Moral Consensus Research Articles

Repairing with a warm heart: How medical practitioners cultivate affective relationships with clients.

Healthcare providers are often advised to manage emotions to adhere to professional feeling rules and avoid deep affection for clients, but there are situations where this would not apply. We offer an atypical case of a cleft lip and palate (CLP) treatment program where affectionate medical provider-patient relationships are encouraged. Participant observation in a CLP department, in-depth interviews with the medical team, and public online content from the official WeChat account of the department showed that a meaningful bond was formed through a contextual concordance of moral consideration and professionalism across the organization. Medical practitioners have developed and justified such emotional work at the individual, professional, and organizational levels through three concordant micro-processes: developing the moral deservingness of the patient, instilling moral fulfillment into professionalism, and establishing moral consensus among medical professionals. This study enhances our current understanding of emotional work in healthcare by recognizing the moral consideration of patients and its influence on medical practices and by highlighting the complexities and dynamics of different feeling rules.

Does Momentary Outcome-Based Reflection Shape Bioethical Views? A Pre-Post Intervention Design.

Many bioliberals endorse broadly consequentialist frameworks in normative ethics, implying that a progressive stance on matters of bioethical controversy could stem from outcome-based reasoning. This raises an intriguing empirical prediction: encouraging outcome-based reflection could yield a shift toward bioliberal views among nonexperts as well. To evaluate this hypothesis, we identified empirical premises that underlie moral disagreements on seven divisive issues (e.g., vaccines, abortion, or genetically modified organisms). In exploratory and confirmatory experiments, we assessed whether people spontaneously engage in outcome-based reasoning by asking how their moral views change after momentarily reflecting on the underlying empirical questions. Our findings indicate that momentary reflection had no overall treatment effect on the central tendency or the dispersion in moral attitudes when compared to prereflection measures collected 1 week prior. Autoregressive models provided evidence that participants engaged in consequentialist moral reasoning, but this self-guided reflection produced neither moral "progress" (shifts in the distributions' central tendency) nor moral "consensus" (reductions in their dispersion). These results imply that flexibility in people's search for empirical answers may limit the potential for outcome-based reflection to foster moral consensus.

Can Synodality Ferment an Inclusive Catholicism?

Abstract This article discusses the significance of the extensive data-gathering procedures incorporated into recent synodal preparations and how they advance Pope Francis’s commitment to forging a church informed by a dialogue between theological ideas and empirical realities. Drawing on my prior case analysis of the Synod on the Family, I argue that despite the limits in place then on lay participation in the formal synod discussions, the diversity of the laity’s self-reported experiences penetrated the bishops’ deliberations. This achievement is in part a function of the synod communication structure whereby participants are allocated to shared-language groups, thus avoiding self-selection based on a priori doctrinal or country-specific biases; the resulting (forced) dialogue with difference helps foster the gradual development of more inclusive doctrinal framings as seen in the post-synodal Amoris Laetitia. In a historic expansion, the Synod on Synodality formally includes lay voting participants and therefore lay perspectives will directly shape the synod proposal outcomes. Like the bishops, lay Catholics do not speak with one voice, and thus the task of finding moral consensus will still necessarily require respectful mutual listening and reciprocal dialogue.

When Healthcare Professionals Disagree: Finding the Right Balance.

Healthcare disagreements are common, but recognising the causes is essential to reaching a moral consensus. The article describes the challenges associated with resolving the disagreements. Therefore, a systematic and timely team-based discussion, ethics consultation with ethicists and the hospital ethics committee, active participation of all members' discussions, and scheduled debriefings are pragmatic ways to find balance when healthcare professionals disagree. Teams need these attempts to build consensus and make moral decisions. It also fosters harmony, prioritises patient and team interests and, most importantly, keeps the team intact.

Embracing Liberalism’s Complexity

ABSTRACT Liberalism offers communities an eclectic set of core values and diverse institutions that may improve the chances that people with varying beliefs and life goals can live and work together in relative peace and prosperity. Yet liberal democracy is under threat, once again. Anti-liberal populists on the right and radicals on the left both dismiss core civil and political rights, but for different reasons: unrealistic expectations for moral consensus or equality of outcomes, respectively. Similarly, too many self-described liberals act illiberally, allowing their enthusiasm for a particular cause to justify sacrificing other core values. This essay has three purposes: (1) to counter recurring forecasts of the death of liberalism; (2) to clarify that liberalism’s normative, political, and institutional diversity has proven essential to its survival thus far; and (3) to suggest ways in which liberalism’s diversity may be further enriched by incorporating polycentric governance and other aspects of institutional analysis as developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom.

Moral Relevance Approach for AI Ethics

Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics is proposed as an emerging and interdisciplinary field concerned with addressing the ethical issues of AI, such as the issue of moral decision-making. The conflict between our intuitive moral judgments constitutes an inevitable obstacle to decision-making in AI ethics. This article outlines the Moral Relevance Approach, which could provide a considerable moral foundation for AI ethics. Taking moral relevance as the precondition of the consequentialist principles, the Moral Relevance Approach aims to plausibly consider individual moral claims. It is not only the common ethical target shaping our moral consensus but also the inherent moral ability connecting others with us.

Credit Cars: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Auto Loans

Drawing on trade publications, contemporaneous newspaper stories, and other historical sources from the early twentieth-century United States, this article explains how installment plans overcame moral and business concerns to become the standard way people bought cars. Prominent figures in the automobile industry and financial institutions initially denounced the idea of selling cars on credit, and many banks declined to extend credit to would-be auto buyers. However, the relevant legal infrastructure heavily favored creditors, allowing them to circumvent usury laws and guaranteeing their right to repossess assets if borrowers missed payments. When the profit-making that these aspects of the law enabled became clear, moral objections to the idea of selling cars on credit yielded to a new moral consensus among powerful actors that valorized buying cars on credit and concentrated disapprobation on just those borrowers who defaulted on their payments. Thus, the characteristics of the legal infrastructure functionally presupposed the resolution of the erstwhile debate about the fundamental morality of selling cars on credit. Ultimately, lending practices building on the legal and moral foundation established in the early twentieth century led to the establishment of subprime auto lenders whose business model revolves around exorbitant interest rates, high fees, and aggressive repossession.

AGAMA EKLOGIS DAN WACANA NON-HUMAN TURN

This article discusses the difference between posthuman discourse and nonhuman discourse in the context of ecological religion. Unlike posthuman discourse, which has teleological elements, nonhuman discourse emphasizes that humans interact with nonhuman entities without seeking the transformation of humans into non-humans. The article proposes that it is important to understand the relationship between humans and nature as a nonhuman agency, rather than merely as nonhuman entities. This is aimed at reconstructing the ontological basis of ecological religious discourse to avoid being trapped in an anthropocentric paradigm. This research adopts the conceptual frameworks of Actor-Network Theory and the Politics of Things developed by Bruno Latour to view the relationship between humans and nature in a broader and non-teleological context. The analytical methods used in this research are philosophical approaches and literature review. Both approaches are used to find the philosophical foundation of ecological religious discourse and its correlation with the Non-human Turn. The research results show that at the epistemic level, human subjectivity is crucial in determining attitudes toward the conceived reality. However, at the ontological level, there is a space untouched by human thought and consciousness, implying a postponement/suspension of moral judgment that is not final. In particular, in moral consensus, the actors involved also include non-human entities. Consequently, the understanding of the ideal attitude toward nature should use a phenomenological approach that focuses on the consequences of the objectification of the subject toward the world beyond itself.

What’s Good About Inclusion? An Ethical Analysis of the Ideal of Social Inclusion for People with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities

‘Social inclusion’ is the leading ideal in services and care for people with intellectual disabilities in most countries in the Global North. ‘Social inclusion’ can refer simply to full equal rights, but more often it is taken to mean something like ‘community participation’. This narrow version of social inclusion has become so ingrained that it virtually goes unchallenged. The presumption appears to be that there is a clear moral consensus that this narrow understanding of social inclusion is good. However, that moral consensus is not clear in the case of people with profound intellectual and/or multiple disabilities (PIMD), who are not able to express their needs and preferences verbally. Moreover, social inclusion has proven to be difficult to conceptualize and implement for people with PIMD. Therefore, it becomes imperative to ask about the ethical rationale of the narrow understanding of social inclusion. For what reasons do we think social inclusion is good? And do those reasons also apply for people with PIMD? This article addresses these questions by providing an ethical analysis of the ideal of social inclusion for people with PIMD. It discusses four ethical arguments for social inclusion and probes their relevance for people with PIMD. The article argues that none of these arguments fully convince of the value of the narrow understanding of social inclusion for people with PIMD. It ends with advocating for an ethical space for imagining a good life for people with PIMD otherwise.

Technology moral sense: Development, reliability, and validity of the TMS scale in Chinese version.

The aggregation of intelligent technologies such as big data, algorithms, and biometrics poses new moral risks to humanity and has raised awareness of technology ethics. Based on the research on moral issues in the fields of ethics and psychology, we built the concept of technology moral sense (TMS) by investigating three dimensions-technology moral consensus, cognition, and emotion. We focused on the field of intelligent surveillance technology, adopted a scale, and conducted a questionnaire survey with more than 1,000 respondents. We used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to test two different samples. First, by combining item analysis and Cronbach's alpha coefficient, we established that all three dimensions are reliable. Our results indicated a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.944, 0.891 and 0.938 for technology moral consensus, emotion, and cognition. Second, exploratory factor analysis verified that there were three factors, the eigenvalues were all greater than one, and the cumulative variance explanation rate was 74.953%, and the factor loading coefficient of the 18 items are greater than 0.5. Finally, we used confirmatory factor analysis to test the fit of the model. The test shows that RMSEA = 0.078, CFI and TLI are greater than 0.9, which indicating the fit was suitable and the construct validity was good. Our findings demonstrated that the new scale is a reliable tool for assessing the technology moral sense in China. The results support the reliability and validity of the Technology Moral Sense (TMS) scale, and explain the existence of the concept of technology moral sense through three dimensions.

Richardson on moral innovation

Richardson on moral innovation

National and supranational mechanisms for the protection of human rights and freedoms in contemporary conditions

Subject of the research. The article considers two levels in the mechanism of protection of human rights and freedoms: national and supranational. National includes both judicial and non-judicial methods of protection. The supranational level is represented by universal (global) and regional ways. The purpose of the research is to identify an effective mechanism for the protection of human rights that can replace the mechanism of protection provided by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950, which has ceased to be valid for citizens of the Russian Federation. Research methods are the formal-legal method, analysis, synthesis, formallogical method.The main results. Theoretically, a particular citizen can use any of the national and supranational mechanisms for the protection of human rights. However, the nature of their action and the procedure for gaining access to these mechanisms are different, which affects their effectiveness and the readiness of a person to turn to one or another method of protection. Among supranational mechanisms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 has a unique status: on the one hand, this document is “a symbol of the moral consensus of all states, the starting point for the creation of a modern human rights regime”; on the other hand, it is an act-declaration, the application of which in specific legal relations and the protection of human rights with its help are problematic. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 12/16/1966 provides for the establishment of a Human Rights Committee that exercises control over the provisions of the Covenant through a system of reports. Reports on measures taken to implement the rights provided for by the Covenant, as well as on non-fulfillment of their obligations under the Covenant by other States Parties, are submitted by States Parties. The mechanism of reports, however, is not reliable enough - there are states that ignore it.Regional Conventions are rightly considered the most effective means of protecting human rights. The implementation of the provisions of the Conventions is ensured by the activities of supranational judicial bodies, to which the applicant can file a complaint. The conditions for applying to such a court, its territorial proximity, the possibility of executing court decisions make this method of protection as accessible as possible. Among the national remedies, first of all, it should be noted the activity of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation to protect the constitutional rights of citizens. The provisions of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the Constitution of the Russian Federation in the section on human rights are almost identical, often written in the same phrases. But, despite the number of coincidences in the designation of human rights and freedoms, the main thing is not the designation (this is a declaration) of a specific right or freedom, but how they are applied and what is the practice of their protection (interpretation) by the Constitutional Court at the national level and the Convention on the supranational. It is here that the understanding of “identical” formulations can differ, and the question of who is better: a national or supranational body protects a particular human right, becomes debatable. It should also be remembered about the very meaning of supranational protection as an opportunity to receive protection from one's own state, albeit a subsidiary one. Therefore, it would be wrong to assume that in the absence of the possibility of applying to the ECHR, a citizen will be able to receive protection in the Constitutional Court without prejudice to the outcome of such protection.Considering that the protection of human rights is, first of all, the activity of national courts of first instance, consideration by the courts of administrative, civil and criminal cases, in cases where it is carried out in full compliance with the norms of procedural legislation, is able to fully ensure the protection of the rights and human freedoms. To do this, the courts have all the necessary tools, you just need the ability and desire to use them.Among the internal structures for monitoring the observance of human rights, a number of state and public bodies can be distinguished - the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, the police, the prosecutor's office and others. However, it is not possible to attribute them to the effective bodies for the protection of human rights.Conclusions. The existing national and supranational mechanisms for the protection of human rights, in their effectiveness, are not able to fully compensate for the loss of the opportunity for citizens of the Russian Federation to file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights.

Moral Tipping Points

Abstract: We examined how morality subcultures moderate judgments of a narrative character’s behavior along the moral continuum. Using the moral continuum procedure (MCP) across two studies ( Matthews, 2019 ), we identify the point along the moral continuum where trait moral salience (i.e., one’s sensitivity to different moral foundations) begins to influence moral judgments. Findings indicate that trait moral salience does not influence judgments of less immoral behaviors (i.e., behaviors that fall along the beginning the continuum). However, trait moral salience does impact judgments of more immoral behaviors (i.e., behaviors that fall on the latter half of the continuum), in a pattern consistent with past research. Our data imply that a moral tipping point along the continuum exists, where moral judgments shift from moral consensus (i.e., a general uniformity in moral judgments) to moral disagreement (i.e., divergence in judgement caused by individual differences in trait moral salience). We posit that dynamic coordination theory’s conceptualization of common knowledge helps explain the observed tipping point. Thus, the current project contributes toward extant media theorizing ( Tamborini et al., 2012 ) by specifying how morality subcultures function along a moral continuum.

Conflicts of Interest in Decision-making for the Transportation of Dangerous Goods by Sea: Perspectives of Freight-forwarding Sales People

This study develops and investigates an ethical decision-making model to evaluate the major factors-moral sensitivity, moral consensus, desire for power, and desire for money-that influence conflicts of interest in decision-making among ocean-freight-forwarding salespeople. To empirically test this conceptual model, we used a scenario-based questionnaire to collect 139 valid samples and then conducted further analyses using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients and hierarchical regressions. The results of the preliminary analysis revealed two types of conflicts of interest in decision-making, namely avoidance of negative effects and positive promotion, which were significantly related to moral sensitivity and moral consensus. Advanced regressions partially supported the six hypotheses proposed herein; thus, salespeople's ethical decision-making was influenced by their moral sensitivities, moral consensus, and desire for power. These findings provide new insight into the relevant factors that influence freight-forwarding salespeople's ethical judgments when making decisions concerning the transportation of dangerous goods. We also discuss the implications for daily operations of conflicts of interest in decision-making and provide managerial insights for freight-forwarding companies.

Distinguishing Moral Disengagement from Moral Disagreement in a World of Contentious Ethical Issues

We critique research on moral disengagement (MD), which presumes widespread agreement about what is right and wrong. While it is appropriate to label justifications of ethical lapses concerning non-contentious issues (e.g., corruption) as MD, many real-world ethical issues, particularly in organizations, are unclear or contested, and subject to reasoned disagreement about what the moral course of action is. We argue that research on MD is less applicable to situations involving moral disagreement, unless fundamental changes to how it is tested are adopted. Moral disagreement arises both because people have different underlying moral foundations that affect how they evaluate situations, and because there are moral dilemmas in which no response can avoid harm or a violation of other deeply-held ethical principles. In this essay, we discuss two important consequences created by assuming moral consensus, and suggest ways to study MD that relax this assumption and allows for disagreement. We argue for the importance of making research on ethics more realistic and applicable to the kinds of moral dilemmas that confront organizations and their members on a more regular basis.

Papuan Muslims in “One Furnace, There Stones” Metaphor in Fakfak Regency, West Papua Province: An Anthropolinguistic Perspective

Religion should not be used as a legitimacy tool, particularly just as a justification for achieving goals that are full of the nuances of power politics, and the like. This study aims to reveal a tradition of Papuan Muslims in their attempts to create tolerance and harmony in the lives of religious people, which have been practiced and inherited for a long time, from generation to generation. This tradition is practiced by the Papuan Muslims in the Fakfak Regency, known as the “One Furnace, Three Stones” metaphor. This metaphor is used by the community in Fakfak as a moral consensus in the process of integration and social balance. The two approaches applied in this study are a theoretical approach and a methodological approach. The theoretical approach is an exploration of anthropolinguistic and metaphor theory; while the methodological approach is a descriptive approach with an explanative dimension. Based on the perspective of anthropolinguistic and metaphor, this study seeks to apply scientific principles to socio-cultural data, and adapts the steps of scientific studies in other fields of science. This study follows several procedures, including providing data, analyzing data, and presenting the results of data analysis. The results of this study holistically identify the issues of pluralism in Islam and Papuan culture, Islamic migration, metaphorical Papuan Muslim relations, and ideology. This study implies that it could be used as a basic reference in the practice of religious development which upholds tolerance and harmony between religious communities.

Metternich's Peace Management, 1840–48: Anachronism or Vision?

AbstractAustrian chancellor Metternich's Europeanism is often disputed. It has been claimed that he strove only to strengthen Austrian power within the German Confederation and to establish Austrian hegemony in Central Europe, with European interests and the Concert of only secondary concern. The objective of this article is to analyze Metternich's opinions and acts during selected European crises and events between 1840 and 1848, arguing that his approach to resolving them or dealing with their consequences shows that during this period his primary objective was to maintain European peace. He wanted to achieve this by demonstrating the moral consensus of, ideally, all the great powers by abating tense nationalist sentiments, calling for the observance of international agreements and the respect of rights, adopting preventive measures, and warning against or drawing attention to possible negative consequences of the crises for peace in Europe. Metternich's attempt at preserving European peace at all costs was mainly a result of his personal experience of revolution and almost a quarter century of warfare with France. By the 1840s, however, Metternich's style of peace management was rejected as anachronistic, resulting in several military conflicts in subsequent years. Considering the events of the last century that led to European integration, however, his Europeanism deserves a more forgiving evaluation.

As jy arm is, is jy fokol! – poverty, personalism, and development: farmworkers’ experiences of neoliberal South Africa

ABSTRACT Contemporary commercial agricultural production in the Western Cape bears the legacies of longstanding racialised paternalism. Attending to interpersonal interactions and expectations in this milieu, this paper interrogates the changing conceptions and experiences of poverty, personalism, and development among farmworkers in the neoliberal 2010s. Central to the analysis are two vignettes. The first captures interaction between an employer and an employee of a relatively progressive farming business, and the second presents the experiences of a woman farmworker with an empowerment project run by a non-governmental organisation. Both vignettes show how claims to develop or empower inadvertently affirm the disempowerment of those being developed or empowered, while the privileged status of those doing development remains unchallenged. The Afrikaans idiom of ‘as jy arm is, is jy fokol! [if you’re poor, you’re nothing]’ brings out the rawness of emotions, expressing a breach in promises of development, as a way out of poverty and powerlessness. Despite the nominal moral consensus over poverty reduction objectives and policies, the neoliberal economy of development in post-apartheid South Africa produces its own social and material inequalities. The burdens and humiliations resulting from changing character of inequalities manifest in interpersonal interactions, perpetuating feelings of worthlessness among the working poor.

Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Asia by Diana S. Kim (review)

Reviewed by: Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Asia by Diana S. Kim Simon Soon Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Asia, by Diana S. Kim. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2020. 336 pp ISBN 978-069-1172-40-8, pb ISBN 978-069-1199-70-2 For the larger part of the 19th century, opium was the chief source of revenue for European colonial enterprises. Since many European colonial port settlements gained competitive edge principally by lowering or abolishing trade tariffs altogether, the funding for public works and town building had to be raised through other means. The narcotic trade offered an easy solution, although the moral quandary would ultimately lead to widespread condemnation from the early 20th century onwards. The story of this shift is the focus of Diana S. Kim's monographic study on the rise of opium prohibition across Southeast Asia. Empire of Vices tracks the story of the changes in governmental and public perception of opium as a unfolding drama across three European colonies: Burma, Malaya and Indochina. To contextualise the significance of opium's reverie inducing signifiance, Kim notes that more than 50 percent of colonial taxes in the British and French colonies of Southeast Asia came from the sale of opium to local inhabitants. In a sense, Kim notes that the legitimacy of the trade was a felicitous alignment of 'the fiscal might and moral right of imperial rule'. During this period, opium was largely seen as a drug that delivers a state of euphoria or other enhanced mood. At times, it was also spoken of positively for its ability to suppress pain as well as induce relaxation, drowsiness, and sedation. Yet, despite the positive health endorsement that opium initially received and its seeming economic indispensability, public perception and colonial administrative policy about the narcotic took a drastic turn at the turn of the century towards [End Page 203] condemnation. By then, the narcotic addictive and debilitating properties became increasingly pronounced and a new moral consensus could no longer justify the trading of opium as a reliable source of public revenue. New strides were made by the very same power to condemn the social danger of the drug. What might account for this change of heart? This is where Kim's Empires of Vices offers a much-needed re-examination of the history of opium prohibition. It is a topic that has acquired general familiarity, although how the story of opium has been told is often conveyed through the pathos of tragedy. Kim eschews these moral theatrics, focusing instead on the how rather than the why. If the why is largely a moral question, the how is a historical one. In turn, story of opium told through this book is not a straightforward didactic story about revenue extraction and social control. The problem Kim sets before herself are two-fold. First, she attempts to make sense of the uneven development of this shared reform across the region by complicating the conventional narrative that changes in colonial policies were simply following metropolitan directives or were mediated by transnational social and religious activists. Second, Kim has set her sights on producing a more satisfying and humanistic account of why the colonial state was willing to abandon its key source of revenue, given that the political economy of colonial enterprises were aimed at maximising profits. In setting out to build up our understanding of opium monopolies in all their complexities, Kim creates a scaffold for the unfolding drama using what she calls a layered comparative approach. At the most direct level, the scaffolding offers a way to iron out discrepancies in sources that a historian is limited to when working across different colonial contexts. Such discrepancies are reasons why comparative research is often thought of as a challenging task. Yet, when comparisons are structured as layers, it functions as a narrative device as well. In this way, Kim's comparative approach also propels a wide range of rich and complex historical sources, ranging from colonial policy papers to literary texts, along a chronological vector. The central topic of the book was the gradual establishment of opium monopolies from 1890s...

Abraham's Faith in Kierkegaard's Conception: An Analysis of the “Fear and Trembling” Book

The author of the article "Abraham's faith in Kierkegaard's conception: an analysis of the books 'Fear and Trembling,'" analyzes the theme of faith from the perspective of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The philosopher was impressed by the adventure of the faith of Abraham who was challenged to sacrifice his son at the command of Yahweh (Gen. 22). The paper tries to find the explanations of philosophy, with reference to the acceptance of the divine challenge, by Abraham, who seems inhuman and irrational. We will analyze the expression used by Kierkagaard, who calls Abraham the "Knight of the Faith," in what sense, paradoxically, by faith did Abraham win Isaac? What is the significance of the knight of resignation, with reference to the one who refuses the act of faith, and wants to keep the temporality. We will see that from his point of view, the believer cannot accept advice, he will travel alone on this path. The logic of faith, the silence and the fear of faith are analyzed. The relationship between ethics and faith is also discussed. We will discuss the ethics that Kiergegaard refers to, as a set of moral rules shared by a human community - the moral consensus shared by a majority, which seems to be at odds with biblical faith. It also assesses the benefits of faith, in contrast to living by sight, and why Abraham became a guiding star.