whole perceived as the highest authoritative source of moral judgement and the sole distributor of moral responsibility. Consistent implementation of the collectivist worldview in the context of Soviet society inevitably leads to an imbalance in the relationship between individual and collective principles and, ultimately, the justification of any coercion and violence by the state as such a team performing the highest guardianship and pedagogical function.

Moral Responsibility for Racial Oppression

In his recent monograph, (Re-)defining Racism: A Philosophical Analysis (2020), Alberto G. Urquidez invites the reader to take a fresh look at the confused and complicated concept of racism. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, Urquidez argues that debates over racism are not about discovering what racism really refers to in the world but the appropriate rule of representation— the standard of the correct use of the term (p. 25–26). Discovering racism is a normative endeavor and, he argues, a prescriptive one (Urquidez, p. 26). My comments here are not intended as a critique of Urquidez’ account so much as an opportunity to reflect on where he might go from here in developing his account. In particular, I focus on lingering questions over the relationship between the critique of structures and practices licensed by political morality and that of individual behaviors. I explore how Urquidez grounds claims of individual moral responsibility for racism.

Structural Injustice and the Emotions

A structural harm results from countless apparently innocuous interactions between a great many individuals in a social system, and not from any agent’s intentionally producing the harm. Iris Young has influentially articulated a model of individual moral responsibility for such harms, and several other philosophers have taken it as their starting point for dealing with the phenomenon of structural injustice. In this paper, I argue that this social connection model is far less realistic and socially effective than it aims to be. This is because the model systematically neglects the key role played by the emotions in human moral life.

Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America by Jordan J. Dominy

Reviewed by: Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America by Jordan J. Dominy Greg Barnhisel Jordan J. Dominy. Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America. UP of Mississippi, 2021. ix + 159 pp. In William Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!, Shreve McCannon implores his Harvard roommate, Quentin Compson, to tell him about the South: “What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” Even a Canadian like Shreve knows that to his Mississippian friend, the South, not the US, was his country of birth. The South was briefly an independent nation just three decades before Quentin’s birth. But it retained, refined, and intensified its separateness in the decades after the Confederacy fell and Reconstruction was sabotaged. Separateness, in fact, became the South’s identity: it saw itself as a captive region, a rump nation, within a larger and not particularly benevolent state. Thus, it seems improbable that Southernness could become a central component of a larger, amalgamated American identity, especially when crafting and selling that identity was a primary concern of American intellectuals and policymakers as the US became, in the years after the war, the world’s primary power and a synecdoche for the Free World. But, as Jordan J. Dominy argues in Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of America, that’s exactly what happened. Like so much else, this universalizing of Southernness was largely Faulkner’s doing. Although this book spans the earliest years of the Cold War to the present day (what Dominy might call the Duck Dynasty stage of Western civilization), Faulkner looms over the project, as he did over American literature of the time. Area studies, a foundation-funded academic endeavor that began in the 1930s, became an urgent priority after World War II, when the US had to train leaders and technocrats to lead a loose global empire. Southern studies soon joined Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and, of course, American Studies in scholarly journals and graduate catalogs. And “the figure of Faulkner” (38), Dominy asserts, “is what makes possible the area studies paradigm of southern studies.” When asked, Faulkner was pleased to represent the benign face of America and volunteered to go on numerous cultural-diplomatic trips for the State Department, often reciting his 1951 Nobel speech to foreign audiences. And he was an adamant and vocal anti-Communist. The problem was that he was just so . . . Southern. The Soviet Union, [End Page 789] as well as leftists in the West, made sure to remind everyone about Southern segregation and racial terrorism whenever American diplomats started raising their voices about freedom and equal opportunity. Excusing or even defending Southern resistance to desegregation, Faulkner often did his own cause little help. So how to square this circle? Dominy shows that the US consistently relied on two strategies: stressing the primacy of the individual and aestheticizing. Faulkner’s works were explained, by the Southern-rooted Kenyon Review and others, as formalist tours de force, not as depictions of a South whose culture was poisoned by white supremacy. These New Critical readings “contain[ed] unsavory national political problems by making them into an object of formalistic literary study” (45). And when a work just could not be entirely aestheticized (as with Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust), questions of race became issues of individual morality, or the human heart in conflict with itself, as Faulkner himself put it in the Nobel address. So, in Intruder in the Dust, Dominy explains, Gavin Stevens’s commentary “obscures and depoliticizes the problem [of an attempted lynching] by emphasizing individual moral responsibility and duty to country” (41-42). Dominy argues that the idea of the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. influentially developed in his 1949 book of the same name became the master concept of this strategy. Centrist politics, individual responsibility, and a commitment to narrowly defined civil liberties were its cornerstones and allowed critics and prize committees to read deeply political works such as All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison as dramas...

Shared Epistemic Responsibility

AbstractIt is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared (or joint) moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a profoundly incomplete picture of what we're epistemically obligated to do and when we deserve epistemic blame. First, I argue that we have epistemic obligations to perform actions of the sort that can be performed in conjunction with other people, and that consequently, we are often jointly blameworthy when we violate shared epistemic obligations. Second, I argue that shared responsibility is especially important to doxastic responsibility thanks to the fact that we don't have the same kind of direct control over our beliefs that we have over our actions. In particular, I argue that there are many cases in which a particular individual who holds some problematic belief only deserves epistemic blame in virtue of belonging to a group all the members of which are jointly blameworthy for violating some shared epistemic obligation.

Merab Mamardashvili and Immanuel Kant: a dialogue on transcendental consciousness and moral responsibility

Mamardashvili always engaged in a dialogue with thinkers of the past, particularly with those philosophers whom he considered to have founded the phenomenological analysis of consciousness. He had a particular fascination for Kant. Not only did Mamardashvili devote to him a series of lectures, but he referenced Kantian themes throughout the entirety of his work. This article focuses on two of those themes. The first is transcendental consciousness, considered as that which makes experience possible without being itself reducible to experience. Consciousness is at the basis of all the different “forms” that make possible our experience of the world. Thinking is possible only in the context of cultural tradition, which is embedded in language. The second is individual moral responsibility. Everyone everywhere takes a stance at all times, here and now, thereby assuming the whole responsibility for their action. Mamardashvili’s dialogue with Kant leads us to consider some of the ethical problems of human civilization.

Moral Responsibility Reconsidered: Integrating Chance, Choice and Constraint

Clarity is needed regarding moral responsibility, for theoretical and practical purposes, such as philosophical coherence and social regulation. In this article, I examine the notion of (individual) moral responsibility. I first dispense with a preliminary concern, that the notion of moral responsibility can be used in at least two distinct ways, which I argue are necessarily related and hence can be jointly addressed in this article. I then elaborate on what I consider to be the three key tenets of the proposed theoretical approach: chance, choice and constraint (which can hence be termed the 3Cs theory of responsibility); specifically, I consider chance as indeterminate (although calculable), whereas choice and constraint are determined by chance and by each other. I then integrate these tenets to form a rudimentary yet useful theory of (individual) moral responsibility, particularly referring to the iterative process of chance, choice and constraint. And then I apply this theory to three sufficiently dissimilar types of situations of ascending complexity: the responsibility of a democratically elected politician regarding his or her public communication, the responsibility of a person with psychosis regarding his or her psychosis-related behavior, and the responsibility of a parent regarding his or her dependent child’s upbringing. Finally, I summarize and attend to special and general implications of my conclusions, such as the importance of considering expected – rather than actual – impact of chance, choice and constraint, during moral deliberation for assignment of (individual) moral responsibility.

Obesity, stigma and reflexive embodiment: Feeling the 'weight' of expectation.

The dominant obesity discourse which emphasises individual moral responsibility and lifestyle modification encourages weight-based stigma. Existing research overwhelmingly demonstrates that obesity stigma is an ineffective means by which to reduce the incidence of obesity and that it promotes weight-gain. However, the sensate experiences associated with the subjective experience of obesity stigma as a reflexively embodied phenomenon have been largely unexamined. This article addresses this knowledge gap by providing a phenomenological account. Data are derived from 11 months of ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews with three single-sex weight-loss groups in England. Group members were predominantly overweight/obese and of low-socio-economic status. The analysis triangulates these two data sources to investigate what/how obesity stigma made group members feel. We find that obesity stigma confused participant's objective and subjective experiences of their bodies. This was primarily evident on occasions when group members felt heavier after engaging in behaviours associated with weight-gain but this 'weight' did not register on the weighing scales. We conceptualise this as the weight of expectation which is taken as illustrative of the perpetual uncertainty and morality that characterises weight-management. In addition, we show that respondents ascribed their sensate experiences of physiological responses to exercise with moral and social significance. These carnal cues provided a sense of certainty and played an important role in attempts to negotiate obesity stigma. These findings deepen the understanding of how and why obesity stigma is an inappropriate and ineffective means of promoting weight-loss.

A Phenomenological Theory of Ecological Responsibility and Its Implications for Moral Agency in Climate Change

In a recent article appearing in this journal, Theresa Scavenius compellingly argues that the traditional “rational-individualistic” conception of responsibility is ill-suited to accounting for the sense in which moral agents share in responsibility for both contributing to the causes and, proactively, working towards solutions for climate change. Lacking an effective moral framework through which to make sense of individual moral responsibility for climate change, many who have good intentions and the means to contribute to solutions for climate change tend to dismiss or put off addressing the root causes. With this tendency arises the practical problem that climate change calls for urgent global collective action, both in terms of mitigation (addressing the root causes, especially by reducing GHG emissions) and adaptation, in order to prevent global temperature rise from exceeding 2C and avoid worst case climate scenarios. In this paper, I develop a phenomenological theory of ecological responsibility which addresses the conceptual problem Scavenius brings out and contributes to clarifying the sense in which moral agents share responsibility for both the causes and solutions for climate change. To develop this theory, I draw from, combine, and transform insights from the late work of Husserl on open horizons, transcendental intersubjectivity, and genetic phenomenology with breakthroughs from Emmanuel Levinas in articulating an original, asymmetrical theory of unlimited, diachronic responsibility. In drawing from Husserl, I show how what Levinas describes as the source of a demand for unlimited, diachronic responsibility (an encounter with the infinity of the other) can be phenomenologically reinterpreted in terms of a horizon of indeterminacy. I then show how horizons of indeterminacy arise in phenomenological descriptions of both human and nonhuman entities in such a way that discloses the demand for responsibility as a broad-ranging demand for unlimited, diachronic ecological responsibility. An important implication of this phenomenological theory of ecological responsibility is that it contributes to clarifying the sense in which individual moral agents share in responsibility for long range collective moral problems such as climate change.

Individualism as a Cultural Syndrome in Recent American Cinema

The article explores the balance of the two basic cultural constructs - individualism and collectivism - and the way it is represented in the American cinema of 2015-2016 as exemplified by a number of films set in the past, present and future. The author comes to the conclusion that in the face of a global peril the idea of individual moral responsibility inevitably leads to the role of collectivism as the essential survival condition.

Financial Market Manipulation, Whistle-Blowing and the Common Good: Evidence from the LIBOR Scandal

In this paper, circumstances under which the prevention of market manipulation may not ultimately serve the common good, are considered. Prevention of these crimes is necessary given their considerable economic and social impacts. Recent prosecutions for manipulation of the important LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) in the international finance market are used to argue that top-down approaches to the rule enforcement of individuals and corporations, cannot ultimately succeed in preventing these types of crimes. One key concern with current regulatory approaches is that they assume individuals make rational, consequence-based decisions. This allows the abdication of individual moral responsibility in favour of institutional and regulatory guidance. The LIBOR scandal, however, shows that compliance to these rules is especially problematic in organizations plagued with self-centred, narcissistic and ruthless profit-driven cultures. Alternatively, we suggest that a bottom-up approach, which relies upon individuals acting in the interest of the common good, maybe more effective in organisational environments that are duty, as well as incentive, based. This approach requires individuals to accept a degree of moral responsibility for their actions, and to some extent the actions of others. We believe that properly motivated and instructed, individuals can think and act better than they might otherwise do despite behavioural bias.

Social Sin and Social Wrongs: Moral Responsibility in a Structurally Disordered World

Many of the most pressing moral problems that face our world are structural problems. Problems of this nature present difficulties for Christian ethicists because structural features tend to undermine conditions for the attribution of individual moral responsibility. This essay proposes an approach to this problem that reconciles a social account of sin with individual moral responsibility. Two key moves drive this proposal. First, I argue for a sharper distinction between sin and moral wrongdoing than is common. Second, I argue that both sin and individual moral responsibility ought to be understood socially. This proposal addresses deep conceptual problems and points practical efforts in a new direction.

Telling ‘moral tales’? Family narratives of responsible privilege and environmental concern in India and the UK

Contemporary discussions of climate change response frequently emphasise individual moral responsibility, but little is known about how environmental messages are taken up or resisted in everyday practices. This article examines how families negotiate the moral narratives and identity positions associated with environmental responsibility. It focuses on families living in relatively affluent circumstances in England and South East India to consider the ways in which the families construct their understandings of environment and take up identities as morally responsible. Our analysis focuses on a subsample of case studies involved in the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods Family Lives and the Environment study, within the NOVELLA node, using a multimethod qualitative approach with families of children aged between 12 and 14. This article focuses on interviews with 10 of the 24 families in the sample, all of whom (in both India and the UK) discussed environmental concerns within moral narratives of the responsibilities of relative privilege. Findings highlight the potential of cross-world research to help theorise the complex economic and cultural specificity of a particular morally charged framing of environmental concern, addressing the (dis)connections between ‘moral tales’ of responsible privilege and individual and collective accounts of family practices.

Victims, vectors and villains: are those who opt out of vaccination morally responsible for the deaths of others?

Mass vaccination has been a successful public health strategy for many contagious diseases. The immunity of the vaccinated also protects others who cannot be safely or effectively vaccinated—including infants and...

The Exemplary Ethical Leadership of King Moshoeshoe of Basotho of Lesotho in the Nineteenth Century Southern Africa

There is no gainsaying in that nation-building requires bold, visionary, and above all, exemplary ethical leadership. King Moshoeshoe 1 of the Basotho of Lesotho standing as an exemplar of ethical leadership is abundantly supported both by his monumental achievements and by the ethical qualities of his organizational creative leadership. The purpose of this exemplar profile is to display his underappreciated record of individual moral responsibility for social science disciplines i.e. political management, political science, political philosophy, public administration, business administration, leadership studies, organizational theory etc. There is so much these disciplines can learn about the nature of ethical leadership and its relationship to public organizational effectiveness from Moshoeshoe’s leadership philosophy, managerial style, organizational behavior and decisions in their quest for building harmonious and just societies worldwide.

Individual Moral Responsibility and the Problem of Climate Change

Abstract The problems caused by anthropogenic climate change threaten the lives and well-being of millions, yet it seems that we, as individuals, are powerless to prevent or worsen these problems. In this essay we consider the difficulty of assigning moral responsibility in cases of collective action problems like the problem of anthropogentic climate change. We consider two promising solutions, the expected utility and rights based solution, and argue that both are incapable of explaining why individuals have moral obligations to address collective action problems. We believe, however, that this result does not justify inaction, instead it reveals a failure of moral philosophy to adequately address collective action problems. More work must be done to address the moral responsibilities that arise in cases of collective action problems and we close by pointing in the direction of some promising work in this area.