Socio-moral Issues Research Articles

The Need for Phronesis

AbstractThis chapter explores the state of public and academic discourse about socio-moral issues elicited by the Covid-19 pandemic, through two informal case studies of Facebook statuses and columns in two leading UK newspapers. The Facebook statuses tended to focus on performance virtues as remedies rather than moral virtues, whereas a survey among the general public highlighted the role of moral virtues. Divisions of opinion among columnists in the Guardian and Daily Telegraph turned out to be about different prioritisations of moral virtues rather than a trade-off between virtues and economic values. However, missing from all those discourses was attention to the meta-virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom, as an adjudicator of virtue conflicts. Recent psychological work on wisdom does not fully ameliorate this lacuna; the paper argues that a retrieval of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis is needed to help us make balanced moral decisions.

Women and Representation: Cross-Party Collaboration in the Australian Federal Parliament

The Parliament of Australia has been host to a rare phenomenon of ‘cross-party collaboration’ (CPC), in which politicians work together across party lines by co-sponsoring a bill or voting together in a conscience vote. CPC points to gaps in political parties' platforms, leading individual politicians to seek representation of issues outside party divisions. This article explores the phenomenon of CPC and outlines different ways it has been used by politicians. As will be demonstrated, CPC in the Australian context is relatively gendered as mainly women politicians have used it to advance socio-moral issues, suggesting an alternative style of representation.

ATTITUDES ABOUT SOCIO-MORAL ISSUES AMONG RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR YOUTH

Recent headlines suggest that Americans, and American youth in particular, are growing more liberal in their attitudes about social and moral issues. Do these trends suggest that the oft discussed “culture wars” are nearing an end? We examine this possibility by asking whether younger generations of religious and secular Americans do indeed espouse more liberal attitudes about sociomoral issues than their counterparts in older generations. We focus specifically on differences within and across religious groups in attitudes about four issues: abortion, same-sex marriage, stem cell research, and the environment. We are especially interested in comparing generational differences in attitudes about high profile, “old-line” wedge issues (abortion and same-sex marriage) in the culture wars with newer, lower profile issues (stem cell research and the environment). Using the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey, we find that religious youth are generally not more liberal than older religious individuals.

The Disappearing God Gap? Religion in the 2008 Presidential Election

This book is the result of a research collaboration of six leading scholars of American religion and politics, each of whom focuses on a different aspect of the complicated relationship between these two social spheres. As such, it offers a richer, more nuanced treatment of religion's relevance to politics than most other works of its kind. The book's focus on religion in the 2008 presidential campaign makes it an especially timely publication. After “moral values” discourses facilitated the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush, scholars should be especially eager to learn whether religious factors played a significant role in the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the American presidency. Smidt and colleagues use the 2004 presidential election as a benchmark of sorts to frame their analysis of the 2008 campaign and its results. They acknowledge that the Bush–Cheney ticket's success in mobilizing people of faith across the religious spectrum fueled discussion of whether a “God gap” was cleaving the American electorate. But could such a voting gap hold in the face of concerted efforts by Democratic candidates to “get religion,” or displacement of socio-moral issues from the public agenda by the 2008 economic crisis, or fraying/diversification of the Religious Right? It is the authors’ mission to answer precisely this question.

Conceitos de didática: depoimentos de docentes universitários da área de Educação Física

In the research it was investigated how university teachers in Physical Education conceptualize didactic. There was a reviewing in the literature addressing history and conceptualizations of teaching. Using the technique of interview and qualitative analysis, it was collected and analyzed the evidence of thirteen university professors from the master's degree in Physical Education. With the method of historical approach it was found that the didactic teaching has articulated the educational trends: traditional, new school, technical and progressive and is conceptualized as a discipline, field of study and teaching´s technique. As technique it can be understood in the broad sense referring to the procedures of bringing somebody to learn something, and towards educational shows the procedures coupled with socio-moral issues. The evidence collected showed that professors believe the teaching in the broad sense. It follows that the formation of the professors was addressed only as a didactic approach to teaching, despite its historical trajectory and pedagogical practices are directly linked to the direction of education.

Moral Judgment Among Alcohol-Other Drug Dependent Persons in Recovery

The moral judgment of 114 male alcohol-other drug dependent persons in various stages of recovery was tested by Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT). Two hypotheses were tested: (a) the moral judgment of participants will be positively correlated with recovery variables such as sobriety period, holding a job, participation in NA, ending criminal behavior and (b) participants treated in a unit that emphasizes sociomoral issues will present higher levels of moral judgment. Neither of the hypotheses were corroborated. A noticeable result is that the moral judgment of the participants was found to correspond to that of the lower age norm group. Several possible explanations for the results are offered, alongside implications for treatment and for further research.

Religion and Culture in Tension: The Abortion Discourses of the U. S. Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention

Sociologists increasingly emphasize the systemic openness of religious organizations to their environment. Mark Kowalewski argues that the Catholic church, for example, engages in a “limited accommodation” with the broader culture in order to “rein in the forces of change and to keep modernizing elements under the control of the existing power elite.” Others suggest that the church manages its multiple identities across diverse audiences by articulating culturally adaptive discourses. Nancy Ammerman documents the responsiveness of religious organizations to political currents by demonstrating how doctrinal and ideological upheavals within the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980's resulted in a conservative resurgence within the organization and a new administration committed to taking an activist public stance on various sociomoral issues, including abortion.

Religion and Culture in Tension: The Abortion Discourses of the U.S. Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention

Sociologists increasingly emphasize the systemic openness of religious organizations to their environment. Mark Kowalewski argues that the Catholic church, for example, engages in a “limited accommodation” with the broader culture in order to “rein in the forces of change and to keep modernizing elements under the control of the existing power elite.” Others suggest that the church manages its multiple identities across diverse audiences by articulating culturally adaptive discourses. Nancy Ammerman documents the responsiveness of religious organizations to political currents by demonstrating how doctrinal and ideological upheavals within the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980's resulted in a conservative resurgence within the organization and a new administration committed to taking an activist public stance on various sociomoral issues, including abortion.

Understanding children and ourselves: Teachers' reflections on social development in the classroom

Teachers' reflections are presented on the changes occurring while fostering children's social competence and skills in an intervention program. Classroom discussion on interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution was emphasized as a constructive teaching strategy in promoting children's social growth. The curriculum themes focused on friendship, the school community, and the family. The focus is on how the teachers perceived changes in their knowledge of students' social growth and their own teaching skills and attitudes towards working on sociomoral issues in the classroom. In addition, their reflections on changes in the students' social interactions and sense of classroom community are included.

The Mood of America in the 1980s: Some Further Observations on Sociomoral Issues

The entry of the New Christian Right into the American political arena in the 1 980s provoked a number of scholarly controversies including a debate about the orientation of Americans to politicized sociomoral issues. Following a review of the debate, a typology of political arenas is proposed. The typology generalizes Converse's (1964) analysis of belief systems in mass publics. The hypothesis that the American political arena in the 1 980s contained one of the types, a quasi-ideological politics of sociomoral issues, is tested with data from the 1980 and 1988 General Social Surveys. The hypothesis is not rejected.

Socio-Moral Issues and Recent Presidential Elections

The contention that the New Christian Right has had no influence on recent presidential elections is examined with reference to the relationship between attitudes toward social issues and voters' choices. Data from a national sample (1980 election) and from a sample drawn in Muncie, Indiana"Middletown "-(1984 election) indicate that respondents' orientations to social issues favored Reagan at the polls.

Aesthetics East and West

Van Meter Ames, in his review of Essays in East-West Philosophy, has remarked that the 1949 Philosophers' Conference unhappily neglected any serious consideration of aesthetics East or West.' As a member of that Conference, I must agree with Ames that aesthetics was neglected in 1949 and that such neglect was unfortunate, particularly for those who do their best to keep abreast of twentieth-century times. It is to be hoped, of course, that the next Conference will broaden out not only geographically but also problematically, i.e., with respect to the range of problems considered central to the philosopher's quest. If philosophy is concerned, ultimately, with the nature of man and his relationship to the world in which he lives, then man's drive toward aesthetic expression, being as basic and as ineradicable as man's drive toward intellectual understanding, moral evaluation, or social reconstruction, must be an object of serious concern for the philosopher. It may be granted that a total approach to philosophy is, geo-culturally, an East-West approach; but within the framework of this total approach the world must be viewed not merely as something to be known and shared, but also as something to be expressed artistically and enjoyed or responded to aesthetically. What man is, how man views his world, and what man is spiritually capable of achieving-all of these are embodied not only in the Ethics of Spinoza, the Principles of Euclid, and the Analects of Confucius, but also in the sonnets of Shakespeare, the quartets of Bart6k, and the paintings of the Southern Sung artists. Observations of this kind should be so obvious as to be quite unnecessary. And yet, although there are a number of volumes devoted to the history of Western aesthetic theory, most historians of general philosophy concern themselves only with epistemological, metaphysical, and socio-moral issues. Indeed, one of the few philosophical works in English which is basically historical in its orientation and which includes, as a major part, aesthetic considerations, is the volume by Schoen, Schrickel, and Ames entitled Understanding the World.2 But even here we find what actually amounts to three