Sense Of Moral Obligation Research Articles

Fichte’s Practical Response to the Problem of Other Minds

The present paper examines the problem of attributing mental predicates to anyone but myself. Traditionally, this has been a major issue at the intersection of epistemology and ethics, because whether we should consider someone in our moral deliberations is often thought to depend on their cognitive abilities or their capacity for consciousness. For both Kant and Fichte, we have direct moral duties only to other rational beings. The fact that the other is present to us as a representation (for Kant) or as a Not-I that is posited in opposition to the I (for Fichte) threatens our supposed moral obligations to them and risks a form of metaphysical solipsism and moral egoism. The bindingness of interpersonal obligations depends on overcoming the separation between me and other persons. It will be shown that in order to establish the other as a morally considerable being, Fichte reverses the direction of implication: I do not derive my moral duties from others’ personhood; rather, others’ personhood follows from my immediate sense of moral obligation toward them. The way that the problem of other minds is posed presupposes that the only appropriate answer would be a series of propositions that establishes the existence of other morally considerable beings outside of myself. The immediate moral feeling of considerability, however, is not a proposition. It will be argued that Fichte thus provides a radically different alternative to Kant’s approach. The problem of other minds is not answered or solved but is rather dispelled in Fichte’s philosophy by the feeling of moral obligation and the recognition of others as the object of our obligations.

Correlation between sustainability education and engineering students’ attitudes towards sustainability

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of a sustainable development course on the beliefs, attitudes and intentions of a cohort of engineering students in a university in Miri, Malaysia, towards sustainability.Design/methodology/approachQuestionnaire survey was conducted among the cohort of students encompassing the three facets mentioned.FindingsThe respondents expressed low to medium agreement towards all the survey items related to beliefs, attitudes and intentions. A sense of moral obligation towards sustainability is linked to higher sustainability awareness, willingness to safeguard sustainability and a sense of responsibility towards sustainable development. The respondents were generally perceived to have fundamental knowledge of sustainable development.Research limitations/implicationsThis study shows that a sustainable development course called Engineering Sustainable Development offered in a university in Miri, produced positive impacts on the beliefs, attitudes and intentions of the engineering students towards sustainable development. Sustainable development courses are generally instrumental to impart the value and practices of sustainability among university students.Originality/valueAs limited correlational studies on whether sustainable development courses effectively shape the beliefs and attitudes of students have been previously conducted, this study provides insight into the effectiveness of one of such courses and how the course can be further improved to enhance its effectiveness.

The influence of Vietnamese consumers’ altruistic values on their purchase of energy efficient appliances

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how consumers’ altruistic values influence their personal norms, environmental attitudes, subjective norms and perceived barriers, all of which in turn influence their pro-environmental behaviour (i.e. the purchase of energy efficient household appliances).Design/methodology/approachThis research follows a hypothetic-deductive approach. A unique conceptual model examines the role of consumers’ altruistic values in relation to their environmentally responsible purchase behaviour. Structured questionnaires were administered to randomly selected Vietnamese consumers who visited busy electronics and appliance specialist stores, which yielded 682 usable responses.FindingsStructural equation modelling revealed that consumers’ altruistic values tend to positively influence their personal norms, environmental attitudes, subjective norms and mitigate their perceived barriers in relation to the purchase of energy efficient appliances.Practical implicationsMarketers, policymakers and sustainability campaigners should develop relevant communication and education programmes that emphasise the importance of purchasing energy efficient appliances for the environment and society, arousing consumers’ sense of moral obligation and societal responsibility to purchase such products. They should also provide a convenient and easily accessible shopping environment for consumers.Originality/valueThis research makes an important contribution by presenting and testing a new altruistic-values-based model that seeks to understand consumers’ environmentally responsible purchase behaviour. This model could serve as a blueprint for future studies in the domain of pro-environmental behaviour, especially those in emerging markets.

The practice of burden sharing in European crisis management operations

ABSTRACTIf a European organisation decides to deploy a military force in Mali or a police mission in Afghanistan, member states probably believe that collective security is a public good that benefits them all. But who will lead the mission? Who will staff it? Who will pay for it? Who will risk casualties? While rational-choice theorists expect little burden sharing, constructivists expect a great deal more insofar as normative pressures are brought to bear on governments. The problem is that it is hard to find countries that systematically eschew their responsibilities or, contrariwise, systematically contribute their fair share out of a sense of moral obligation. In this article, we analyse burden sharing as an anchoring practice, shedding light on the social logic of burden sharing rather than abstract interests or norms. Established after the end of the Second World War, the field of European security has given birth to a “community of security practice” around the more or less routine task of determining national contributions to crisis management operations. Based on interviews with practitioners from the UK, France, Germany, Norway and Ireland, we analyse the impact of intersubjectivity, power and strategic culture on the practice of burden sharing.

Pad (moralnih) vrednosti u kontekstu ego ideala i ideal ega

All conclusions about some psychological characteristics or content must derive from relations of social, or better yet, epochal changes and structure they create. General agreement - admittedly biased and without access to a constant fact which is not close to any transitional movements - that the times are unstable - does not end with a precise understanding of how much would that instability reflect on the formation of a stable character. It could be said that this particular level of structuration, which connects 'the external' and 'the internal', is consistently absent in most theories. This especially applies to our central self, our consciousness, the authoritative part of us that sets standards and has been wrongly equated with universal truths, general principles and something that is considered to be common to all people. All complexity of formation of the super­ego, as the lastly formed instance that is also responsible for the sense of duty or the sense of moral obligation, has always been a result of the current form of structuration and has always been realized, more or less, as a distorted memory of certain, quite determined, events that a subject was overwhelmed with. If we listen to our own tendencies toward instability, we will not fall into the trap which is often present when describing ourselves, i.e. the belief that we have 'a real self', common to all human beings, whose requests are more important than requests of all others. However, outside of dynamic psychology, it would be difficult to understand how Lacan's 'split entity' could ever have 'a real self' whose requests are, especially concerning morality, more important than all other requests. Human nature has most easily been introduced into the norm by those ideals that had insisted on denial, and are located in the ego ideal. When 'ideals' moved, usually behind a screen of freedom and urge for individualization, the pleasure returned to nature in the form of ego ideals that knew the answer to the question, 'What is good for a man's life?' It is, as a reality principle, located in egocentric context, but no longer as an individual excess, but rather as a general, universal truth. Individualism, as the supreme value, has allowed different people to keep different views on what is a good life. While the ego ideal extolled people to make a compromise in which, of course, they had to forgo nature for the sake of culture, ideal ego approves all bypasses of the law if it is good for the subject. It could almost be said that the system of ego ideal, which is valued less and less, makes values as they are. There is no degradation whatsoever because cancelling of differences and boundaries leads to uniformity where the difference between the right and wrong is reduced to personal good. 'An inner voice' that dictates duties to the subject and indicates where good and evil are in opposition as pure or impure, was suspended. Ideal ego is not an ally of the law because it does not care for the subject's well-being. Unlike it, the ego ideal was giving satisfaction by its realization. No matter how strange it might seem, the highest value in a man (moral values) is most deeply associated with the lowest, with his pure nature. Therefore, it is difficult, if not impossible, to answer the question, 'What is my true self?' to a man who wonders what it is human nature. For psychoanalysis, it is hard to accept that naive 'clear understanding of self' and own values, which starts from Plato. And that was particularly difficult when, instead of compensated narcissism in the ego ideal, he continued his life in the ideal ego.

The Sacrosanctity of the Holocaust and its Influence on Judaism and the State of Israel

The Holocaust maintains a status of inviolability in the Christian religious public sphere and also the mainstream media. The scale, gravity and sheer atrocity of the Holocaust still commands a response. The article argues that questions demanded by the Holocaust of the Christian church and the free world’s passivity in the face of genocide, led to a Christian support for the State of Israel driven by guilt and a sense of moral obligation which side-lined the impact of the State on the Palestinian people. With the Israel-Palestine conflict in its seventh decade, the imperative to overcome the hegemony of Holocaust memory is more urgent than ever. Seventy years after the Holocaust, its legacy in public and theological memory dominates questions of Judaism within the polity and the State of Israel. Two legal cases, which attracted media attention, illustrate how Holocaust memory is evoked in response to questions of Jewish practice in the European polity. Two further examples demonstrate how the pernicious influence of Holocaust memory and rhetoric colour responses to criticism of the State of Israel.

Political Capital, Everyday Politics and Moral Obligations: Understanding the Political Strategies of Various Elites and the Poor in Kyrgyzstan

Using the Bourdieusian framework to analyse the nature of social stratification in rural Kyrgyzstan, this article examines how local politics is strategised by different groups in the social field. The article suggests two modifications to the Bourdieusian framework to reflect better the nature of local politics. First, despite lacking significant capital holdings, poor groups undertake everyday resistance and mediated politics. Second, intellectual and traditional elites engage in the politics of ‘doing the right thing’, motivated by a sense of moral obligation. The article provides a critical challenge to the concept of clan and elite-led politics which is often used to explain events in Central Asia.

The value of employment for people living with spinal cord injury in Norway

The purpose of this article is to examine the value of employment for people living with spinal cord injury in Norway. The main focus in the 31 interviews dealt with general perceptions of integration and participation. The value of employment was a major theme, primarily described by the participants in terms of personal and social identity in interaction with others, as a hegemonic social norm and a sense of moral obligation to contribute to society. The value of meaningful regular jobs – in contrast to government projects jobs or routine jobs – was emphasized.

Validating the Measurement of Components of Commitment in a Portuguese Sample

This study aimed at adapting and validating the Measurement of Components of Commitment scale (MCC; Johnson et al. in J Marriage Fam 61:160–177, 1999) in a sample of 335 Portuguese individuals, varying in sexual orientation and type of romantic relationship (single, civil union, married). Results suggest adequate construct validity and reliability. Principal axis factoring and confirmatory factorial analysis supported Johnson et al. (1999) proposed tripartite structure: personal commitment referring to positive feelings towards the partner (three factors); moral commitment referring to a sense of moral obligation to maintain the relationship (three factors); structural commitment referring to the perception of external barriers preventing relationship termination (four factors). Convergent validity results further suggest the MCC’s distinctiveness regarding other measures of commitment, by showing personal, but not moral or structural, commitment, to correlate with the Investment Model Scale (Rusbult et al. in Personal Relationships 5:357–387, 1998), defining commitment as a unitary construct pertaining a general long-term orientation and intent to persist in the relationship, and psychological attachment towards the partner. Finally, the MCC proved sensible across different types of romantic relationship, cohabitation status and relationship duration, further extending the scale’s original results and evidences on construct validity. We discuss MCC’s relevance to academics and professionals studying romantic relationships.

The Complex Climate Change Incentives of China and the United States

It is increasingly clear that the world would be better off with an international agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions. What remains poorly understood is that the likely costs and benefits of emissions controls are highly variable across nations. Most important, prominent projection suggest that the world's leading emitters - the United States and China - have weak incentives to participate in an agreement that would be optimal from the standpoint of the world. The first problem is that any significant emissions effort would probably be exceedingly expensive for both nations. The second problem is that on prominent projections, the United States and China are unlikely to be the most serious losers from climate change. There are two ways to eliminate the resulting obstacle to an international agreement. The first is through altering the perceived cost-benefit analysis for both countries. The second is through an understanding that both nations, and the United States in particular, are under a moral obligation not to inflict serious harm on the highly vulnerable citizens of Africa, India, and elsewhere. Existing proposals for unilateral action on the part of the United States seem to stem from an unruly mixture of confusion, hope, and a sense of moral obligation. There are also interesting differences between the situations of the two leading emitters: Because China is much poorer and has much lower per capita emissions, it is especially difficult to interest China in taking aggressive steps to reduce its emissions.

Nie Wieder: Group‐Based Emotions for In‐Group Wrongdoing Affect Attitudes toward Unrelated Minorities

This article focuses on the effects of group‐based emotions for in‐group wrongdoing on attitudes towards seemingly unrelated groups. Two forms of shame are distinguished from one another and from guilt and linked to positive and negative attitudes towards an unrelated minority. In Study 1 (N = 203), Germans' feelings of moral shame—arising from the belief that the in‐group's Nazi past violates an important moral value—are associated with increased support for Turks living in Germany. Image shame—arising from a threatened social image—is associated with increased social distance. In Study 2 (N = 301), Britons' emotions regarding atrocities committed by in‐group members during the war in Iraq have similar links with attitudes towards Pakistani immigrants. We extend the findings of Study 1 by demonstrating that the effects are mediated by a sense of moral obligation and observed more strongly when the unrelated group is perceived as similar to the harmed group. Guilt was unrelated to any outcome variable across both studies. Theoretical and practical implications about the nature of group‐based emotions and their potential for affecting wider intergroup relations are discussed.

PC-FACS

PC-FACS

Environmental Corporate Social Responsibility and the Carbon Economy: A Case for CSR, the Triple Bottom Line and Obliquity

Expenditure in pursuit of the goals of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is increasingly compatible with profit-maximisation. The benefits of adopting CSR can have significant advantages for both shareholders and the environment, particularly when undertaken voluntarily. But another factor in favour of CSR is the oblique pressures brought to bear from a sense of moral obligation, a more ethical approach, sweeping into boardrooms. Obliquity may achieve even more than direct measures.

‘You don't have to be black skinned to be black’: Indigenous young people's bodily practices

In contemporary Western societies, disciplinary and normalising technologies function to create a sense of moral obligation within each individual to monitor and regulate the body in terms of health, including diet and exercise. The settler/Aboriginal experience in Australia provides an example of the ways in which biopolitics has operated at a population level for all Australians and in specific ways for Indigenous bodies. This study sought to explore the perceptions of a group of urban Indigenous young people regarding their views of their bodies in the context of health and physical activity. Using the lens of biopolitics, complemented by post-colonial theory, this paper will draw attention to the ways in which historical and current discourses around Indigenous health might illustrate biopolitical technologies of power whilst also highlighting the ways in which Indigenous young people have navigated both disciplinary and normalising regimes. Fourteen participants (six male and eight female) were interviewed seven times over two and a half years using mapping, photos and drawing as stimuli. Data were analysed both thematically and through a process of discourse analysis with a view to explore the ways in which participants negotiated discursive constructions of the body, particularly notions of self-governance. It appeared that the young people engaged with, were ambivalent to, contested and resisted discourses around ‘proper’ bodily appearance, the obligation to ‘work’ on their bodies, their perceptions of an ideal body, their negotiation of an authentic ‘black’ body and the ways in which they used their bodies to perform or achieve. The voices of the young people illustrate these themes. This research contributes significantly to the modest body of physical education and health literature from the perspectives of Indigenous young people. It raises questions about the impact of normalising discourses on Indigenous young people and in particular the ways in which those who resist them might be positioned.

Green Marketing: A Start to Environmental Safety

The world is developing significantly with huge industrialization all around and leaving behind a curse to the nature. People all around the globe are now aware about the environmental depletion which the industrialists have been serving along with the bundle of utilities. Newspapers, magazines and all media are also now a days enhancing consumer’s attention towards the environmental effects a product may have. This problem, thus, being not of a nation but of the whole globe, has increased the need of the marketer to focus upon. In order to survive in such an aware market, every marketer has to imperatively focus upon the green marketing. There is nothing new in the green product and green marketing but it only cares for the environment. Environment friendly products/raw mate-rials are the demand for both real consumers as well as the industrial buyers. Green marketing is a global concern and it is going to have a better future ahead. It can most profitably be used as a growth opportunity if the lag behinds are eliminated. The most important factor is to understand the consumer’s perception about the environment and to develop a better sense of moral obligation in every citizen.

Return: The Photographic Archive and Technologies of Indigenous Memory

This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photographic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances – especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultural protocols that have moved far beyond legal provisions for protecting intellectual property. Experiments with new digital tools attempt to understand and balance the role of photographs of Aboriginal people within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. However, cultural protocols rely significantly upon representations of “remote” Aboriginal communities in northern Australia that emphasize difference and reify practices that may in fact be fluid, and overlap with Western values. In the aftermath of colonialism, photographs are important to Aboriginal communities, especially in southern Australia, not merely as an extension of tradition, but also in the context of colonial dispossession and loss. As a form of Indigenous memory the photographic archive may address the exclusions and dislocations of the recent past, recovering missing relatives and stories, and revealing a history of photographic engagement between colonial photographers and Indigenous subjects.

Allied health professionals' intention to work for the National Health Service: a study of stayers, leavers and returners

While there has been a recent squeeze on staff costs, it continues to be important to offer graduating clinical staff National Health Service (NHS) employment in order to maintain the long-term strength of the service. In addition, the experiences of the Canadian nursing profession suggest that complacency about an improving recruitment situation can lead to problems. Consequently, the objective of this study was to identify what influences allied health professionals' (AHPs) intention to work for the NHS. A postal survey was sent to members of four Allied Health Professions equally (N = 4800), targeting Stayers in, Leavers from, and Returners to, the NHS. One thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine questionnaires were returned giving an overall response rate of 40%. Stayers' intention to remain in the NHS was influenced by continuing professional development opportunities, confidence that they can find NHS work, commitment to their profession, a sense of moral obligation and a belief that other people important to them think it is a good idea. Returners' intention is influenced by similar factors as Stayers. Leavers are influenced by similar factors as Stayers/Returners but to a lesser extent. The study shows that perceptions of various NHS work characteristics, which lead to reasonably positive attitudes towards the NHS, do not necessarily translate into intention to work for it. The study also shows that intention to work for the NHS is not solely dependent on perceptions of NHS jobs and that career-decision-making is a social process, with the opinions of people who are important to AHPs also influencing career decisions.

What’s the Matter with Footnotes?

Should graduate studentsand even many professorsreally be trying to solve the world’s problems before they know enough about their own discipline? Mark C. Taylor disparages academic specialization as “more and more about less and less,” as if specialization requires small-mindedness and lack of intellectual ambition. But specialization is not always-already narrowness; if it were, then the academic collaboration that Taylor extols would entail locking several blinkered professors in a room and hoping they come up with answers to global problems. Could they even communicate with one another in mutually comprehensible terms? If they could, then they would not be what Taylor says they are. If scholars are to band together and use their various forms of expertise to fight, for example, climate change and international conflict, those individual scholars need expertise in their fields in the first place. It is the very nature of “expertise in their fields” that requires further attention. Disciplinary boundaries are problematic and, perhaps increasingly, restricting, but they also serve purposes. Disciplinary norms exist for reasons: they tell us what questions to ask, what methods to use, and what counts as evidence. In Stanley Fish’s characterization, “I am professionally correct, not out of a sense of moral obligation or choice of values … but out of a sense that the structure of a fully articulated profession, be it negligence law or literary criticism, is such that those who enter its precincts will find that the basic decisions, about where to look, what to do, and how to do it, have already been made” (Fish 1995, 44). The average academic professional is not—and should not be—interested in revolutionizing the profession but in simply practicing it, doing what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science,” which “does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none” (Kuhn 1996, 52). Scholars within disciplines apply the latest techniques and theories to the extant data. But it is not clear what will constitute “normal science” under Taylor’s new academic regime. Taylor’s own work is innovative and multidisciplinary in the best ways. His work is distinguished by its range, depth, and its embrace of past, present, and future. He knows this of himself: “As I move from theology to philoso

農村地域における景観形成に関わる住民の認識と行動の構造化

Today, small-scale landscape, such as space use or design of the ground is entrusted to the inhabitants. In this situation, to enhance landscape perception of people in the area is demanded for advancing landscape preservation and creation whose nucleus is inhabitants there. So, the first thing we need is to grasp perceptional structure of inhabitants, and to make situations and thoughts of the people who form rural landscape clear. In this study, therefore, it is tried to grasp the Major psychological factors of inhabitants action toward the landscape integration and structurize the factor for Kaneyama-town, Yamagata, where worked on the landscape integration. First of all, I tried setting of a hypothesis structure model of the Major psychological factors of the action toward the landscape integration. Next, I made a questionnaire according to the model, and carried it out for 300 people. From analysis of the findings, the relationship between the factors of sense of values agreement, attachment and sense of moral obligation and the action became clarified. Unlike the hypothesis model, the inhabitants action toward the landscape integration was directly influenced by the perception that was formed from sense of values agreement for the policies and sense of moral duty based on regionalism.

Rational choice theory and moral action

In his article 'The Case for a Multiple Utility Function' (Economics and Philosophy, 2, 159-83), Etzioni took the view that moral acts are qualitatively different from acts aimed at the satisfaction of desires. He introduced moral preferences and argued that these cannot be traded off against non-moral preferences and that, therefore, the quest for want-satisfaction and the sense of moral obligation are best kept apart. Acceptance of this view would lead to the practice of multiple utility functions. My aim is to show that the idea of a moral preference is only feasible as a meta-preference, and that the art of meta-ranking is practised when ranking incomparable preferences.