Moral Calculus Research Articles

Offensive and Harmful Advertising: A Content Analysis of Official Complaints

ABSTRACT This study presents an analysis of 9,055 complaints about offensive and harmful advertising, using archival data from the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The aim is to identify what advertising is actually complained about and contrast these findings with the field’s previous focus on potential offense. Due to its moral calculus, growing presence in the marketplace, and higher proportion of offense and harm-based complaints, the noncommercial sectors (not-for-profit, third, and public sectors) have been selected for study. Key findings are used to propose a new typology of offense elicitors and raise questions about the effectiveness of a self-regulatory system.

Culture's Ethical Palette: Cultural Influences in the Moral Machine Era

Culture, an intricate tapestry of beliefs, values, and traditions, serves as both a mirror reflecting an individual's identity and a potent force shaping their very being. This cultural mosaic imparts a unique hue to each person's outlook and molds their moral compass. Indeed, the multifaceted influence of culture extends its reach into the realm of moral decision-making, where diverse cultural backgrounds yield a kaleidoscope of choices. As observed in the Moral Machine experiment, cultural nuances are pivotal in shaping preferences when confronted with ethical dilemmas. Varied cultural aspects, such as religion and collectivism, cast their distinct shadows on individuals' choices. These cultural imprints infuse complexity into the moral calculus, offering a window into the diverse ethical landscapes that emerge from different cultural backgrounds. In the context of emerging technologies like automated cars, the impact of culture on decision-making is particularly significant. It is plausible that vehicles equipped with artificial intelligence may make distinct choices when operating in diverse cultural settings. These differences, rooted in cultural backgrounds, are not arbitrary but arise from deeply ingrained cultural values and norms.

Non-ideal Critical Realism Analysis on the Ethical Positions of Secular Doctors Towards Human Genome Editing

Human genome editing could be used to improve human intelligence, appearance, and physical strength. The ethical issues posed by the technology are causing public concern. Secularism views efforts to find moral truth do not depend on supernatural authority. The existence of a secular minority in Indonesia is considered an anomaly in public discourse and is left behind in the morally critical policy-making deliberations on genome editing regulations. The research explored Indonesian secular doctor’s view of human genome editing. This qualitative research used a non-ideal critical realism approach through in-depth interviews and literature review. Secular doctors say that human genomic editing has no different weight from other artificial selection. After conducting a risk-benefit analysis through moral calculus, secular doctors generally have positions and attitudes that support the research and implementation of human genomic editing technology.

Comical moments and comical characterisations in Tobit: The undermining of self-righteous piety, simplistic retribution, and limited Yahwism

This article argues that comic moments and comic characterisation are used in Tobit as a means of satirically exposing a type of Yahwism characterised by inward-looking piety, religious and ethnic endogamy, and simplistic notions of retribution. Comic moments and comic characterisation, are therefore important ethical devices in Tobit used to expose the problematic nature of an obsessive emphasis on religious boundary maintenance as demonstrated by the extreme version of endogamy that Tobit endorses. The article argues that the theme of “insults” in Tobit, and the distinction between public and private behaviour serves to destabilise the main character’s hyper-religiosity. The article suggests that Tobit’s restrictive form of Yahwism and his overzealous Yahwistic piety are exposed and undermined in Tobit to illustrate for audiences that the deity Yhwh does not operate within a mechanistic moral calculus. The article pays close attention to the significance of the language and translations of Tobit when making this case.

Gentrifiers Evading Stigma: Social Integrationists in the Neighborhood of the Future

Abstract How does the moral calculus of gentrification change for self-conscious newcomers in neighborhoods with a reputation deemed unworthy of preserving? In pointing to a set of practices distinct from “pioneering” accounts of gentrification, Brown-Saracino (2007) identified social preservationists as figures who seek to preserve authentic community and the marginalized old-timers who embody it. Using the deviant case of Bridgeport—a historically White neighborhood in Chicago with a deeply historical and persistent reputation for racism —we examine how self-conscious newcomers orient themselves to the gentrification process when the old-timers are not considered a marginalized group worth protecting, but rather a powerful group with problematic racial views. Whereas Brown-Saracino identified the importance of “selecting the old-timer” among a set of potential representatives of a valorized past, we suggest that in this case, newcomers fight to redefine a neighborhood based on a socially desirable future. Drawing on two distinct sets of ethnographic and interview-based data, we outline how this process has unfolded. We conclude that Bridgeport’s story points to the importance of examining how gentrification ideologies emerge from the collision of personal commitments and neighborhood context, as neighborhood newcomers balance their ethics, concerns over personal reputation, and salient aspects of their new homes, including place reputation.

Is Mohism really li-promotionalism?

ABSTRACT A longstanding orthodoxy holds that the Mohists regard the promotion of li (benefit, 利) as their ultimate normative criterion, meaning that they measure what is yi (just, 義) or buyi (unjust, 不義) depending on whether it maximizes li or not. This orthodoxy dates back at least to Joseph Edkins (1859), who saw Mozi as a utilitarian and an ally of Bentham. In this paper, we will argue that this orthodoxy should be reconsidered because it does not square with several passages from the Mozi. That the Mohists place a strong weight on the promotion of ‘li for the whole world (tianxia zhi li, 天下之利)’ is uncontroversial. We argue, however, that in certain cases the Mohist moral calculus diverges in its rationale or outcome from li-promotionalism. This position rejects the orthodoxy by showing that Mohism and li-promotionalism are not entirely coterminous.

Around the World in 50 Restaurants

Around the World in 50 Restaurants

Accountability and Troubling the Caring Ideal in the Classroom: A Call to Teacher Citizenry

This work considers challenges facing the classroom caring ideal that Nel Noddings’ ethics of care theory exemplifies. It is evident that conditions of a neoliberal regime of accountability, a contested Common Core, and high stakes testing undermine the plausibility of this vaunted relation in the classroom. Along these lines, market logics operating in K-12 education can further hinder the predominantly white teaching force from caring for their Black and brown students. Given the forced prioritization of care that accountability policies generate, I propose an alternate ethic of teacher citizenry, which is reasoned commitment to the educational well-being of each child. As a civic virtue, teacher citizenry encapsulates the responsibility that teachers have to themselves, students, and other democratic stakeholders in light of being co-citizens/citizens-in-the-making. Such considerations can inform critically reflexive determinations in a manner consistent with a democratic subject striving to exhibit civic virtues. The profession’s public function acts a reasonable moral constraint that grounds its ethical norms within the political morality of participatory democracy. Teacher citizenry liberates the practitioner to make the moral calculus rather than merely a prudential one that failing to meet the ethics of care standard can compel.

All Animals are Equal, but Some More than Others?

Does the moral badness of pain depend on who feels it? A common, but generally only implicitly stated view, is that it does not. This view, ‘unitarianism’, maintains that the same interests of different beings should count equally in our moral calculus. Shelly Kagan’s project in How to Count Animals, more or less (2019) is to reject this common view, and develop an alternative to it: a hierarchical view of moral status, on which the badness of pain does depend on who feels it. In this review essay, we critically examine Kagan’s argument for status hierarchy. In particular, we reject two of the central premises in his argument: that (1) moral standing is ultimately grounded in agency and (2) that unitarianism is overdemanding. We conclude that moral status may, despite Kagan’s compelling argument to the contrary, not be hierarchical.

Philosophy Problems Become Real During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Philosophy Problems Become Real During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Mutuality Talk in a Family-Owned Multinational

This article draws on work carried out as part of a collaboration between an elite business school and a family-owned multinational corporation, concerned with promoting ‘mutuality in business’ as a new frontier of responsible capitalism. While the business school partners treated mutuality as a new principle central to an emergent ethical capitalism, the corporation claimed mutuality as a long-established value unique to their company. Both interpretations foreground a central problem in recent writing on the anthropology of business/corporations: the tension between the claim that economic life is always embedded within a moral calculus, and the shift towards increasingly ethical behaviour among many corporations. Further, recent work in the anthropology of business rejects normative evaluations of corporate ethicizing. When corporations lay claim to ethical renewal, but maintain a commitment to competition and growth, then anthropologists must balance a sympathetic engagement with corporate ethicizing, and critical engagement with growth-based strategies.

AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92

AIDS Was Our Earthquake:American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92 Gregg Drinkwater (bio) On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis Pneumonia among five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. That report is generally understood as the first official documentation of the epidemic that was briefly called "gay cancer" and then "Gay Related Immune-Deficiency" (GRID) before being labelled "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS) in the summer of 1982. By 1985, 15,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease. Nearly 13,000 of them had died.1 The majority were gay and bisexual men and intravenous (IV) drug users—all populations that were widely stigmatized at the time. From the beginning of the AIDS crisis in 1981 through 1985, American Jewish leaders were largely silent. We do not see evidence of widespread Jewish communal engagement with AIDS in the United States until September 24, 1985, when two young and charismatic rabbis in San Francisco delivered Yom Kippur sermons on AIDS in their respective Reform synagogues: Congregation Sha'ar Zahav (serving primarily LGBTQ members) and Congregation Emanu-El (with primarily straight members). Both sermons, and the rabbis who delivered them, profoundly shaped liberal American Judaism's responses to AIDS. [End Page 122] The Sha'ar Zahav sermon, delivered by Yoel Kahn, a 26-year-old gay man newly ordained as a Reform rabbi, suggested a Jewish path forward on HIV/AIDS grounded in the insights of the Gay Liberation Movement and an approach that centered gay and lesbian lives. The Emanu-El sermon, in contrast, delivered by Robert Kirschner, a 34-year-old straight man newly promoted as his congregation's senior rabbi, called upon Jewish compassion in the face of a public health crisis affecting stigmatized populations. Yet both shared common ground. Rather than framing the religious and moral issue at the heart of HIV/AIDS as a need to proscribe sexual behavior coded as dangerous and aberrant, as was common among evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish leaders, the rabbis who delivered both of these sermons reflected the emergence of a new moral calculus in which acceptance and tolerance of gay and lesbian people became a Jewish moral litmus test among liberal Jews. The Jewish AIDS initiatives that followed in the wake of the conversations these sermons helped spark were rarely about policing the sexual and intimate behavior of gay and lesbian people. Instead, most of the Jewish AIDS programs that emerged in the US in the late 1980s focused on providing support and social services to people with AIDS (hereafter PWAs) and their families; raising awareness about the risks of AIDS; making AIDS more visible in Jewish communities; and modifying the behaviors of non-gay Jews toward gay and lesbian people.2 In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, conservative American Christian religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, had insisted that AIDS was God's punishment for sinful "homosexual" behavior. A 1986 Gallup poll, five years after the AIDS crisis emerged, indicated that 42 percent of Americans agreed with him.3 Such religious bigotry in the early 1980s was one factor that gave political and cultural leaders license to minimize the threat of the disease and to openly mock those suffering from AIDS.4 Few Jewish leaders outside the ultra-Orthodox community, however, made claims about AIDS that explicitly invoked God's wrath as the cause of AIDS. One exception was the Modern Orthodox Rabbi Barry Freundel—the same rabbi who was arrested in 2014 for voyeurism at a Washington DC mikvah (ritual bath)—who wrote in a 1986 essay that—although one can cite Jewish proof texts arguing both for and against divine punishment—"[b]y far, the greater evidence indicates that God's retribution plays a role in epidemics such as AIDS." Yet even Freundel quickly dismissed the question as irrelevant to the Jewish obligation to "heal and prevent death wherever possible."5 More often, Orthodox Jewish leaders joined conservative Christians in describing AIDS as the consequence of what they saw [End Page 123] as abhorrent or even pathological behavior, although the vast majority still held that regardless of...

The Moral Calculus of Vocational Passion in Digital Gaming

The desire to “do what you love” energizes employment and engagement in creative industries such as digital gaming yet drains hobbyists and aspirants by normalizing expectations to sacrifice job security for passionate work. This article investigates how individuals regulate their aspirations through taken-for-granted trade-offs between vocational compromise and compensation. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with players at fan conventions and recruitment events in North America suggests a moral calculus of corruption and sublimation between passion and profit, which can be traced back to industrialization’s cleavage of labor from recreation and its institution of hobbies as productive leisure. Building on existing research about waged labor’s imagined denigration of hobbies, this argument juxtaposes the passion that is corruptible by work and the passion that promises to sublimate work from drudgery. Interrogating this confounding logic cultivates counter-narratives for purposeful livelihoods beyond industrial-era notions of productivity and neoliberal notions of passion.

The Responsibility to Protect in a world of already existing intervention

In the face of humanitarian crises, members of the international community are often presented with a choice: engage in forms of action, including military intervention, or stand by and watch. This framing ignores practices of intervention that are already taking place and contributing to the emergence and perpetuation of humanitarian crises. Despite calling for more attention to be paid to already existing intervention, literature on the Responsibility to Protect has not adequately understood its implications for the legitimacy and likely effectiveness of military intervention. To redress this gap, we argue, first, that a focus on already existing intervention complicates the moral calculus on which defences of military intervention as part of the Responsibility to Protect are based. Second, we claim that actors already engaged in damaging practices of intervention are bad international citizens who are not fit for the purpose of humanitarian military intervention. Third, we argue that in both ignoring already existing intervention and calling for additional military intervention under its third pillar, the Responsibility to Protect legitimises a moralistic form of militarism. These three arguments show that it is a mistake to follow recent literature in responding to already existing intervention by simply adding to the Responsibility to Protect, for instance, duties to engage in structural prevention and to support refugees. Rather, what is needed is a more fundamental rethink that departs from the Responsibility to Protect.

Translating the Unconscious: Aleramo's and Delmar's <em>A Woman</em>

Translating the Unconscious:Aleramo's and Delmar's A Woman Carol Mastrangelo Bové (bio) Sibilla Aleramo's novels, especially Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), engage the reader in powerful modernist texts that anticipate some of Freud's discoveries in the same period, Virginia Woolf's novels by about ten years, and Simone De Beauvoir's The Second Sex by about forty (Ferme 1999). Una Donna, 1906 (A Woman), merits a re-examination of its relevance for a better understanding of psychoanalytic writing, feminism, and Translation Studies. My reading of this novel will focus on the unconscious desires and fears connected to sexuality and gender. I will refer to the Italian and English versions by the British feminist, Rosalind Delmar, originally published by Virago Limited in 1979, and, to a lesser extent, Maria Lansdale's translation by Putnam's Sons in 1908. Delmar's and Lansdale's translations of Aleramo enable one to better decipher the spirit of the original Italian by providing good but different interpretations to compare with one's own. This comparative, historical method is at the heart of recent developments in literary translation, which now emphasize a text as variable, changing with the mentality and resources of the translator and his or her formation. Internationally recognized scholars such as Emily Apter (Professor of French at NYU), Pascale Casanova (was Associated Researcher at the Center for Arts and Language and Literary Critic in Paris), and David Damrosch (Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University) have written cogently about the increasingly important and innovative role of translation in the study of literature and in the institutions that produce knowledge in the humanities. The emerging translation studies discipline is different from translation as it has been studied for instance, in the 1960s. At that time scholars often thought of a translated text as a literal and equal representation of the original and ignored for the most part the wide range of choices at the translator's disposal, choices that give different and often acceptable meanings to words that put into play a number of possibilities. Translation studies now understands more clearly that important texts in world literature rendered in another language [End Page 139] are different from the originals, manifesting the variety of cultural practices and the richness of linguistic, literary, and philosophical phenomena across linguistic and national borders. Literary translation is thus an interdiscipline drawing on the translator's formation and other historical, material conditions in which she or he lives. Based on the opposition "self/other," to the degree that one normally reproduces in one's own or target language an original or urtext from a foreign tongue, Translation Studies engages, for example, in psychology via psychoanalytic literary criticism—in fact, it has already done so in the work of Antoine Berman (1992) and others. Emily Apter, for instance, connects Translation Studies, in the context of psychoanalytic theory and group psychology, to foreign policy and efforts to promote world peace. She states that "mistranslation in the art of diplomacy thus comes to signal an intractable non-translatability between nations, a condition of catastrophic blocage that inspires paranoid projection and the moral calculus of the zero-sum game (in which whatever benefits one side is assumed to hurt the other). She gives a specific example of how mistranslation led to, if not the Franco-Prussian War, at least to a symptom of the "impossibility of dialogue constitutive of the truth of Franco-Prussian relations" (Apter 2006, 20-21). In this way, Berman's and Apter's work builds on the parallel established by Paul Ricoeur between the repression of fears and desires within the psyche, on the one hand, and censorship/banishment in groups or nations, on the other. Our contemporary period may be apparently more open to emotions considered taboo in the past, like the bisexual desire of Aleramo and her narrators. Yet increasing conflicts within individuals and between nations indicate, I would argue, as does Apter, a need to confront them. Scholars and non-academic readers in the United States and abroad often overlook Aleramo's seminal text in Italian and English, not to speak of the unconscious drives operating at the...

On the Importance of Species for Rule-Consequentialism: A Reply to Galvão

Pedro Galvão claims that, on the ideal rule-consequentialist code, all sentient humans have rights, whereas animals do not. Because agents are not impartial, total well-being would be lower if they were aware of a general disposition to harm in order to promote the good. Animals cannot be aware of that disposition, so it would be justified to harm them when that is best. Galvão also claims it is wrong to help an animal, even when optimific, if that harms another animal. I argue he is misguided. First, impartial agents would err in the moral calculus, causing falsely optimific harms. To compensate for that, all sentient individuals must have rights – though those protecting some humans may be stronger. Second, when helping is optimific, it is at least permitted. Moreover, since most sentient beings are wild animals with net negative lives, agents should be generally disposed to intervene in nature on their behalf.

Response to Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo’s review of Extraordinary Responsibility: Politics Beyond the Moral Calculus

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“Please Don’t Mind Our Tattoos”

Singapore has transformed its prison system over the last 20 years to focus on rehabilitation, and recidivism rates have fallen by nearly 50 percent. But Baz Dreisinger finds that the government’s push to employ former prisoners is driven more by an abundance of low-level jobs than any moral calculus.

Against Covert Moral Bioenhancement

Moral bioenhancement is an area of bioethical and scientific research dedicated to altering or augmenting moral beliefs, will, and behavior through biomedical interventions. Small advances in the field have been made in recent years. Researchers have primarily focused on evaluating subjects’ moral behavior or beliefs after administering certain drugs or stimulating suspected regions of interest in the brain. Theoretical models indicate that the scope of such interventions can be increased only through covert moral bioenhancement. However, covert moral bioenhancement is illicit because it fails to respect the dignity of the patients through informed consent. These difficulties demonstrate the dangers of the utilitarian worldview that is rampant in modern society. Almost any action carried out on the human person can be justified on the basis of a weak moral calculus and an imagined good.

The relationship between physical aggression, foreign policy and moral choices: Phenotypic and genetic findings.

Previous work has demonstrated that both leaders and other individuals vary in dispositional levels of physical aggression, which are genetically influenced. Yet the importance of individual differences in aggression for attitudes toward foreign policy or context-laden moral choices, such as sacrificing the lives of some for the greater good of many, has yet to be fully explored. Given the global importance of such decisions, we undertook this exploration in a sample of 586 Australians, including 250 complete twin pairs. We found that individuals who scored higher on Buss-Perry's physical aggression scale were more likely to support aggressive foreign policy interventions and displayed a more utilitarian moral calculus than those who scored lower on this scale. Furthermore, we found that the majority of variance in physical aggression lay in genetic factors for men, whereas the majority of the variance was in environmental factors for women. The source of covariation between aggression and political choices also differed between the sexes. A combination of genetic and environmental factors accounted for most of the cross-trait correlations among males, whereas common and unique environmental factors accounted for most of the cross-trait correlations among females. We consider the implications of our results for understanding how trait measures of aggression are associated with foreign policy and moral choices, providing evidence for why and how individuals differ in responding to complex social dilemmas. Aggr. Behav. 43:37-46, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.