Moral Goodness Research Articles

Refusing a compulsory want for revenge, or, teaching against retributive justice with liberatory pedagogy

ABSTRACT Retributive justice serves as a punitive foundation on which Western education is organized. It relies on paternalistic notions of moral goodness with the teacher embodying moral perfection and academe serving as the “neutral” ground on which a student learns to be a “moral” actor. In turn, students of marginalized intersectional difference “pay” for their incapacity to perform correctly. We reject retributive impulses as violent enactments of power. Our goal is humble and direct: abolish the prison industrial complex with everything we've got. And we believe pedagogical contexts provide a relational means to critique and imagine a world free of prisons.

Who is moved more deeply by others’ acts of moral goodness? The relationship between ones’ sense of power and the experience of moral elevation

Who is moved more deeply by others’ acts of moral goodness? The relationship between ones’ sense of power and the experience of moral elevation

Architectural Values, Political Affordances and Selective Permeability

AbstractThis article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, health, social status and more. This suggests settings areselectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods.

“That’s Unhelpful, Harmful and Offensive!” Epistemic and Ethical Concerns with Meta-argument Allegations

“Meta-argument allegations” consist of protestations that an interlocutor’s speech is wrongfully offensive or will trigger undesirable social consequences. Such protestations are meta-argument in the sense that they do not interrogate the soundness of an opponent’s argumentation, but instead focus on external features of that argument. They are allegations because they imply moral wrongdoing. There is a legitimate place for meta-argument allegations, and the moral and epistemic goods that can come from them will be front of mind for those levelling such allegations. But I argue there is a dark side to such allegations, and their epistemic and moral costs must be seriously weighed. Meta-argument allegations have a concerning capacity to derail discussions about important topics, stymieing argumentational interactions and the goods they provide. Such allegations can license efforts to silence, punish and deter—even as they provoke the original speaker to retaliate in kind. Used liberally, such allegations can escalate conflicts, block open-mindedness, and discourage constructive dialogues. In response, I defend “argumentational tolerance”—a principled wariness in employing meta-argument allegations—as a virtue of ethical argument.

The Moral Politics of LGBTI Asylum: How the State Deals with the SOGI Framework

Abstract The article proposes a political ethnography of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) asylum founded on a fieldwork (2017–19) in an associative and activist context that supports LGBTI asylum applicants. Through the analysis of the narratives mobilized and produced during the interviews between asylum applicants and institutional agents in charge of receiving and assessing the requests for international protection, the article explores the institutional uses of the SOGI framework. The hypothesis that the article puts forward is that, far from concerning exclusively a confrontation/dispute among models of sexual orientation and gender identity, these interactions actually bring forth a logic of exchange of moral goods (vulnerability, feelings of shame and fear, identity, narratives). Given the impossibility for LGBTI asylum applicants to produce probatory documentation, this study exposes the strategies for determining legitimate from illegitimate LGBTI migrant subjects, ‘good’ from ‘bad’ migrant stories, and, therefore, the political and moral dimension of the institutional work and the grant of the right of asylum.

The Basis of Morality for Shaftesbury: Moral Sense

Bu çalışmada on sekizinci yüzyıl İngiliz düşünürlerinden Shaftesbury’nin ‘ahlak duygusu’ teorisi tartışılmaktadır. Ahlak duygusunun doğal bir duygu olduğunu öne süren Shaftesbury, bu duygu sayesinde iyi ve kötünün ne olduğunun bilineceğini, bu nedenle de ahlakın temelinde ahlak duygusunun yer aldığını iddia eder. Shaftesbury’ye göre ahlak duygusu, görme ve işitme gibi doğal bir yetidir. O, ahlak duygusunun çeşitli nedenlerle bozulmasını önlemenin ve yetkinliğini geliştirmenin ancak iyi bir eğitimle mümkün olabileceğini düşünür. Ayrıca o, bireylerin kendi faydasına göre davranmak isteyeceğini inkâr etmez, ancak bireyin çıkarı ile toplumun çıkarının uyum içinde olduğunu ve bu uyum sayesinde ahlaki iyiliğin ortaya çıktığını savunur. Egoist ahlaka ve kötücül insan doğası anlayışına karşı çıkan Shaftesbury, ahlakın nesnel ve özerk olduğuna inanır. Duygucu ahlakın öncüsü kabul edilen Shaftesbury’nin ahlak duygusu teorisi, sonraki duygucu etik türlerinden önemli ölçüde farklıdır. Onun, duygunun yanında akla da büyük önem verdiği ahlak teorisi, insana duygu-akıl bağlamında bütüncül olarak yaklaştığı için oldukça önemlidir.

Cognitive Process Differences Between Moral Beauty Judgments and Moral Goodness Judgments

Goodness and beauty have always been important topics of debate in the field of philosophy and aesthetics. The present study used behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether moral beauty judgments and moral goodness judgments involve different cognitive processes or the same cognitive process under different language labels for the same human act. Behavioral results showed that individuals gave significantly higher scores for a beautiful face than an ugly face when making moral beauty judgments, but there were no significant differences between the two conditions when making moral goodness judgments. The ERP experiment displayed larger P2 amplitudes and the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude was elicited when displaying beautiful faces but not ugly faces during moral beauty judgments. However, during moral goodness judgments, the P2 and LPP showed no significant differences under the two conditions. In general, we conclude that moral beauty judgments and moral goodness judgments involve different cognitive processes, although they objectively refer to the same human act. One of the most important differences between moral beauty judgments and moral goodness judgments was that the former process involved an image, whereas the latter did not. The present conclusion provides important insights into the research in aesthetic perception and moral sense.

Aesthetics and morality judgments share cortical neuroarchitecture

Philosophers have predominantly regarded morality and aesthetics judgments as fundamentally different. However, whether this claim is empirically founded has remained unclear. In a novel task, we measured brain activity of participants judging the aesthetic beauty of artwork or the moral goodness of actions depicted. To control for the content of judgments, participants assessed the age of the artworks and the speed of depicted actions. Univariate analyses revealed whole-brain corrected, content-controlled common activation for aesthetics and morality judgments in frontopolar, dorsomedial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Temporoparietal cortex showed activation specific for morality judgments, occipital cortex for aesthetics judgments. Multivariate analyses revealed both common and distinct whole-brain corrected representations for morality and aesthetics judgments in temporoparietal and prefrontal regions. Overall, neural commonalities are more pronounced than predominant philosophical views would predict. They are compatible with minority accounts that stress commonalities between aesthetics and morality judgments, such as sentimentalism and a valuation framework.

The Affirmative Culture of Healthy Self-Care: A Feminist Critique of the Good Health Imperative

Feminist critiques highlight how neoliberal ideologies withdraw attention from the social and the political toward the cult of individual hard work, thereby obscuring oppression and economic disenfranchisement as merely matters for individuals to “overcome” with hard work. Individuals should see their health as a matter of personal responsibility making disability, class, and gender merely private matters to attend to with proper healthy self-care. In this paper, I expand upon feminist philosophy to think about healthy self-care as requiring a delayed body fantasy and to ask if we might see healthy self-care like a morally neutral hobby rather than a mark of moral and social goodness.

Science learning to understand the value of conservation character in students in the coastal region

This research was conducted to understand the value of conservation character in students by utilizing local resources in the coastal areas of Gorontalo Province. The research design used is the application of one group pretest-posttest design. Data collection was performed using cluster sampling techniques with research subjects totaling 160 students spread across four elementary schools in the coastal areas of Gorontalo Province. Data analysis was performed using N-Gain and Anava 2 x 2 test to see differences in learning outcomes in the form of moral knowledge and moral goodness of conservation at each grade level and examine the difference in the total score of the pretest and the total score of the posttest. The results showed that the N-Gain value for knowledge about coastal natural resources was 0.74, moral conservation knowledge was 0.76, and moral goodness conservation was 0.84. Anava test results showed the level of class and type of test differed significantly on the character values of students with sig <0.05 (0.000 <0.05). That is, there are differences in the value of student conservation characters based on grade levels. Significantly the character value of grade 3 and grade 4 students shows the highest value compared to the grade value of grade 5 and grade 6 students. The application of science learning tools with conservation characteristics utilizing the local potential of natural resources in elementary school students in coastal areas can understand the character conservation of students in coastal areas.

On the Absence of Moral Goodness in Hobbes\u2019s Ethics

This article reassesses Hobbes’s place in the history of ethics based on the first systematic analysis of his various classifications of formal goodness. The good was traditionally divided into three: profitably good, pleasurably good, and morally good (bonum honestum). Across his works, Hobbes replaced the last with pulchrum—a decidedly non-moral form of goodness on his account. I argue that Hobbes’s dismissal of moral goodness was informed by his hedonist conception of the good and accompanied by reinterpretations of right reason and natural law. By dispensing moral goodness and insisting on the hedonist and relational nature of the good, Hobbes moreover recast and rendered more urgent the question of why we should be moral. Hobbes is commonly thought to have raised this question so starkly because of his general insensitivity to the demands of justice. My analysis suggests that it may also, or rather, have been due to his restrictive conception of the good. A comparison with other moral philosophers from the period—including Suárez, Gassendi, Locke, and Pufendorf—indicates how unusual Hobbes’s jettisoning of moral goodness was.

What if God commanded something horrible? A pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics

AbstractThe objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God's necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even against this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss's reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands.

Can public virtues be global?

ABSTRACTAn important issue within the field of global ethics is the extent or scope of moral obligation or duties. Cosmopolitanism argues that we have duties to all human beings by virtue of some common property. Communitarian ethics argue that one's scope of obligation is circumscribed by one's community or some other defining property. Public virtues, understood to be either a property that communities possess to function well or a moral excellence constitutive of that community, offer an interesting challenge to this binary by positing moral goods or excellences that are constitutive of a community yet global in application. Virtues such as tolerance, charity, moderation, or benevolence might be examples of such goods or excellences endorsed by a community but applied to individuals who are not members of the community, or, as in the case of environmental ethics, even to entities that are not moral agents. Unlike cosmopolitan ethics, the scope of the obligation does not depend on identifying universal properties, such as rationality, human dignity, or utility, but could be defined entirely by and within a community.

Bioética de vacunaciones y salud pública

Bioethics goes beyond the ethical problems that arise in clinical practice concerning vaccination. It is conditioned both by teleological (aristotelian) ethics that has a good purpose orientation and by the ethical ethics (kantian) in which moral goodness is determined by the awareness of duty as a human being. According to the principle of opportunity we study what are the possibilities available that are more suitable to reach a purpose since the values and principles of Bioethics should be a useful tool for public health and, being that vaccinations are a part of it, in the decision-making.

Vaccine bioethics and public health

Bioethics goes beyond the ethical problems that arise in clinical practice concerning vaccination. It is conditioned both by teleological (aristotelian) ethics that has a good purpose orientation and by the ethical ethics (kantian) in which moral goodness is determined by the awareness of duty as a human being. According to the principle of opportunity we study what are the possibilities available that are more suitable to reach a purpose since the values and principles of Bioethics should be a useful tool for public health and, being that vaccinations are a part of it, in the decision-making.

RODION RASKOLNIKOV’S IDEA IN VIETNAMESE TRANSLATION

The article discusses the translation into Vietnamese of excerpts about the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov’s idea in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel «Crime and Punishment». We used all available Vietnamese translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, adapted of the original language. We have done a comparative analysis of translations of the verbal conceptualisation of Rodion Raskolnikov’s ideas and their reverse translations accompanied by their analysis. What is worth drawing attention to, are the depressing poverty of Raskolnikov, his social protest as the main motives which made the hero to pass to the terrible crime. There is weakened interest in the hero’s idea, in its hidden godless character of Raskolnikov’s ideas – the protagonist challenges not only the outrageous social injustice, but also the foundations of Orthodoxy, according to which the Law of moral goodness comes from God rather than from humans. It has been shown that Vietnamese translators, working on the translations of «Crime and Punishment», have experienced several diffi culties. The main one is their lack of understanding and knowledge of the realia from Russian people’s daily religious and cultural life in the mid-19th century. The realities of everyday life and spiritual Orthodoxy are often replaced by the realities of the Buddhist cult, which brings to the novel an unusual «oriental» religious fl avour. Some specifi c clarifi cations are suggested for unclear content in the available translations.

Between Mysticism and Politics: The Continuity in and Basic Pattern of Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Thought

Abstract Vladimir Solov’ëv, informal “founder” of the current of Russian religious philosophy which gained some prominence in the early 20th C with thinkers like N. Berdyaev, S. Frank and S. Bulgakov, based his social and political philosophy as well as his program of “Christian politics” (an attempt to bring the world as close to the Kingdom of God as possible, while steering clear from any idea of “building” God’s Kingdom on Earth) on a series of personal mystical encounters with Sophia, understood by him as, simultaneously, Eternal Femininity, Divine Wisdom and World Soul. The paper argues that this vision remained the foundation of his entire world-view, despite the fact that he initially articulated a more “utopian” vision of a world-encompassing “free theocracy,” while later in his career he elaborated, in Opravdanie dobra [The Justification of the (Moral) Good], a more realistic, but still “ideal-theoretical” vision of a just Christian state. Highlighting the tension between Solov’ëv’s advocacy of a free and plural sphere of public debate and his own “prophetic” position based on privileged access to divine wisdom, the paper ends with a discussion of the intrinsic and unsolvable tension between religion and politics, and with the claim that there is a fundamental opposition between holistic mystical visions and a recognition of the political, understood as the ubiquitous possibility of both conflict and concord among humans.

Apocalyps, notre amour

Abstract Apocalypse, notre amour. An essay The apocalypse entails the idea of a final judgment. Thinking about the apocalypse then invites us to consider the question of mankind’s goodness. With Immanuel Kant, I will argue, that such reflection warrants a deep pessimism. Humankind falters in light of the moral standard. Yet, such pessimism leaves room for a political optimism in which impartiality and reciprocity are key elements. Even if moral goodness is nigh-impossible to achieve, we can and should strive for minimal decency. Also, I will claim that those who have reason to doubt Kant’s rationalist and metaphysical foundations for such a modest political program (because they believe in pluralism), still have reason to endorse a similar political liberalism. We will need confidence in this endeavor to respond to a growing relativism, possibly foreshadowing an Other Apocalypse in which all judgment is judged to be wrong.

Neural correlates of moral goodness and moral beauty judgments

The objects of moral goodness and moral beauty judgments both generally refer to the positive moral acts or virtues of humans, and goodness must precede moral beauty. The main difference is that moral beauty, but not moral goodness, triggers emotional elevation. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms involved in both judgments. In the current study, 28 healthy female participants were scanned when they rated the good and beautiful extent of positive moral acts in daily life depicted in scene drawings to investigate the neural systems supporting moral goodness and moral beauty, specifically to test whether neural activity associated with moral beauty is same or different than moral goodness. The conjunction analysis of the contrasts between moral goodness judgment and moral beauty judgment identified the involvement of the left inferior orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), suggesting that the two judgments recruited the activity of a common brain region. Importantly, compared with the moral goodness judgment, the moral beauty judgment induced greater activity in more advanced cortical regions implicated in elevated emotions, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), superior frontal gyrus (SFG) and the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). These regions have been strongly correlated with the cognitive aspects of moral cognition, including theory of mind (ToM). In addition, moral beauty judgment also activated brain regions implicated in empathy including the midline structures and the anterior insula. Based on these results, the brain harbors neural systems for common and for domain-specific evaluations of moral goodness and moral beauty judgments. Our study thus provides novel and compelling neural evidence for the essence of moral beauty and advances the current knowledge of the neural mechanisms underlying the beauty-is-good stereotype.

Two Dogmas of the Artistic-Ethical Interaction Debate

AbstractCan artworks be morally good or bad? Many philosophers have thought so. Does this moral goodness or badness bear on how good or bad a work isas art?This is very much a live debate.Autonomistsargue that moral value is not relevant to artistic value;interactionistsargue that it is. In this paper, I argue that the debate between interactionists and autonomists has been conducted unfairly: all parties to the debate have tacitly accepted a set of constraints which prejudices the issue against the interactionist. I identify two demands which are routinely placed on arguments seeking to establish interaction and argue that they are, in fact, mutually conflicting.There are two upshots. First, in light of this, it is unsurprising that arguments for interaction have failed to meet with everybody’s satisfaction. The constraints are such that no argument can meet them. Second, recognizing this helps us uncover a new, promising, but hitherto overlooked strategy for establishing artistic-ethical interaction.