8. A Moral Assessment of Existing Voucher Programs

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

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MORALITY, LAW AND CONFLICTING REASONS FOR ACTION

The Cambridge Law Journal ◽

10.1017/s0008197312000207 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 71 (1) ◽

pp. 59-85 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Peter Cane

Keyword(s):

Moral Reasoning ◽

Practical Reasoning ◽

Broad Sense ◽

Moral Reasons ◽

Reasons For Action ◽

Human Conduct ◽

Morality Plays ◽

Moral Assessment ◽

The Concept Of Law ◽

The Relationship

AbstractIn The Concept of Law, H.L.A. Hart suggested that four formal features of morality distinguish it from law: importance, immunity from deliberate change, the nature of moral offences and the form of moral pressure. On closer examination, none of these supposed features clearly distinguishes morality from law, at least in the broad sense of ‘morality’ that Hart adopted. However, a fifth feature of morality mentioned by Hart – namely the role that morality plays in practical reasoning as a source of ultimate standards for assessing human conduct – does illuminate the relationship between law as conceptualised by Hart and morality variously understood. Because morality has this feature, law is always subject to moral assessment, and moral reasons trump legal reasons. It does not follow, however, that law is irrelevant to moral reasoning.

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Indirect reciprocity can overcome free-rider problems on costly moral assessment

Biology Letters ◽

10.1098/rsbl.2016.0341 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 12 (7) ◽

pp. 20160341 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Tatsuya Sasaki ◽

Isamu Okada ◽

Yutaka Nakai

Keyword(s):

Social Norms ◽

Free Rider ◽

Evolution Of Cooperation ◽

Indirect Reciprocity ◽

Accurate Evaluation ◽

Assessment Systems ◽

Moral Assessment

Indirect reciprocity is one of the major mechanisms of the evolution of cooperation. Because constant monitoring and accurate evaluation in moral assessments tend to be costly, indirect reciprocity can be exploited by cost evaders. A recent study crucially showed that a cooperative state achieved by indirect reciprocators is easily destabilized by cost evaders in the case with no supportive mechanism. Here, we present a simple and widely applicable solution that considers pre-assessment of cost evaders. In the pre-assessment, those who fail to pay for costly assessment systems are assigned a nasty image that leads to them being rejected by discriminators. We demonstrate that considering the pre-assessment can crucially stabilize reciprocal cooperation for a broad range of indirect reciprocity models. In particular for the most leading social norms, we analyse the conditions under which a prosocial state becomes locally stable.

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Social assessment of technology and humanitarization of engineering in the information society

RUDN Journal of Sociology ◽

10.22363/2313-2272-2020-20-3-471-486 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (3) ◽

pp. 471-486

Author(s):

V. A Tsvyk ◽

I. V Tsvyk

Keyword(s):

Information Society ◽

Information Technologies ◽

Technological Development ◽

Scientific Discipline ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Social Assessment ◽

Research And Innovation ◽

The Social ◽

Development Technology ◽

Moral Assessment

The article considers definitions of the contemporary technology and its social and moral assessment. In the information society, humanitarization of engineering and technical education in general becomes extremely important together with the social-humanitarian knowledge in the interdisciplinary assessment of the scientific-technological development. Technology Assessment (TA) is a new scientific discipline, a theory of assessing and forecasting the development of technology, and a practice of consulting. Based on the TA, algorithms are developed to identify negative effects of technology and to make scientifically sound decisions. An interdisciplinary dialogue on the social assessment of technology should focus not only on technocratic tasks but also on the social-humanitarian methodological and epistemological foundations of the TA. In recent years, this component of the social assessment of technology has influenced the Western-European academic discourse on Responsible Research and Innovation, which reflects the scientific understanding of the importance of ethical reflection of technical activity. Thus, there is an obvious need for the combination of the social-humanitarian expertise of innovative technological projects with technical, mathematical and applied methods in the information age. Contemporary radical changes determined by the scientific-technological revolution require new approaches, methods and forms of interaction between people and communities, while their global nature determines universal ethical principles of these relationships. The post-modern information development of Russia will be accompanied not only by implementation of information technologies in all spheres of life, but also by the social-moral assessment of technology, humanization and humanitarization of engineering, strengthening personal professionalism and creative abilities.

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La colère dans les Sentences attribuées à Publilius

Myrtia ◽

10.6018/myrtia.500121 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 36 ◽

pp. 76-91

Author(s):

Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle

Keyword(s):

Moral Assessment ◽

The Republic

In the Sententiae associated with Publilius, there are two main characteristics of anger: its brevity and its danger. Such a view was common by the end of the Republic. The moral assessment of anger can vary: when it is the result of a thoughtless impulsion, which occurs most of the time, the anger is blamed, but several verses seem to approve it when it came from a wise man. It is hard to understand whether this fact is influenced by a philosophy (Epicuraneism) or by dramaturgic necessities we do not know because of the fragmentary state of our corpus. It is nevertheless possible to assign a role to anger in several usual mime plots: it can provoke an argument as well as a reconciliation between two people who are in love and, as it appeared in Classical Comedy, it seems to occur often in a father-son relationship. Dans les Sentences attribuées à Publilius, deux traits sont inhérents à la colère: sa brièveté et sa dangerosité, ce qui reflète une vision largement partagée à la fin de la République. L’appréciation morale, elle, est variable: lorsqu’elle procède d’un élan irréfléchi, ce qui est le cas ordinaire, la colère est condamnée, mais plusieurs vers semblent l’approuver quand elle émane d’un sage. Il est difficile de déterminer si ce fait résulte d’une influence philosophique (l’épicurisme) ou de nécessités dramaturgiques qui nous échappent en raison du caractère fragmentaire du corpus. Il est toutefois possible d’assigner un rôle à la colère dans certaines intrigues probablement classiques du mime: elle est susceptible de provoquer aussi bien la fâcherie que la réconciliation entre amoureux et, à l’instar de la comédie classique, paraît fréquente dans les relations entre un père et son fils.

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