Moral Disagreement Research Articles

CHALLENGES AND PERSPECTIVES OF INTERCULTURAL ETHICS IN THE THEORY OF GLOBAL MANAGEMENT

The development of the global market has created a need for global management ideas that can be overcome in practice by solving complex problems. The formation and development of global management ideas is strongly influenced by different cultural traditions and values of Eastern and Western cultures, which determine different management methods. The ability to organize production and manage processes on a global platform is critical to creating and maintaining high living standards. The vital foundation on which sustainable decisions in the field of management are based can have a strong impact on the fulfilment of humanity’s expectations for well-being and prosperity. The reasonable question therefore is: what value system could become the universal ethical framework that integrates different cultural traditions and worldviews and underpins the field global management? Intercultural ethics is one of the most recent research projects to analyze a wide range of ethical issues arising from the multidisciplinary perspective of societies and cultures. Intercultural ethics seeks to identify the existing different cultural, value beliefs, to define universal ethical principles on the basis of which intercultural decisions and agreements on the development, implementation, management and use of digital technologies are made. Different cultures disagree on common universal moral decisions because they are based on unique worldviews and value systems, and there is no universally accepted epistemically sound way to resolve such moral disagreements. The question is, what are the basic assumptions underpinning the impact of intercultural ethics on the theory of global management that would enable the common development and application of a system of universal ethical principles governing the development of global management processes in different regions and cultures of the world? The article hypothesizes that a synthesis of classical Aristotelian virtue ethics, Confucian ethics, and African ubuntu philosophical ethics could underpin intercultural ethics, embodying the universal ethical values of Western and Eastern cultures in global management theory.

Moral Disagreement and Practical Direction

Whenever A judges that x-ing is morally wrong and B judges that x-ing is not morally wrong, we think that they disagree. The two standard types of accounts of such moral disagreements both presuppose that the class of moral wrong-judgments is uniform, though in different ways. According to the belief account, the disagreement is doxastic: A and B have beliefs with conflicting cognitive contents. This presupposes “belief-uniformity”: that the content of moral concepts is invariant in such a way that, whenever A believes that x-ing is morally wrong and B believes that x-ing is not morally wrong, their beliefs have mutually inconsistent contents. According to the attitude account, moral disagreements are non-doxastic: A and B have clashing practical attitudes. This presupposes “attitude-uniformity”: that moral judgments are always accompanied by, or consist of, desire-like attitudes. Consequently, neither account is available if both uniformity-claims are rejected – as e.g., various forms of content-relativism do. This paper presents a new non-doxastic account of deontic moral disagreement, consistent with the rejection of both uniformity-claims. I argue first, that even if deontic moral judgments are not desires, and are not always accompanied by desires, they have practical direction in the same sense as desires: they are attitudes that one can act in accordance or discordance with. Second: deontic moral disagreement can be understood as clashes in practical direction: roughly, A and B morally disagree if, and only if, some way of acting is in accordance with A’s judgment but in discordance with B’s.

A pluralist hybrid model for moral AIs

With the increasing degrees AIs and machines, the need for implementing ethics in AIs is pressing. In this paper, we first survey current approaches to moral AIs and their inherent limitations. Then we propose the pluralist hybrid approach and show how these limitations of moral AIs can be partly alleviated by the pluralist hybrid approach. The core ethical decision-making capacity of an AI based on the pluralist hybrid approach consists of two systems. The first is a deterministic algorithm system that embraces different moral rules for making explicit moral decisions. The second is a machine learning system that accounts for calculating the value of the variables required by the application of moral principles. The pluralist hybrid system is better than the existing proposals as it better addresses the moral disagreement problem of the top-down approach by including distinct moral principles. Besides, the pluralist hybrid system reduces the opacity of ethical decision-making by implementing explicit moral principles for moral decision-making.

SHOULD WE BELIEVE IN MORAL REALISM? ON THE BURDEN OF JUSTIFICATION OF MORAL REALISM IN MORAL DISAGREEMENTS

Moral realism and moral relativism are two influential dogmas in moral philosophy. This paper examines relativism’s possible position and the burden of justification of a particular form of realism in the problem of moral disagreement. This paper concludes that neither position is morally acceptable, and this paper further offers a hint to a middle way: moral pragmatism.

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.

Current challenges faced by transgender and gender-diverse patients and providers in anesthesiology.

Current challenges faced by transgender and gender-diverse patients and providers in anesthesiology.

Modelling in Normative Ethics

This is a paper about the methodology of normative ethics. I claim that much work in normative ethics can be interpreted as modelling, the form of inquiry familiar from science, involving idealised representations. I begin with the anti-theory debate in ethics, and note that the debate utilises the vocabulary of scientific theories without recognising the role models play in science. I characterise modelling, and show that work with these characteristics is common in ethics. This establishing the plausibility of my interpretation. Taking methodological inspiration from modelling in science gives us new tools for managing idealisations, and a new perspective on pluralism. I think demonstrate why this interpretation is a fruitful way of interpreting ethics, by looking at three case studies. First, I return to the anti-theory debate and argue that modelling opens up a new middle ground. Second, I argue that a modelling lens offers a new way of understanding impossibility theorems in population ethics, and their bearing on ethics as a whole. Finally, I show how viewing our work as modelling can be deployed in debates within ethics, using the debate over prioritarianism as an example. I close with further methodological suggestions for those who choose to see themselves as modellers. I discuss the role of counterexamples, our responses to moral disagreement, and the training of new ethicists.

The contribution of professional autonomy in advancing ethical behaviour: A narrative review of studies in nursing.

This article explores moral disagreements between nurses and physicians; specifically, we aim to analyse professional nurses' practice in navigating these conflicts. Nurses face morally challenging situations while caring for patients when their views on treatments and care may contradict those of physicians. It is important that nurses represent patients' perspectives and are partners in the care decision-making process. A narrative review was conducted by including peer-reviewed articles in English. A literature search was conducted using the Web of Science database and Google Scholar search engine from 1 December 2021 to 10 February 2022. A total of 27 articles published between 2009 and 2021 were included in the analysis. The following themes were explored in this article: areas in which moral disagreements occur and how these disagreements shape physician-nurse relationships, differences in the status of professional autonomy in nursing in the Baltic states and Nordic countries, and potential directions for nurses' involvement in the decision-making process regarding moral disagreements in nursing practice. Moral disagreements between nurses and physicians most often occur in situations related to treatment and/or care strategies as well as end-of-life decisions. Nurses' participation in the decision-making process and physicians' willingness to consider nurses' perspectives play a fundamental role in navigating moral conflicts because nurses possess a body of knowledge about their patients that differs from that of physicians. This knowledge is just as worthy as physician knowledge. Considering the level of professional autonomy in specific regions, nurses' involvement in decision-making regarding particular patients' care in the Baltic states seems to be relatively low compared to that in the Scandinavian countries, where nurses have a much wider space for independent decision-making. Complex moral situations that require the input of both physicians and nurses must be examined and addressed. Several processes may assist in fostering nurses' contributions to decision-making, among which training to effectively deal with morally complex situations and creating an atmosphere conducive to collaboration between physicians and nurses are particularly important.

Practical Expressivism

<i>Practical Expressivism</i>

When and why "staying out of it" backfires in moral and political disagreements.

People care where others around them stand on contentious moral and political issues. Yet when faced with the prospect of taking sides and the possibility of alienating observers with whom they might disagree, actors often try to "stay out of it"-communicating that they would rather not to take a side at all. We demonstrate that despite its intuitive appeal for reducing conflict, opting not to take sides over moralized issues can harm trust, even relative to siding against an observer's viewpoint outright. Across eleven experiments (N = 4,383) using controlled scenarios, real press video clips, and incentivized economic games, we find that attempts to stay out of the fray are often interpreted as deceptive and untrustworthy. When actors choose not to take sides, observers often ascribe concealed opposition, an attribution of strategic deception which provokes distrust and undermines real-stakes cooperation and partner choice. We further demonstrate that this effect arises only when staying out of it seems strategic: Actors who seem to hold genuine middle-ground beliefs or who lack incentives for impression management are not distrusted for avoiding conflict. People are often asked to take sides in moral and political disagreement. Our findings outline a reputational risk awaiting those who opt not to do so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Service, reciprocity, and remedy: From Confucian meritocracy to Confucian democracy

One of the most notable features in recent Confucian political theory is the advocacy of political meritocracy. Though Confucian meritocrats’ controversial institutional design has been subject to critical scrutiny, less attention has been paid to their underlying normative claims. This paper aims to investigate the two justificatory conditions of Confucian political meritocracy—the service condition and the reciprocity condition—in light of classical Confucianism and with special attention to moral disagreement. Finding the normative argument for Confucian political meritocracy both incomplete (in light of classical Confucianism) and implausible (under the circumstances of moral disagreement), it proposes Confucian constitutional democracy as an alternative that can meet the three conditions of the good Confucian polity—service, reciprocity, and remedy—by reconceiving the people's well-being in terms of their basic rights, as well as by promoting constitutional dialogue among the three branches of the government.

Respect for conscientious judgement in health care.

Respect for conscientious judgement in health care.

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.

Negotiating “women”: metalinguistic negotiations across languages

The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between (what I shall call) linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language (2018). Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between linguistic conservatives and reformers who are speaking different languages. The objection generalises to metalinguistic approaches to e.g. moral disagreements. This paper discusses the Babel objection and shows how to dispel it.

A Care Ethical Engagement with John Locke on Toleration

Care theorists have yet to outline an account of how the concept of toleration should function in their normative framework. This lack of outline is a notable gap in the literature, particularly for demonstrating whether care ethics can appropriately address cases of moral disagreement within contemporary pluralistic societies; in other words, does care ethics have the conceptual resources to recognize the disapproval that is inherent in an act of toleration while simultaneously upholding the positive values of care without contradiction? By engaging care ethics with John Locke’s (1632–1704) influential corpus on toleration, I answer the above question by building the bases for a novel theory of toleration as care. Specifically, I argue that care theorists can home in on an oft-overlooked aspect of Locke’s later thought: that the possibility of a tolerant society is dependent on a societal ethos of trustworthiness and civility, to the point where Locke sets out positive ethical demands on both persons and the state to ensure this ethos can grow and be sustained. By leveraging and augmenting Locke’s thought within the care ethical framework, I clarify how care ethics can provide meaningful solutions to moral disagreement within contemporary pluralistic societies in ways preferable to the capability of a liberal state.

Hope for the Evolutionary Debunker: How Evolutionary Debunking Arguments and Arguments from Moral Disagreement Can Join Forces

AbstractFacts about moral disagreement and human evolution have both been said to exclude the possibility of moral knowledge, but the question of how these challenges interact has largely gone unaddressed. The paper aims to present and defend a novel version of the evolutionary “debunking” argument for moral skepticism that appeals to both types of considerations. This argument has several advantages compared to more familiar versions. The standard debunking strategy is to argue that evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs generate skeptical implications because they attribute those beliefs to factors that are unrelated to their truth. That strategy is vulnerable to “third-factor” responses, which invoke first-order moral claims to challenge the assumption that Darwinian factors and the moral truths are really unrelated in that way. In contrast, our version is immune to those responses, as it does not proceed via assumptions about how Darwinian factors relate to the moral facts. Instead, it focuses on what evolutionary accounts of moral beliefs have to say about the fact that people often reach divergent moral beliefs. The argument thereby illustrates how the debunking strategy can join forces with the argument from moral disagreement. The combination of those strategies presents, we think, a challenge that is more formidable than when they are considered separately.

The Right Argument from Moral Disagreement

The anti-realist's argument from moral disagreement has prematurely fallen out of favor. The argument has never been stated explicitly in correct form, and its proponents have not appealed to the best examples to support its premises. Realists have responded with a multitude of possible replies without applying them to the most convincing examples of irresolvable disagreements. The argument is a modus ponens from apparent fundamental disagreements to a disjunction of possible explanations, and then a disjunctive argument eliminating all but one alternative. The most convincing example from the point of view of the anti-realist is the disagreement between the collectivist and the individual rights advocate, which occurs on both the levels of principle and individual judgment. Realist explanations for such disagreements include ignorance of nonmoral facts, application of principles in diverse contexts, bias, faulty reasoning, incommensurability or ties, lack of empathy or imagination, inaccessibility of moral facts, or different meanings for moral terms. I argue that none of these realist explanations for the disagreement between the collectivist and the individualist works, leaving only the anti-realist explanation. Other realist moves, for example analogies with other areas of discourse, including disagreement among meta-ethicists, are also shown to fail.

The Limits of Metalinguistic Negotiation: The Role of Shared Meanings in Normative Debate

AbstractAccording to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics recognize, and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations.

Determining Vaccine Justice in the Time of COVID-19: A Democratic Perspective

AbstractWhat does vaccine justice require at the domestic and global levels? In this essay, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, we argue that deliberative-democratic participation is needed to answer this question. To be effective on the ground, abstract principles of vaccine justice need to be further specified through policy. Any vaccination strategy needs to find ways to prioritize conflicting moral claims to vaccine allocation, clarify the grounds on which low-risk people are being asked to vaccinate, and reach a balance between special duties toward countrymen and universal duties toward foreigners. Reasonable moral disagreement on these questions is bound to exist in any community. But such disagreement threatens to undermine vaccine justice insofar as the chosen vaccination strategy (and its proposed specification of vaccine justice) lacks public justification. Inclusive democratic deliberation about vaccine justice is a good mechanism for tackling such moral disagreement. By allowing residents and citizens to participate in the specification of abstract principles of vaccine justice, and their translation into policy, democratic deliberation can enhance the legitimacy of any vaccination strategy and boost compliance with it.

Faultless Disagreement as Evidence for Moral Relativism

Arguments from faultless disagreement appeal to the possibility of mistake-free disagreement as evidence for semantic relativism. Typically, these arguments focus on paradigmatically subjective topics such as taste, aesthetics, and comedy. Many philosophers hold that ethics is also a subjective topic. But so far, there has been little discussion of faultless disagreement in ethics. In this paper, I advance an argument from faultless moral disagreement, in favour of a relativist semantics for ethics.