Moral Sanctions Research Articles

Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, Volume Two: Hoch- und Spatmittelalter (review)

This is the first volume to appear in a planned six-part series on the history of religion in the German lands from antiquity through the modern era. Its declared goal is to examine the totality of religious behavior and experience during the high and later Middle Ages from a phenomenological and interdisciplinary perspective. The author, Peter Dinzelbacher, has consciously written neither a history of theological ideas nor a church history. Rather, by drawing on a wide range of sources including both Latin and vernacular verse and texts, painting, sculpture, and inquisition and visitation records, Dinzelbacher examines how religion affected daily life and attitudes. His presentation of hundreds of examples of (predominantly) late medieval religious life in Germany rests on two fundamental assumptions. First, "holiness" is not understood as the equivalent of moral sanctity, but rather as the numinous presence of unseen powers which could be associated with persons, places, rites, and objects. Second, late medieval religious life was characterized by a conflict between institutional religion (religion préscrite) on the one hand and the people's lived religious experience (religion vécue) on the other. Both assumptions lead to a problematic understanding of medieval religion, as I will argue below.

Rights and Resources—Libertarians and the Right to Life

The author addresses Robert Nozick's claim that: “The particular rights over things fill the space of rights, leaving no room for general rights to be in a certain material condition.” Hence Nozick insists that rights are violated if citizens are compelled to contribute to others' welfare, however urgent their needs may be. The author argues that it is characteristic of libertarian theories that they invoke the moral sanctity of private property against welfarist or egalitarian conceptions of social justice. Nozick's version of the libertarian critique has three conceptual pillars–“right,”“thing” and “space.” On that basis Nozick claims that talk of welfare “rights” can be condemned on the plane of rights. This is true, Nozick maintains, even of “the right to life.” The author contends that this argument fails. It equivocates over the idea of “rights”; and it misconceives crucial features of property. Nozick deploys exclusive “domain rights,” whilst attacking “important‐interest rights.” His historical‐entitlement theory fails as a justification of private property. The author argues that, so far as material objects are concerned, private property institutions depend upon trespassory rules which do not impose morally binding obligations unless basic needs are catered for. Furthermore, private property institutions also comprise monetary resources to which the spatial metaphor of exclusive rights does not apply. Holdings vested in any particular person at any particular time are stamped, morally, with a mix of contestable and mutable property‐specific justice reasons. Hence it is fallacious to suppose that ownership rights together exhaust all normative space over “things.”The major objection to speaking of everyone's having a right to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these “rights” require a substructure of things and materials and actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. [≡] The particular rights over things fill the space of rights, leaving no room for general rights to be in a certain material condition. (Nozick 1974, 238)

The greener way to success at 3M

On a global scale, people are increasingly condemning behaviors that cause damage to the environment. Manufacturers are constantly under pressure to develop environmentally friendly operations. The moral sanction enjoyed by organizations doing so may be compounded by business advantages over less principled competitors.

Moral Rules and the Moral Sentiments: Toward a Theory of an Optimal Moral System

We examine how moral sanctions and rewards, notably the moral sentiments involving feelings of guilt and virtue, would be employed to govern individuals' behavior if the objective were to maximize social welfare. In our model, we analyze how the optimal use of guilt and virtue is influenced by the nature of the behavior under consideration, the costs of inculcating moral rules, constraints on the capacity to experience guilt and virtue, the fact that guilt and virtue often must be applied to groups of acts rather than be tailored to every conceivable type of act, and the direct effect of feelings of guilt and virtue on individuals' utility. We also consider a number of ways that the model could be extended, discuss the extent to which our analysis is consistent with the observed use of guilt and virtue, and relate our conclusions to longstanding philosophical debates about morality.

Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality ed. by Charles L. Briggs (review)

REVIEWS625 Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality. Ed. by Charles L. Briggs. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 7). New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. ii, 248. $49.95. Reviewed by James Stanlaw, Illinois State University Most anthropologists and linguists would agree that narratives are critical devices that can be used to establish social organization, convey values, reify power structures, and solve disputes. Few would also deny that conflict, on any number of levels, is part of our daily lives. But as Charles Briggs, the editor of this volume, says, conflict and narrative have usually been treated in relative isolation (3). This collection of essays—which grew out of a special session of the American Ethnological Association meetings in 1988—is an attempt to examine them together linguistically in an ethnographic context. In a long introduction, B sets a theoretical grounding for how narrative might sustain, create, and mediate conflict. In essence, this is a review essay of about 175 sources examining most of the critical literature through about 1994. But more than that, B, in lucid detail, discusses how ideology articulates with hegemony, how power meets with resistance, as well as how symbols, icons, and indexes operate in discourse and metadiscursive practices. The logic behind why the following eight papers are presented is clearly stated. The book's first chapter is Donald Brenneis's discussion of conflict resolution using talanoa 'gossip' and pancayat 'mediation' in an East Indian community in the Fiji Islands. The former is raucous, quick, and entertaining while the later is staid, formal, and deliberate. Gossip holds people together through a kind of friendship diat is often difficult to achieve in this 'perilously flexible social world' (47) while formal mediation sessions reinforce the egalitarian sense of community where everyone has the right to have their say. Besides helping to resolve specific disputes, these two narrative devices extol culturally salient models of discourse and behavior. In the second article, Ellen Basso examines Taugi, me trickster figure of me Kalapalo of central Brazil. Tricksters—who are both mythological culture heroes and clowns who violate the most sacred of social taboos—are found throughout the world's societies, particularly in indigenous America. They have long been objects of fascination for anthropologists and psychoanalysts alike. By considering tricksters as 'narrativized selves' (54) we can see how Taugi creates his ambiguous persona through his self-referential discourse (by such means as not using evidential particles in his speech). In the book's third chapter, Michael Herzfeld discusses the creation of 'honor among thieves' in a society of sheep-poachers. He explores a number of narrative and linguistic devices some highland villagers in Crete use to suggest that they have no choice but to resort to thievery, even though they may be quite cognizant of the legal and moral sanctions they have violated. This moral ambiguity is compounded when two moral codes—that of the village and that of the nation-state (which share a partially common rhetoric)—can be played off one another. The fourth entry takes us to that most exotic of field sites, the American dinner table. In this article, Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor describe the kind of talk that often occurs between parents and children over the evening meal as the events of the day are related to other family members. One particular form of discourse—what the authors call 'detective stories'—is seen as being 'co-narrated' by both speaker and listeners. A detective story here is one where some participants feel there is missing information critical to the plot or the motivation of the characters. In Lieutenant Columbo-like fashion, an interrogator may persist in seeking information beyond the initial version of the story, which (at least in some sense) could be considered already complete. For instance, in one example given, a young girl describes her incredulity at a classmate only getting a detention for an infraction (lifting up her dress in front of the boys) that she felt should have merited at least a suspension. However, on closer questioning by her brother, it turns out the girl has also had a detention in the past—a fact that for obvious reasons...

Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.

This text argues that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme, he offers an interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances an argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behaviour accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibililty. This book touches on issues of broad concern to philosphers, legal theorists, political scientists and anyone interested in the nature and limits of responsibility.

Complicating military intervention's moral case

Any decision to use military force should be subjected to close moral scrutiny, but military interventions, by their very nature, invite it. Unlike military force used for strategic goals or other narrow reasons of state, an intervention explicitly appeals to broader moral claims such as the defense of human rights, an end to bloodshed, the defeat of aggression, and so on. Its justification stands or falls on the moral force of its cause. Interventions should, therefore, be especially open to moral examination, and since they rely so heavily on broad moral claims, our moral sanction should not be given lightly. Indeed, at least one type of military intervention relies on an underlying moral justification that is deeply flawed but rarely challenged.

Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.

This text argues that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme, he offers an interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances an argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behaviour accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibililty. This book touches on issues of broad concern to philosphers, legal theorists, political scientists and anyone interested in the nature and limits of responsibility.

Failings of the disease model of addiction

Colloquially, addiction ranges in meaning from addiction to good deeds to addiction to substances of abuse. Especially during the last four decades, ‘addiction’ in this extreme pejorative meaning has been portrayed alternatively as a disease or a sin, and has been subject to social and moral sanctions. In an open society of free individuals such a coercion cannot be justified unless the condition is defined precisely by the simultaneous attributes of severe psychotoxicity, severe withdrawal symptoms, and recurrence tied to the loss of self-control and individual volition. Still, these attributes are open-ended, and an explicit metric of severity at which they may trigger social objection has not been clarified. As a consequence, ‘addiction’ allegations are left to elicit emotional, subjective, and value-laden responses ready to be exploited. A clamorous example is the claim by US officials that cigarette smoking is equal to the abuse of heroin or cocaine. An unequivocal definition of ‘addiction’ may restore some sense of proportion to official normative intervention. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Backward-Looking Social Control

Rational-choice theorists stress the need for social control to overcome the free-rider problem in collective action. Critics counter that mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement are themselves public goods that presume collective action rather than explain it. In response Heckathorn (1989) proposed an analytic solution based on « hypocritical cooperation » in which rational actors calculate the optimal allocation of resources between compliance with collective obligations and their enforcement. I relax these « forward-looking » behavioral assumptions and show how social control might evolve among « backward-looking » pragmatists. Computers simulations test the ability of various sanctioning regimes to generate cooperation as well as resist stampedes that risk overcooperation and needless sacrifice. External moral sanctions produce too little cooperation, while internalized sanctions produce too much.

Unwanted pregnancy and abortion: Bogotá, Colombia

A survey of abortion patients at a reproductive health clinic in Bogota Colombia suggests that even in a country with strong legal and moral sanctions against abortion womens personal needs to avoid the long-term negative consequences of an unwanted pregnancy will prevail. The Orientame clinic provides among other services vacuum aspiration of retained products of conception to women who present with incomplete abortion. The 602 study subjects were interviewed in October 1990-January 1991 at the clinic before the abortion procedure. Their average age was 27 years (range of 16-48 years) and 31% had some university education. The average age at first intercourse was 19 years (61% became sexually active before this age) compared to the national average of 21 years; the average number of pregnancies was 3 only 1 of which was desired. The frequency of unwanted pregnancy was highest among those who lived with a permanent partner and already had 5-8 children. 43% of subjects did not want any more children. The index abortion was the 1st for 66% the 2nd for 26% the 3rd for 7% and the 4th for 1%. While 87% had some experience with contraception (which is widely available in Colombia despite the illegality of abortion) only 58% had been using a method when this pregnancy occurred. Of those who did not want any more children 14% were using an effective method 49% a less effective method and 37% were not using any method. Overall the most common methods in use when pregnancy occurred were rhythm (17%) vaginal foam (11%) pill (7%) and condoms (7%). Sterilization is culturally unacceptable in Colombia there is considerable misinformation regarding the side effects associated with effective methods and women who use a less effective method often do so incorrectly and without understanding of how it works. Although 80% had been exposed to anti-abortion ideas and 25% considered the procedure a sin they regarded prevention of an unwanted child a higher value. The main reasons for not wanting pregnancy were fears of single parenting partner opposition or restrictions of educational or employment opportunities. Overall these findings pinpoint a need for increased education about and access to effective contraception.

Sanctions and the Notion of Morality

It is sometimes thought that it is part of the notion of morality that moral norms are backed up by sanctions of some special sort. This view is sometimes explicitly argued for, as by T. L. S. Sprigge, and sometimes appears in the background of discussions that are centered around other issues, as in Narveson's The Libertarian Idea. The aim of this paper is to show that difficulties in attempts to analyze the notion of morality by appealing to moral sanctions go much deeper than is usually realized.

Understanding the Merton Thesis

FIFTY YEARS ON, the Merton thesis continues to arouse historians' passions. It is difficult to understand why. There has never been a celebrated historical theory so cautiously framed, so methodologically eclectic, so hedged about with qualifications as to its form, content, and consequences, and so temperately expressed. Robert Merton and his defenders are accustomed to say that his thesis has been misunderstood. They are being much too kind to certain of the critics. One is tempted to put the case more strongly than that. On the evidence of some of those historians who have endeavored to refute what they represent to be his thesis, Merton's 1938 monograph and related texts can scarcely have been read at all. Merton is quite right to complain at the cavalier treatment he has received at the hands of his critics in the historical community. Modern literary theory rightly suggests that the meaning of a text is determined by its structure or content, nor indeed by the author's intentions. Nevertheless, it is both a useful convention and a justifiable moral sanction in the academic world that interpretations and understandings be at least occasionally disciplined by reminding readers of what is written in the relevant text. How did Merton himself define and characterize his hypothesis? What bearing did these representations have on its subsequent career in the academic world? First, what was the nature of the thing that Merton was trying to explain? Here, at the very core of his enterprise, historians nervous about the black beast of externalism should be reassured. Neither in his 1938 text nor in subsequent writings was Merton ever concerned to adduce social factors to explain the form or content of scientific knowledge or scientific method. Indeed, it is a plausible hypothesis that our present-day language of and external factors, as well as the validation of an overwhelmingly internalist historiography of scientific ideas, actually originated with Merton and the circle of scholars with whom he studied and worked in the 1930s. Thus, for example, Merton was exceedingly careful to dissociate himself explicitly from any enterprise (e.g., that of the Marxist Boris Hessen) that sought to account for scientific method or knowledge by reference to social or economic considerations, or, indeed, by reference to nonscientific cultural factors such as religion.' Merton's claims were not to imply that the discoveries of Newton, Boyle or other scientists can be directly attributed to the sanction of science by religion. Specific discoveries and inventions belong to the internal history of science and are largely independent of factors other than the purely scientific. And in an essay published even before

Adolescent sexology and ephebiatric sexual medicine.

Ephebiatric sexual medicine is a specialty that still awaits its Vesalius. The age of onset of puberty has decreased by four years in the past two centuries, without a concordant change in social and legal institutions governing sexual and economic autonomy. Concomitant with the reintroduction of the ancient European betrothal system, the adolescent age of first coitus has lowered and averages two years earlier than first contraception. The hiatus is attributed to the moral sanctions against open access to contraception in adolescence. The neglect of sexual learning in teenage allows cases of suicidal and homicidal lovesickness to be undetected and likewise the mental template or "lovemap" of paraphilic pathology in adolescence lacks both preventive measures and treatment. The newest treatment of the paraphilias is with antiandrogen combined with counseling. Positive or negative preparedness for first orgasm or first coitus correlate with positive or negative outcome in subsequent sexuoerotic health. Knowing the sexology of syndromes, for example genetic and endocrine syndromes of childhood, expedites the delivery of sexological health care service in adolescence.

The problem of terminology in one of Marx's works

The text we will be analysing is: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction (the first two pages), written between the end of 1843 and January 1844. It was published in March of the same year in The French-German Annals. When Marx talks about 'man', it is generally Feuerbach that he has in mind. The same can be said with reference to the sentences: "Man makes religion" and "criticism or religion", which are upheld by the young followers of Hegel, from Strauss to Moshe Hess, and from Feuerbach to Bruno Bauer. However, in these two pages Marx deals also with his immediate past and at the same time with the theories of these young scholars. These accounts are therefore rendered simultaneously; the same applies to the statement: "Aber der Mensch das ist kein abstraktes, ausser der Welt hockendes Wesen. Der Mench, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Soziet/it" [But man is not an abstract being, hidden outside the world (who dwells hidden, squatting and kneeling outside the world). Man is Man's world, State and Society]. This is a criticism directed at Feuerbach's concept that Man is an abstract being, a concept which was used by Marx in the years immediately preceding this and which, in a discontinuous form, bring us to these first pages. The final part of paragraph 7 has a similar meaning directed this time at Bruno Bauer: "The criticism of sky thus becomes the criticism of the earth, and the criticism of religion becomes the criticism of right, the criticism of theology becomes the criticism of politics". This is the philosophical itinerary which Marx had already followed and which leaves Bruno Bauer and the young followers of Hegel behind, although it is also the beginning of the way which will allow Marx to stop being a young follower of Hegel and become a Materialist. This is the moment (from the spring of 1843 to the summer of 1844) in which Marx and Engels, who were in contact with one another, developed their ideas from idealism to materialism and evolved them individually, from positions of radical democracy to Communism. This evolution meant an 'overcoming' in the Hegelian sense of the word. From the philosophical point of view it can be expressed by omitting some of the terms from the vocabulary of the young followers of Hegel and by preserving others, or by giving a new sense to the old terms. Zvi Rosen has published an important work 1 concerning the influence of Bruno Bauer on Marx's terminology on religion. In the second chapter of the second part of his essay entitled: 'Bauer's Themes on the Marxian Conception of Religion', he convincingly shows the origin of the following words or sentences which appear in these first two pages of the Introduction: (1) Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen image]. (2) ist die Religion das Selbstbewusstsein und das Selbstgefiihl des Menschen [religion is Man's selfconsciousness and selfsensibility]. (3) die Religion, ein verkertes Weltbewusstsein [religion, an inverted consciousness of the world]. (4) eine verkerte Welt [an inverted world]. (5) die Religion ist die allgemeine Theorie dieser Welt [religion is the general theory of this world]. (6) ihre moralische Sanktion [its moral sanction]. (7) die imagin~ren Blumen an der Kette [the imaginary flowers of the chain]. The above are the seven themes of Bauer which Marx underlined, because they were in general the most distant from the radical atheism of Bauer himself. Concerning the other similarities which Rosen found, the following points must be clarified: (1) Die Auflaebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glficks des Volkes [The overcoming of religion as an illusory happiness of the people], where only the second part of the comparison is authentically Bauerian. We must point out an important terminological difference here. Rosen translates 'Aufhebung' with 'cancelled' (suppress, eliminate, abolish); but in German this term means both "to abolish' and 'to preserve' (maintain). The English translation corresponds to an 'overcoming' in the Hegelian sense of the word. (2) Sie ist das Opium des Volks [It is the opium of the

Internal Shame as a Moral Sanction

Internal Shame as a Moral Sanction

Female-Centered World Views in Iranian Culture: Symbolic Representations of Sexuality in Dramatic Games

How do women in male-dominant cultures define and interpret reality-their own reality, particularly, attributive and rational,1 erotic and nonerotic aspects of their sexuality? Are their conceptions merely extensions or derivations of reality as defined by the male-centered culture? In the absence of movements or organizations, such as we find in Western societies, that explicitly aim to defend the female's legal, economic, and political interests,2 do women passively participate in the structures of their own domination? Do they accept the notions of how they are supposed to feel, think, and act, because they are influenced by the weight of moral or mechanical3 sanctions or because they internalize these structures through socialization and enculturation processes? In this paper, I hope to underscore the inadequacy of this perspective for understanding the dialectical nature of sexual as well as other forms of sociocultural domination.4 I will examine the case of Iran, a society that

Economists and Economic Change

In human affairs, power complements authority and is essential to its exercise. All life forms develop and use physical energy in the living process, but only man possesses power to direct his fellows to his bidding. In addition to physical power, he employs economic and moral power for this purpose. Authority-applying physical, economic, and moral sanctions to direct and control activity in utilizing nature's resources and distributing richesestablishes the pattern of the economy and affects the quality of a civilization. This paper examines briefly the role of economists and institutions in three economic periods distinguished by differences in the exercise of authority and power in economic affairs: (1) the feudal and mercantile eras of John Locke and Adam Smith; (2) the classical laissez-faire period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and (3) the era of concentrated economic authority from the Great Depression to the present. In the seventeenth century, John Locke challenged the structure of feudalism; in the eighteenth, Adam Smith, that of mercantilism; and in the nineteenth, Karl Marx challenged capitalism. Locke's and Smith's orthodox followers have basked in the ideological support the classical framework provides to those wielding economic authority. The same is undoubtedly true of Marxian adherents in communist economies. In the last half-century, however, orthodox theorists have been on the defensive as classical abstractions have failed to provide solutions to public

Abortion: An unresolved moral problem

Voluntary Abortion involves the preventable destruction of an unformed or partly formed human organism. It is disagreement about the moral significance of this fact which sustains the controversy over abortion. This disagreement derives from a dispute about the sanctity, or morally protected position, of the destroyed organism, which in turn results from conflicting opinions about the basis or criterion of sanctity rather than any uncertainty over how they may apply. The thesis of this paper is that this last disagreement about the criterion of moral sanctity cannot be settled by rational, i.e. non-circular, argument; and hence, that there is no rational method of resolving the controversy over the morality of abortion.

Viewer's moral sanction of retribution in the appreciation of dramatic presentations

An audiovisually presented fairy tale, which involved provocation and retaliation as the central theme, was created in three versions. Relative to the provocation, retaliation was too mild, equitable, or too severe. Children at the developmental stages of expiatory retribution (4-yr olds) and equitable retribution (7- and 8-yr olds) served as subjects. Appreciation of the presentation was measured in facial displays, in structured interviews, and in ratings. Consistently across measures, it was found that for children at the stage of expiatory retribution, appreciation increased with the severity of the retaliatory acts. Children at the stage of equitable retribution, in contrast, appreciated equitable retaliation the most. At this stage, inequitable retaliation (too mild or too severe) was found to impair appreciation significantly. The findings were interpreted as consistent with the proposal that the depiction of punitive, retaliatory activities will be enjoyed the more, the closer they approximate the viewer's moral expectations.