Moral Duty Research Articles

The Ethics of Social Media: Why Content Moderation is a Moral Duty

This article defends platforms’ moral responsibility to moderate wrongful speech posted by users. Several duties together ground and shape this responsibility. First, platforms have duties to defend others from harm when they can do so at reasonable cost. Second, platforms have a moral duty to avoid complicity with users’ wrongfully harmful or dangerous speech. I will argue that one can be complicit in wrongs committed by others by supplying them with a space in which they will foreseeably commit them. For platforms, proactive content moderation is required to avoid such complicity. Further, platforms have an especially stringent complicity-based duty not to amplify users’ wrongful speech, thereby increasing its harm or danger. Finally, platforms have a duty not to enable new wrongs by amplifying otherwise innocuous speech that becomes wrongfully harmful only through amplification. I close by considering an objection—that content moderation by platforms constitutes an objectionable form of private censorship—explaining how it can be answered.

Forms of Calling and Helping Behaviors at Work: Psychological Entitlement and Moral Duty as Mediators

Even though calling researchers have identified two major forms of calling, namely modern and neoclassical, existing studies do not agree on whether these two forms are consistent or different in their mechanisms and outcomes. This study aimed to investigate whether modern and neoclassical calling are both indirectly related to unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through the mediating roles of psychological entitlement and moral duty. Additionally, this study also aimed to investigate whether psychological entitlement functions as a mediator greater in magnitude for modern calling, whereas moral duty functions as a mediator greater in magnitude for neoclassical calling. Results from 463 employees in South Korea from two time points at 1 month interval revealed that both modern and neoclassical calling were indirectly positively related to UPB through psychological entitlement and indirectly positively related to OCB through moral duty. There was insufficient evidence to support the notion that the mediators would be different in magnitude based on the form of calling. Thus, this study demonstrates the double-edged nature of calling in relation to OCB and UPB. Additionally, it suggests that the outcomes of employees’ calling at work may depend more on the strength rather than the form of their calling. The implications and directions for future research are discussed.

العقد في الفكر الفلسفي: دراسة في فلسفة القانون

The aim of the study is to investigate the development of the idea of the contract from a philosophical perspective, and to know the philosophy of the balance of civil contracts. The philosophical approach was used to study and derive the idea of the balance of civil contracts as one of the pillars of contracts. The study reached a number of results, the most important of which are: The principle of the authority of the will in creating legal actions, but within its reasonable limits, in which the will is balanced with justice and the public interest. This is what is meant by the objectivity of the contractual will. The principle of good faith in negotiations always works to achieve contractual balance because it aims to protect legitimate trust in transactions, in order to conclude a contract based on informed consent to the contract by its parties. Although this principle is stipulated to be dealt with in the stage of interpreting and implementing the contract, the prevailing opinion in jurisprudence and judiciary is to work with it in the stage prior to contracting as a moral duty. Contractual negotiations give the will complete freedom to decide the fate of the contract. When the will enters into contractual negotiations, it is able to determine the effects of the contract, which is something that is taken away from it in contracts of adhesion. Contractual negotiations play a fundamental role in achieving contractual balance, because they protect the contract from defects, by allowing the negotiating parties to review the terms of the contract, and thus they are a guarantee for the weak party against the strong party that has economic and legal dominance over the contract. The study recommended many recommendations, the most important of which are: paying attention to the principle of good faith in general in contracting in all stages of the contract, and stipulating it and formulating it in a clear legal formulation in the stage preceding the contract. Also, paying attention to studying the stage of contractual negotiations in the stage preceding the conclusion of the contract, and allocating a legal regulation for it that regulates the relationship between the negotiators in Egyptian civil law.

Motivated to Fight: Diverse Motivations of Foreign Fighters in the Russia–Ukraine War

Why fight for someone else’s war? This study explores the motivations of foreign fighters joining the Ukrainian Foreign Legion during the 2022 to 2023 phase of the Russia–Ukraine War. Unlike previous research centered on foreign nationals’ involvement in terrorist organizations and jihadist groups, particularly in the Middle East, this case captures a different trend characterized by institutionalized recruitment processes and tacit international support. Using an original data set of 296 pro-Ukraine fighters compiled from open-source materials, we analyze their stated motivations and demographic characteristics. We found motivations vary based on specific factors. Fighters’ origin includes Westerners fighters for empathy, altruism, and moral duty, while former Soviet fighters are driven by ideology and geopolitics. The complex and context-dependent nature of foreign fighter motivations is highlighted in this study, emphasizing how motivations can shift across time and context. This finding urges future research to consider both general and conflict-specific factors.

Kant on Self‐Legislation as the Foundation of Duty*

AbstractDuties to oneself are central to Kant's moral thought. Indeed, in his Lectures on Ethics, he claims that they “take first place, and are the most important of all” (LE: 27:341). Despite this, Kant is not clear about what they are or why they are ‘the most important.’ What is it for a duty to be owed to oneself? And in what sense do such duties ‘take first place’? I answer these questions: a duty to oneself is a self‐legislated duty, and they ‘take first place’ in that all ethical duties are, fundamentally, duties to oneself. Based on a close reading of Kant's “Apparent Antinomy” regarding duties to oneself in The Doctrine of Virtue §§1–3, I argue that Kant holds that (1) a duty is owed to its legislator, and (2) all duties are self‐legislated. I then argue that this interpretation is further supported by Kant's understanding of the Categorical Imperative as a “principle of autonomy” in the Groundwork (G: 4:433). I conclude by offering an interpretation of the Categorical Imperative on which even though all duties are ultimately owed to oneself, there remains an important sense in which some duties are owed to others as well.

A Profit Cap is not yet a General Moral Duty for Companies: A Corporate Social Contract Perspective

AbstractIn both the literature and practice, it has been advocated that companies should have a profit cap. Utilizing corporate social contract theory, this article posits that under at least three conditions, companies do not have a general moral duty to cap their profits. These conditions entail that a company adheres to the contracting principles of its stakeholder relationships, that the constitutive stakeholders of the company have not otherwise stipulated in the corporate social contract, and that the macrosocial contract does not prescribe otherwise to the company. The first two conditions are company-specific and hence do not constitute a generic moral imperative, and there is currently insufficient evidence for the third, generic condition.

VACCINATION HESITATION FROM THE BIOETHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Introduction: Vaccine hesitation represents a significant challenge to public health, with serious consequences, such as the resurgence of eradicated diseases, the return of measles and pertussis in Brazil, as well as other immunoprevenable diseases, due to the fall in vaccination coverage. There is a bioethical conflict between the autonomy of parents who choose not to vaccinate their children and the lack of responsibility, as citizens, to protect public health. In addition, the responsibility of health professionals to work in accordance with the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence, so that they always indicate and encourage vaccines duly endorsed by science. Respect for autonomy should be balanced with the collective good, where vaccination hesitation contributes to the resurgence of preventable diseases and generates negative impacts on public health. Objective: Discuss vaccine hesitation from the perspective of bioethics from a real case report, addressing the repercussions of doctors’ instructions to their patients. Additionally, the legal aspects related to the obligation of vaccination in Brazil are discussed, with emphasis on collective protection and ethical duty to promote public health. METHOD: This is a descriptive and qualitative study based on a real case report of meningoencephalitis resulting from chickenpox, whose searches were performed in the Scielo, PubMed and Lilacs databases. Discussion: Varicella is a disease caused by the varicella-zoster virus, whose transmission occurs through respiratory aerosols or contact with the contents of skin lesions. Its main complications are meningoencephalitis, pneumonia, skin and ear infections. Meningoencephalitis is a rare interlocutory appeal that consists of acute central nervous system inflammation and can be fatal. Vaccination against chickenpox prevents injuries resulting from this infection. According to the legislation in force in the country, the obligation to immunize through a vaccine that, registered with a health surveillance body, is part of the National Immunization Program or its obligatory application determined by law is constitutional. Addressing the precepts of principalist bioethics, the present study relates them to the reported case, aiming to broadly discuss vaccine hesitation from medical advice. CONCLUSION: The case report highlights the importance of vaccination against the varicella zoster virus in preventing serious complications and the bioethical dilemma between parents’ autonomy and the responsibility of protecting the health of children and the community. Non -immunization, as in the case of the varicella, highlights the need to prioritize the principles of beneficence and non -maleficence. Although autonomy is essential, it should be balanced with the individual and collective good, especially in vaccination, where protection depends on adherence to immunization policies. Vaccine hesitation is a growing public health problem, requiring health professionals to be well formed to combat misinformation and promote evidence -based practices.

Geoff Brennan on the Ethics and Rationality of Voting

Geoff Brennan made a wide range of important contributions to the literature on the ethics and rationality of voting. This article begins by situating these contributions in the broader debate over rational choice theory and the so-called paradox of voting. It then introduces Geoff’s expressive theory of voter behaviour, as developed in conjunction with Loren Lomasky, and considers its significance for the justification of democracy and the ethics of voting. The final section engages critically with Geoff’s view that citizens do not have moral duties to vote, developing a novel argument in defence of such duties that appeals to the importance of the social norms that undergird the processes of representative democracy.

Saving cosmopolitanism from colonialism

ABSTRACT Cosmopolitanism – the view that moral concern, and consequently moral duties, are not limited by borders – seems to justify colonialism with a ‘civilizing’ mission, because it supports the enforcement of moral norms universally, with no distinctions between territories, and settler colonialism, because it promotes ideas like common ownership of the Earth and open borders. I argue that existing attempts to defend cosmopolitanism from this worry fail, and that instead the cosmopolitan should embrace a cosmopolitan instrumentalist defence. According to cosmopolitan instrumentalism, colonialism is wrong (when it is wrong) for instrumental reasons: it has all sorts of terrible effects. There is nothing per se wrong with colonialism itself, so cosmopolitanism need not worry about licencing it in principle. There is much that is wrong with colonialism in practice, so cosmopolitanism can easily condemn colonialism as egregiously wrong, although it cannot condemn it as per se or necessarily wrong.

Risks of competing discourses of scientific responsibility in global ocean futures

Accelerated innovation in climate-impacted oceans is outpacing standards of scientific responsibility. Standards of responsibility are critical because they shape research agendas, funding flows, scientific practice, and how innovations are regulated. Here, we examine responsibility debates among 243 marine scientists and end-users proposing, trialling and/or implementing 76 innovations for climate-impacted oceans. We identify three distinct discourses: ‘science outside society’, ‘science for society’ and ‘science with society’. Competition within and across these discourses reveals heightened tensions between the need to protect scientific autonomy and freedom, and moral duty to ensure socially just and desirable ocean futures. Without thorough debate and oversight, the wide-reaching power of such unresolved tensions could propel marine science and ocean futures into volatile ethical and moral territory. Better connection and articulation of standards of responsibility with scientific motivations, practices, and funding are key to ensuring the transparency and accountability required to progress equitable and sustainable oceans.

Motivation from Joseph Ratzinger’s Eschatological Realism for Protecting Humanity’s Future

Abstract This article outlines one way in which Joseph Ratzinger’s eschatology could contribute to reducing the risk humanity now creates to its own survival. Studies of ‘Existential Risk’ warn that hazards arising from Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and Engineered Pathogens require mitigation to safeguard the future of the human race from a calamitous end. Preventative measures, however, entail sacrifice, and there is no shortage of resistance to regulation of behaviours and technological development. Ethics of empathy, utility, and duties reach breaking point when stretched to overcome the temporal and moral gap between present agency and future well-being. This article proposes that Ratzinger’s theology of history and commitment to eschatological realism offers an intertwined double benefit: his warning about the danger of conflating hope in God’s Kingdom with hope in a future world humanity could perfect for itself opens up the uniquely rich ground of a trans-historical hope in Jesus Christ, in which an impactful relationship of love for humanity’s future can put down roots today.

Between two worlds: the scientist’s dilemma in climate activism

Environmental activism presents an ideological dilemma for environmentally concerned scientists, who must balance traditional scientific values of objectivity and impartiality with the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis. This paper presents a critical discursive analysis of interviews with 27 scientists from 11 countries. It details the linguistic repertoires scientists draw on and the subject positions adopted to manage this dilemma. We observed that scientists employ two strategies to reconcile their professional identities with their activism: redefining the scientist identity, and reframing the work that scientists do. The subject positions adopted broadly serve to legitimize action, such as arguing that activism as a scientist is objective and rational, or that being a scientist conveys a moral duty to advocate for scientific information. By analyzing how scientists negotiate conflicting identities and values, this research offers valuable insights into fostering informed decision-making and action in addressing urgent environmental challenges.

Have we (really) done enough? Strengthening “outcome responsibility” in assessing moral duties toward refugees of protracted crises

ABSTRACT This article seeks to advance the discussions on our moral obligations towards refugees of protracted crises by proposing a nuanced application of outcome responsibility. Differentiating causal and outcome responsibility through intention, involvement, and side-taking principles has both symbolic and practical significance in assigning reparative and remedial duties. The framework utilizes domestic analogies to help explain the refined version of these two responsibility types. It examines the Syrian crisis within this paradigm to offer a clearer understanding of the actors that are ‘morally obligated and more likely’ to help. This argument addresses political communities instead of their states, emphasizing their pivotal role as bearers of the consequences of state decisions. Employing an outcome responsibility-based sense of ethical duty (ORSED) can foster more inclusive and welcoming environments, mitigating resentment regardless of border controls or burden allocation.

Values of Coexistence in Islamic Civilization: The Relationship with Others and the Challenge of Extremism

This study employs a descriptive-analytical method to emphasize the genuineness and importance of peaceful coexistence values among religions and cultures in Islamic civilization. It specifically focuses on the interaction with others, living together, acknowledging, respecting, and collaborating with them in different aspects of shared humanity. This research examines the language of extremism by studying and analyzing it, seeing it as the primary obstacle to the principles of civic coexistence and tolerance. The research findings indicate that the key factor that sets apart the principles of peaceful coexistence among individuals, irrespective of their religious and racial backgrounds, and that necessitates the acceptance of others in Islamic ideology, is the perception of such acceptance as legitimate obligations. An individual is recognized as a Muslim only when they openly acknowledge their adherence to the Islamic faith. Through the analysis of holy writings and the Prophet's biography, the researcher concludes that any radical and divisive rhetoric that promotes the rejection of peaceful coexistence cannot be regarded as Islamic speech, and does not accurately reflect Islam and Muslims. Instead, it is an extreme rhetoric that only represents its advocates, a rhetoric that Islam disavows, just as it disavows other forms of hate speech. The research urges the official religious authorities in Arab and Islamic countries to take on the legitimate, ethical, and scientific duty of freeing religious matters from ideological manipulation and restoring the correct approach to interpreting religious texts, while avoiding extremist ideological exploitation. This proposal advocates for the promotion of harmony, resolution of misunderstandings, fostering love and unity, prevention of excommunication, defamation, and conflict. It suggests the establishment of educational programs focused on promoting peace and coexistence values, as well as encouraging research in the field of tolerance education and acceptance of others. The objective is to cultivate an intellectual atmosphere in our universities that prioritizes wisdom, reason, logic, and evidence over emotional slogans. This will result in universities producing graduates who possess values of tolerance and coexistence, equipped to challenge and dismantle hateful and extremist ideologies by exposing their flaws and removing the religious facade from their harmful ideas.

To Speak Up or Not to Speak Up, Organisational and Individual Antecedents That Undergird This Behaviour in Resource Constrained Region.

To examine the organisational (i.e., perceived organisational support and psychologically safe environment) and individual (i.e., value, belief and norm) antecedents that strengthen healthcare workers' speaking-up behaviour in a developing economy. The study uses a cross-sectional design to gather the same data from healthcare workers within the Ashanti Region of Ghana. The data collection happened between 15 June and 30 August 2023. A sample of 380 healthcare workers was selected from 20 facilities in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. A configurational approach, a fussy-set qualitative comparative analysis, was used to identify the configurations that caused high and low speaking-up behaviour among the study sample. The study results reveal that whereas four configurations generate high speaking-up behaviour, three configurations, by contrast, produce low speaking-up behaviour among healthcare workers. Results suggest that in so far as organisational support systems which take the form of a psychologically safe environment and perceived organisational support are vital in relaxing the hierarchical boundaries in a healthcare setting to improve healthcare workers' speaking-up behaviour, the individual value-based factors that take the form of values, beliefs and norms are indispensable as it provides the healthcare workers with the necessary inner drive to regard speaking-up behaviour on patient safety and care as a moral duty. Healthcare workers' speaking-up behaviour is better achieved when organisational support systems complement the individual norms, values and beliefs of the individual. Adhered to Strengthening Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology guidelines. No patient or public contribution.

Justifying access to kidney care in low resource and humanitarian settings.

Access to and quality of kidney care is not equitable between or within countries. A natural question is whether global kidney care inequities are always unjustifiable and unfair, or are sometimes due to unavoidable competing or conflicting ethical duties or responsibilities. Health is a fundamental right for all people. People with kidney conditions should have the same claim on this human right as others. Countries have an obligation to progressively fulfil this right and a duty to do so equitably, but global progress has been slow. Countries with limited resources or faced with humanitarian emergencies must set priorities to allocate resources fairly. This process involves trade-offs and often people requiring kidney replacement therapy are left out because of costs, logistics and lack of data. Major burdens are placed on clinicians who grapple between their duty to their patient and professional codes and their responsibility to a 'greater good'. These dilemmas apply also to industry, governments and the international community who must recognize their share in these duties. Inequities in kidney health and care must be acknowledged and sustainable and collaborative solutions urgently found such that right to kidney care is progressively upheld for everyone everywhere.

Bale, Heywood, and the Politics of Necessity

Abstract: This essay offers a reading of two well-known early sixteenth-century plays, John Bale’s Kynge Johan and John Heywood’s Play of the Wether , in terms of their Henrician (and possibly early Elizabethan) political resonances. Unlike most such critical accounts of these plays, which often consider them in terms of their relevance to specific episodes of ecclesiastical or courtly controversy, this study suggests that Bale and Heywood represent a particular political practice in order to stage a more broadly theoretical political intervention. I argue that the plays’ interest in acts of petitioning—the licit process through which English subjects may seek redress of grievances from the courts, Parliament, or the Crown—serves to legitimate the condition of need as a basis for broad political participation. In Kynge Johan and The Wether , material need and its more abstract cousin “necessity,” expressed through acts of petitioning, are capable of performing remarkable reorientations of political and ethical duty, as well as of power more generally. Not all of these reorientations, as Kynge Johan in particular demonstrates, are positive, and both plays are conscious of and hesitant about the potentially destabilizing force of need. Yet ultimately, both plays move toward a more collective and less proto-absolutist political model in which need can, through acts of petitioning, be articulated and managed.

Self-Leadership and Ethical Duty - The Leader’s Role

Self-Leadership and Ethical Duty - The Leader’s Role

칼 사우어(Carl O. Sauer)의 문화·역사지리학에 투영된 환경관

Despite Sauer set out his coursework in 1909 in the midst of Davisian physiography and environmentalism, Salisbury at Chicago assisted him to avoid the causative man-nature relation by laying emphasis on field observations. Having witnessed the widespread soil exhaustion in Illinois and Missouri, Sauer now at Ann Arbor had to redress economic and ecological problems from the deforestration of white pines on the Great Lakes. Advising on the issues of land utilization and soil erosion for the New Deal Government, Sauer in Berlekey shaped up the landscape morphology in which culture was conceived as an agent, natural landscape a medium and cultural landscape an outcome. The intellectual encounter with Boasian anthropology resulted in cultural and historical geography or culture history of seeking out the origin, diffusion and transformation of culture and cultural landscape, bearing the brunt of environmentalism. To be noted is that Sauer resurrected Marsh’s Man and Nature by organizing the 1955 international symposium on ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’. Sauer’s environmental ethics urges us to do our moral and ecological duties for the coming generation.

Family care of older people: a matter of moral duty

Family care of older people: a matter of moral duty