scholarly journals No Moral Wiggle Room in an Experimental Corruption Game

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loukas Balafoutas ◽  
Fedor Sandakov ◽  
Tatyana Zhuravleva
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Public Procurement ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Public Official ◽  
Willful Ignorance ◽  
Selfish Behavior ◽  
Information Avoidance ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View

Recent experimental evidence reveals that information is often avoided by decision makers in order to create and exploit a so-called “moral wiggle room,” which reduces the psychological and moral costs associated with selfish behavior. Despite the relevance of this phenomenon for corrupt practices from both a legal and a moral point of view, it has hitherto never been examined in a corruption context. We test for information avoidance in a framed public procurement experiment, in which a public official receives bribes from two competing firms and often faces a tradeoff between maximizing bribes and citizen welfare. In a treatment where officials have the option to remain ignorant about the implications of their actions for citizens, we find practically no evidence of information avoidance. We discuss possible reasons for the absence of willful ignorance in our experiment.

Poetry?

2021 ◽  
pp. 364-380
Author(s):  
Floris Bernard ◽  
Kristoffel Demoen
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
The Difference

This chapter gives an overview of how Byzantines conceptualized “poetry.” It argues that from the Byzantine point of view, poetry only differs from prose in a very formal way, namely that it is written in verse. Both prose and poetry belonged to the category of logoi, the only label that was very frequently used, in contrast to the term “poetry,” which was reserved for the ancient poetry studied at schools. Many authors considered (and exploited) the difference between their own prose texts and poems as a primarily formal one. Nevertheless, poetry did have some functions that set it apart from prose, even if these features are for us less expected. The quality of “bound speech” gained a spiritual dimension, since verse was seen as a restrained form of discourse, also from a moral point of view. Finally, the chapter gives a brief overview of the social contexts for which (learned) poetry was the medium of choice: as an inscription, as paratext in a wide sense, as a piece of personal introspection, as invective, as summaries (often of a didactic nature), and as highly public ceremonial pieces.

A Dialogue on Compassion and Supererogation in Medicine

1995 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Thomasma ◽  
Thomasine Kushner
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View

According to Frankena, “the moral point of view is what Alison Wilde and Heather Badcock did not have.” Most of us, however, are not such extreme examples. We are capable of the moral point of view, but we fail to take the necessary time or make the required efforts. We resist pulling ourselves from other distractions to focus on the plight of others and what we might do to ameliorate their suffering. Perhaps compassion is rooted in understanding what it is that connects us with others rather than what separates us, and rests on developing sufficient awareness, to internalize what our actions, or lack of them, mean in the lives of others.

Justice, Exploitation and the End of Morality

1987 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Small Contribution ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
Moral Assessment

This paper is a small contribution to two large subjects. The first large subject is that of exploitation—what it is for somebody to be exploited, in what ways people can be and are exploited, whether exploitation necessarily involves coercion, what Marx's understanding of exploitation was and whether it was adequate: all these are issues on which I merely touch, at best. My particular concern here is to answer the two questions, whether Marx thought capitalist exploitationunjustand how the answer to that question illuminates Marx's conception of morality in general. The second large subject is that of the nature of morality—whether there are specificallymoralvalues and specifically moral forms of evaluation and criticism, how these relate to our explanatory interests in the same phenomena, what it would be like to abandon the ‘moral point of view’, whether the growth of a scientific understanding of society and ourselves inevitably undermines our confidence in the existence of moral ‘truths’. These again are issues on which I only touch if I mention them at all, but the questions I try to answer are, what does Marx propose to put in the place of moral judgment, and what kind of assessment of the horrors of capitalism does he provide if not a moral assessment?

The Point of Justice

John Rawls ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 148-160
Author(s):  
Rainer Forst
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Luck Egalitarians ◽  
Social Circumstance ◽  
Better Than

John Rawls famously claimed that “the accidents of natural endowment and the contingencies of social circumstance” are “arbitrary from a moral point of view.” Luck egalitarians believe that a conception of justice that eliminates the effects of circumstance but not of choice captures that intuition better than Rawls’s own principles of justice. This chapter argues that the opposite is the case. We can learn from Rawls that one cannot overcome moral arbitrariness in social life by using a morally arbitrary distinction between choice and circumstance. Furthermore, the chapter argues that the incompatibility between these two approaches points to a deeper difference between a deontological and a teleological paradigm that is crucial for the debate between relational and nonrelational notions of political and social justice.

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