Risk perception and behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic: Predicting variables of compliance with lockdown measures

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to counteract it have highlighted the role of individual differences in evaluating and reacting to emergencies, and the challenges inherent in promoting precautionary behaviours. We aimed to explore the psychological and cognitive factors modulating behaviour and intentions during the national lockdown in Italy. We administered an online questionnaire (N = 244) that included tests for assessing personality traits (Temperament and Character Inventory; Locus of Control of Behaviour) and moral judgment (Moral Foundations Questionnaire), alongside behavioural economics tasks addressing different facets of risk attitude (loss aversion, risk aversion and delay discounting). We then assessed the extent to which individual variations in these dimensions modulated participants’ compliance with the lockdown norms. When assessing their joint contribution via multiple regressions, lockdown adherence was mostly predicted by internal locus of control, psycho-economic dimensions suggestive of long-sighted and loss-averse attitudes, as well as personality traits related to cautionary behaviour, such as harm avoidance, and the authority moral concern. These findings show that a multi-domain assessment of the factors underlying personal intentions, and thus driving compliance with government measures, can help predict individuals’ actions during health emergencies. This evidence points to factors that should be considered when developing interventions and communication strategies to promote precautionary behaviours.

Exploring the Temporal Dynamics of Dehumanization in Nazi Antisemitic Propaganda (1927-1945)

Dehumanization is frequently cited as a precursor to mass violence, but quantitative support for this notion is scarce. The present work provides evidence for this link by examining the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi propaganda. Our linguistic analysis of Nazi propaganda suggests that Jews were progressively denied the capacity for fundamentally human mental experiences in the lead up to the Holocaust. These results are consistent with the notion that, given that the recognition of another’s mental experience promotes moral concern, dehumanization facilitates violence by disengaging moral concern. However, after the onset of the Holocaust, our results suggest that Jews were attributed a greater capacity for agentic mental states. We speculate this may reflect a process of demonization in which Nazi propagandists portrayed the Jews as highly capable of planning and intentionality while nonetheless possessing a subhuman moral character. These suggestive results paint a nuanced portrait of the temporal dynamics of dehumanization during the Holocaust and provide impetus for further empirical scrutiny of dehumanization in ecologically-valid contexts.

A bolder One Health: expanding the moral circle to optimize health for all

One Health is a ground-breaking philosophy for improving health. It imaginatively challenges centuries-old assumptions about wellbeing and is now widely regarded as the ‘best solution’ for mitigating human health problems, including pandemic zoonotic diseases. One Health’s success is imperative because without big changes to the status quo, great suffering and ill-health will follow. However, even in its more ambitious guises, One Health is not radical enough. For example, it has not embraced the emerging philosophical view that historical anthropocentrism is an unfounded ethical prejudice against other animals. This paper argues that One Health should be more imaginative and adventurous in its core philosophy and ultimately in its recommendations and activities. It must expand the circle of moral concern beyond a narrow focus on human interests to include nonhuman beings and the environment. On this bolder agenda, progressive ethical and practical thinking converge for the benefit of the planet and its diverse inhabitants—human and nonhuman.

testimonial injustice ‘out here in the projects’ – misrecognising victimhood in the bed intruder meme

In the wake of ‘Black Lives Matter’, this paper examines the concept of testimonial injustice and the prejudicial stances held towards victims that diminishes the credibility of their claims and the social support they receive from the public. To explore this concept, the following work revisits the widely parodied U.S. originating broadcast news report, The Bed Intruder. In the broadcast, victims of a home invasion and attempted rape deliver a public call that outlines the conditions of their victimhood and the potential threat to the community. A rhetorical stylistic analysis of the victims’ testimonial discourse and a thematic analysis of a sample of YouTube videos that reappropriate and parody their discourse are conducted. The analyses highlight the memetic elements of the video parodies that acknowledge the victimisation and yet strategically misconstrue events in ways that 1) render the victims and their claims less credible and 2) fail to provide them with the moral concern such an acknowledgement deserves.

In the Basement

The home fallout shelter is an outsized presence in American culture around 1962 despite the fact that relatively few were actually built. There are a number of reasons this happened; the reason that dominated the imaginary around individual private shelters was the moral concern it raised. Like the family unit held together by strong atomic forces and unable to be split up without cataclysmic effects, the suburban house was imagined as self-contained and fortified, while able to be grouped effectively in larger clusters, a social agglomeration without the concomitant dangers of collective action or public space. The dissonance between a contained, feminized home shelter and a fortified, masculinized bunker recurs in fiction from the period and in fiction looking back through it. There was little space within the dominant nuclear imaginary for articulating contrarian thoughts; but we do find them in places where it was conventionally harder to take those thoughts seriously: in the frivolous behavior attributed to children and women, and in the frivolous spaces of containment where children and women were allowed to play at being serious grown-ups.

Learning Right from Wrong: A Cross-national Analysis of Education, National Scientific Investment, and the Morality of Science

Opposition to and skepticism of science have important social consequences, as highlighted by contemporary debates about vaccines and climate change. Recent studies suggest that opposition to science is rooted in moral concerns and reflects a belief that science breaks down traditional conceptions of right and wrong. This article turns attention to the education system and to national contexts to examine how people see science as a moral threat. We analyze data from the World Values Survey using multilevel regression models and find that individuals with higher levels of education are less concerned about the effects of science on morality. Yet, education differences in moral concern about science are more than twice as large in countries with the highest levels of scientific investment compared to those with the lowest. We conclude that although the link between education and the moral consequences of science is not limited to specific countries, its intensity varies across national contexts. We discuss these findings in light of recent scholarship on political and religious opposition to science, noting the importance of understanding publics’ views of the moral consequences of science.

On and beyond artifacts in moral relations: accounting for power and violence in Coeckelbergh’s social relationism

The ubiquity of technology in our lives and its culmination in artificial intelligence raises questions about its role in our moral considerations. In this paper, we address a moral concern in relation to technological systems given their deep integration in our lives. Coeckelbergh develops a social-relational account, suggesting that it can point us toward a dynamic, historicised evaluation of moral concern. While agreeing with Coeckelbergh’s move away from grounding moral concern in the ontological properties of entities, we suggest that it problematically upholds moral relativism. We suggest that the role of power, as described by Arendt and Foucault, is significant in social relations and as curating moral possibilities. This produces a clearer picture of the relations at hand and opens up the possibility that relations may be deemed violent. Violence as such gives us some way of evaluating the morality of a social relation, moving away from Coeckelbergh’s seeming relativism while retaining his emphasis on social–historical moral precedent.

Understanding Gun Ownership in the Twenty-First Century: Why Some Americans Own Guns, But Most Do Not

The gun ownership literature is vast, with dozens of studies seeking to explain who owns guns and why. We build on this literature in two key ways. First, we introduce a new variable into the fold: moral concern about harming others. We theorize that this concern actively inhibits gun ownership. Second, we direct theoretical and empirical attention to a predictor of gun ownership that has frequently been overlooked in the contemporary gun literature: childhood socialization. Using data from a national sample of 1,100 adults, we find that moral concerns about harm represent a barrier to gun ownership and limit the number of guns people own. By contrast, childhood socialization has the opposite effect. Furthermore, we find that childhood socialization is not only the strongest predictor of owning guns but also fully mediates the relationship between gender and gun ownership.

New Institutions for Global Justice and Alleviating Global Poverty

Alleviation of global poverty, especially in the global South has an urgent issue of moral concern for world leadership. Global institutions have laid down various proposals to eradicate poverty across the globe but nothing substantial has changed and still millions of people are living in acute poverty. Global academia especially political theorists/philosophers have tried to address the issue of global poverty and in this paper I will be discussing the cosmopolitan position to address the issue. The proposed paper seeks to explore: what must a globally egalitarianinstitutional design look like that addresses the morally urgent problem of global poverty,especially in the global south?