Moral Convictions Research Articles

Social Identification in Collective Climate Activism: Predicting Participation in the Environmental Movement, Extinction Rebellion

ABSTRACT Human-induced climate change poses an unprecedented global threat. Researchers agree that dealing with climate change requires international collective action and widespread social transformation. This study integrates insights from the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA) and the Encapsulated Model of Social Identity in Collective Action (EMSICA) to explain participation in the environmental movement, Extinction Rebellion (XR). Structural equation models of data from a survey of 203 current or potential XR activists supported two identity-based pathways to collective action behavior and future intentions: moral convictions → anger → XR identification → collective action and global identification → participative efficacy → XR identification → collective action. Perceived group efficacy predicted collective action intentions but not behavior. Fear, guilt/shame, and hope did not significantly predict collective action behavior or intentions. We discuss the interplay of personal and social identity processes underlying climate change activism, as well as the need for longitudinal and experimental studies to disentangle causal relations. We propose that environmental campaign groups could foster group identification and thence collective action by communicating moral outrage about climate change, together with the potential efficacy of individuals’ actions toward achieving the group’s goals.

Attitudes and related factors toward organ donation among relatives of chronic kidney disease patients and healthy individuals

Purpose: The current study firstly aimed at investigating organ donation and related factors. Another aim of the study is to compare the knowledge and attitude levels of organ donation between the risky population with organ failure and healthy participants. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional survey was conducted in the tertiary university hospital between March-October 2019. A total of 88 healthy participants (group 1) and 56 participants with chronic kidney disease ((CKD) (group 2)) were included in the study. Organ donation attitudes of participants were measured with Organ Donation Attitudes Scales Turkish Version questionnaire. Result: A total of 144 participants (56 were CKD patients and 88 healthy participants) were included in the study. The scores of all participants from the sub-dimensions of the scale were humanity and moral conviction / beliefs (HMC): 90.70±20.36, fears of medical neglect (FMN): 27.38±11.52 and fears of bodily mutilation (FBM): 32.03±10.67, respectively. Group 2 participants’ humanity and moral conviction/beliefs (HMC) dimension scores were higher than group 1. Group 2 participants’ fears of medical neglect (FMN) score was higher than group 1. Factors affecting organ donation attitudes were gender and education level. Conclusion: Organ donation positive attitude scores were higher in women and those with higher education levels. Our results may suggest developing empathy and education programs on organ transplantation, as a means for increasing the number of potential organ donors.

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian realist pendulum

Reinhold Niebuhr is widely acknowledged as the father of Christian realism and a staunch critic of pacifism. In a famous exchange with his brother H. Richard in The Christian Century, Niebuhr defended the necessity of entering the fray of battle to combat evil as opposed to opting for non-violent detachment that ultimately usurps God’s authority to decide on final matters. Niebuhr, however, never endorsed an aggressive Just War doctrine. Striving to reconcile the Christian command of love with the harsh realities of power resulting from universal sinfulness, Niebuhr emphasised the necessity of negotiating the distance between the two extremes of a pendulum swinging from Christian pacifism to the endorsement of interventionist policies. Rather than this being an expression of the ambiguity of his moral convictions, this paper argues that it is a product of his sensitivity to applying contextual moral and political judgement as an exercise of theological responsibility.

Death Penalty Abolitionism From the Enlightenment to Modernity

The modern movement to abolish the death penalty in the United States stresses that this punishment cannot be applied fairly and effectively. The movement does not emphasize that killing prisoners is inhumane per se. Its focus is almost exclusively on administrative, procedural, and utilitarian issues, such as recurrent exonerations of innocents, incorrigible racial discrimination, endemic arbitrariness, lack of deterrent value, and spiraling financial costs. By comparison, modern European law recognizes any execution as an inherent violation of human rights rooted in dignity. This humanistic approach is often assumed to be “European” in nature and foreign to America, where distinct sensibilities lead people to concentrate on practical problems surrounding executions. In reality, this Article demonstrates that the significant transatlantic divergence in abolitionism is a relatively recent development. By the late eighteenth century, abolitionists in Europe and America recurrently denounced the inhumanity of executions in language foreshadowing modern human rights norms. Drawing on sources overlooked by scholars, including the views of past American and French abolitionists, the Article shows that reformers previously converged in employing a polyvalent rhetoric blending humanistic and practical objections to executions. It was not before the 1970s and 1980s that a major divergence materialized. As America faced an increasingly punitive social climate leading to the death penalty’s resurgence and the rise of mass incarceration, its abolitionists largely abandoned humanistic claims in favor of practical ones. Meanwhile, the opposite generally occurred as abolitionism triumphed in Europe. These findings call into question the notion that framing the death penalty as a human rights abuse marks recent shifts in Western Europe or international law. While human rights have indeed become the official basis for abolition in modern Europe, past generations of European and U.S. abolitionists defended similar moral and political convictions. These humanistic norms reflect a long-term evolution traceable to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But for diverse social transformations, America may have kept converging with Europe in gradually adopting humanistic norms of punishment.

Johnny Tested Positive for COVID-19, What Is Next for the Team?

Johnny Tested Positive for COVID-19, What Is Next for the Team?

Moral Extremism

AbstractThe word ‘extremist’ is often used pejoratively, but it’s not clear what, if anything, is wrong with extremism. My project is to give an account of moral extremism as a vice. It consists roughly in having moral convictions so intense that they cause a sort of moral tunnel vision, pushing salient competing considerations out of mind. We should be interested in moral extremism for several reasons: it’s consequential, it’s insidious – we don’t expect immorality to arise from excessive devotion to morality – and it’s yet to attract much philosophical attention. I give several examples of moral extremism from history and explore their social‐political implications. I also consider how we should evaluate people who miss the mark, being either too extreme in the service of a good cause or inconsistent with their righteous convictions. I compare John Brown and John Quincy Adams, who fell on either side of this spectrum, as examples.

Activism and radicalism in adolescence: an empirical test on age-related differences

ABSTRACT These days, political mobilization, particularly among young people, is on the rise. However, some of these people not only engage in legal and non-violent (activism) but also in illegal and violent actions (radicalism). In this work, we aimed to empirically explore these phenomena in greater detail, hypothesizing that younger (compared to older) adolescents are not only more prone to activism but also radicalism. We additionally aimed to investigate risk factors in this developmental period. In particular, we explored the possibility that social exclusion and a weak moral identity would make adolescents more readily express support for radicalism. In a study with four different Austrian high schools, activism and radicalism was assessed in mid- to late adolescents (14–19 years) using different validated measures. Moreover, we assessed participants’ moral identity and manipulated social exclusion. Results showed that participants in mid adolescence were more susceptible to activism and, in particular, radicalism than participants in late adolescence. Moreover, weak moral convictions revealed to be related to radicalism among mid-adolescents. Social exclusion did not moderate radicalism in adolescents. Illuminating age-related differences in activism and radicalism, the current study contributes to an empirical foundation of radicalism research and may animate means of prevention in developmental populations.

Theological reflection as a leadership development practice for the post-Christendom Scottish church: Developing moral convictions and navigating new identities

This paper discusses the role of theological reflection in church leadership development, focussing in particular on missional leadership in a post-Christendom context. It considers the organisational viability of a programme of theological reflection for leadership development, and the particular qualities which such a programme could foreseeably foster.

What Makes an Attack Sexual?

AbstractWe recognise certain acts as ‘sexual assault’, ‘sexual violence’, or a ‘sexual offence’, often to offer strong moral condemnation or to prescribe legal sanction. A common feature of these attacks is that they impose nonconsensual sexual contact; they are sexual attacks. While there has been extensive discussion of consent to sexual contact and of the conditions under which consensual contact is sexual, there has been little investigation into what it is for nonconsensual contact to be sexual. The purpose of this article is to examine the conditions under which an attack (nonconsensual contact) is sexual. I first argue that an account of sexual attacks is important, not least because the question has pressing moral and legal implications. I then consider and reject three accounts, one appealing solely to intuitions, one appealing to the body parts involved, and one appealing to the assailant’s mental state. Finally, I develop my own account. I propose that an attack is sexual if and only if it carries a sexual expressive significance, and thereby conveys a sexual meaning.

From ‘echo chambers’ to ‘chaos chambers’: discursive coherence and contradiction in the #MeToo Twitter feed

ABSTRACT Using the example of the Twitter feed #MeToo, this paper argues that CDS, in its task to understand more about how social media can offer ways for voices to challenge ideologies from below, needs to explore the ideas of ‘nodes’ (KhosraviNik, M. (2017b). Right wing populism in the west: Social media discourse and echo chambers. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Majid_Khosravinik/publications) and ‘echo chambers’ in greater detail. Though #MeToo did provide an ideological challenge, I show how it is also discursively chaotic and partly driven by influencers who may have a range of other motivations to align with the moral capital in the feed. At another level, #MeToo is highly nodal in terms of affect and moral conviction. These features can be understood in regard to nodal power of affective connectivity (Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics and structure of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication and Society, 19(3), 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697) and also in terms of major shifts in accepted norms of debating politics and society driven by social media. I consider what this means for CDS in relation to identifying discourses and discovering ideology in the social media landscape.

Losing More than Money: Organizations’ Prosocial Actions Appear Less Authentic When Their Resources are Declining

Companies often benefit from others’ attributions of moral conviction for prosocial behavior, for example, attributions that a company has a sincere moral desire to improve the environment when behaving sustainably. Across four studies, we explored how organizations’ changing resource positions influenced people’s attributions for the motivations underlying prosocial organizational behaviors. Observers attributed less moral conviction following prosocial behavior when they believed an organization was losing (vs. gaining) economic resources (Studies 1 and 2). This effect was primarily a “penalty” assessed against organizations that were losing resources, as opposed to a “reward” given to organizations gaining resources (Study 3). Finally, we found that this effect occurred because people perceive organizations that are losing resources as more situationally constrained, leading them to attribute less dispositional moral conviction (Study 4). We discuss theoretical and practical implications stemming from how changes in resource access can lead people to be more skeptical of organizations’ motivations following prosocial behavior.

The Dark Side of Morality – Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence

People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their moral convictions about a variety of sociopolitical issues prior to undergoing functional MRI scanning. During scanning, they were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of violent protests that were ostensibly congruent or incongruent with their views about sociopolitical issues. Complementary univariate and multivariate analytical strategies comparing neural responses to congruent and incongruent violence identified neural mechanisms implicated in processing salience and in the encoding of subjective value. As predicted, neuro-hemodynamic response was modulated parametrically by individuals’ beliefs about the appropriateness of congruent relative to incongruent sociopolitical violence in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and by moral conviction in ventral striatum. Overall moral conviction was predicted by neural response to congruent relative to incongruent violence in amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that moral conviction about sociopolitical issues serves to increase their subjective value, overriding natural aversion to interpersonal harm.

Ahab, a Charismatic Leader?: A Study on Ahab’s Leadership in Moby-Dick Using Robert J. House’s Charismatic Leadership Theory

This paper attempts to find an answer to the question “how could Ahab lead his subordinates to the destruction by Moby Dick?” It also checks if Ahab can be called a charismatic leader as many critics have done so, in most cases, without a clear understanding of the concept of charisma. It focuses on the critical scenes of Chapter 36 “The Quarter-Deck” in which he succeeds in securing the supports of the sailors of the Pequod. Using Robert J. House’s much-cited foundational Charismatic Leadership theory in which he introduces four characteristics —dominance, self-confidence, n Influence, and moral conviction—that a charismatic leader has, the paper investigates whether those characteristics are found in the depiction of Ahab in the chapter. Ahab seems to show those charismatic characteristics there more than any other parts in the novel, which suggests that he is behaving temporarily like a charismatic leader particularly in this chapter in order to get what he needs.

The Problem of the Conscience Clause of Healthcare Professionals in Italy in the Years 2017-2020

The main goal of the article is to analyse the key elements of the living will in Italy and present the dispute regarding the understanding of the conscience clause of healthcare professionals. In the country on the Tiber, a law on the living will was passed in 2017. A living will consists in the anticipatory expression of ‘will’, by an adult or legal guardian acting in full possession of their mental faculties, concerning the possible administration or discontinuation of certain medical therapies in the future. The conscience clause, on the other hand, means the right to refuse to take such actions, which a particular person considers to be contrary to their personal convictions. The Italian law on the living will does not contain a provision on the conscience clause. For this reason, an ethical and legal problem arose for healthcare professionals, who refused to comply with the wishes of their patients for moral or religious reasons, for example by discontinuing artificial hydration or nutrition, thus, leading to the patient’s death. The ethical and legal dispute in Italy is part of a contemporary global debate on conscience clauses, euthanasia, assisted suicide, human rights, and the dignity of human life. Analyses have shown that healthcare professionals should be guaranteed the right, not to perform such medical procedures, which are contrary to their moral and religious convictions.

The historical development of anti-usury laws in Austria and Poland

Virtually all modern legal system attempts to balance the interests of debtors and creditors. Both categories of parties are equipped with instruments protecting their interests where the law (precisely: the social and moral convictions prevalent in the society that tend to determine the content of the law) deems such protection justified. Just as creditor protection concentrates on dealing with dishonest debtors and preventing fraud, debtor protection has been crafted to shield debtors from abusive interest rates or other – excessively detrimental – contractual provisions (e.g. clauses that unconscionably expand debtors’ liability or render their defences effectively inoperative). Such practices, especially charging excessive interest, have been called usury. In contemporary Polish law the system of debtor protection is multi-layered, with various instruments whose scope often overlaps. That such system exists and how it operates is a direct result of the historical development of instruments aimed at combating usury. This text aims to recapture how anti-usury legislation developed in Austria, whose legal system is closely related to Polish, and to describe how legal systems tend to arrive at very similar outcomes – notwithstanding the differences in the globality of circumstances. The authors employ legal comparative and historical methods, supplanted by formal-dogmatic ones, to present the evolution of anti-usury legislation in Austria as well as the state of anti-usury private law legislation in Poland.

Am I actually a veterinarian or an economist? Understanding the moral challenges for farm veterinarians in Germany on the basis of a qualitative online survey

This qualitative online survey (n = 123) investigated what farm veterinarians in Germany perceive as morally challenging situations. Vital moral challenges can be described as conflicts between different actors who make demands on the veterinarians, like (a) animals, (b) farmers, (c) politics, (d) society, (e) veterinary offices (f) colleagues, supervisors, employees and competitors and (g) the veterinarian himself/herself. Or they can be described as the conflict between different roles of veterinarians who describe themselves as (a) advocates for the animals, (b) entrepreneurs, (c) social workers, (d) part of agriculture, (e) colleagues, supervisors, employees and competitors and (f) private persons. It can be deduced that at least some study participants find the described moral challenges a cause for moral distress. The key moral challenge for farm veterinarians, from their own viewpoint, are not so much open ethical questions, ethical dilemmas or “duty vs. inclination” conflicts, but rather situations in which their personal moral convictions are conflicting with external obstacles. Accordingly, a feeling of powerlessness appears in their answers. The extremely limited financial scope of animal owners could be identified as the key external obstacle.

Taking the Relationship Between Populism and Healthcare Seriously: A Call for Empirical Analysis Rather Than Moral Condemnation Comment on "A Scoping Review of Populist Radical Right Parties' Influence on Welfare Policy and its Implications for Population Health in Europe".

In this commentary, we reflect on Rinaldi and Bekker’s scoping review of the literature on populist radical right (PRR) parties and welfare policies. We argue that their review provides political scientists and healthcare scholars with a firm basis to further explore the relationships between populism and welfare policies in different political systems. In line with the authors, we furthermore (re)emphasize the need for additional empirical inquiries into the relationship between populism and healthcare. But instead of expanding the research agenda suggested – for instance by adding categories or niches in which this relationship can be observed – we would like to challenge some of the premises of the studies conducted and reviewed thus far. We do so by identifying two concerns and by illustrating these concerns with two examples from the Netherlands.

Moral Conviction, Emotion, and the Influence of Episodic versus Thematic Frames

ABSTRACT Morally convicted attitudes—attitudes grounded in core beliefs about fundamental right and wrong—play an important role in political psychology, public opinion, and political behavior. Extant research suggests that these attitudes are intensely held, likely to evoke strong emotional responses, more stable and less amenable to compromise, and perceived to be universally true. Despite a large body of research on how morally convicted attitudes affect behavior and choice, several open questions remain about their antecedents. There are two questions central to this article: First, can the news media effectively communicate a sense of moral conviction to the mass public? Second, if so, what are the factors that cause these attitudes to become morally convicted? Drawing on framing theory, appraisal theory, and research in political communication, we hypothesize that moral conviction can be effectively communicated using episodic (as opposed to thematic) frames, and also, that emotional reactions to such frames contribute to the development of moral conviction. Using four survey experiments and two replications, we find some support for our hypotheses, but we also find that treatment effects are likely context dependent. We close with a discussion about avenues for future research.

When (fake) beauty turns ugly: Plastic surgery as a moral violation

Plastic surgery is a popular form of appearance modification. Nonetheless, attitudes toward the recipients of plastic surgery remain divided. These attitudes may be indicative of an underlying moralisation of plastic surgery in contemporary society. To test this hypothesis, we examined perceptions of plastic surgery in the context of Moral Foundations Theory – a formal framework in which morality is categorised into five innate foundations: Sanctity, Care, Fairness, Loyalty, and Authority. Across two complementary online surveys with samples of 385 undergraduate psychology students (75% female) and 1533 sexual minority men, respectively, we investigated participants’ valuation of each moral foundation and their moral condemnation of plastic surgery. Results indicated that scores on Sanctity predicted moral condemnation, such that participants who valued Sanctity more highly were more likely to perceive plastic surgery as morally fraught. Sanctity encompasses naturalness and purity elements of morality. As such, results were explored in the context of two broad theories: feminist theory, which posits that unnatural beauty is perceived as unfavourably as ugliness itself, and evolutionary theory, which suggests that unnatural stimuli are moralised because they elicit innate and powerful disgust reactions. Ultimately, we concluded that the underlying societal moralisation of plastic surgery is attributable to perceptions of plastic surgery as fundamentally unnatural. Implications for interventions targeted at eradicating plastic surgery condemnation are discussed.

Social Influence and Group Identity.

This chapter reviews research on the group identity explanation of social influence, grounded in self-categorization theory, and contrasts it with other group-based explanations, including normative influence, interdependence, and social network approaches, as well as approaches to persuasion and influence that background group (identity) processes. Although the review primarily discusses recent research, its focus also invites reappraisal of some classic research in order to address basic questions about the scope and power of the group identity explanation. The self-categorization explanation of influence grounded in group norms, moderated by group identification, is compared and contrasted to other normative explanations of influence, notably the concept of injunctive norms and the relation to moral conviction. A range of moderating factors relating to individual variation, features of the intragroup and intergroup context, and important contextual variables (i.e., anonymity versus visibility, isolation versus copresence) that are particularly relevant to online influence in the new media are also reviewed.