Which moral exemplars inspire prosociality?

Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background (Relatability) and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar’s actions are (Attainability). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading true stories about the good deeds of a recent fellow alum, compared to a famous moral exemplar from decades past. Study 2A developed a battery of short moral exemplar stories that more systematically varied Relatability and Attainability, along with a set of non-moral exemplar stories for comparison. Studies 2B and 2C examined the path from the story type to relatively low stakes altruism (donating to charity and intentions to volunteer) through perceived attainability and relatability, as well as elevation and pleasantness. Together, our studies suggest that it is primarily the relatability of the moral exemplars, not the attainability of their actions, that inspires more prosocial motivation, at least regarding acts that help others at a relatively low cost to oneself.

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar

Based on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as analysis of the exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, this paper looks at the ways in which the dictator’s moral exemplarity has evolved over time since his military victory in 1939. During the early years of his dictatorship, Franco’s propaganda machine built the legend of a historical character touched by divine providence who sacrificed himself to save Spain from communism. His moral charisma was enriched by associating his historical mission with a constellation of moral exemplars drawn from medieval and imperial Spain. After his death, his moral exemplarity dwindled as democratic Spain embraced a political discourse of national reconciliation. Yet, since 2000, a new negative exemplarity of Franco as a war criminal has come into sharp focus, in connection with the exhumation of the mass graves of tens of thousands of Republican civilians executed by his army and paramilitary. In recent years, Franco has reemerged as a fascist exemplar alongside a rise of the extreme right. To understand the revival of his fascist exemplarity, I focus on two processes: the rise of the political party Vox, which claims undisguised admiration for Franco’s legacy (a process I call “neo-exemplarity”), and the dismantling in October 2019 of Franco’s honorable burial and the debate over the treatment that his mortal remains deserve (a process I call “necro-exemplarity”).

Understanding the Spread of Sustained Employee Volunteering: How Volunteers Influence Their Coworkers’ Moral Identity Work

Employee volunteering has become a common phenomenon in many organizations. However, it is unclear how sustained volunteering spreads between colleagues. Drawing on an empirical study set in the English legal profession, this study examines the processes through which existing employee volunteers influence their coworkers to internalize a volunteer identity. The study yields a theoretical model that specifies how coworkers may identify existing volunteers as moral exemplars. Five forms of social influence emanate, often unknowingly, from these exemplars: encouraging, evoking, edifying, enacting, and exemplifying. These forms of social influence inform coworkers’ microprocess of moral identity work through which they claim a volunteer identity. This study thereby shifts attention from the well-theorized outcomes of moral identities to the largely unexamined social influences on moral identities in the workplace, enriching our understanding of the development of the moral self that is foundational to theories of volunteering and identity.

Virtue Ethics and Action Guidance

Theological ethicists rarely allow the virtues to perform the heavyweight work of guiding action. This article contests this tradition and argues that, and demonstrates how, virtue ethics provides a practicable method of normative action guidance. The article contends that there are five interrelated but distinct modes of virtue action guidance. The first three modes—dialogue, emulation, and substituted judgment—invite the agent to take counsel with moral exemplars. The interrogative and discovery modes direct agents to morally deliberate using thick accounts of the virtues.

The Art of Stoic Living

Meditation is key to the art of Stoic living. But it’s not Zen or Buddhist meditation. If you are meditating like an Eastern monk, you are trying to quiet the chattering mind. If you are meditating like a Stoic, you are cultivating that busy mind. How does self-talk, and often self-blame, promote calm? Stoic living also involves monitoring the onset of disruptive emotions, and some Stoic-minded teachers have designed Stoic exercises for this kind of impulse control in their classrooms. Others practice Stoicism by looking to moral exemplars. A Cato or a Socrates, as the Stoics would say. But who is a modern moral exemplar? Take Hugh Thompson, the young American Army helicopter pilot who stopped the My Lai massacre. Would he be part of a Stoic pantheon? Moral outrage at the brutal massacre of 500 innocents prompted him to land his helicopter that day and stop the onslaught. Would a Stoic permit, or extoll, just action motivated by righteous anger?

Moral exemplars for the virtuous machine: the clinician’s role in ethical artificial intelligence for healthcare

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to pervade several aspects of healthcare with pace and scale. The need for an ethical framework in AI to address this has long been recognized, but to date most efforts have delivered only high-level principles and value statements. Herein, we explain the need for an ethical framework in healthcare AI, the different moral theories that may serve as its basis, the rationale for why we believe this should be built around virtue ethics, and explore this in the context of five key ethical concerns for the introduction of AI in healthcare. Some existing work has suggested that AI may replace clinicians. We argue to the contrary, that the clinician will not be replaced, nor their role attenuated. Rather, they will be integral to the responsible design, deployment, and regulation of AI in healthcare, acting as the moral exemplar for the virtuous machine. We collate relevant points from the literature and formulate our own to present a coherent argument for the central role of clinicians in ethical AI and propose ideas to help advance efforts to employ ML-based solutions within healthcare. Finally, we highlight the responsibility of not only clinicians, but also data scientists, tech companies, ethicists, and regulators to act virtuously in realising the vision of ethical and accountable AI in healthcare.

Moral-Exemplar Intervention: A New Paradigm for Conflict Resolution and Intergroup Reconciliation

Conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation are difficult to achieve because of many social and psychological obstacles, such as people’s belief that members of a social group that is an adversary of their own group are mostly bad and essentially all the same. In this article, we introduce a novel intervention aimed at challenging these beliefs by exposing people to stories about individuals who have risked some important aspects of their lives to save the lives of other social groups’ members ( moral exemplars). The effects of this moral-exemplar intervention have been tested with field experiments in several postconflict contexts using members of real antagonistic groups. We discuss the results of these studies and three specific and important aspects of the moral-exemplar intervention: (a) its comparative advantage over existing social-psychological interventions aimed at conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation, (b) its content and conditions, and (c) implications for future theorizing and research targeting prosocial changes in attitudes and intergroup behavior.

Lyrical liars, animal desires and figurative kinship: Robert Henryson's defence of poetry in the prologue to The Morall Fabillis

This article cites Robert Henryson's Fables in order to contextualise the history of the medieval notion that the world of imaginary, poetic fiction, needs justification; and examines the theological sources which served as the foundation of that debate and provided the validation for the use of fable animals as moral exemplars.