Moral People Research Articles

Are moral people happier? Answers from reputation-based measures of moral character.

Philosophers have long debated whether moral virtue contributes to happiness or whether morality and happiness are in conflict. Yet, little empirical research directly addresses this question. Here, we examined the association between reputation-based measures of everyday moral character (operationalized as a composite of widely accepted moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and fairness) and self-reported well-being across two cultures. In Study 1, close others reported on U.S. undergraduate students' moral character (two samples; Ns = 221/286). In Study 2, Chinese employees (N = 711) reported on their coworkers' moral character and their own well-being. To better sample the moral extremes, in Study 3, U.S. participants nominated "targets" who were among the most moral, least moral, and morally average people they personally knew. Targets (N = 281) self-reported their well-being and nominated informants who provided a second, continuous measure of the targets' moral character. These studies showed that those who are more moral in the eyes of close others, coworkers, and acquaintances generally experience a greater sense of subjective well-being and meaning in life. These associations were generally robust when controlling for key demographic variables (including religiosity) and informant-reported liking. There were no significant differences in the strength of the associations between moral character and well-being across two major subdimensions of both moral character (kindness and integrity) and well-being (subjective well-being and meaning in life). Together, these studies provide the most comprehensive evidence to date of a positive and general association between everyday moral character and well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Are Moral People Happier? Answers From Reputation-Based Measures of Moral Character

Supplemental Material for Are Moral People Happier? Answers From Reputation-Based Measures of Moral Character

THE RIGHTEOUS STATE IN BUDDHISM, AS ARTICULATED IN SELECTED DISCOURSES FROM THE SUTTA PIṬAKA

This research aims to critically examine the righteous State in Buddhism as articulated in the selected discourses from the Sutta Piṭaka. Through qualitative research methodology with library approach, this research was carried out by collecting data from primary sources and secondary sources. This research shows that according to Buddhism, righteous State is not only as a good governance, but also include the righteous people in the society. It is understood that even though, Buddhism directly shows the path to get rid of existence (saṃsāra), but the Buddha and his disciples lived in society. Therefore, the Buddha tried to promote social virtues, duties and responsibilities necessary for a better social pattern. The Anukampaka, Vyagghapajja and Sigālovāda discourses include the teachings required to secure social values. According to the Rajja Sutta of Saṃyutta Nikāya, the Buddha’s attitude was to see a governance that does not kill or harm others. The Buddha preached the king Kosala once that there is no real winner in war, and it destroys social harmony as well. So, Buddhism focuses not only on creating a good governance, but also a society with moral people, and building a good State in the combination of both.

Exploration and practice of ideological and political education in instrumental analysis courses: a case study on chromatography course teaching

Instrumental analysis is an important professional course for many chemistry majors. Its teaching content is rich, diverse and is closely related to daily life. Moreover, this course contains a large number of ideological and political resources. This study investigates chromatography technology in instrumental analysis as an example, focusing on aspects such as chromatography knowledge, solution preparation, standard operations, and guided experiments, to deeply explore the elements of ideological and political education and organically integrate them into the teaching of instrumental analysis courses. Academic teaching of professional knowledge increases the diversity and richness of the teaching content and enhances the innovative skills of the students. In addition, this teaching method can inspire students to establish life goals and great ideals, with the aim of ultimately cultivating moral people.

Control body, representative of regions, or elitist chamber of wisdom? The perceived roles of upper chambers and the case of the Czech Senate

ABSTRACT Existing research on bicameralism has paid rather limited attention to examining the legitimacy of upper chambers. This paper addresses this research gap and examines the unintended roles of upper chambers using the case of the Czech Senate. It explains how citizens perceive the role of the upper chamber and how their perceptions can differ from the chamber’s actual role. The research employs content analysis of semi-structured interviews with two groups of citizens (30 in total). The results show that the Senate is perceived as an elitist, apolitical institution that is or should be composed of wise, experienced, and moral people. A minority of citizens perceive the Senate as a body representative of local interests. However, these perceptions do not correspond to reality. The difference between the Senate’s perceived and real role can have both negative and positive effects on the institution’s legitimacy.

Enabling corporate immorality: Understanding administrative evil through Better Off Ted

Even where corporations actively engage in unquestionably immoral behaviour, the vast majority of their employees are often morally good people. When moral people produce significantly immoral results simply by doing their jobs, we call it ‘administrative evil’. Administrative evil is humorously, but revealingly presented in Better Off Ted (2009–10). Through Better Off Ted, we learn how administrative evil derives in large part from bureaucratic structures that facilitate moral employees into thinking of both their companies and their own identities in fashions that distance their labour from the products of their work. These bureaucratic systems encourage employees to view themselves as constructive and valuable workers, while seeing their companies as incompetent organizations that are merely performing immoral acts by mistake. Through realistic, fleshed-out examples, Better Off Ted enables us to understand how corporations use bureaucracy to constrain the moral senses of its employees, who follow seemingly dumb rules that just happen to lead to inherently immoral, but consistently profitable results.

Leading collaborative change amid a crisis: a framework to liberate a team’s leadership skills and promote sales performance

PurposeThis study aims to introduce an alternative model, “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), Virtue and Vice” (3V’s), to unleash leadership skills, promote organisational collaborative change and impact sales performance during an unprecedented crisis.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology outlines action research based on the 3V’s model and its application in an international business-to-business sales organisation during Covid-19. It explores alternative paths informed by play-at-work and Plato’s philosophy applied to work-based-learning. Each action/iteration adds to the model, which becomes more likely appropriate for various situations.FindingsThe 3V’s boosted change implementation and improved sales performance. The 3V’s conceptualised an invitation to immerse oneself in the constant “river of change” (VUCA) and a means of understanding the role of leadership in navigating this change by embracing simple rules: searching for justice (Virtue) and overcoming the barrier of public opinion (Vice).Research limitations/implicationsThe 3V’s model is grounded in leadership literature and a sole application, providing real international data relevant to organisations and leaders. This has yet to be evaluated further.Practical implications3V’s can enhance the understanding of a leading collaborative change and re-frame team dynamics in post-pandemic times for the broader public.Social implicationsThe approach advocated is a practice of “swimming alongside the team”, which should enable empowerment and collaboration rather than a top-down direction. Focussing on leaders who are moral people, this approach becomes a differentiator in a digital world.Originality/valueThis study examines Plato’s philosophy, play-at-work and other leadership theories in a model which prepares organisations to respond to crisis by providing the ability to reflect on human aspects and straightforward, transferable skills.

Parenting Style in Developing the Character of Elementary School Student Responsibility

Character education in learning plays a role in helping students to grow good character that can be realized in their social life. Character education can also play a role so that students want to independently learn the material and develop an attitude of responsibility towards the tasks given by the teacher. This study aims to analyze the parenting style of parents in developing the responsibility of children ata private elementary school. The research employed a qualitative descriptive methodology. This study methodology employs many data collection techniques, including observation, interviews, documentation, and questionnaires. This investigation employed the Miles and Huberman model as the data analysis technique. The outcome of his research pertains to the influence of parenting on the development of kid responsibility. Parenting greatly affects children's development and growth. Effective and suitable parenting practises help children grow and develop, whereas insufficient parenting might hinder their growth. Student accountability is directly related to parental attitudes. Parents must consider their children's particular qualities and developmental needs, including their age, while using effective parenting practises. Parents must also be patient, open, and eager to listen to their children when faced with obstacles or needs. Parents may help their children grow and develop into well-rounded, moral people by using successful and suitable parenting practises.

Shaping of Moral People Towards Law Compliance from A Western Theory Perspective

A moral person is a personal characteristic in terms of good and bad behavior that is prominent and accepted in a community context. Law compliance is a necessity in an individual's life that is surrounded by various codes of conduct and ethics to create a perfect life. Shaping moral people from various perspectives is a basis and guide to life. This article discusses the view of the western theoretical perspective in shaping law compliance. As a bibliographic study, this paper presents qualitative findings based on detailed references from journals, articles, books and newspapers. The findings are then elaborated thematically with narrative writing. Based on the findings of the study, shaping moral people towards law compliance can be practiced through the perspective of three western theories, namely utilitarianism, personality virtue and deontology theories. Research findings are also discussed based on examples and descriptions.

Making molehills out of mountains: Removing moral meaning from prior immoral actions

AbstractAt some point in their lives, most people have told a lie, intentionally hurt someone else, or acted selfishly at the expense of another. Despite knowledge of their moral failings, individuals are often able to maintain the belief that they are moral people. This research explores one mechanism by which this paradoxical process occurs: the tendency to represent one's past immoral behaviors in concrete or mechanistic terms, thus stripping the action of its moral implications. Across five studies, we document this basic pattern and provide evidence that this process impacts evaluations of an act's moral wrongness. We further demonstrate an extension of this effect, such that when an apology describes an immoral behavior using mechanistic terms, it is viewed as less sincere and less forgivable, likely because including low‐level or concrete language in an apology fails to communicate the belief that one's actions were morally wrong.

Grounding and Applying an Ethical Test to Organisations as Moral Agents: The Case of Mondragon Corporation

Moral people (i) have good goals in acting in a challenging situation; and (ii) use their rightly disposed intellectual and voluntary capacities (virtues) and resources to choose a good action in that situation. This requires (iii) sound ethical deliberation and decision-procedures for realising practically the abstract values and principles relevant in the concrete situation. After deliberation about sub-goals and means, they (iv) choose to execute the best particular action plan. They will have canvassed possible outcomes of the intended act, which, when executed, will have a particular result and (v) consequent outcomes for themselves, and for others; and (vi) it will show respect for the wellbeing of the community or wider society, represented by the state, and reflected in state law. A comprehensive third-party moral judgement on the act will encompass the intention and execution of the act in the situation.Part 1, Sections I-IV of this paper argue that organisations can be said to be quasi-persons, personal and moral. As artificial organisational quasi-persons, with a similar structure to natural persons, they can also have analogues of the moral features of natural persons’ moral acts: i)-vi): good goals, rightly disposed capacities and resources, ethical decision procedures, good acts or activities, with good outcomes for others, and respect for society’s norms represented in state law. An ethical acronym, GREAOS, capturing the six dominant features shared with natural persons, is suggested.In Part 2, an application of GREAOS is then made to assess a concrete organisational case, Mondragon Corporation, in order to show how if the analogy between persons and organisations is sound in principle, the acronym’s application can be made to ethically unpack a case. The acronym gives Mondragon Corporation at least a pass on ethics. Although a work in progress, its success in realising ideals of economic democracy can be an exemplar of stakeholder capitalism, an alternative to an unbridled shareholder capitalism, which has had its day.

The Voice of Morality: The Two-Way Relationship Between the Beauty of Voice and Moral Goodness

The Voice of Morality: The Two-Way Relationship Between the Beauty of Voice and Moral Goodness

Better Your Best: How to be more moral

Studying exceptionally moral people can be hard on the ego. These people’s lives put me to shame. Dorothy Day, for example, founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933 to feed and house the poor during the Great Depression; it now serves nearly 200 communities around the world.

Selfish for a Reason: Using your power to help others

You might expect that the most moral people in the world (think Gandhi or Mother Teresa) are strongly motivated by helping others and not at all self-serving. Such a lopsided motivational profile is what makes them moral, right? Not so, it turns out.

Moral Evaluations of Humor Apply Beyond Just Those Telling the Joke

Humor involves both joke-tellers and listeners, both of whom are subject to observers' evaluations. Past research has suggested a tension between humor and morality such that moral individuals may be less humorous, and humor may promote tolerance of moral violations. Building on this work, we highlight that individuals engaging in humor are themselves subject to inferences of moral character. Joke-tellers are evaluated as less moral people when their jokes are offensive. Individuals who laugh at jokes are similarly evaluated as less moral, but only when the jokes are offensive, not clean. Across two experiments (Studies 1 and 2) using different manipulations, we found support for these effects and the mediating role of perceived norm violations. In Study 3, we further found preliminary evidence depicting nuanced similarities and differences between the effects on moral evaluations and other-person perceptions such as warmth and competence. These findings contribute to understanding of moral judgment in humor.

Pandemic and Teaching the Georgian Literature (Developing emotional intelligence)

Since 2020 our planet is facing a huge danger named pandemic Covid-19. This latter seems like is tempting the humankind, reminding that besides technological miracles exist other significant factors necessary for prolonging and supporting the life on earth. Human moral values, like empathy, solidarity, helping those in needed, that were temporarily shifted back to the foreground now naturally moved back to surface. And these highly moral people gifted with such features (mainly medics and volunteers) are fighting against the virus and saving the lives all around the world. Simultaneously, importance and necessity of controlling and managing human emotions in adequate directions have aroused. Thus, emotional intelligence is attracting significant attention, it is the main and necessary background for creating everything that is valuable for humanity.Either our native country is facing and is fighting against pandemic, the country which is situated on the cross of East-West worlds, the country with enriched and ancient history and culture. After gaining the state independence important institutional branch like educational system was under refining and reforming processes when pandemic as a challenge came upon. Because of latter situation it is of great importance that new vectors and tendencies featured in contemporary worldwide educational systems should be promptly reflected on our educational system as well.By the author’s opinion, main attention should be focused on establishment of highly moral values and emotion controlling issues, especially to an education process of young people born and rising in digitalized epoch. The art, and principally literature, should make significant contribution towards this direction.In this article some processes and changes made in educational system at schools are discussed and criticized from above stated position; are mentioned and emphasized the centuries-old traditions of preaching humanism, compassion and tolerance in Georgian literature; our literature’s possibilities of teaching in terms of the development of emotional intelligence in adolescents are analyze.

The Most Good You Can Do with Your Kidneys: Effective Altruism and the Organ-Shortage Problem.

Effective altruism is a growing philosophical and social movement, whose members design their lives in ways aligned with doing the most good that they can do. The main focus of this paper is to explore what effective altruism has to say about the moral obligations people have to do good with their organs, in the face of an organ-shortage problem. It is argued that an effective altruism framework offers a number of valuable theoretical and practical insights relevant to ongoing debate about how to resolve the organ-shortage problem. Its recommendations constitute a plausible and promising strategy for increasing the supply of, and decreasing the demand for, human organs, in a way that protects (rather than ignores, or preys upon) the global poor. And, many of its recommendations can be implemented into policy without requiring that citizens actually become effective altruists themselves.

From Virtue to Grit: Changes in Character Education Narratives in the U.S. from 1985 to 2016

How did narratives about character education in the United States change between 1985 and 2016 and what does this reveal about the changing meaning of character over this time period? Policymakers and pundits have frequently invoked ideas of “good” versus “bad” character as they attempt to blame individuals for their own circumstances. It makes sense to trace these narratives in their various forms, beginning with the discourse around character and children. Character education programs are a natural object to study in order to capture these narratives. Despite this, sociologists have largely ignored character education, which leaves a significant gap in the scholarly knowledge about both character education and the social construction of designations of “good” versus “bad” character more generally. In this paper, I address this gap by examining the narratives around character education between 1985 and 2016. After analyzing 600 articles from Education Week and the New York Times mentioning character education, I find that there is a significant expansion of the ways in which advocates argue for character education in the schools. Whereas earlier narratives encouraged character education as a means to teach students how to be good, moral people starting in the early 2000s, these narratives expanded to include teaching character as a means to improve academic performance. This finding is significant as we continue to see both education reformers pushing for character education as a tactic to improve achievements and policymakers and pundits invoking character flaws as a means to blame individuals for structural inequality.

Drinking Carling Out of Stella Glasses: People and Place in the Missing Middle.

As trends of social and economic change allow precarity to inch into the lives of those who may have been more accustomed to security (Standing, 2011, 2014), this paper addresses the response of some young people who are caught “betwixt and between” in potentially liminal states (Turner, 1967). Those whose families have undertaken intra- or intergenerational social mobility and who have made a home in a place, Ingleby Barwick in Teesside, that seems to be of them and for them—an in-between place that is seen as “not quite” middle or working class. This paper draws data from a research project that adopted a qualitative phenomenological approach to uncover the meaning of experiences for participants. Methods included focus groups and semi-structured interviews through which 70 local people contributed their thoughts, hopes, concerns, and stories about their lives now and what they aspire to for the future. Places, such as the large private housing estate in the Northeast of England on which this research was carried out, make up significant sections of the UK population, yet tend to be understudied populations, often missed by a sociological gaze attracted to extremes. It was anticipated that in Ingleby Barwick, where social mobility allows access to this relatively exclusive estate, notions of individualism and deservingness that underlie meritocratic ideology (Mendick et al., 2015; Littler, 2018) would be significant, a supposition borne out in the findings. “Making it” to Ingleby was, and continues to be, indicative to many of meritocratic success, making it “a moral place for moral people” (McEwan, 2019). Consequently, the threat then posed by economic precarity, of restricting access to the transitions and lifestyles that create the “distinction” (Bourdieu, 1984) required to denote fit to this place, is noted to be very real in a place ironically marked by many outside it as fundamentally unreal.

SHOULD YOU DESIGN THE PERFECT BABY?

ABSTRACTAs our technology rapidly advances, designer babies and other bioethical issues are fast becoming possible. Instead of solely being considered in economic terms, or in terms of accuracy and desirability, ethical questions should also be asked such as ‘is this a good thing to do?’. This article considers whether moral people would ‘design’ and genetically engineer their babies and applies the moral theories of virtue ethics, deontology and utilitarianism to help guide our ethical decision-making in relation to this complex issue. Even if we can do something, we should pause and consider whether or not we should.