Moral Experience Research Articles

Fairness, Benefits, and Voluntary Acceptance

Abstract The principle of fairness suggests that it is wrong for free riders to enjoy cooperative benefits without also helping to produce them. Considerations of fairness are a familiar part of moral experience, yet there is a great deal of controversy as to the conditions of their application. The primary debate concerns whether cooperative benefits need to be voluntarily accepted. Many argue that acceptance is unnecessary because such theories are too permissive and acceptance appears to be absent in a variety of cases where considerations of fairness nevertheless seem applicable. In this paper, I defend the claim that acceptance is necessary by suggesting that these worries can be disarmed, and that theories that deny the necessity of acceptance face deep challenges in articulating an understanding of cooperative benefits that does not also appeal to a person’s acceptance of them.

Moral Distress Under Structural Violence: Clinician Experience in Brazil Caring for Low-Income Families of Children with Severe Disabilities.

Rigorous attention has been paid to moral distress among healthcare professionals, largely in high-income settings. More obscure is the presence and impact of moral distress in contexts of chronic poverty and structural violence. Intercultural ethics research and dialogue can help reveal how the long-term presence of morally distressing conditions might influence the moral experience and agency of healthcare providers. This article discusses mixed-methods research at one nongovernmental social support agency and clinic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Chronic levels of moral distress and perceptions of moral harm among clinicians in this setting were both violent, following Nancy Scheper-Hughes' use of that term, and a source of exceptional and innovative care. Rather than glossing over the moral variables of work in such desperate extremes, ethnography in these settings reveals novel skills and strategies for managing moral distress.

On emotions as a condition for morality

The idea that we must free ourselves from the mastery of our emotions in order to act morally has been challenged over the past decades as Kant scholars have turned to the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Judgment to regain the centrality of emotions in this tradition. I want to expand the claim about the positive role of emotions in Kant’s moral theory by arguing that certain emotional states should be understood as having an even more fundamental role, namely, as an empirical condition for morality. Therefore, I will show that the structure Kant provides to explain the human mind conceives of our moral experience as relying on what he calls lower faculty of feeling. After sketching Kant’s approach to cognition, I will show how some feelings are indissociable from the human moral experience – and notably, from the ability to act in accordance with our predispositions. I will discuss textual evidence for this view and explain that, although Kant himself failed to devise an explicit taxonomy of emotions, there is a sense in which pathological feelings are to be regarded as a condition for morality.

Moral Responsibility, Moral Sanctions, and the Value and Normative Content of Morality

The paper deals with the problem of the role of moral of sanctions — an expression of retrospective moral responsibility — in the moral experience. Moral sanctions are negative consequences of a moral transgression or deviation that spring from their condemnation. This kind of sanctions includes public censure and self-censure. The author tries to establish whether the all content of morality is supported by moral sanctions. The first object of the analysis are moral norms (rules, requirements) creating obligations. There is an interesting precedent of splitting apart obligations and sanctions in H. Hart’s philosophy. Though Hart overlooks “the conceptual intuition that something can be genuinely obligatory only if those who are obligated can justifiably be held responsible or accountable for compliance” (S. Darwall). This intuition is deeply rooted in the moral consciousness and ethical thought (the most vivid examples — S. Pufendorf and J.S. Mill). But moral norms (rules, requirements) creating obligations are not the only element of the content of morality. Moral values have a capacity to influence the behavior of an agent not through norms (rules, requirements) but directly. R. Nozick supposed that there is a special type of sanction in this sphere (the so called “value sanction”). The author shows that it is not a sanction proper. The main conclusion of the paper is as follows: the moral space without sanctions and retrospective responsibility is the space there moral values influence the behavior of an agent not only directly but without overlapping with moral norms (rules, requirements). Supererogation fits the bill perfectly.

FEATURES OF THE PORTRAIT GENRE IN ART

This article analyzes the portrait genre in art and its nature of conveying the inner world of a person, his personal abilities through artistic means. The artist’s worldview was also reflected, and his ability to convey to the viewer his moral experience, aspirations and hopes through his works was analyzed. A portrait is not just an image of a person’s external appearance, but a complex image of a person’s psychology and inner world. Taking a portrait image, entering the thoughts of the person depicted, we understand not only the person himself, but also the world around him through the prism of his feelings and thoughts.

Forgotten wars: Russian nurses reflect on their choices in the armed conflicts of Afghanistan and Chechnya

This article examines Russian nurses’ reflections about their individual moral experience of the armed conflicts in Afghanistan (1979–1989) and in Chechnya (1994–1996; 1999–2009). The study relies on published documents and interviews featured in various online sources. The study aims to shed light on the main value orientations that influence present-day evaluations of these events and to show how the values systems of those participating in war had become transformed under the influence of wartime experiences. The concept of charity plays a crucial role in the nurses’ reflection as it enables them to emphasise their special mission in war: not only to provide people with health care but also with moral support. This concept also underpins the practises of justification of moral choice. The article demonstrates that the discrepancy between established commemorative practises and the personal inability to make sense of death in war makes any justification of casualties impossible on the level of individual reflection relative to the events of the WWII. The circumstances of war’s ‘trauma epidemics’ remain significant within these women’s personal moral experience. In addition to the paralysis or passivity in the face of death that they experienced, in their civilian lives, they become acutely aware of the impossibility of finding any meaning in the death toll that is war’s inevitable result. The nurses’ memoirs lay a special emphasis on their attitudes toward the enemy. On one hand, they remember the feelings they experienced toward the enemies in Chechnya or Afghanistan; on the other hand, from a more recent perspective, it becomes clear that these armed conflicts require new interpretations and evaluations.

Predicting Moral Elevation Conveyed in Danmaku Comments Using EEGs.

Moral elevation, the emotion that arises when individuals observe others' moral behaviors, plays an important role in determining moral behaviors in real life. While recent research has demonstrated the potential to decode basic emotions with brain signals, there has been limited exploration of affective computing for moral elevation, an emotion related to social cognition. To address this gap, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) signals from 23 participants while they viewed videos that were expected to elicit moral elevation. More than 30,000 danmaku comments were extracted as a crowdsourcing tagging method to label moral elevation continuously at a 1-s temporal resolution. Then, by employing power spectra features and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regularized regression analyses, we achieved a promising prediction performance for moral elevation (prediction r=0.44±0.11). Our findings indicate that it is possible to decode moral elevation using EEG signals. Moreover, the small-sample neural data can predict the continuous moral elevation experience conveyed in danmaku comments from a large population.

The relationship between moral courage and providing safe care in nurses: A cross-sectional study.

Moral courage is one of the moral virtues, which can have a great impact on the provision of safe care for patients. Providing safe care is one of the most significant and fundamental principles of healthcare. This study aimed to determine the relationship between moral courage and safe care among nurses and explain the factors predicting safe care. This is a cross-sectional study conducted on 172 nurses who worked in selected hospitals affiliated with the Iran University of Medical Sciences in 2019. For this purpose, self-report questionnaires on moral courage and safe nursing care were used. The collected data were analyzed in the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23.0 using descriptive (mean, standard deviation, percentage, and frequency) and inferential (Pearson's correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression) statistics. P values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Mean scores of nurses' moral courage and safe care were desirable (407.57 ± 53.97) and satisfactory (311.31 ± 39.48), respectively. There was a significant correlation between the scores of nursing safe care and moral courage (r = 0.69, P < 0.001). Moral courage, gender, and work experience explained 54% of the variance of nursing safe care. The results showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between safety care and moral courage. It seems that increasing nurses' awareness of ethical principles leads to their courageous ethical behaviors, and safety and high-quality care should be one of the goals of all healthcare professionals. Also, the results of this study support the need to improve the knowledge and awareness of nurses and nurse managers regarding the importance of moral courage in providing safe nursing care and improving patient safety.

Euthanasia in Video Games – Exemplifying the Importance of Moral Experience in Digital Gameworlds

The paper classifies euthanasia and discusses its typological presence in storytelling video games. It aims to illustrate the importance of experiencing simulated moral challenges in the context of gameworlds as a significantly influential, exponentially growing form of interactive media. In contrast to older works of art and media, such as film and literature, the difference should be emphasized in light of the player’s ability to make choices in video games. Although the influence of gameworld content depends on the player, the experiences and knowledge gained from playing storytelling video games may influence the player’s problem-solving orientation in the landscape of difficult moral dilemmas they may encounter throughout their lives.

How Sinful Is Sin? How Vicious Is Vice?

We defend the guise of the good thesis in a tradition going back to Socrates and Plato, according to which persons act on the basis of what appears to them as good or the least bad or evil act available to them. This seems contrary to moral experience, but we defend the thesis against plausible counter-examples in life as well as fiction. We contend that the thesis makes wrong-doing and vice intelligible, but still wrong, dysfunctional and horrific.

Core Curriculum Planning in Madrasa to Increase the Quality of Education at MTsN 2 Jombang Indonesia

Madrasa are Islamic educational institutions oriented towards Islamic learning and general science in an integrated manner. The Madrasa curriculum is designed so that students can study Islamic religious knowledge in depth and general knowledge like schools in general. In boarding school-based madrasas, the madrasa curriculum is integrated with the boarding school curriculum with a more comprehensive deepening of Islamic religious knowledge. The boarding school curriculum that has been integrated provides religious education content, moral education experiences, school, and general education, as well as skills that need to be managed with integrative management. This study aimed to describe the planning of the boarding school-based madrasa core curriculum and identify the forms of boarding school-based madrasa core curriculum assessment. This type of qualitative research with a multi-site approach, namely, research focused on explaining or disclosing differences from different sites and occurs in different research arenas. This descriptive research aims to obtain an in-depth description of core curriculum management in Islamic boarding schools, namely MTsN 2. Data collection techniques used include (1) in-depth interviews, (2) participant observation (participant observation), and (3) study documents (study documents). Data analysis techniques in multi-site studies were carried out in two stages, namely: (1) analysis of individual site data (individual cases); and (2) cross-site data analysis (cross-cases analysis). The study’s findings explain that the core curriculum for Islamic boarding schools is formulated and developed by focusing on students’ potential, development, needs, interests, and environment.

Parental Attachment and Adolescent Moral Reaction Modes: The Serial Mediating Model of the Teacher-Student Relationship and Deviant Peer Affiliation.

Moral decision outcomes and emotional experiences after moral decisions are combined to create four moral reaction modes: happy victimizer (HV), unhappy victimizer (UHV), happy moralist (HM), and unhappy moralist (UHM). This study aimed to explore the relationships between parental attachment (PA) and adolescent moral reaction modes, and further examine the mechanism of the serial mediating effects of the teacher-student relationship (TS) and deviant peer affiliation (DP). A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2022 among 3053 students (including 1496 females) from four middle schools, four high schools, and three colleges in China using a voluntary and anonymous questionnaire. Our study reveals that PA was positively associated with HM modes and negatively associated with UHM, UHV, and HV modes. Both TS and DP serially or partly mediated the relationship between PA and adolescents' four moral reaction modes. This study uncovered significant social relationship pathways for moral reaction modes. TS and DP are two important mediators between PA and moral reaction modes. Secure parental attachment can develop positive teacher-student and peer relationships. This can then encourage adolescents to behave in more positive HM modes and fewer UHM/HV/UHV modes.

Call for Papers: Media and Moral Understanding

Call for Papers: Media and Moral Understanding

Perspectives: Advertising and climate change – Part of the problem or part of the solution?

The advertising industry has a direct carbon footprint but also contributes to climate change by stimulating unsustainable economic growth, promoting climate-harmful consumerism, and greenwashing polluting products and companies. However, advertising can also play a pivotal role in fighting climate change. The advertising industry can reduce its carbon footprint, fight greenwashing, and cut ties with polluting clients and industries. Green advertising can shift consumers away from climate-harmful consumption patterns toward a low-carbon culture by providing accurate information and leveraging psychological processes such as moral satisfaction, nature experiences, and fear responses, among others. For advertising research to play a significant role in this paradigm shift, it should focus more specifically on climate-relevant behaviours instead of on general green consumer behaviour, and adopt a more holistic approach to analyze the role of advertising not only in influencing individual consumers’ decisions but also in sustaining a cultural narrative that promotes climate protection.

THE INFLUENCE OF JUDO ON THE MORAL AND VOLUNTARY EDUCATION OF SENIOR SCHOOL STUDENTS

In the process of educating modern schoolchildren, martial arts classes become important, namely judo classes, which can be used to develop not only physical qualities and abilities, but also moral and volitional characteristics, the development of which significantly affects the formation of a personality. The article considers the results of experimental work on the implementation of the technology of moral and volitional education of high school students who practice judo. The technology of moral and volitional upbringing of children by means of judo included three stages: value-oriented; development and harmonization; improvement and generalization of moral and volitional qualities. At all stages, the emphasis of the predominant action shifted to the structural components of the moral and volitional sphere: cognitive, emotional, volitional, motivational, and behavioral. The purpose and objectives of the above-mentioned stages determined the specifics of sports activities, the role and position of the coach-tutor, forms, and methods of education, as well as features of pedagogical interaction with parents and school, aimed at improving the moral and volitional education of young judokas. Thus, the need for pedagogical justification of teaching judo to students determines the relevance of our study, which identified pedagogical conditions, as well as identified the core elements of the technology of moral and volitional education of students by judo, which became the novelty of the research. The following research methods were used to solve the problems: analysis and synthesis of scientific and methodological sources on the peculiarities of the development of moral and volitional qualities; pedagogical observation.&#x0D; It is established that the most important sources of moral and volitional formation of student youth at the initial stage of classes are the study of history, jute etiquette. Collective development of etiquette leads to group self-regulation. Students willingly participate in the process of self-control and control of group behavior.&#x0D; For an objective assessment of the moral and volitional upbringing of students also developed criteria and indicators determined by the purpose of the formation of the moral and volitional sphere of the student's personality. Improvement of moral and volitional qualities and experience of moral and volitional behavior was carried out.

The Moral Injury ExperienceWheel: An Instrument forIdentifying Moral Emotions and Conceptualizing the Mechanisms of Moral Injury.

This paper introduces an infographic tool called The Moral Injury ExperienceWheel, designed to help users accurately label moral emotions and conceptualize the mechanisms of moral injury (MI). Feeling wheels have been used by therapists and clinical chaplains to increase emotional literacy since the 1980s. The literature on the skill of emotion differentiation shows a causal relationship between identifying emotions with specificity and emotional and behavioral regulation. Emerging research in moral psychology indicates that differentiating moral emotions with precision is related to similar regulatory effects. Based on this evidence, it is proposed that increasing moral emotional awareness through use of an instrumentthat visuallydepicts moral emotions and their causal links to MI will enhance appraisal and flexible thinking skills recognized to reduce the persistent dissonance and maladaptive coping related to MI. Design of the wheel is empirically grounded in MI definitional and scale studies. Iterative evaluative feedback fromVeterans with features of MI offers initial qualitative evidence of validity. Two casestudies will show utility of the wheel in clinical settings and present preliminary evidence of efficacy.

Design features of books with augmented reality for preschool children.

Preschool age is rightfully considered one of the most important periods in a child's life, since at this stage the formation of the psycho-emotional structure of the personality, the recognition of oneself, one's desires, the disclosure of the concept of the inner world take place. Acquaintance with a book for a child is nothing more than an opportunity to develop in a multi-faceted manner, to learn the world through immersion in a visual-graphic environment, culture. Independent study of books and electronic resources forms the skill of searching for information without the help of the environment, teaches to concentrate on one's desires, but it also has a negative aspect - the lack of primary socialization that occurs in the process of interaction between the child and the parent. Reading with the help of an adult can help a preschooler understand a lot more, both in terms of acquiring new knowledge and gaining emotional experience. The visual-graphic language, through which the “communication” of the child and the book takes place, develops the aesthetic, artistic and moral experience that a person relies on in their adulthood. In the era of digitalization, major changes are taking place in the book market, which are associated not only with new formats, but also with new needs and types of thinking of preschoolers. Introducing a child to the virtual space from an early age leads to the consumption of a large amount of information that does not have time to be remembered due to the limitations of a child's memory and cognition. The consequence of which is a superficial acquaintance with the material, the lack of knowledge as such. Reading for preschoolers seems to be a too long and complicated process, the cognitive function of the book is losing its relevance due to the lack of interest in the process. Augmented reality technologies provide the child with the opportunity to interact with the book in 4 planes at once, which greatly expands the possibilities of paper publications. A gadget (a mobile phone or a tablet) is connected to the process of "communication" between a preschooler and a book. The interactive component consists in animating illustrations that can be presented in the form of a game that has a direct connection with the text. Emphasizing clip thinking of preschoolers, the text in augmented reality books is concise, written in simple language, with an emphasis on the most important details, which greatly simplifies understanding and memorization. AR or "Augmented Reality" has great potential for children from a very young age.

Interactive universalism, the concrete other and discourse ethics: A sociological dialogue with Seyla Benhabib’s theories of morality

Noting that Benhabib’s ethical theory has seldom been engaged with by sociologists of morality, this article introduces and interrogates Benhabib’s ethical theory from a sociological perspective. It is argued that Benhabib’s critiques of Enlightenment conceptions of morality complement sociological theories of morality. Her concepts of the ‘concrete’ and ‘generalized’ other and ‘interactive universalism’ can potentially inform recurrent debates in the sociology of morality about the extent to which cultural plurality precludes the possibility of sociologists providing normative judgements, and the extent to which certain features of moral experiences can be taken to be universal. However, Benhabib’s argument that discourse ethics can provide a procedural means to judge between competing moral claims leads her to prioritize the perspective of ‘postconventional’ Western modernism as the means to adjudicate between the moral tolerability of cultural beliefs and practices. This leads her to characterize ‘conventional’ moral systems as subordinate, which succumbs to postcolonial critiques of the role of processes of domination in organizing the validity of moral claims.

Second victim experiences and moral injury as predictors of hospitalist burnout before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BackgroundThe increasing number of physicians leaving practice, especially hospitalists, has been well-documented. The most commonly examined factor associated with this exodus has been burnout. The COVID-19 pandemic has put a unique and unprecedented stress on hospitalists who have been at the front lines of patient care. Therefore, the investigation of burnout and its related factors in hospitalists is essential to preventing future physician shortages.ObjectiveThis study examined the relationship between burnout, second victim, and moral injury experiences before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among hospitalists.MethodsTwo anonymous cross-sectional surveys of hospitalists from a community hospital in the metropolitan Washington, DC area were conducted. One was conducted pre-COVID-19 (September-November 2019) and one was conducted during COVID-19 (July-August 2020). The surveys were sent to all full-time hospitalists via an online survey platform. A variety of areas were assessed including demographic (e.g., age, gender), work information (e.g., hours per week, years of experience), burnout, second victim experiences, well-being, and moral injury.ResultsBurnout rates among providers during these two time periods were similar. Second victim experiences remained prevalent in those who experienced burnout both pre and during COVID-19, but interestingly the prevalence increased in those without burnout during COVID-19. Moral injury was predictive of burnout during COVID-19.ConclusionWhile there were some factors that predicted burnout that were similar both pre- and during-pandemic, moral injury was unique to predicting burnout during COVID-19. With burnout as a contributing factor to future physician shortages, it is imperative that predictive factors in a variety of different environments are well understood to prevent future shortages. Hospitalists may be an excellent barometer of these factors given their presence on the front line during the pandemic, and their experiences need to be further explored so that targeted interventions aimed at addressing those factors may be created.

Moral distress and moral injury and their interplay as a challenge for leadership and management: The case of Croatia.

We aim to investigate the interplay between moral distress and moral injury among nurses working in palliative and oncology wards and to assess its impact on nursing leadership. The past 2 years have been particularly challenging for nurses and nursing leaders in Croatia. The coronavirus disease pandemic and the subsequent earthquakes in the country significantly impacted the work of nurses. Moral distress has been well-known to nursing professionals, but recent studies warn about cofounding it with moral injury and their possible intercorrelation, deserving more attention from an empirical perspective. We conducted quantitative cross-sectional research in palliative and oncology wards in 11 Croatian health care facilities on 162 nurses, using a questionnaire and paper/pencil method over 6 months (1 January 2021 to 1 July 2021). The questionnaire consisted of three parts: sociodemographic data, a Measure of moral distress for health care professionals and Moral injury symptoms scale for health care professionals. The research protocol was approved by the Ethics committee of the Catholic University of Croatia under no. 1-21-04. The findings of our study demonstrated that the current average levels of moral distress might be characterized as low, but the moral injury symptoms are severe. The results of our study bring interesting novel insights, such as the strong correlation between moral distress and moral injury, but also in terms of nurses' decision to leave or consider leaving their position. The nurses who experience higher levels of moral distress experience severe symptoms of moral injury, while nurses who score higher in moral distress and moral injury have left, considered or consider leaving their positions. This study highlighted the need to pay attention to the emerging phenomenon of moral injury that has been unaddressed and overshadowed by moral distress, their intercorrelation, and the importance of addressing them timely and adequately within health care organizations with their leadership and management. These findings provide a significant insight that may assist nursing managers and leaders to act and respond in time to develop various prevention and mitigation measures and help resolve situations leading to moral distress or moral injury.