Moral Entitlement Research Articles

Morality Appraisals in Consumer Responsibilization

Abstract In recent decades, U.S. gun rights lobbying groups, politicians, courts, and market actors have sought to responsibilize U.S. consumers to use firearms to address the societal problem of crime. These efforts center an interpretation of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment as an entitlement for individuals to practice armed self-defense. Using interview and online discussion data, this research investigates consumers’ responses to responsibilization for this morally fraught set of behaviors, and the role of consumers’ various understandings of the right to bear arms in these responses. Findings show that consumers consider multiple, specific armed protection scenarios and accept responsibilization in only a portion of these scenarios while rejecting it for the remainder. Acceptance is determined by their appraisals of the morality of consumer responsibilization subprocesses. Consumers’ understanding of the constitutional right serves as a heuristic in these appraisals, with some understandings leading consumers to accept responsibilization across a much larger proportion of scenarios than others. Contributions include illustrating response to consumer responsibilization as a proportionality; illuminating consumers’ active role in appraising responsibilizing efforts; and demonstrating how some consumers come to understand a responsibilized behavior as a moral entitlement.

Unpacking the relationship between customer citizenship behavior and dysfunctional customer behavior: the role of customer moral credits and entitlement

PurposeWhile the positive effects of customer citizenship behavior are well established, research on its potential negative consequences is scarce. This study aims to examine the indirect relationship between customer citizenship and dysfunctional customers via customer moral credits and entitlement, as well as the moderating influence of customer citizenship fatigue.Design/methodology/approachStudy 1 employed a cross-sectional design with a self-administered survey. The data were collected from 314 customers using an online research panel. In Study 2, the authors manipulated customer citizenship behavior using 203 participants to establish causality and rule out alternative explanations of the findings of Study 1. In Study 3, the authors replicated Study 2 and enhanced internal validity by using a more controlled experimental design using 128 participants.FindingsThis study shows that when customer citizenship fatigue is high, customer citizenship behavior elicits customer moral credit, which leads to customer entitlement and, in turn, promotes dysfunctional customer behavior. Conversely, when customer citizenship fatigue is low, customer citizenship behavior does not generate moral credit or entitlement, preventing dysfunctional customer behavior.Practical implicationsThe study shows that promoting customer citizenship behavior does not always lead to positive outcomes. Therefore, when promoting customer citizenship behavior, managers should consider the psychological licensing process and ways to mitigate the influence of moral credits.Originality/valueThis study challenges common wisdom and investigates the dark side of customer citizenship behavior. Specifically, it demonstrates that customer citizenship behavior could backfire (e.g. dysfunctional customer behavior). It also shows that only customers who experience a high level of fatigue from their citizenship behaviors are psychologically licensed to gain moral credit, leading to dysfunctional customer behavior.

‘I Gave Grain to All of Dendera in its Entirety’: mentions of large-scale food donations in the VIth Upper Egyptian nome in the First Intermediate Period

The paper scrutinizes written sources on large-scale food donations in the Denderite nome during the First Intermediate Period, paying special attention to their contexts – the official statuses of the owners of these inscriptions, the peculiarities of their monuments, etc. Such data cast a new light on incentives for boasting about lavish food donations in Denderite autobiographies. While the owners of the inscriptions in question have relatively humble official positions, their funerary monuments appear to be very expensive by the Dendera cemetery standards of the time. The author argues that these Denderites emphasized their generous food donations primarily to justify their moral entitlement to their monuments, which would otherwise have appeared far too sumptuous for the persons not belonging to the administrative elite.

The Legitimation of Rewards to Education

Abstract Everywhere, education is well rewarded, roughly 5% to 15% for each additional year of university, hence a major source of income inequality. Why do ordinary people see income rewards to education as legitimate? Two key theories: (1) their moral views might align with classical equity arguments asserting a moral entitlement to rewards in proportion to contributions. (2) Alternatively, they might see rewards to education as fair returns on investment, a morally infused folk version of human capital. These share almost all their predictions, but they differ if an employer fully finances the education. Analysis of a large representative Australian sample reveals that the public’s ideal returns to education match equity justifications (~80%), not economists’ fair return on investments (~10%).

From moral disaster to moral entitlement – The impact of success in dealing with a perpetrator past on perceived ingroup morality and claims for historical closure

Germany’s past is marked not only by the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also by a history of collective attempts to come to terms with these crimes. The present paper focuses on the previously rarely explored consequences of perceived success in dealing with a perpetrator past for the moral ingroup-image and the demand for an end to the discussion of this chapter of history (i.e., demand for historical closure). In one correlational study (N = 982) and three experimental studies (N = 904), we found robust evidence for a positive association between perceived success in dealing with the Nazi past and perceived ingroup morality. The results on the assumed influence of success on claims for historical closure, mediated by morality, were only partly supportive and inconsistent, particularly when controlling for political orientation and collective narcissism. However, final single-paper meta-analyses revealed a significant association between perceived ingroup morality and demand for historical closure (K = 5), as well as a small but significant effect of success (vs. failure) on demand for historical closure (K = 4), even when accounting for political orientation. Implications for understanding ethical self-views in historical perpetrator groups and recurring debates about a ‘Schlussstrich’ on the German Nazi past are discussed.

But I’ve Got My Own Life to Live

The dominant response to Peter Singer’s defense of an extremely demanding duty of aid argues that an affluent person’s duty of aid is limited by her moral entitlement to live her own life. This paper argues that this entitlement provides a basis not for limiting an affluent person’s duty of aid but rather for the claim that she too is wronged by a world marked by widespread desperate need; and the wrong she suffers is a distinctive one: the activation of a duty of aid so demanding that it dominates her life, crowding out her own valuable projects and involvements.

From Moral Disaster to Moral Entitlement – The Impact of Success in Dealing with a Perpetrator Past on Perceived Ingroup Morality and Claims for Historical Closure

From Moral Disaster to Moral Entitlement – The Impact of Success in Dealing with a Perpetrator Past on Perceived Ingroup Morality and Claims for Historical Closure

Mass Incarceration, Penal Moderation, and Black Prisoners Serving Very Long Sentences

The prevalent criminal justice practices in the U.S. have produced levels and patterns of incarceration that fewer and fewer politicians, scholars, and citizens care to support. There seems to be widespread consensus that the system is indicted as unjust by its outcomes no matter how these outcomes came about. But if that is so, how can it be turned back? Who should be eligible for release, and on what grounds? This article addresses the position of black prisoners serving very long sentences. Many of these prisoners are at risk of missing out under current legislative and administrative proposals designed to reduce overall levels of imprisonment. Partly this is due to the fact that the wrong of mass incarceration is often understood as a wrong suffered at the collective level by what has come to be referred to as “overpunished communities.” It is unclear how the existence of that collective wrong affects the permissibility of continued punishment at the individual level. This article develops an argument that, at the individual level, being a black prisoner serving a very long sentence gives rise to a moral entitlement for a review of the need and justification for continued incarceration. The article outlines the basic shape of a clemency scheme devised especially for these prisoners as a moral imperative for a reform process intended to remedy penal injustice.

From revolutionary Paris to Nootka Sound to Saint-Domingue: The international politics and prejudice behind Wollstonecraft’s theory of the rights of humanity, 1789–91

Against the background of the international political crises generated by the early phase of the French Revolution at Nootka Sound in 1790 and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a capacious political theory of the “rights of humanity.” She pushed beyond narrow post-revolutionary European constructions of “the rights of man” which ignored or excluded “the poor,” “Indians,” “African slaves,” and “women.” While closely following the international politics of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft developed the core arguments of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her key philosophical innovation was to publicly universalize the conceptual scope of rights, such that rights were no longer—implicitly or explicitly—solely the legal entitlement of propertied white European men, but rather the moral and political entitlement of the whole of humanity across nations. Yet she rhetorically contradicted and philosophically limited the cross-cultural universalism of her theory of equal rights by punctuating her arguments with Western Protestant and Orientalist stereotypes of Eastern despotism. Consequently, international politics and international prejudice shaped Wollstonecraft’s theory of equal rights and her application of it to peoples and cultures beyond those of Western Protestant Europe.

SARS-CoV-2 safer infection sites: moral entitlement, pragmatic harm reduction strategy or ethical outrage?

The pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 has led to unprecedented changes to society, causing unique problems that call for extraordinary solutions. We consider one such extraordinary proposal: ‘safer infection sites’ that would...

From helping hands to harmful acts: When and how employee volunteering promotes workplace deviance.

This study examines how the laudable behavior of employee volunteering can lead to deviant workplace behavior. We draw on the moral licensing and organizational justice literatures to propose that the relationship between employee volunteering and workplace deviance is serially mediated by moral license (moral credits and moral credentials) and psychological entitlement. Results from 2 multiwave survey studies of full-time employees from a variety of organizations and industries confirm that moral credits and psychological entitlement serially mediate this relationship, although the proposed mediating role of moral credentials was not supported. Organizational justice moderates the impact of psychological entitlement on workplace deviance; the indirect relationship between employee volunteering and workplace deviance weakens when perceptions of organizational justice are high. This study demonstrates a potential dark side to employee volunteering and also contributes to the moral licensing and behavioral ethics literatures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Human and nonhuman rights

This paper tries to rethink the notion of human rights and to evaluate whether we should redefine them in light of the main challenges presented by advances in technoscience (genetic engineering, robotics, nanotechnology etc.). It claims that there are basic, intrinsic rights to personhood, which, on the one hand, allow us to justify a moral claim to a posthuman existence (should it become possible) and to attribute rights to artificial agents, while, on the other hand, granting the moral entitlement to remain human. This shows that the notion of human rights is far from becoming obsolete, as claimed by some scholars. The paper is divided into five parts. It (1) presents reasons for rethinking the notion of “a right” in order to apply it to beings other than humans (e.g., nonhuman animals, robots etc.); (2) discusses the metaethical problem concerning the meaning of “a right”; (3) presents a basic system of rights that are intrinsic to personhood and that can be attributed to different kinds of agents (human or not); (4) analyzes whether there is a right to a posthuman existence or a right to remain human; and finally, (5) presents some reasons to justify such a system of rights.

Can There Be a Right of Return?

Abstract During long-term refugee displacements, it is common for the refugees’ country of origin to be called on to recognize a right of return. A long-standing tradition of philosophical theorizing is sceptical of such a right. Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan are contemporary proponents of this view. They argue that, in many cases, it is not feasible for entire refugee populations to return home, and so the notion of a right of return is no right at all. We can call Adelman and Barkan’s view the feasibility objection. Many defenders of rights will deny that empirical facts such as the kind to which Adelman and Barkan appeal are relevant to determining whether a moral entitlement amounts to a right. In contrast, I offer a response to the feasibility objection that does admit the relevance of facts. In my view, considerations of feasibility do matter when determining what rights human beings possess. Nevertheless, the feasibility objection is undone by its failure to acknowledge a distinction between two different kinds of feasibility constraints. ‘Hard’ constraints include logical, nomological and biological considerations. ‘Soft’ constraints include political, cultural and institutional factors. A necessary condition of a moral entitlement achieving the status of a right, I argue, is that it be feasible in the hard sense. Crucially, however, a right need not always be feasible in the soft sense. Refugees can have rights that it is not currently possible to implement politically.

The Conflation of Morality and “the Fair and Just Solution” in the Determination of Restitution Claims Involving Nazi-Looted Art: An Unsatisfactory Premise in Need of Change

Abstract:In recent literature on the restitution of Nazi-looted art, reference can be found to notions of morality as impetus for the return of cultural property to claimants who, although they may be able to evidence their ownership to an object, are stymied by onerous legal frameworks. With such claims, it is often the recognition of a moral entitlement or obligation that leads to a resolution regarding restitution. This conflation of morality with justice seems to have taken hold, in particular, with the articulation of the Washington Principles in 1998, which call on nation-states to create alternative dispute resolution processes for the fair and just resolution of Nazi-looted art claims. In determining what is fair and just in the resolution of these looted art claims, regard is often made to the strength of a party’s moral claim to the property. The exercise of notions of morality is often seen as resulting in a fair and just outcome, linking morality with the fair and just solution of such cultural property claims. But, it is justice on what ground? Is morality the proper yardstick by which to determine whether outcomes of restitution claims are just and fair? This article explores the use of morality and offers an argument that it should not be the basis on which entitlement should be determined, primarily due to its amorphous nature and undefined relationship to justice. This is further supported by a claimant narrative suggesting that concepts of reconciliation and procedural fairness are of concern to claimants rather than recognition of moral entitlement. Having regard to these concerns, the article recognizes a need for a new conceptual framework from which to assess the delivery of the just and fair solution and that reflects these concerns.

Inclusivity of past collective trauma and its implications for current intractable conflict: The mediating role of moral lessons.

How are perceptions of past collective trauma related to moral lessons derived, and how are those in turn associated with conflict-related policy preferences of those presently involved in intractable conflict? We hypothesized that inclusive conceptions of past trauma will be positively associated with moral obligations and negatively with moral entitlement, and that moral obligations will be positively associated with humanitarian policies and negatively with militaristic policies, while moral entitlement will be positively associated with militaristic policies and negatively with humanitarian policies. In a cross-sectional study with a representative sample of Jewish Israelis (N=504), moral obligations mediated the association between higher inclusivity of past collective trauma and humanitarian policy support, while moral entitlement mediated between lower inclusivity and increased militant policy support. Inclusive perceptions of past trauma and its moral lessons may play a critical role in advancing conflict resolution in intractable conflicts settings unrelated to the initial trauma.

Anti‐reductionism and Expected Trust

AbstractAccording to anti‐reductionism, audiences have a default (but defeasible) epistemic entitlement to accept observed testimony. This paper explores the prospects of arguing from this premise to a conclusion in ethics, to the effect that speakers enjoy a default (but defeasible) moral entitlement to expect to be trusted when they testify. After proposing what I regard as the best attempt to link the two, I conclude that any argument from the one to the other will depend on a strong epistemological assumption that has not yet been discussed in this connection.

‘The only thing I “earned” in the damned war was PTSD.’ Reconsidering veteran sociality and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the monies that circulate in the system of veteran protection in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and shows that they are enacted in economically and morally conflicting ways. While the federal authorities treat the monies inconsistently, sometimes portraying them as compensation for service in the war, and other times branding them as dubious entitlements overused in the post-war years, ordinary war veterans, such as those living with posttraumatic stress disorder in the city of Tuzla where the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork, understand veterans’ monies as a moral (and inviolable) entitlement rooted in their wartime experience. Besides these actors, there are also international creditors involved that denounce these monies as an economically harmful and corrupting gift. Current studies see veteran sociality and politics in post-Yugoslav conditions as a result of local post-war and post-socialist struggles for symbolic and material gains. However, this case foregrounds how veteran sociality and politics are also shaped by the interventions of international actors.

Invoking the Complainer’s Past Transgressions: A Practice for Undermining Complaints in Therapeutic Community Meetings

ABSTRACTThis article examines how a person who is the target of a complaint can undermine the moral entitlement of the complainer to issue that complaint. They do so by invoking the complainer’s own past transgressions. By pointing out an incongruence between the complainer’s current moral stance, as reflected in the complaint, and their status, as evidenced in their past conduct, speakers orient to an expectation of moral status/stance congruence as a basis for the validity of a complaint. My data consist of complaints and rebuttals collected from recorded group meetings within therapeutic communities for the treatment of people recovering from drug misuse. Data are in Italian with English translation.

Balancing the Scales: Negotiating Father's Parental Leave Use.

Studying couples who shared parental leave presents the opportunity to explore decision-making processes that may challenge conventional care arrangement typical of early parenthood. Interviews with 33 Canadian heterosexual couples indicate gendered sticking points in the division of official leave time. Whether fathers took leave because of their personal desires or material circumstances, this study finds that men and women did not enter negotiations on a level playing field. Strong cultural support for mothers'-but not fathers'-time with baby tipped the scales toward maternal care giving, even when couples wanted to share parental leave. Nevertheless, financial considerations such as a man's topped-up pay or woman's career could lessen the weight of mothers' moral entitlement to the leave time by presenting couples with an alternative logic on which to base their decision making.

Are All Types of Discrimination Created Equal?

Are all types of discrimination created equal? This project takes an experimental approach to disentangle the different mechanisms generating discrimination. We let a large random sample of the Israeli Jewish population play four games with fictitious partners who belong to one of the following social groups: Women, Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews. A ‘dictator game’ was used to investigate negative emotions of dislike; a ‘trust game’ was used to explore mistrust; a ‘competence game’ was used to explore beliefs about competence and intelligence; and a ‘donation game’ was used to investigate beliefs about moral entitlement. Above and beyond of all of the other social groups, Arabs were found to be the most discriminated against group, across all of the domains measured in the different games. Ultra-Orthodox Jews were discriminated against in the dictator game, but were favored in the trust game, suggesting that they are disliked but viewed as trustworthy. Women were generally favored, compared to men, across all games. Mizrahi Jews were not discriminated against in the dictator game, but were given less money by Jewish men in the trust game. This suggests that Mizrahi Jews are not disliked, but are rather viewed as not trustworthy by Jewish men. Our findings suggest that although in many countries, anti-discrimination laws apply a unified approach to eliminate all forms of ethnic, gender, and religious-based discrimination, in reality, because each form of discrimination is generated by different mechanisms, no one policy fits all. Thus, our project makes two main contributions to the empirical study of anti-discrimination law: First, we offer an innovative methodology to disentangle the different mechanisms generating discrimination that could enable policymakers to design more accurate anti-discrimination laws. Second, we document differences in the types of discrimination targeted at different social groups in Israel – a poster child of heterogeneous and segmented societies.