Conventional Morality Research Articles

Informal Sperm Donation in Russia

Rising infertility across the globe has created a growing demand for assisted reproductive technologies (ART). In recent years, apart from sperm donation in formal settings such as fertility clinics, informal donation practices have emerged and spread across Russia. These reproductive donation practices have become possible due to the development of social networks and private online platforms. We conducted a pilot study (eleven semi-structured interviews) of the informal sperm donation in Russia and analyzed donor-recipient interactions, donors’ expectations and experiences of finding recipients online. We focus on donors' motivations and on the meanings, which donors invest in this practice that consumes significant resources on their part (medical tests and artificial insemination costs, travel and accommodation expenses, sometimes mutually agreed financial support of future offspring). We interpreted the practices that coalesced around informal donation from the perspective of symbolic interactionism, because it allowed us to showcase how actors reflected on and formulated the meanings of their actions in the absence of externally imposed rules (legal regulations, established moral conventions). Since informal donation practices do not fit into the traditional schemes of interpretation, such research requires the actors involved in informal donation either to create their own schemes or to modify the existing conceptual frames in creative ways. The study shows that informal donors do not only provide their genetic material but also spend time and invested considerable resources to ensure their procreation, including eventual financial support of the child. At the same time, these men are not interested in marital relations or paternal relations with their offspring. Thus, the informal sperm donors do not associate the parental project with traditional family and its values. We conclude that ART engendered a new phenomenon, which might be described as extramarital reproduction. Assisted reproduction outside marriage ­gains footing in Russia and requires more detailed further study.

Nature as Space: Gender Roles and Subversion in Edna O’Brien’s “A Scandalous Woman”

The rigid social conventions for women in rural twentieth century Ireland, specifically that of the nun and the mother, are illustrated and subsequently subverted by the figures of the scandalous woman and the witch in Edna O’Brien’s short story, “A Scandalous Woman”. Most of the scholarship on this short story and O’Brien’s work in general has been focused on the gender roles in terms of women’s rights. The purpose of this paper, however, is to explore the interrelationship between both the accepted and subversive roles of women, and at the same time demonstrate how social conventions are made subversive by the natural surroundings, outlining both the conventional and subversive nature symbolism which underpins conventional morality. Nature takes on various guises in the story: it has symbolic importance as spiritual sustenance, it has an underlying psychological component, and finally it is present in both erotic and esoteric situations. Spaces are inexorably intertwined with religion and the role of the women in the story, specifically in the context of Eily, the protagonist, and her progression from an innocent girl to a scandalous woman. These connections also serve to illustrate the main character’s progression from innocent girl to scandalous woman in terms of the interactions of gender, nature, and space.

Growing Students' Moral Reasoning Through Parenting Parenting in Elementary Schools

This study aims to describe students' moral reasoning and parenting applied by parents in growing students' moral reasoning at Leminggir State Elementary School. This research is a qualitative research with a case study research design. The subjects in this study were the fifth grade students of the Leminggir State Elementary School. Data collection was taken through interviews, observation, and documentation. The results of this study indicate that (1) The moral reasoning of fifth grade students at Leminggir State Elementary School shows at level II (Conventional Morality) namely in the first stage: Child orientation or a good person. (2) The parenting pattern of parents in growing children's moral reasoning is by fostering obedience to religious moral teachings that are accustomed to daily life with religious moral values ​​such as discipline, honesty, and not being arrogant that have been applied to have an impact on children's lives such as and children's words are more orderly, children can distinguish between good and bad even if only a few actions.

Learning to Classify Morals and Conventions: Artificial Intelligence in Terms of the Economics of Convention

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its relation with societies has become an increasingly interesting subject of study for the social sciences. Nevertheless, there is still an important lack of interdisciplinary and empirical research applying social theories to the field of AI. We here aim to shed light on the interactions between humans and autonomous systems and analyse the moral conventions, which underly these interactions and cause moments of conflict and cooperation. For this purpose we employ the Economics of Convention (EC), originally developed in the context of economic processes of production and management involving humans, objects and machines. We create a dataset from three relevant text sources and perform a qualitative exploration of its content. Then, we train a combination of Machine Learning (ML) classifiers on this dataset, which achieve an average classification accuracy of 83.7%. A qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the predicted conventions reveals, inter alia, that the Industrial and Inspired conventions tend to co-exist in the AI domain. This is the first time, ML classifiers are used to study the EC in different AI-related text types. Our analysis of a larger dataset is especially beneficial for the social sciences.

In- and out-groups across cultures: Identities and perceived group values

Distinguishing and privileging one's in-groups from out-groups appears to be a human universal, though theories about why and how this happens diverge. This paper contributes to understanding these processes by adding cross-cultural, ecological validity to a demographic understanding of a) which in- and out-groups are prevalent in four distinct societies and b) discernible patterns in the values that members of these groups are perceived to hold. Our results suggest that respondents see in-groups, often their family, as conventionally moral (caring for others) across societies, while typically perceiving a range of disparate out-groups as hedonistic and self-serving. We find both commonalities and distinctions in third-order beliefs (‘what I believe they believe’) across four samples, yet all highlight one axis of Schwartz's value scheme capturing conventional morality as central for feelings of affiliation with in-groups and ‘othering’ for out-groups.

Pinter and Film: A Brief Reflection on The Servant (1963)

Written by Harold Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey, The Servant (1963) was and continues to be a masterpiece. Restored in 2013 in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, I had the opportunity recently to see a screening of the film in a small theatre. Of course, the screening was pre-COVID.The film was introduced by James Fox, who plays the young, aristocratic master to Dirk Bogard's devious servant. He agreed to let me print his words in The Harold Pinter Review: Thank you for asking me to introduce The Servant tonight and for screening it. I'm delighted it still has such a permanent place in the affection of film lovers, after over fifty years.Many happy coincidences went into my being cast as Tony; Sarah was wanted for Vera, and we were going out at the time, Dirk had seen me recently in a TV play, my father, also my agent, was a partner of Leslie Grade, who supplied the needed funding for the film.More to the point, what are the factors that have given The Servant its enduring appeal? I am hardly qualified to add more than that, on reading Harold's script, I intuitively felt its power, drama, and entertainment value. And I think most of the credit must go to Joe Losey and the producers, who gave him the freedom to give us the treatment and interpretation he wanted.As we know, Joe was a fugitive in Europe from the American anti-communist purge.And something gave him an artistic perception into the English characteristics of Tony's incorruptible privilege and Barrett's personal, socially disruptive revolution. And what he delivered is a visibly and technically perfect rendering of dominance and submission, which has the power to affect us today. I hope you enjoy the film. The film did not disappoint, and it grows more relevant as the financial disparities among classes widen. It opens optimistically. Tony, the young, entitled, upwardly mobile member of the British upper class, begins acquiring the trappings of success. To oversee his recent trophies and treasures, he hires a servant named Barrett, brilliantly played by Dirk Bogard, who won a BAFTA for the film. Barrett not only becomes indispensable, he infuses himself into Tony's life. He brings Vera, played by Sarah Miles, into the house under the pretense that she is his sister. Barrett and Vera, however, turn out to be the serpents in Tony's idyllic garden. They quickly erode his will, leading him to a life of indolence and sin, all on his money, of course. Tony's fiancé, Susan, played by Wendy Craig, offers Tony one last chance at a “normal” life, but Barrett's powerful depravity overcomes her conventional morality within moments. The film ends with a hauntingly perverse image that may inspire viewers to go home and take a shower.What is remarkable about this effect is that the film was made while censorship was still in place, so all the depravity is suggested, implied, and nodded toward. The cinematography and direction are brilliant, and the film's restoration ironically brings out a brilliant crispness and clarity in a film that blurs the lines between and among class, gender, and power. If you have not seen It or have not seen it since its restoration, it is worth a look.

Machiavellianism dimensions, religiosity, social environment, and tax evasion

This research aims to investigate the effects of Machiavellianism dimensions that consist of the use of manipulative tactics, cynical views, and disregard of conventional morality on tax evasion. Further, we also analyze the effects of religiosity and social environment as the variables that control Machiavellianism behavior. The population in this research are individual taxpayers, and the sampling technique used is an online survey with the snowball sampling method. The criteria used in sampling are taxpayers who are self-employed or entrepreneurs. The data is then analyzed using the univariate and multivariate General Linear Model (GLM) methods. The results show that manipulative tactics and disregard of conventional morality have positive effects on tax evasion. Meanwhile, cynical views have a negative effect on tax evasion. Further, religiosity has negative effects on the use of manipulative tactics and disregard of conventional morality. Lastly, social environment has a positive effect on cynical views but no significant effects on the use of manipulative tactics and disregard of conventional morality.

The Gastropoetics of Sex: Gluttony, Lust and Excess in Late Nationalist India

In this paper, I explore the ways in which queer sex acts and orientations come to be coded through other modes of signifying excess in colonial and nationalist discourse. I explore the way in which food and sex are held on a continuum that ties gluttony to abstinence, creating the standards for respectable sexuality and a map for flouting them. Fundamentally, I look at how sex and food are conflated, especially when enjoyed or imagined in ways outside the norm of conventional morality. Moreover, I examine the terms through which this correlation is translated into a broader framework for thinking about the body in its private and shared forms.

Discovering Our Music With Infants

Les descriptions détaillées des parents sur leur vie quotidienne avec leurs bébés durant la première année ont conduit à la théorie de la musicalité communicative des humains, et à la reconnaissance de l’importance de la mélodie dans l’apprentissage culturel. En utilisant les méthodes avancées des ordinateurs graphiques pour étudier l’acoustique musicale, les qualités affectives de la voix et des rythmes dans les patterns narratifs ont été révélées dans les proto-conversations des mères avec leurs enfants durant les 6 premiers mois, dans le parler bébé et dans les chants et les comptines que les mères commencent à partager avec leurs enfants à cette période. On a pu montrer que le bébé, même nouveau-né, discrimine et partage à la fois les émotions évoquées par différentes qualités des sons vocaux et instrumentaux, et leur combinaison dans des séquences narratives de mélodie avec et sans mots. Les bébés apprennent à produire leurs comptines favorites avec leurs parents et leur fratrie, utilisant parfois des rituels ancestraux. Cette capacité à partager et à se souvenir du sens et du format des sons en y ajoutant l’expression du visage et des mains qui les accompagnent donne un support vivant à l’apprentissage de tous les patterns comportementaux culturels, y compris l’usage d’outils pour les repas et pour les jeux, et les premiers mots du langage. Les conventions esthétiques et morales sont acquises avec la conscience des ressentis de vie exprimés dans le chant, et utilisées pour rendre vivantes les pratiques coutumières. La poésie créative de la danse, du chant et de la narration, le « comment » de l’expression, et pas seulement son aspect factuel, sont de plus en plus reconnus comme des éléments importants des thérapies et de l’éducation précoce.

Amorous Constitutions: Bodies and the Affect of Amatory Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Lasselia

Amorous Constitutions:Bodies and the Affect of Amatory Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Lasselia Aleksondra Hultquist In the dedicatory epistle of Eliza Haywood's 1723 novel Lasselia: or, The Self-Abandon'd, the author claims that she is writing detailed scenes of seductive encounters only for the "unthinking Part of the World, [to know] how dangerous it is to give way to Passion."1 And yet the seduced female body is one of the hallmarks of Eliza Haywood's writings. The following passage from Lasselia is an exemplar of the many seduction scenes in Haywood's early amatory works: [In] the strange Disorder of her fluttering Heart, depriving the Blood of its usual Circulation, all her Limbs forgot their Function, and she sunk fainting on the Bank…He threw off his upper Garment…and flinging himself down by her, with a thousand Kisses and Embraces, at once restor'd her to that Sense she had so lately lost…It was in vain she struggled to rise—in vain that she endeavour'd to repel the soft Endearments of his Lips and Arms; her Eyes confess'd the unwilling Transport of her Soul, and told him all he wish'd to ask: nor was he scrupulous of letting her know how well he was acquainted with his Happiness…Trembling and panting, 'twixt Desire and Fear, at last she lay resistless in his Arms,[and] with faultering Accents confesse'd a mutual Ardour; and if he did not obtain the highest Favour she cou'd grant, he had too much to boast of, to fear she cou'd deny him any thing.2 [End Page 105] There is at least one such scene of this kind of seduction in each of Haywood's amatory fictions, the repetition of which has tended, in the past, to be understood as a mark of her poor literary craftsmanship.3 However, recent scholarship argues that such scenes are emotionally significant. Stephen Ahern has reasoned that repetitive affective events in literature, such as seduction, are driven by an overarching imperative: to get at something profound but not quite reachable—hence the need to repeat, to rehearse as if obsessively, and without resolution, scenes of affective contagion.4 Earla Wilputte contends that the stylistic expressions in repetitions of love scenes indicate Haywood's "dissatisfaction with the conventional literary discourse for love."5 Such studies allow that there is more at stake in these scenes than titillation, moral convention, or marketability. Affect provides a vocabulary to read the recurring seduction scene as an important space for knowledge through the amatory constitution. This article argues that the recurring amatory encounter can be better unpacked by using affect theory. By focusing on the body in affective seduction events in Lasselia, I use affect theory to uncover the ontological and phenomenological work accomplished in her description of the amatory constitution. My aim here is to read the affective body in the seduction scene as a site of emotion work that teaches characters how they feel about each other through the experience of love. Focusing on the amatory constitution—that is, the seduced body overcome by love—helps us recognize the significance of the passions in eighteenth-century texts, a significance that I believe Haywood's readers understood implicitly. The amatory form tries to work out those indescribable moments of feeling between desire, seduction, and propriety. The sign of such feeling is the amorous constitution, which implies a body that is not only prone to the affective contagion of physical love and sexual desire, but also what Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard have called a site of creative potentiality.6 The amorous constitution provides important information for characters' accrued knowledge about how they feel. Exploring the meaning of bodies in Haywood's amatory scenes is not a new endeavor. Early feminist critical configurations of women and desire insisted upon the ignorance of physical craving in females, reading the amatory body as a site of desirability as opposed to a craving entity in and of itself. Criticism by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ros Ballaster, and Toni Bowers on the amatory body tends to argue that, in the amatory seduction scene, women want one thing (sex...

Measuring Moral Judgment of Education Profession Ethics Among Pre-Service Teachers of the School of Educational Sciences at the University of Jordan

This study aimed at identifying moral judgment for education profession ethics among pre-service teachers programs of the School of Educational Sciences at the University of Jordan. Accordingly, the researchers developed a Moral Judgment Scale based on Kohlberg (1984), and on the Adult Moral Judgment Scale localized by Abdul-Fattah (2001). The scale consisted of five dilemmas related to ethics in education profession. Validity and reliability of the scale were confirmed. Study population involved (420) students from (5) programs in the academic year 2018/2019. The results of the study showed that the prevailing moral judgement is the second level (conventional morality) of Kohlberg with (308) students of (89.3%), and the fourth stage (Upholding/enforcing norms and laws) with (245) students of (71%) of total students. No students were in the first level, stage 1, stage 2, nor in stage 6. However, significant differences were observed in the level of moral judgment attributable to the academic achievement variable, while no differences were attributable to the program specialization. Moreover, significant differences were found in the moral judgment stages attributable to the academic achievement and students’ program. These findings argue for investment in pre-service teachers’ education to increase their moral judgment during education profession.

Climate Change is Unjust War: Geoengineering and the Rising Tides of War

AbstractClimate change is undeniably a global problem, but the situation is especially dire for countries whose territory is comprised entirely or primarily of low‐lying land. While geoengineering might offer an opportunity to protect these states, international consensus on the particulars of any geoengineering proposal seems unlikely. To consider the moral complexities created by unilateral deployment of geoengineering technologies, we turn to a moral convention with a rich history of assessing interference in the sovereign affairs of foreign states: the just war tradition. We argue that the just war framework demonstrates that, for these nations, geoengineering offers a justified form of self‐defense from an unwarranted, albeit unintentional, aggression. This startling result places our own carbon‐emitting activities in a stark new light: in perpetrating climate change, we are, in fact, waging war on the most vulnerable.

Značaj mladih protagonistov v Plavtovem Hišnem strahu in Trinovčevem

Pogost motiv v rimski paliati so medgeneracijski konflikti. Medtem ko očetje največkrat poudarjajo konvencionalno moralo in kažejo varčnost, že kar skoporitost, se sinovi v njihovi odsotnosti radi predajajo razvratu: zapravljajo denar, popivajo in se spuščajo v razmerja s heterami, ponavadi ob pomoči kakega nabritega domačega sužnja. Ker vlada v komediji saturnalijski narobe svet, na koncu »zmagajo« sinovi in sužnji, ki so tudi glavni junaki teh komedij. Tu in tam pa Plavt sinovom položi na jezik besede, ki odstopajo od njihovega siceršnjega ravnanja in jih prikažejo v odgovornejši luči. Njegova najrazvpitejša »moralistična« komedija je Trinovčevo (Trinummus), vendar zasledimo moralno navdahnjene vložke in značajske lastnosti tudi v drugi komediji s podobnim izhodiščem, ki deluje veliko bolj razposajeno: v Hišnem strahu (Mostellaria). Ob primerjavi mladih protagonistov v Plavtovih komedijah Hišni strah in Trinovčevo ugotovimo, da je komedija Trinovčevo občutno bolj moralistična od Hišnega strahu, vendar po drugi strani tudi v slednjem ni mogoče videti gole burke kot, denimo, v Oslih (Asinaria) istega avtorja. Če si v Oslih oba protagonista, oče in sin, ki se pehata za isto meretrix, pravzaprav zaslužita zgolj posmeh občinstva, imajo glavni junak Hišnega strahu, njegov prijatelj in ljubica več značajskih lastnosti, ki so jih morale prikupiti tudi kritikom Katonovega kova.

The Origins of Natural Law Thinking in the Ideas of Ancient Greek Sophists: Protagoras and Antiphon

Protagoras and Antiphon are the first authors known to us who offered their views on the correlation between human nature, on the one hand, and the requirements of the law and positive morality, on the other. With Protagoras and Antiphon, the conventional character of law and morality, as well as the existence of a moral obligation to obey the law, became vital subjects of philosophical discussion. Protagoras, according to Plato’s testimony in the dialogues "Protagoras" and "Theaetetus", attempted to reconcile individual and public interests with the help of the concept of universal virtue, which all citizens of the polis should participate in. This attempt, however, is difficult to regard as successful, since, according to the logic of Protagoras, virtue is only a means for the survival of individuals and ensuring their security. While providing justification of the paramount importance and natural character of civic virtues, Protagoras at the same time allows for the possibility of following them only for appearance, as a cover for selfish motives.Antiphon views the contract between people as the sole and sufficient basis of law and morality. Approaching the problem from an individualistic point of view, Antiphon sharply contrasts nature and convention. Nevertheless, he considers the former rather in terms of benefits and harms of following it, and not as a source of objective moral prescriptions. According to this interpretation, nature and convention are two different worlds; one may chose which of them to follow, but it is impossible to reconcile them. Neither Protagoras, nor Antiphon offers any consistent concept of human nature, and that is why their ideas could not be characterized as natural law in the full sense of the word. Their views of nature do not yet contain fundamental standards, with which human law and conventional morality could be compared. The main weakness of both theories is their inability to give account of the social character of human nature. At the same time, the undoubted merit of Protagoras and Antiphon is the very statement of the question of the priority of nature or the convention, individual or public interests, as well as of the possibility of their harmonization. The ideas of two senior sophists played a decisive role in shaping the intellectual climate, in which, primarily in direct controversy with them, Plato and Aristotle produced much more elaborate concepts of human nature; and the natural law tradition emerged.

The Merchant's Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan by Simon Partner

Reviewed by: The Merchant's Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan by Simon Partner Anne Walthall (bio) The Merchant's Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan. By Simon Partner. Columbia University Press, New York, 2018. xxiv, 291 pages. $60.00, cloth; $59.99, E-book. Shinohara Chūemon was 51 when he left his village in the province of Kai to become a merchant in Yokohama. As a rural entrepreneur (gōnō), he already had experience in commerce and in local administration. Even so, appealing to the shogunate for permission to open a store in a city that had [End Page 148] yet to be built in order to conduct business with foreigners was a gamble. Although Chūemon's exact motivation remains unknown, Simon Partner emphasizes a risk-taking mentality that led him into one business venture after another. Partner sees this willingness to seize new opportunities as characterizing many of the men who went to Yokohama in the pursuit of profit and new ideas. Yokohama has long loomed large in the history of modern Japan. Some of the Westerners who flocked there in search of fortune kept journals that have been published. Everyone who studies Japan's opening to the West and the treaty port system in particular deals with Yokohama. Its role in the opening of Japan to foreign commerce thus constitutes an oft-told tale, but Partner provides new nuance through his attempt to paint a picture of daily life in the city from the point of view of an ordinary Japanese merchant. Chūemon had his successes and failures, each of which serves to illuminate changes in global demand for Japanese products, the technologies of trade, and the character of information networks. In Partner's eyes, these had a greater impact on ordinary Japanese people and on Japan's future than many of the policies inaugurated by statesmen. I am sympathetic to Partner's desire to center individuals such as Chūemon in historical accounts because examining the choices and the experiences of people like him provides compelling illustrations of social transformations. When Japanese historians turned away from Marxism to pursue people's history (minshū shi), they argued that commoners made a greater contribution to economic progress and social change than samurai not only because there were more of them but because they had a well-developed sense of conventional morality (tsūzoku dōtoku) that structured their actions. Although Partner does not discuss Chūemon's moral code, it can be seen in his work ethic and his trustworthiness. His backers and business partners lived in Kai where he could communicate with them only through letters sent to his son, yet even though he often had to postpone paying off his debts at year's end, they trusted him enough to keep extending credit to him. Without this degree of mutual confidence, even the strictest contracts would not have sufficed to guarantee the shipment of goods to Yokohama. In the course of his dealings with multiple partners, Chūemon got burned by a fellow Japanese only once—a remarkable testimony to the strength of the social bonds at that time. Partner derives his time frame for this study from Chūemon's arrival in Yokohama in 1859 to the last letter he wrote to his son in 1873. One of the pleasures of doing history is reading other people's mail, and Partner makes the most of his opportunity. Many of the letters pertain strictly to business, especially in the early years when Chūemon was struggling to raise capital and to find products that would appeal to foreigners. Would they like dried grapes? Alas, no. They liked to keep their houses warm, so they needed a [End Page 149] plentiful supply of charcoal, but not in the summer months when a large shipment that Chūemon had commissioned finally arrived. When a blockade of southern ports during the American Civil War prevented textile factories in England from getting the supplies of cotton they had heretofore relied on, Chūemon manfully strove to fill the gap with cotton from Kai. Factory owners preferred the cotton with longer fiber that they could get...

Gold Mountain Turned to Dust: Essays on the Legal History of the Chinese in the Nineteenth Century American West by John R. Wunder

231 Reviews 230 OHQ vol. 120, no. 2 these stories live and work for us in bettering diverse human relations and protecting our fragile planet — whether through ambitious new practices such as decolonization, or more familiar ones such as reconciliation — remains the challenge. Robert E. Walls University of Notre Dame ELEANOR BALDWIN AND THE WOMAN’S POINT OF VIEW: NEW THOUGHT RADICALISM IN PORTLAND’S PROGRESSIVE ERA by Lawrence M. Lipin Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2017. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 272 pages. $27.95 paper. Lawrence M. Lipin’s Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View is a finely crafted portrait of a Progressive Era Portland journalist and speaker that offers students and scholars of American feminism and radicalism key insights into the texture and complexity of movements for social change. Through this readable and intellectually vibrant account, readers come face to face with the contradictions linking Baldwin, a labor rights advocate and critic of finance capitalism with an abolitionist heritage, to women’s rights, New Thought enthusiasm, and anti-Catholic diatribes associated with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. Baldwin was the daughter of a New England Methodist circuit preacher and abolitionist who stressed voluntary individual conscience over tradition and hereditary church affiliations. Abolition offered a historical precedent for putting aside self-interest and acting on one’s moral compass. Baldwin and her brother Henry, a monetary radical supporter of the Greenback and Populist parties, saw exploitation of wage labor in the late-nineteenth-century industrial economy as another form of bondage that was furthered by an unholy alliance of corporate and government leaders protecting a restrictive monetary system. Between 1906 and 1909, Baldwin produced a daily column, “The Woman’s Point of View,” on the editorial page of the Portland Telegram . Building on Victorian tropes of female moral character to suggest that sympathy and benevolence were qualities that justified the influence of independent women in all aspects of economic and social life, she insisted that women in Progressive Era America were central to building a better world. Although some columns linked crass materialism with male power and corruption, others explored a variety of social feminist issues such as proper parenting, child labor, settlement-house life and the need for residences for wage-earning women, the dangers of vaccination, social hygiene and the single standard of sexual behavior, egalitarian marriages, and compassionate approaches to the poor and to criminal offenders. Citing female citizenship as the prerequisite for reform, her columns warmly supported woman suffrage. In no arena, however, did Baldwin speak truth to power more explicitly than in her critique of capitalism. Bridging middle-class women’s culture and radical political economy, she pointed to profit seeking by fashion, meatpacking, and milk interests at the expense of nature and family well-being. Although not identifying as a socialist, Baldwin called on women readers as consumers to recognize the benefits of government -run banks and mines while supporting the labor movement. Capitalism’s problem, she insisted,“wasunder-consumptionbythemasses, caused by the unequal power relations that concentrated wealth in the hands of a few” (p. 153). Utilizing the radical labor theory of value, Baldwin preached a cooperative approach to social relations. Yet she emphasized that the key to revolutionary progress lay in the mind, a major strand of New Thought teaching that collective thinking could shape the material world. As a “religion of social protest” that connected body and spirit, New Thought sought to break down both Victorian moral conventions limiting women’s sphere and impulses toward violence and greed (p. 142). In the years after publishing Money Talks (1915), for example, Baldwin lectured trade unionists on currency as a “spontaneously created social force or energy” (p. 153). World War I intensified Baldwin’s dedication to the mystical faith that fluid thought was bound together by forces of attraction. She assured readers of the postwar Oregon Labor Press, for example, that the Bolshevik Revolution was part of the history of human liberation and that communist opposition to ecclesiasticism did not connote animosity to religion in its spiritual sense. Indeed, the anti-institutional perspective of New Thought teaching set the grounds for her subsequent denunciation of the Roman Catholic...

The Relation between Conventional Morality and Rational Morality from the Viewpoint of Hegel

The Relation between Conventional Morality and Rational Morality from the Viewpoint of Hegel

Downplaying class with style: Middle class anxiety and the aesthetic performance of role distance

Discourses on middle class taste, lifestyle and ‘aesthetics’ have emphasized how middle class agents orient to mark their position by appropriating ‘legitimate’ cultural goods and practices and eschewing ‘illegitimate’ ones. This paper examines what could be learned, if the analytical perspective is broadened and shifted from the sociocultural distinction games between collective class agents to actual situated performances, and the stylistic and expressive means, with which middle class agents relate themselves also to their own class and to its – sometimes troublesome – cultural, aesthetic and moral conventions and expectations. We formulate one version of such a reflexively relational approach to the complexities of middle class agency and its performative enactment. By utilizing analytical tools originally developed by Erving Goffman, and applied here to analyze some excerpts from the film American Beauty, we demonstrate how aesthetic performativity oriented to the ‘downplaying’ of class distinctions can be used by middle class agents to pursue authenticity and to resist, and gain experiential distance from, the agonizing middle class roles, expectations and ‘principals’ readily surrounding them.

Hans in Luck or the moral economy of happiness in the modern age

ABSTRACTGenerations of men and women since antiquity have been preoccupied with the difficult quest for happiness. Up until modernity, people relied on the gods or God to grant them happiness. In the course of the eighteenth century, happiness became both a secular promise and a moral-political claim relevant to all people. The fairy tale Hans im Glück (Hans in Luck), published by the Grimm brothers in the early nineteenth century, and discussed in this article, provides a telling example of a quest for happiness unconcerned with moral prescriptions and social conventions, in which the hero focuses on his own feelings. Two centuries later, modern men and women find themselves in a predicament. Happiness still tops their private wish list but it seems harder than ever to achieve it, with abundant confusion as to what real happiness feels like. Subjective well-being tends to be distinguished from notions of happiness associated with serene bliss and fulfilment, beyond the limits of modern consumer society. Happiness has been defined as ‘people’s perception of the meaningfulness, sense of purpose, and value of their lives’, thus reintroducing morality and higher principles without, however, excluding hedonistic Hans-in-Luck style choices.

“An injury to shame”

This article looks at the discourse of obscenity in mid‐ to late nineteenth‐century German legal and aesthetic thought and its implications for both historical and contemporary hermeneutical practices. The article proceeds genealogically from definitions of obscenity in German law (particularly the controversial and widely consequential Lex Heinze of 1893), to the aesthetician Karl Rosenkranz's definition of obscenity as “the intentional injury to shame,” to the programmatic realism of the late nineteenth‐century literary historian and critic Julian Schmidt. Within this genealogy, the obscene emerges as a concept that extends far beyond either legal pragmatics or emotional susceptibility to delineate a particularly suspect play of exposure and concealment, isolation and integration, presence and significance, absorption and theatricality. For the aesthetic thinkers of the late nineteenth century, art and literature must be perpetually on their guard against a certain gratuitous form of sensual spectacle, which not only violates moral conventions, but also threatens a particular idea of the human being and its relationship to the external world in a way that is not merely historical, but continues to be relevant to literary and philosophical debates today.