Moral Sentiments Research Articles

Politics of Affect in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

This paper analyzes The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in terms of Coleridge’s imaginative plea for a modification of consciousness about racial slavery prevalent in the then British society. What lends muscle to the plea is the use of gothic supernaturalism, which helps bring about a transformation in the Mariner. The gothic-actuated transformation, this paper claims, derives from Coleridge’s own ambiguous attitude to English imperialism—an ambivalence which results into systematic portrayal of the violator as the rightful beneficiary of the reader’s sympathy. The paper concludes that the poem’s turn to the affect of moral sentimentalism intends to make the reader of Coleridge’s time acquiesce in accepting colonial guilt as the spiritual politics of quietism, thereby averting the possibility of a violent reaction both from the hapless victims and some conscientious victimizers. There was not much thrust on an economic and political upgrading of the status of the slaves; instead, the affects of outrage, disgust, horror, and shame were evoked in the white anti-slavery texts so that the ugliness of imperialism and the concomitant slavery were criticized without really writing them off.

South–South Relations in the Era of Far-Right Populism: The Syrian Refugee Crisis on Brazilian Television

Abstract From the perspective of South–South relations, the dramatic shift in Brazilian politics from Leftist to far-Right governments since 2003 has echoed in popular culture as a national identity crisis. At a time when nationalism and xenophobia are fueled by political rhetoric and a prolonged economic downturn, television melodrama Órfãos da terra (Orphans of the Earth, 2019) depicts the plight of Syrian refugees in Brazil, explaining the humanitarian dimension of the crisis and appealing to the public's moral and religious sentiments. The telenovela also invokes Brazil's history as an immigrant country and the idea of mistura (mixture) as its defining trait. In this way, the telenovela engages in a contest over Brazilian identity by promoting a progressive alternative to the resurgent far-Right ideology. But this alternative betrays a deep-seated Islamophobia that paradoxically brings it closer to its ideological antagonist. An Islamophobic rejection of xenophobia, Órfãos da terra trades the South–South solidarity of the Lula-Dilma era (2003–2016) for a nationalist myth of exceptionalism, in parallel with Bolsonaro's strong U.S. orientation.

Moral legitimisation in science, technology and innovation policies

Worldwide, governments and institutions are formulating AI strategies that try to square the aspiration of exploiting the potentials of machine learning with safeguarding their communities against the perceived ills of unchecked artificial systems. We make the claim that these new class of documents are an interesting showcase for a recent turn in policy work and formulation, that increasingly tries to intertwine moral senti-ment with strategic dimensions. This process of moralizing is interesting and unprece-dented coming from governmental actors, as these documents are guidance documents but not law. Given the significant leeway in development trajectories of open meta-technologies such as artificial intelligence, we argue that these more moralizing ele-ments within policy documents are illustrative of a new class of policy writing, meant to catalyze and shape public opinion and thus by proxy development trajectories.

Positive Religious Coping, Cultural Anthropology of Women Rights and Well-Being of Hindu Women in Bali Indonesia: Mediation of Socio-Economic Women Rights

International human rights organizations are working hard to protect women's cultural, social, and political rights by enforcing laws and amendments to safeguard women's well-being in society. Providing women with their fundamental rights is based on positive attitudes towards them in society. Hence it is important to study the factors impacting women’s well-being. Established on the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Normative Theory of Human rights, this study aims to determine the factors that underpin Hindu women's well-being in Bali, Indonesia. A cross-sectional survey was conducted from 338 females of the Hindu religion (students, staff, and faculty members) from four public and private Indonesian higher education institutes/universities in Bali. Results revealed that positive religious coping and the cultural anthropology of women's rights, directly and indirectly, impacted women's well-being via women's socio-economic rights. This extended and more comprehensive model would help practitioners better understand how the blend of people's religious values, society, and cultural anthropology of women's rights can positively enhance their well-being.

The art of being in the eighteenth century: Adam Smith on fortune, luck, and trust

ABSTRACT This article offers some reflections on the importance Adam Smith accorded to luck in The Wealth of Nations. While the place of moral luck in The Theory of Moral Sentiments has been the subject of some scholarly attention, this has not been the case for luck in his best-known work. It focuses on what Smith thought particularly striking about our estimation of our own good fortune and argues that it accentuated the need for trustworthiness and trusted friends.

Laughter in the economic philosophy of Adam Smith

Laughter is relatively unexplored in Adam Smith’s economic philosophy. In this article, laughter in Smith’s two major works The theory of moral sentiments and An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations will be surveyed to assess the role it possibly played in his work, and whether there is a link between laughter and economics. It will be argued that although it is not a major theme in Smith’s work, there is a link between laughter and economics. Laughter is understood from the perspective of the instincts of self-interest and sympathy with the corresponding socio-ethical assessment in which the impartial spectator plays a central role. Hence, Smith understood laughter as a social deliberated phenomenon, and not an individual response to an event. This social dimension is where the assessment of laughter takes place to gauge propriety. It will be highlighted that the assessment in many of the references that Smith makes to laughter are mostly embedded in a disjunction or binary connective that consists of self-interest and sympathy. This disjunction is cross-categorical and often of the weak type which results in a tension between self-interest and sympathy. It will be argued that disjunction resists reduction of self-interest that is seen in the excess and narcissism of contemporary capitalism.

Adam Smith: el capitalismo y su frustrado proyecto de civilización

In this paper we aim to address the problem that we interpret as guiding Adam Smith´s work: the question of the historical viability of modern society. To this end, we seek to argue: 1) that both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations show that the full deployment of trade is both necessary and problematic, even seriously dangerous, as the foundation of the new society; 2) that both works discuss, from complementary angles, in what sense and under what conditions modern society is viable. If it is of interest to note that Smith reflected on such a problem, even more relevant is the very solution on which he worked throughout his career, without reaching it: the development of a scientific and philosophical foundation for a theory of modern jurisprudence that would make possible the conception and progress of a well-governed society.

Financial reporting and moral sentiments

Scholars have long suspected that people behave differently when their actions will be observed by or revealed to others. We hypothesize that financial reporting that reveals managers' actions will lead managers to take actions that better align with investor interests. We test this hypothesis with an experiment in which we manipulate the availability of a financial report that reveals managerial actions. Our evidence shows that financial reporting leads a manager to choose reinvestment and resource-sharing actions that better align with investor interests, even when the investor can impose no cost or confer no reward on the manager. This effect holds when the investor can shut down the firm and take a sizable portion of the assets. Our evidence suggests that financial reporting's economic value comes not only from its traditional contracting function, but also because managers care about investors' moral evaluations of them that are enabled by reporting.

Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850

A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850 would be a very good thing to have, but this book is not quite that. Rather, it starts with a testing point in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and then discusses various writers who might be seen to respond to it—principally Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and the French translator of Smith. The point is the celebrated passage in Moral Sentiments where Smith discusses how we can never really participate in someone else's experience. We are always required to imagine it “in some measure,” he says, even if the experience in question is extreme and proximate, “though our brother is upon the rack.” Britton understands “in some measure” as articulating a limit to sympathy, making sympathy depend “figurative or literally, on the bonds of kinship,” a view apparently confirmed by Smith's remark, later in the book, that people find it difficult to respond spontaneously to the reported troubles of faraway peoples. How much did Smith intend his example to invoke the idea of a “familial bond”? To speak of “our brother” could be as much generic as familial (he is happy to strike the more personal note of “my friends” elsewhere in the book), and I have always thought Smith's sense of fraternity was the product of the effort of sympathy rather than its precondition. Anyhow, it is clear that he is moved by the difficulty of sympathizing with absent strangers, and Britton resourcefully explores the ways in which her novelists imagine characters rising to the same sort of challenge by telling stories from a different point of view. The books she discusses are full of frame stories, embedded tales, quoted letters, and reports, all of which work, as she says, to shift around narrative perspectives and raise at least the possibility of identifying with someone else. Whether “identifying” with someone else is indeed the basis of the moral life is no doubt another matter: “A man only is interested in anything when he identifies himself with it,” Whitman once said—a claim not without its problems.

The Promise of Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and Business Ethics

Pragmatists believe that philosophical inquiry must engage closely with practice to be useful and that practice serves as a source of social norms. As a growing alternative to the analytic and continental philosophical traditions, pragmatism is well suited for research in business ethics, but its role remains underappreciated. This article focuses on Richard Rorty, a key figure in the pragmatist tradition. We read Rorty as a source of insight about the ethical and political nature of business practice in contemporary global markets, focusing specifically on his views about moral sentiments, agency, and democratic deliberation. Importantly for business ethicists, Rorty’s approach sets in stark relief our moral responsibility as useful, practical thinkers in addressing the societal challenges of our time. We use “modern slavery” as an empirical context to highlight the relevance of Rorty’s approach to business ethics.

Contextualization of the Classic Moral Sentimentalism

Moral sentimentalism can be defined as the philosophical theory according to which emotions are the source of our value judgements, in general, and of our moral judgements, in particular. It follows that, from a historical and conceptual point of view, moral sentimentalism has emerged and developed in opposition to moral rationalism, according to which reason allows us to formulate and understand value judgments from a psychological point of view and is also the source of our axiological knowledge from an epistemic point of view. In this article we present the theoretical issues related to the sentimentalist approach to morality and evaluative judgments, starting from the diverse theories of the classical representatives of sentimentalism, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith, and especially the three theses they defended: psychological perspective, the theory of moral sense and the theory of moral feelings. I also argue that the first moral sentimentalism emerged from the confrontation of three distinct aporia: the first aporia refers to the conceptualization of emotions and emotional states; the second deals with the possibility of axiological knowledge; and the third refers to the nature and existence of values. Finally, we are interested in the birth of sentimentalism in order to highlight a series of difficulties inherent in this theoretical approach and which we find today in contemporary moral sentimentalism. The aim is to highlight the conceptual and argumentative tensions that were at the heart of sentimentalism at its emergence.

Was Adam Smith an evolutionary economist?: Smith\u2019s study of botany and Charles Darwin\u2019s theory of morality

This paper aims to extend and provide a new understanding of Adam Smith’s thoughts by focusing on some revisions in the 4th edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1774), “the nutritional value theory of corn” in the Wealth of Nations, and then comparing Smith’s discourses on the formation of morality with C. Darwin’s. Smith’s understanding of human nature extended and deepened with the study of botany and other sciences at Kirkcaldy after spending 2 years in France as Duke Buccleugh’s tutor. He began to understand human nature not only as a composite of self-love and benevolence, but also of instinctual and experiential knowledge. Thus, Smith’s system transitioned to an evolutionary one, and he became an unconscious forerunner of the Darwinian theory of morality formation.

A Defense of Modest Ideal Observer Theory: The Case of Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator

I build on Adam Smith’s account of the impartial spectator in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to offer a modest ideal observer theory of moral judgment that is adequate in the following sense: the account specifies the hypothetical conditions that guarantee the authoritativeness of an agent’s (or agents’) responses in constituting the standard in question, and, if an actual agent or an actual community of agents are not under those conditions, their responses are not authoritative in setting this standard. However, in the account that I provide, the hypothetical conditions can themselves be constructed from the psychology and interactions of actual human beings. In other words, facts about the morally appropriate and inappropriate are determined from hypothetical conditions that––while agents in a given society might have yet to attain them––can be constructed from those agents’ shared experiences. Thus, the account offers both an attainable standard of moral judgment and a standard that can transcend the biases of the society which gave rise to it. I also defend the account against three challenges: (a) ideal observer theories do not offer the right kind of motivation to act on the verdicts of the ideal observer; (b) ideal observer theories cannot explain why the idealization in question is well-motivated and not objectionably ad hoc; (c) the standard used in ideal observer theories cannot be defended upon further reflection, because we would need a non-arbitrary, second-order standard to govern our reflection on the first-order standard of moral judgment.

Development research on unitary moral learning programme which tackles various moral education issues, with a focus on the 'special subject of moral education'

Unfortunately, racism, cultural and religious discrimination, homophobia and other forms of discrimination remain prevalent in society. Instilling the key tenets of ethics and morality is important in helping overcome these issues. This starts at an early age with the education of schoolchildren and Yoshio Oshitani is a researcher based at Mukogawa Women's University, Japan, who is exploring moral education and social issues in schools. Oshitani's focus is on cultivating moral judgement, moral sentiment and motivation to practice morality among schoolchildren. Ultimately enabling them to be raised to live independently with moral practice. To do this, it is important to address existing issues in the Japanese school system and introduce a focus on moral education. As such, Oshitani and his team have developed a class whereby one hour a week schoolchildren use textbooks and other teaching materials to understand moral values that can enable us all to live better and consider moral events and situations from multiple perspectives. The development of each child is monitored through individual evaluation, (evaluating areas of growth) with their sense of moral values considered. Ultimately, Oshitani believes that if children can be introduced to morality from an early age, this will lead to a better, more accepting future society.

Impartiality through ‘Moral Optics’: Why Adam Smith revised David Hume's Moral Sentimentalism

We read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as a critical response to David Hume's moral theory. While both share a commitment to moral sentimentalism, they propose different ways of meeting its main challenge, that is, explaining how judgments informed by (partial) sentiments can nevertheless have a justified claim to general authority. This difference is particularly manifest in their respective accounts of ‘moral optics’, or the way they rely on the analogy between perceptual and moral judgments. According to Hume, making perceptual and moral judgments requires focusing on frequently co-occurring impressions (perceptions of objects or reactive sentiments) for tracking an existing object with its perceptual properties or an agent's character traits. Smith uses visual perception for the purpose of illustrating one source of the partiality of the sentiments people feel in response to actions. Before making a moral judgment, people have to disregard this partiality and accept that they are all equally important. Smith and Hume's different ways of relying on the same analogy reveals the still-overlooked and yet profound differences between their moral theories.

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814

THE PLEASURE OF EXCHANGE: ADAM SMITH’S THIRD KIND OF SELF-LOVE

This article argues that the self-love that motivates exchange in The Wealth of Nations (WN) can be seen as the desire for deserved approval discussed by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). This often overlooked desire appears in TMS as the most representative kind of self-love. Exchange motivated by this desire emerges as the way to find confirmation through others’ appraisal of one’s own self-assessment, and thus to find an agreed-upon measure for respective deserved praise. The target in this economic relationship is that equivalence that signals mutual recognition of deserved esteem. Equivalence here is the aim and not the result of exchange, unlike a tug-of-war, where both parties try to give as little and gain as much as possible regardless of the recognition each deserves.

Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, edited by Sarah Collins

Reviewed by: Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject ed. by Sarah Collins Emma Sutton (bio) Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, edited by Sarah Collins; pp. xiii + 254. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $80.00 ebook. From videos of George Floyd's murder to tweets of political leaders wearing or eschewing masks to photographs of statues being tumbled, many of the events for which 2020 will be remembered are impressed on our collective memories through visual images. None of us can doubt visual media's capacity to galvanize shared actions, sentiment, and a sense of community, as well as—all too often—division, intolerance, and hatred. Amid urgent global concerns, music may seem incidental or irrelevant to politics. But from protest songs performed at Black Lives Matter gatherings to online outpourings of anguish about the cancelation of live concerts and risks associated with choral singing, it is clear that music plays a vital part in contemporary ideas about community and the responsibilities of our shared social and individual lives. These examples have their own distinctive contexts, but they also bring into focus how our contemporary assumptions about the value and roles of music are profoundly indebted to Victorian ideas. Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject thus has an acute topical resonance. The eleven essays in Sarah Collins's handsomely produced collection explore the significance of music to Victorian ideas about selfhood (often via self-cultivation) and community. Rightly noting that musical metaphors frequently underpin philosophical and literary liberal writing about "moral sentiment" and "sympathetic social relations," the volume also argues that our own understandings of Victorian liberalism have [End Page 137] overlooked the role of aesthetic experience in it (1). As Collins observes, this may partly be because liberal thinkers from Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill were dismissive of music; despite being an accomplished keyboard extemporizer, Mill famously termed musical performance "unproductive labour" (qtd. in Collins 1). But Collins invites us to reconsider the apparent precedence of production and pragmatism over pleasure and beauty in this quotation and in liberal discourse more widely. A running concern of the volume is music's role in the relationship between individualism and control in liberal writing about music and in musical practice, a relationship often organized along class lines. At the heart of the opening section are questions about whom music was for, where and when it was accessed, and what was heard. Erin Johnson-Williams's chapter on music and physical exercise in working-class schools examines musical pedagogy to unpack some of the limitations of liberalism's emphasis on self-development. Describing the mass-choreographed action songs, physical drills, and displays widely used to provide physical education following the 1870 Education Act, she rightly notes their inextricability from militarism and colonialism. She emphasizes, too, the differences between "complex listening" instilled in middle-class children who were taught musical notation and the contrasting emphasis on P. E. for the children taught only drilling and Tonic Sol-fa (19). Such concerns are picked up in a chapter on music education and choral singing in pauper schools, asylums, and prisons. The physical and mental health benefits of music-making were emphasized, as was its potential to support the development of speech, hearing, and literacy. But music's role in reforming initiatives in institutions typically was framed in the language of utility and trod a narrow line between self-development and control: as Rosemary Golding pithily notes, "Conformity was the route to freedom" (66). Simon McVeigh's chapter on the "Sunday music question" further teases out tensions between individualism and state control: the push (inspired by the Great Exhibition) to make music accessible to workers through Sunday performances was closely linked to non-conformism and tolerance of religious observance; later in the century, it became entwined with aestheticism's valorizing of individualism (40). Yet it was also closely linked to the state's role in determining public good given its interdependence with the development of public parks, promoted as ideal venues for performances that promised physical and spiritual health. A greater sense of music's potential to foster dissent is apparent in two...

Which Button Do I Push? More Thoughts on Resetting Moral Philosophy in the Western Tradition

This article investigates Michael Slote’s call for rebalancing Western moral philosophy by using Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism, as a form of moral sentimentalism. I agree with the need for a correction of the over reliance on reason in Western moral philosophy, but I reject the rational/sentimental dichotomy and focus on the importance of the will. I make use of the important contribution made by Daoism and the conduct concept of wu-wei 無為. I explain the use of wu-wei in Daoist texts as a nominative to denote a type of conduct, as a verb in moral imperatives, and as an aspiration for human moral behavior. I consider how appropriating this concept into Western moral thought offers significant solutions to three seemingly intractable problems: weakness of will, universalization of moral duties, and the conception of life as plagued by moral dilemmas. I conclude that wu-wei is not the result of some experience of alternative consciousness. It is an alternative consciousness that is shown in behavior, but not able to be said in language.

The North-South divide in business leaders' moral sentiment: a problem for global sustainability

The North-South divide in business leaders' moral sentiment: a problem for global sustainability