Moral Hierarchy Research Articles

A Political Radicalization Framework Based on Moral Foundations Theory

Moral foundations theory proposes that individuals with conflicting political views base their behavior on different principles chosen from a small group of universal moral foundations. This study proposes using a set of widely accepted moral foundations (fairness, in-group loyalty, authority, and purity) as proxies to determine the degree of radicalization of online communities. A fifth principle, care, is generally surpassed by others that are higher in the radicalized groups’ moral hierarchy. Moreover, the presented data-driven methodological framework proposes an alternative way to measure whether a community complies with a certain moral principle or foundation: not evaluating its speech, but its behavior through the interactions of its individuals, establishing a bridge between the structural features of the interaction network and the intensity of communities’ radicalization regarding the considered moral foundations. Two foundations were assessed using the network’s structural characteristics: in-group loyalty measured by group-level modularity, and authority evaluated using group domination, for detecting potential hierarchical substructures within the network. By analyzing a set of Pareto-optimal groups regarding a multidimensional moral relevance scale, the most radicalized communities were identified among those considered extreme in some of their attitudes or views. An application of the proposed framework is illustrated using real-world datasets. The radicalized communities’ behavior exhibited increasing isolation, and their authorities and leaders showed growing domination over their audience. Differences were also detected between users’ behavior and speech, showing that individuals tended to share more “extreme” in-group content than they publish: extreme views get more likes on social media.

Towards a historical geography of girlhood

AbstractThis paper makes an argument for a geography of girlhood, located at the intersection of historical geographies of globalisation and empire on the one hand, and feminist interventions in the geography of childhood and youth on the other. A focus on girlhood, I argue, opens up a debate on the discipline's own implication in a debate on climate science, moral hierarchies of civilisation and reproductive health at which intersection the category of ‘girl’ was materialised in the 19th century. This focus extends and historicises the argument made by scholars like Nicola Ansel that geographies of childhood speak not only to intimate scales of experience ‐ such as the home and neighbourhood—but instead suggest the ways in which everyday life is implicated in the scale of the global and the geopolitical. Drawing on an inter‐disciplinary scholarship, the paper argues that debates on gender and maturity—converging on the figure of the ‘girl’—shaped raced and classed imaginaries of progress in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through this, the paper demonstrates that ‘girlhood’ is at the heart of historical geographies of urban planning, social care, and health, as well as indexing the continuities in the transition from a colonial discourse of civilisation to a mid‐20th century concern with development. Finally, the paper asks how to write about girls through an archive that is almost obsessively fixated on them as subjects of education and reform, even whilst they rarely appear in it as speaking subjects. I argue that both an emergent focus on non‐textual objects as sources, as well as the use of ephemeral material—including notes, creative writing exercises from the classroom, school diaries etc.—alongside the official archive might open the scholarship up to a multi‐scalar analysis of girlhood as imbricated in larger global and national discursive and material practices.

Perverse attraction: Idolatry, pornography, and the making of infrastructure

The making of novel infrastructure often involves some kind of faith. This article considers a pair of experiments in the context of blockchain infrastructure led by entrepreneur Ameen Soleimani: MolochDAO and SpankChain, a grant fund and a sex-worker payments network, respectively. These enact a strategy we describe as “perverse attraction,” or the inversion of dominant moral hierarchies as a means of cultivating faithful practice around a still-incomplete infrastructural project. Although the technology at play is new, the strategy for advancing it reiterates the development of past infrastructures, from print cultures to the early internet. These precursors and the present case suggest that the strategy of perverse attraction, while occurring under the guise of empowerment, risks reinforcing the marginalization of its human participants.

“I could have married in Europe, if I wanted to” How black migrant men challenge moralizing and racializing discourses when returning to Senegal

ABSTRACT Marriage offers one of the few routes for Senegalese migrants to enter Europe and settle there legally, and it is often assumed that migrants marry just for a residence permit. “Marriage migration” is highly scrutinized by state actors, whose admission practices and their consequences have been the focus of much research. Less, however, is known about the perspectives of migrants who left Europe in response to these practices. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, we show how male Senegalese returnees and deportees challenge the idea that men want to marry a European resident at all costs. These men are spatially excluded from Europe but they discursively regain their dignity by returning to Senegal. Their return also challenges gendered and racialized European narratives about dangerous and hypersexual black Muslim males, and at the same time reinforces their positioning in moral hierarchies about love and marriage.

A fence of opportunity

Abstract This article deconstructs the parliamentary discourses regarding two migratory incidents in Ceuta, May 2021, and Melilla, June 2022, when hundreds of people attempted to cross the fences that separate Morocco from Spain. Most of them were immediately deported, many injured, and several died. This analysis compares the density of populist, anti-populist, re-bordering, and de-bordering references in forty-five speeches at the Spanish Congress regarding both tragic events. Vox speakers articulate a distinct discourse that instrumentalises these incidents to convey a sense of existential crisis and to (re)define a populist right-wing political identity based on moral hierarchies, a homogenising conception of society and the exclusion of a dangerous “other.” Meanwhile some parties applied a populist logic to promote de-bordering views and others combined re-bordering and de-bordering claims without imposing a populist frame. This was an opportunity to exhibit a progressive sense of place in borderlands contrasting with Vox’s reactionary one.

Literary Condemnation of the Slave Trade and Wealth as the Cause of Corruption Represented in the Light of English Literature

This article has illustrated how, within the framework of English literature, the slave trade and money are both literarily condemned as the root causes of corruption. When the slave trade was prohibited in the British Empire in 1807, the idea of equating labourers with slaves was highly controversial. That had happened very swiftly after a campaign that had only really begun 20 years before. Both slavery and the trade in Africans have already been condemned on occasion and in literature. The social objective of imitating the great landed nobility was examined and criticised by Adam Smith. The literature of the eighteenth century was also afflicted by the contradiction between the social and moral hierarchy. It is significantly more focused on the landed classes than the corporate sector, even though it is sometimes considered a bourgeois art form. Contrary to popular belief, writers of the late eighteenth century did not promote bourgeois principles in opposition to those of the aristocracy. Conversely, in the last decades of the century, they favoured a rural way of life and resisted urbanisation. They tended to side with the underclass against their new rulers, the industrial bourgeoisie, in the class struggle that industrialization sparked.

Return-to-Work Coordinators' Perceptions of Their Roles Relative to Workers: A Discourse Analysis.

This paper describes how Canadian Return to Work coordinators (RTWC) framed their job roles relative to workers in ways that went beyond the usual professional norms of helping worker recovery. In-depth interviews were conducted with 47 RTWCs across Canada in 2018-2019. We used critical discourse analysis to analyze the way coordinators viewed workers in the complex, multi-stakeholder system of RTW. We identified four ways that RTWCs positioned themselves relative to workers: as trust builders, experts, detectives and motivators. These roles reflected RTWCs position within the system; however, their discourse also contributed to the construction of a moral hierarchy that valued worker motivation and framed some workers as attempting to exploit the RTW system. RTWCs' positions of power in the coordination process warrant further investigation of how they exercise judgement and discretion, particularly when the process depends on their ability to weigh evidence and manage cases in what might be seen as an objective and fair manner.

Discipline and moralise: gratitude education for China’s migrant families

ABSTRACT The problems China’s rural-born migrants face in accessing urban public services, including education, are widely known. This article analyses how official discourse attributes migrant children’s vulnerability to their ‘problematic family background’ while exhorting them to show ‘gratitude’ to a benevolent state. Combining documentary analysis and insights from fieldwork, we examine how ‘gratitude education’ seeks to inculcate notions of a moral hierarchy in which migrants are subordinate or inferior. We further investigate parental beliefs and practices with respect to gratitude, and family participation in related educational activities. The findings indicate that such activities constitute just one aspect of a broader strategy that extends to initiatives focused on governance and philanthropy. Programmes of gratitude education are one tactic for concealing the deficiencies in government action on rural migrants’ behalf. By associating entitlement to public goods with individual or familial propriety, they aim to legitimate the institutional barriers that ensure migrants’ enduring marginalisation.

Veganism’s Anti-Anthropocentric Capacity. A Critical Analysis of the Advocacy Discourse of Three Prominent Vegan Organisations

Anthropocentrism has been identified as a root cause of nonhuman animal and intrahuman oppressions and the environmental crisis. Veganism has been celebrated as a philosophy and practice capable of undermining anthropocentrism, yet the anti-anthropocentric capacity of vegan advocacy is understudied. The current research provides a critical analysis of the online advocacy discourse of three prominent vegan organisations – The Vegan Society, PETA, and Viva! – elucidating areas of anthropocentric reinforcement and subversion in correspondence to the conceptual characteristics of anthropocentrism: human-centred narcissism and exceptionalism, the perceived human/animal dichotomy, and a corresponding moral hierarchy that exalts particular understandings of the “human” to the detriment of all considered other-than (Calarco 2014). Given the interconnectedness of nonhuman and human oppressions and importance of decentring the anthropocentric conception of the “human”, the intersectional strengths and shortcomings of the organisations’ vegan advocacy is additionally considered, with many areas of needed improvement being highlighted. The article contributes to research on vegan/nonhuman animal rights advocacy and social movement communication, and facilitates the future production of anti-anthropocentric, intersectional, vegan advocacy campaigns.

Human brain organoid code of conduct.

Human brain organoids are models derived from human embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells that mimic basic cerebral microanatomy and demonstrate simple functional neuronal networks. Brain organoids have been a rapidly expanding avenue for biomedical research in general and specifically: neural development, regeneration, and central nervous system pathophysiology. However, technology replicating functional aspects of the human brain, including electrically active neural networks, requires a responsible code of conduct. In this review, we focus the discussion on intrinsic and extrinsic ethical factors associated with organoids: intrinsic considerations arise with the growing complexity of human brain organoids, including human-animal chimerism, consciousness development, and questions of where these human-like beings fall in a moral hierarchy. Extrinsic considerations explore ethics on obtainment, manufacturing, and production of sophisticated human products. In summary, a thoughtful code of conduct using human brain organoids towards the advancement of science and medicine is crucial. This article shall facilitate a structured thought process approaching the moral landscape of organoid technology.

Managing moral category implications of former drug addiction

This project examines how meanings of drug addiction are negotiated through analysis of situated social actions in a telephone conversation. This paper uses interactional analysis to show how a former heroin user’s identity is constructed and moralized in the process of providing accounts through descriptions of drug addiction and its consequences. This case shows how social actions in interpersonal conversation provide insights into judgment and addiction, and how participants manage the complex moral hierarchies associated with drug use and drug user identities. The analysis contributes to enriching an area of empirical research that needs more data and more attention to interaction, while also contributing to theories of categorization, normalization, stigma, and morality of drug addiction.

The Development of Speciesism: Age-Related Differences in the Moral View of Animals

Humans care for the well-being of some animals (e.g., dogs) yet tacitly endorse the maltreatment of others (e.g., pigs). What treatment is deemed morally appropriate for an animal can depend on whether the animal is characterized as “food.” When such categorization of animals emerges and when a moral hierarchy of beings depending on their species membership (speciesism) develops is poorly understood. We investigate this development across samples of children (9–11 years old), young adults (18–21 years old), and adults (29–59 years old; total N = 479). Compared with young adults and adults, children (a) show less speciesism, (b) are less likely to categorize farm animals as food than pets, (c) think farm animals ought to be treated better, and (d) deem eating meat and animal products to be less morally acceptable. These findings imply that there are key age-related differences in our moral view of an animal worth that point to socially constructed development over the lifespan.

Structures of Morality and Allegiance in the Character Arc Story

Abstract The view that allegiance to characters is a matter of general moral assessment, as developed by Carroll (1984) and Smith (1995), has the resources to respond to counter-examples proposed in the literature, including appeals to anti-heroes, rough heroes and other ‘reprehensible characters’ that garner our allegiance. It can even admit non-moral factors as subterranean influences on moral assessment. Nevertheless, the view requires that the characters we most favour are those with the highest moral standing, and this does not seem to be true of the character arc story (Kelly, 2020). Rather, the mixture of good and bad impulses in the protagonist is set off by the unalloyed moral example of the moral centre, a supporting character whose fate may barely interest us. We conclude that narrative theory is better served by allowing the moral hierarchy of a story to differ from the rank order of its allegiances, and hence that audience affiliation is not simply a matter of moral assessment.

Cervantes’ PERSILES and the Travails of Romance ed. by Marina S. Brownlee

Reviewed by: Cervantes’ PERSILES and the Travails of Romance ed. by Marina S. Brownlee Paul Michael Johnson (bio) Marina S. Brownlee, ed. Cervantes’ PERSILES and the Travails of Romance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 307 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1487504786. To employ a nautical metaphor befitting Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda itself, this book is the latest treasure to wash ashore from the many quatercentenary celebrations in 2017 that commemorated Cervantes’s last work. Giving material form to a colloquium hosted at Princeton University, the volume gathers some of the foremost authorities on the text, along with a handful of emerging scholars who illuminate it with innovative new readings. Marina S. Brownlee’s brief introduction offers a concise summary of the critical [End Page 234] history of Persiles y Sigismunda over the past several decades, as well as an overview of the essays and thematic divisions that make up the edited collection. While looking back to the ancient model of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, she also proposes that, insofar as it “rethinks geopolitical models of race, ethnicity, nation, and religion,” Cervantes’s take on the Greek romance “has never been more timely than today” (3). Travails of Romance begins with an essay by Frederick A. de Armas that engages Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between space and place, a theme that also informs the first section of the volume as a whole. By exploring the symbolic valences of four architectural structures in Rome, all unlikely sites for pilgrims to the Eternal City, de Armas reveals the dangers and comforts of these overlooked spaces, as well as their culturally and religiously charged meanings. It is the wider latitudes of barbarian North and Catholic South, and the inversion of their corresponding moral hierarchies, that concern Michael Armstrong-Roche’s contribution. Through its “Lucianic gaze” and “lexicon of the marvellous” (49), Armstrong disentangles the subtle means by which Persiles y Sigismunda estranges the familiar, rendering moral complexity a vector of edification as well as entertainment. Isabel Lozano-Renieblas rounds out the section with a meditation on the character of Auristela, whose chastity serves as a locus for discerning the symbolic registers of verisimilitude and adventure, suggesting that the inner religious journey of Auristela holds greater importance than the pilgrims’ overtly terrestrial wanderings. The following section of the book traces the “psychic dimensions” of the novel, starting with a contribution by Anthony J. Cascardi. Delving into what he calls the “character enigma,” or why the founder of the modern novel would culminate his literary career with a book full of ostensibly “un-novelistic” characters (83), Cascardi shows how, if we look beyond allegory, Cervantes leveraged the art of narrative to explore the psyche in far greater depth than the humoral and proto-psychological theories of his day. William P. Childers too vindicates for Persiles y Sigismunda a more modern conception of the self than perpetual comparisons to Don Quijote have traditionally precluded. If that novel revolves around a protagonist whose desires and behavior place him at odds with society, then Cervantes’s last work multiplies this problem with a group of characters who must negotiate their conformity, or nonconformity, with one another in what Childers calls a “full-fledged laboratory of individualities” (105). An abiding crux for critics of Persiles y Sigismunda has been the relationship between verisimilitude and the marvelous, and Javier Patiño Loira takes this debate in fresh yet historically responsive directions [End Page 235] with his essay on wonder. Through a study of how sixteenth-century poetic theorists approached the concept, in addition to its affiliation with cognition and emotion, he demonstrates that Cervantes was aware of yet superseded prevailing understandings of wonder and its Aristotelian strictures. The visual realm informs the next set of essays, beginning with Marta Albalá Pelegrín’s exploration of the diversity of pictorial genres represented in Persiles y Sigismunda. Focusing on representations of corporeal violence, she interrogates the aesthetic mechanisms by which visual imagery moved the reader as well as its connection to Catholic relics and other historical anxieties. Though the novel’s varied engagements with ekphrasis have caught the eye of many a reader, few have critically examined the images included in...

Drawing the line at infidelity: Negotiating relationship morality in a Swedish context of consensual non-monogamy

Consensual non-monogamy (CNM) involves being in a relationship that allows participants multiple concurrent sexual and/or intimate partners. Previous studies exploring attitudes toward different types of extra-dyadic sexual activity (EDSA) has typically distinguished between, on the one hand, polyamory/open relationships/swinging and, on the other, infidelity. The aim of this article is to develop further these discussions by showing how the distinctions between relationship types are drawn and/or blurred in social interactions, and how this requires moral work and negotiations of what ethical polyamory is. The research questions are as follows: 1. How are different CNM relationship types distinguished from each other, as well as intertwined and negotiated in social interactions? 2. How are ideals of consent, honesty, and communication reproduced and renegotiated in CNM relationships? 3. How does moral work become important for responding to negative attitudes toward CNM? The material consists of interviews with 22 persons practicing polyamory, CNM, or relationship anarchy, analyzed using thematic analysis. Results show that CNM relationship types are not clearly distinguishable but rather negotiated in social interactions both within a relationship and with others. Interviewees express that consent, honesty, and communication are central for their relationships, but also that they are negotiated. For example, honesty can be renegotiated by introducing an option of not telling your partner everything. Consent can also be renegotiated with some conditions, such as not actively searching out potential partners. They describe several different types of moral work: negotiating and reformulating others’ moral opinions, reversing moral hierarchies, and taking responsibility to explain and to soothe situations. These results contribute to existing research on attitudes toward CNM practices pointing out the importance of taking social interactions into account in order to explore the full extent of negative attitudes toward people involved in CNM relationships and how they handle these interactions.

Demystifying ‘diet culture’: Exploring the meaning of diet culture in online ‘anti-diet’ feminist, fat activist, and health professional communities

Social aspects of dieting are discussed in the extant feminist literature. However, despite frequent use of the term ‘diet culture’ in online communities critical of weight-loss dieting and popular books about the harms of restrictive eating, academic studies have not yet investigated its meaning holistically. We used thematic analysis to examine how those in the broad ‘anti-diet movement’ have challenged norms representing ‘diet culture,’ and how the term can be used to unite feminist researchers, activists, and health professionals. One-hundred and eighteen online qualitative survey participants (94.92% female; 37.29% health professionals; 51.70% anti-diet activists; Mage = 36.67) characterised ‘diet culture’ as ‘health myths about food and eating,’ and a ‘moral hierarchy of bodies’ driven by ‘systemic and structural factors.’ Feminist researchers, activists, and health professionals can use ‘diet culture’ to challenge myths and misconceptions about dieting and health, as well as the broader systems and structures that perpetuate these myths.

Twenty-Four Ways to Have Sex within the Law

This article argues that how sex appears in the law shapes what erotic pleasure is in a commercial context, and indirectly produces sex workers’ ideas about the moral stakes of engaging in certain acts. Although Japan’s anti-prostitution law was intended to eliminate commercial sex, the state’s mid-century attempt to define a proscribed site of sexual pleasure centered on intercourse instead led to the proliferation of erotic services in a diversified marketplace. The efforts of cisheteronormative sex industry businesses to navigate the actual conditions of the law’s enforcement have in turn made intercourse a distinctive site of concern for many sex workers, who regard it as the basis of an imagined moral hierarchy within the industry and as representing the inability of their workplaces to protect them.

Hate Speech, Symbolic Violence, and Racial Discrimination. Antigypsyism: What Responses for the Next Decade?

This paper aims to fulfill a double objective: on the one hand, to explain how hate speech works as a mechanism of racialization towards the Roma, resulting in a concrete form of symbolic violence. On the other hand, to analyze the most relevant institutional responses to fight against antigypsyism, looking at the new EU Roma Framework 2020–2030 with a special attention on the recent developments in Spain. The paper discusses the fact that a focus on symbolic violence and more concretely on hate speech would produce considerably differing approaches to Roma inclusion policies. The paper is divided into three sections: the first section will conceptually address the notions of “antigypsyism”, “racial discrimination”, “symbolic violence”, and “hate speech”. The second section will present and contextualize a series of illustrative cases of antigypsyist hate speech in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. The third section will examine the most relevant legislative and policy initiatives adopted to fight against antigypsyism. The paper will wrap up with a discussion and some conclusions on the functioning of hate speech as a symbolic mechanism of racialization; and its capacity to articulate moral hierarchies and social divisions among the Roma and the rest of society.

Gendered Migration, Gendered Morality: South Korean Men in Intimate Relationships with Filipinas in the Philippines

This article focuses on Korean male migrants who have heterosexual relationships with local women in the Philippines. Research on sex tourism and interracial partnerships has addressed male partners’ rationalising narratives to disassociate themselves from sex tourists. Yet cases of South Korean male migrants to the Philippines require an additional analytic lens to understand how nation intersects with the realm of intimacy in a transnational context. By highlighting how the South Korean men with Filipina partners have been labelled ‘ugly Koreans’ who are harming the country’s national prestige abroad, this study explores the ways that nationalistic sentiment shapes the moral hierarchy among male migrants inside the diaspora based on their partnership. Furthermore, through an analysis of the narrative strategies of South Korean men with Filipina partners, this paper argues that they do not simply prove their innocence but denounce public surveillance by situating their relationship within the private realm of love.

Examining Organizational Narratives: Public Appeals of Morality, Emotions, and Medical Logic in the Case of Sex Work for Disabled Clients*

This study examines public narratives of sex work organizations that specifically serve disabled clientele. We utilize virtual data from two organizational online presences, including featured client and worker testimonials, a related documentary film, and audience commentary. Our analysis illuminates (1) the organizational characterizations of disabled clients as deserving and in need of sex services, (2) depictions of sex workers as moral, medical practitioners, and (3) plots and moral lessons that legitimate organizational services through medical logic. We argue that while such storytelling has the potential to persuade audiences through cultural appeals to morality, emotion, and medical logic, it simultaneously stigmatizes disabled people while constructing moral hierarchies of sex workers.