Moral Space Research Articles

Behold a Pale Horse: Horrors and Heritages of Famine

Behold a Pale Horse: Horrors and Heritages of Famine1 Cormac Ó Gráda (bio) In late January 1849, a woman in her sixties was bludgeoned to death in her own home in Rooskagh, not far from Athlone in the Irish midlands.2 Margaret Kelly, née Doran, was by all accounts an unpleasant woman. She was ‘known to be “snug”, miserly, and, as all misers are, avaricious’. It was not the land that made her ‘snug’; she and her husband, who were childless and who seemingly did not get along, held a modest four acres from an absentee clergyman-middleman, enough to graze two cows. She made her money from what was known in ‘indigenous parlance’ as gombeening, charging eight shillings a year for every twenty shillings she lent, ‘and that on solid security’. Margaret’s murderers were her husband’s brother and his sixteen-year-old son, Pat and Michael Kelly. Pat, who was destitute, had often sought her help, which she had refused, against her husband’s wishes. After Pat had lost his home and ‘the workhouse stared him in the face … he was heard say that he would murder her (the deceased) rather than suffer more want’. The Kellys’ servant girl, related to Margaret but seemingly intimate with her husband, and also a moneylender, was out with the cows when she saw young Michael Kelly watching from a hillock near the house in the pouring rain. Suspecting that he was stealing cabbage, she returned home, only to discover a lifeless and battered Margaret stretched on the floor. Pat and Michael absconded as soon as they realised that they were under suspicion, leaving no traces, but in possession of £12 belonging to Margaret and £30 belonging to the servant girl; ‘and it is to be supposed that with the sum of money they have thus murderously acquired, they are now on their way to America’3. The story of Margaret Kelly, murdered in broad daylight, has both a local and a universal resonance for students of famine. Historians of the Irish Famine will note the timing of this tragedy – nearly a year and a half after the Famine had been declared over in London.4 They will also note how the perpetrators had used emigration, which they could not have afforded [End Page 134] otherwise, as an escape route from the law and from famine. This is a reminder too that the Irish economy at the time of the Famine, though backward, was monetised: the murdered woman was a moneylender. In those years, there were both those who lent money exclusively, like Margaret Kelly, and those, like Darby Skinadre, William Carleton’s fictional ‘miser’ in The Black Prophet, who sold oats and oatmeal on credit. Like Kelly and Skinadre, gombeenmen were unloved, even though their rapacity may have saved some lives in a way that disciples of Adam Smith would have approved of. They were no help, however, to those ‘walking skeletons’ on the public works in Mayo in August 1846, just as famine was beginning to bite, who had not been paid for three weeks, and on whom ‘the gombeen people had stopped their supplies’5. Scholars of famines more generally will see the story of Margaret Kelly as another illustration of what Breandán Mac Suibhne, following Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, has characterised as the Grey Zone inhabited by those who live through or succumb to famines. For Levi, the Grey Zone is the moral space inhabited by victims and persecutors. One must not forget, naturally, who or what forced them into that space. Given the risks involved, in order for her business to survive Margaret Kelly may have been forced (perhaps this is being charitable) to charge high interest rates and to reject the business of those who had no prospect of repaying. But, surely, she could have made an exception for her own brother-in-law? Unfortunately, tales of intra-familial tension and the sundering of family ties are not uncommon during famines. Fast forward to the Leningrad blockade of the Second World War. From an analysis of a large number of diaries kept in the city during the blockade – an unrivalled and unique...

Maintaining the Carceral Echo Chamber: Tensions Within the Anti-Trafficking Movement in Canada

The anti-trafficking movement in Canada has grown rapidly since thelate 2000s, branding itself as a feminist human rights-based effort to eliminatehuman trafficking and taken up by the Government of Canada to position itselfas a benevolent leader on the international stage. Focusing on the membershipof an anti-trafficking coalition in Toronto, Canada, this article explores how themovement creates moral spaces that validate a wide range of anti-traffickingefforts. In unpacking how tensions between members are navigated throughthe suppression of direct conflict and an ethos of collaboration, it demonstrateshow carceral feminist approaches to imagining and eliminating humantrafficking continue to remain dominant despite a growth in the efforts ofindividual members to promote harm reduction and reduce the criminalizationof marginalized communities.

Global health diplomacy and North Korea in the COVID-19 era

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed increasing global inequality in responding to the issues of health. How do we resolve the tension between normative concerns for global responsibility and strategic concerns for national interest in facilitating health aid to vulnerable populations in low-income countries in the COVID-19 era? This article presents global health diplomacy as a conceptual framework that could overcome the dichotomy of humanitarianism and international politics, using health aid to North Korea during COVID-19 as a case-study. Health is a critical component of human dignity and can be a normative motivation for cooperation beyond sovereign borders. However, health is also an important element of national interest and can be a strategic motivation for transnational cooperation. The overlap between the moral and rational spaces in global health diplomacy demonstrates how COVID-19 assistance to North Korea's vulnerable population is in the enlightened self-interest of donors to prevent resurgences of new COVID-19 variants. Moreover, this framework imbues all parties, including aid recipients such as North Korea, with the global cooperative responsibility to address health. In this sense, global health diplomacy can reframe the tensions between humanitarianism and politics, morality and rationality, and cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from antithetical to complementary.

Overlapping consensus in the space of public morality (on John Rawls’s political constructivism

The article is focused on the overlapping consensus model in the space of public morality and possibilities of its practical realization for the development of public consent. In his search for reliable arrangement of public unity John Rawls defines comprehensive moral doctrines and political doctrines as beliefs within private and public spheres, respectively. Overlapping consensus provides public consent in the public space (concerning political doctrines), beyond beliefs of private sphere (comprehensive moral doctrines). Moral values of overlapping consensus form the sphere of public morality, effective in definite historic democratic society. Rawls called it a well-ordered society. Definite historic character of a well-ordered society is predetermined by corresponding background culture. The latter can be implied as the experience of citizenship, conditioned by peculiarities of social institutions of Modernity. It is immediate immanent axiological accompaniment of the public life, background one concerning explicit ethical normative programs and strategies of acting by individuals in public life, directed on optimization of public interaction. Moral values within overlapping consensus are minimalistic (because of their set able to unite all members of a society is the basic one for all of them, irrespectively to their comprehensive moral doctrines, i.e. poor in content, laconic one), contextual (module/ flexible, relevant to public spiritual requests, transforming during the search for integrity minimum) and universal in their imperative power. Overlapping consensus makes impossible transformation of any comprehensive moral doctrine into the regulative idea of public life and set formal horizontal social interaction, which is corrected in real time mode.

Embodying Moral Space: Exploring a Care Ethical Constellation Tool for Moral Deliberation

This paper explores whether and how moral space, as the unfolding of an expressive-collaborative process, can be fostered in a way that engages embodied, affective experiences in relational practices of responsibility. A care ethical constellation is a tool that aims to shed light on relational needs and responsibilities as experienced by participants in an institutional context. We present the theoretical backgrounds of this tool. Then the use of the tool in an eldercare organization is reflected on through a hermeneutical phenomenological analysis. We answer the following questions: (1) How are identities, relationships, and values in this organizational context experienced, as elucidated by the care ethical constellation? (2) Can this care ethical constellation be considered a suitable tool to foster moral space? Our findings show how this tool brought to the fore previously hidden experiences of distance and power struggles between several groups in the organization. It also sheds light on values at stake: a longing for connection and a shared sense of humanness. In the Discussion we look through a lens of “precariousness” to rethink the experience of power struggle, and to deepen our insight into the “political” of a political care ethics. There is a reflection on valuable features, challenges, and requirements concerning this tool for fostering a moral space that productively works with political care ethics in organizations. By inviting participants to share embodied experiences and paying attention to the political hegemonies at play, this approach highlights the embodied dimensions of political care ethics.

3 - Strategic Submission as Resistance? Nabongo Mumia in the Struggle for Post-Colonial Kenya’s Histories

This article pursues the debate on the role that various regional leaders in late pre- to colonial Kenya played in their people’s responses to colonialism and its agents, and the contests for moral historical spaces that have continued to be played out in intellectual and public discourse. Focusing on Nabongo Mumia, the political and cultural figure of the Wanga people in western Kenya, the article examines the fluidity between collaboration and resistance as processes that have been presented mistakenly as dialectical oppositions. Situating my argument within the counter-revisionist trajectory, I demonstrate that the earlier presentation of Nabongo Mumia – and indeed a few other leaders – as a ‘collaborator’ largely simplifies the dilemmas that many a leader were confronted with in the wake of colonial violence, and is used in the current political setup to rationalise deliberate forms of exclusion from central political structures in the country. I further show that for regional leaders in colonial Kenya, strategic submission guided by a variety of legitimate considerations, was often misread as ‘collaboration’, a line that was picked up by earlier Africanist inclined scholars whose nationalistic impulses dr ve them to a search for ‘heroes’, often guided by the matrices of ‘resistance’.

Impoverishing Moral Ecologies

In this paper I consider the notion of “moral ecology” in relation to the social/cultural construction known as “narco-culture.” My claim is that the moral ecology of narco-culture is one that is both destructive and prohibitive of human flourishing. The general idea of a “moral ecology” is that the moral space of human conviviality is not unlike an ecological, or environmental, space—both are constituted by various interdependent relations which, when working harmoniously and in optimal capacity, maintain the overall well-being of its inhabitants (i.e., human agents or the flora and fauna). Within non-human ecosystems, the quality or health of rivers, trees, earth, air, predator-prey relationships, etc., define what Allen Hertzke calls the system’s “carrying capacity.” The carrying capacity refers to what the system can handle while staying balanced and healthy and also indicates the point beyond which the system, if overburdened or degraded, begins to fall apart. In a social setting, the ecology is constituted by moral rules and behaviors, the degradation of which can cause the degradation of the entire system.

Techno-altruism. From cultural conflict to constructive and supportive use of online environments

Abstract Even before the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, the massive use of the digital in everyday life, in the absence of intercultural - media skills, seemed to have fuelled violence, misinformation, ethnocentrisms, prejudices towards the Other (Urry 2000; Appadurai 2005; Couldry 2015; Ziccardi 2016; Europol 2016; SWG 2017, Vox 2018). However, social and digital technology can also be re-thought as a civic and moral space (Silverstone, 2009) able to overcome conflict and polarisation, as a strategic medium to improve social policies and the management of migration flows, actively involving host institutions and communities (Buoncompagni, D’Ambrosi 2020). The panorama of humanitarian aid, in particular, i.e. that typology of interventions aimed at helping populations affected by war events or natural disasters, is completely changing in the way of operating within the world of international migration precisely thanks to the digital infrastructure (IOM 2018). Apps, virtual itinerant maps and self-narratives via social networks, sharing GPS coordinates of the safest routes among migrants, increasing numbers of socially engaged indigenous citizens enrolled in online platforms, are just a few examples of how digital media are acquiring a fundamental role within the migration network in hospitality and aid actions (Brunwasser 2015; Buoncompagni 2021. Only by developing the art of solidarity and the ability to communicate and cooperate globally, opening up to the Other, can the “different” relate effectively and productively in digital society (Chen 2005; Bennet 2015). Pitirim A. Sorokin himself, a still prominent figure of 20th century sociology, stated that historical and techno-cultural changes have not always produced positive results within societies, but at times also negative (or more precisely ‘destructive’) ones: individualism, antagonism, excess of technology and rationality, and in particular the fall of the bonds of solidarity towards the different and the loss of the feeling of belonging (Cimagalli 2010; Marletti 2018; Perrotta 2016). But the sociologist also stressed how altruism could be one of the indispensable ingredients of social life. No society can exist without an “altruistic and creative love” that has as its aim the “altruisation” of individuals and social institutions: a complex process/project capable of encompassing the emotional, supra-rational and spiritual aspects of human relationships (including online), starting from the idea that all men can recognise themselves in certain moral principles, eternal and universal (Mangone, 2020). And such a condition could be re-created/supported also through digital tools and exist in online environments, thus trying to extend, on a theoretical level, Sorokin’s attempt to make sociology (also digital, in this case) a “science of altruism” in the post-pandemic era of global interconnectedness.

Mapping Morality: Visible and Invisible Geographies

Issues related to morality have been discussed in the geography literature off and on for the past fifty years. Since morality deals with correctness—right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, or correct vs. incorrect—it is not difficult to understand how these value labels also exist in geography contexts. The geography literature often deals with morality questions in a light or superficial way which leaves geographers and others wondering if there are more value questions we might address in studying human actions and behavior. Three major foci are addressed in this discussion. The first is to explore moral questions geographers might address when looking at cultural behavior, economic development, social policies, allocation of resources, environmental understanding and interpretation of places and landscapes. The second focus is on mapping moralities, including examples of maps that display visible and invisible geographies about moral places and spaces. The third discusses how this moral thread is worthy of further study in many fields of human and human/environmental geography. A greater understanding these threads will strengthen our understanding and appreciation of “why things are the way they are” but also “why we make decisions that we do” at local and global scales.

‘I see it as a privilege to get to know them’. Moral dimensions in teachers’ work with unaccompanied refugee students in Swedish upper secondary school

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the moral dimensions of teachers’ experiences of working with unaccompanied refugee students in language introduction in Swedish upper secondary school. Theoretically, the analysis uses Bauman’s postmodern ethics, focusing on the tension between the social and the moral space in teachers’ encounters with unaccompanied students. The empirical material is derived from interviews with three teachers, and a reflexive interview approach was used. The outcome of the analysis shows that balancing professional and moral responsibilities is a challenge, and also that while teachers strive to see their students as Other in a moral sense, the demands of the profession might get in the way. This aporia of proximity – the insoluble conflict between the social and the moral space – is faced by the teacher as a moral subject, adding complex moral dimensions to teachers’ work with unaccompanied students.

Mapping Muslim Moral Provinces: Framing Feminized Piety of Pakistani Diaspora

Over the last two decades we have seen a proliferation in the number of self-proclaimed Islamic scholars preaching piety to Muslim women. An emerging few of these scholars gaining prominence happen to be women, feminizing what is predominantly a patriarchal domain of dawah (missionary work) and proselytization. Traditionally speaking, Muslim missionaries have never been restricted to a particular moral province, perhaps due to the fact that Islam was never intended as a hierarchical religion with a mosque–state divide. This makes mapping Muslim moral spaces in a hyper-globalized world—one in which shared identities and ideologies transcend territorial boundaries—all the more challenging. Using the firebrand female Muslim tele preacher, Dr. Farhat Hashmi, and her global proselytizing mission (Al-Huda International) as a springboard for discussion, this paper seeks to map out the ways in which modern Muslim women in the post-9/11 British Pakistani diaspora navigate these moral provinces. By juxtaposing the staunchly orthodox impositions of niqab-clad Dr. Hashmi, with the revolt from within Muslim spaces, from practicing, ‘middle-path’ Muslims, this paper critically engages with Saba Mahmood’s concept of the ‘politics of piety’ and its various critiques. In so doing, we reimagine Muslim spaces, as well as the moralization versus multivocality debate surrounding them, and the importance of positioning agency and complex lived realities of women occupying these spaces at the center of our analysis on Muslim moral provinces.

Cognition in moral space: A minimal model

We describe moral cognition as a process occurring in a distinctive cognitive space, wherein moral relationships are defined along several morally relevant dimensions. After identifying candidate dimensions, we show how moral judgments can emerge in this space directly from object perception, without any appeal to moral rules or abstract values. Our reductive “minimal model” (Batterman & Rice, 2014) elaborates Beal’s (2020) claim that moral cognition is determined, at the most basic level, by “ontological frames” defining subjects, objects, and the proper relation between them. We expand this claim into a set of formal hypotheses that predict moral judgments based on how objects are “framed” in the relevant dimensions of “moral space.”

Taking the burden off: a study of the quality of ethics consultation in the time of COVID-19

BackgroundThe quality of ethics consults is notoriously difficult to measure. Survey-based assessments cannot capture nuances of consultations. To address this gap, we conducted interviews with health professionals who requested ethics...

Trauma Informed Ethics Consultation

We argue for the addition of trauma informed awareness, training, and skill in clinical ethics consultation by proposing a novel framework for Trauma Informed Ethics Consultation (TIEC). This approach expands on the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) framework for, and key insights from feminist approaches to, ethics consultation, and the literature on trauma informed care (TIC). TIEC keeps ethics consultation in line with the provision of TIC in other clinical settings. Most crucially, TIEC (like TIC) is systematically sensitive to culture, history, difference, power, social exclusion, oppression, and marginalization. By engaging a neonatal intensive care ethics consult example, we define our TIEC approach and illustrate its application. Through TIEC we argue it is the role of ethics consultants to not only hold open moral spaces, but to furnish them in morally habitable ways for all stakeholders involved in the ethics consultation process, including patients, surrogates, and practitioners.

特征整合与加工深度对道德概念容器隐喻联结的影响

特征整合与加工深度对道德概念容器隐喻联结的影响

How do Expatriate Managers Draw the Boundaries of Moral Free Space in the Case of Guanxi?

This paper explores expatriates’ ethical evaluations of and responses to guanxi in China through the lens of integrative social contracts theory. We conducted in-depth interviews with 14 expatriate managers who had spent, on average, 6.5 years working and living in China. Based on the content analysis of these interviews, we identified two different uses of guanxi: defensive and competitive. In general, the respondents found defensive guanxi moral in the Chinese context, while they considered competitive guanxi immoral. Based on our findings, we identified fair competition as the substantive hypernorm that governed most respondents’ ethical evaluations of guanxi. The study has implications for all scholars who seek to utilize integrative social contracts theory to study the relationship between informal networks and corruption in developing countries.

Animal food products: policy, market and social issues and their influence on demand and supply of meat.

The present paper aims to contribute to the contentious debate regarding the role of meat as part of a sustainable diet. It uses secondary data to examine the patterns of meat consumption across the globe, and drawing on academic and grey literature, it outlines some of the policy, market and social trends and issues influencing demand and supply of meat. It also presents an overview of the scientific evidence base regarding the pros and cons of meat consumption. The results show that consumption patterns are not homogeneous globally, nor across meat types, with overall meat consumption increasing strongly in developing countries but stagnating in developed countries, and demand for poultry increasing in most regions in contrast to beef. They also illustrate the evolving impact of factors such as income on consumption and the increasing impact of non-economic factors, such as social and policy influences relating to health and the environment, on food choice behaviours, to the extent that such behaviours are increasingly entering a moral space. Given the solid scientific evidence that simultaneously substantiates arguments to increase and decrease meat consumption, it is clear that dietary recommendations need to be context-specific. An important part of the context is the strategies being pursued by researchers and supply chain actors, from farmers through to processors, retailers and food service operators, to improve the sustainability credentials of livestock production. As new evidence emerges from such initiatives, the context will change which means that dietary guidelines will require continuous review.

Publicly Funded Health Care for Pregnant Undocumented Immigrants: Achieving Moral Progress Through Overlapping Consensus.

What just societies owe to non-citizen immigrants is a controversial question. This paper considers three accounts of the requirements of distributive justice for non-citizens to determine what they might suggest about the provision of publicly funded health care to pregnant undocumented immigrants. These accounts are compared to locate an overlapping consensus on the duty of the state to provide care to pregnant undocumented immigrants. The aim of this paper is not to take a substantive position on the "right" prenatal policy, but rather to explore the moral space that this issue occupies and suggest that real moral progress can be achieved through the consistent application of shared values.

Clinical pointers from developing self-awareness.

Seven typical developmental steps are described as cardinal changes leading children from implicit embodied self-awareness at birth, self-consciousness by 2 years, and the adoption of an ethical stance toward others by the preschool years (3-5y). This development may be a useful benchmark for clinicians. In this review, some clinical pointers are outlined in relation to each developmental step, but with a particular focus on the testing of self-awareness in children with developmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, and intellectual disability. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: There are seven major steps in early self and social awareness. Clinical pointers related to each of the seven steps are provided.

Moralisierungen in Gastfamilien für unbegleitete Geflüchtete

Im Beitrag werden Gastfamilien für unbegleitete Geflüchtete als moralische Handlungsräume verstanden, an die unterschiedliche Orientierungen der Moralisierung, aber auch moralische Werte herangetragen werden. Es wird gezeigt, dass Gastfamilien verschiedene Funktionen einnehmen, wenn sie den Unbegleiteten als Gast oder Familienmitglied verstehen, und dass dadurch auch differente Orientierungen und Werthaltungen anders bearbeitet werden können. Als sich neuformierender symbolischer Handlungsraum obliegt es den Gastfamilienmitgliedern, ihre Orientierungen und Wertvorstellungen im Rahmen alltäglicher Interaktionen auszuhandeln. Entlang einer qualitativen Einzelfallstudie aus Deutschland wird gezeigt, wie Moralvorstellungen, aber auch die Rolle des Unbegleiteten und die damit einhergehenden Spielräume der Moralisierung situativ und fluide mit verschiedenen Akteuren ausgehandelt werden. Davon ausgehend werden allgemeine Überlegungen zu Beziehungsgestaltungen und Subjektumbildungen im Zusammenhang mit Moral(-isierungen) als kontingente Orientierungen und Praktiken hergeleitet.