Religiosity differently influences moral attitude for robots in the US and Japan

Researchers have speculated that religious traditions influence an individual's moral attitude and care toward robots. They propose that differences in moral care could be explained by values motivated by religion, anthropocentrism and animism. Here, we empirically examined how moral care for robots is influenced by religious belief and attendance with US and Japanese samples, cultures that are Abrahamic and Shinto-Buddhist traditions respectively (N = 3781). Moral care was higher in Japan and participants with higher religious beliefs had less moral care for robots only in the US. Further, participants who scored low on anthropocentrism and high on animism were more likely to attribute moral care for robots. Anthropocentrism in the US and Animism in Japan had a larger effect compared to the other country. The finding demonstrates how religion could influence moral attitudes for robots, and might suggest the realm of moral consideration could be shaped by cultural traditions.

Revealing The Religiosity in Sedulur Sikep Macapat Songs

Sikep society is known as one of Javanese cultural heritage keepers. Moreover, the society has unique religiosity attitudes that are somehow it misunderstood as disobedience. This research tries to dig the religiosity attitudes reflected on Sikep society’s Macapat songs, especially their focuses and objects. The analysis used appraisal language theory as the approach. The data of the research are words, phrases, or metaphors that reflect attitude in the texts of Sikep society’s macapat songs. The result of the study showed that thereare only two dimensions of religiosity attitudes found in Sikep society’s Macapat song, those are beliefs and values. The value of religiosity reflected on appreciation and judgment; the belief of religiosity consisted of appreciation, judgment, and affect. The objects of religiosity attitudes in the Sikep society’s macapat songs include people (Sikep society, Ki Surantika, man, the children of Sikep society, government, and the ancestors), and something that is humanized (intention, body and soul). The focus of positive moral attitude involves all words, phrases, and metaphor that reflected the principles, prohibitions, ideals; the focuses of negative moral attitude expressed the negative attitudes and behaviors that they proposed to be avoided. Here, the dominant positive attitudes showed their social life. Then, the only two dimensions of religiosity indicate the lack of restricted rules and ritual applied in their religious life.

The Movement for Black Lives and the Language of Liberation

This chapter explores the content and strategy of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) by describing the speech that sustains and promotes the movement. It explicates the content of the movement through the protest chants and other communicative tools M4BL has borrowed from past black liberatory movements. After a brief discussion of some of the challenges facing the movement, it describes four more novel communicative tools associated with M4BL—the hashtag and slogan #BlackLivesMatter, videos of police violence, naming the dead, and stereotype engineering. Each of these tools helps address some challenge, and also bears on some questions of independent philosophical interest—how to remedy testimonial injustice, what it means to engineer a concept, what makes a mental state a moral attitude. It concludes with a brief discussion of the limitations of some of these tools.

Explaining Chinese Consumers’ Green Food Purchase Intentions during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Extended Theory of Planned Behaviour

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has strongly influenced consumers’ habits and behaviours, creating a more sustainable and healthier era of consumption. Hence, there is a potential for further expanding the green food sector in China. The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) is one widely used framework to explain consumers’ food choices. Considering consumers’ internal norms, their perceptions of green food attributes, and the shifting consumer behaviour, our study has extended the TPB framework (E-TPB) by adding constructs of moral attitude, health consciousness, and the impact of COVID-19 (IOC). The results of structural equation modelling among 360 functional samples revealed that the E-TPB model has a superior explanatory and predictive power, compared with the original TPB model regarding Chinese consumers’ green food buying intentions in the current and post-pandemic periods. The path analysis demonstrated that attitude, perceived behavioural control, moral attitude, health consciousness, and IOC have significant positive effects on green food purchase intentions. However, the association between subjective norm and purchase intention varies within the TPB and E-TPB models, which showed a non-significant impact in E-TPB. These findings can generate more suitable managerial implications to promote green food consumption in China during the current and post-pandemic periods.

Beyond Respect and Beneficence

Thomas E. Hill, Jr. breaks with two conventional approaches in moral philosophy. Hill eschews the recent tendency to focus either on duties or on virtues, and instead emphasizes the importance of moral attitudes. And Hill specifically steps outside the usual framework of Kantian ethics by developing and defending the importance of a moral attitude besides respect and beneficence, namely the attitude of appreciation. To appreciate something is to recognize and respond appropriately to its value as something worth attending to, observing, admiring, cherishing, or the like, for its own sake. The attitude of appreciation is especially important in personal relationships, although it includes recognizing and responding positively to the distinctive features possessed by many sorts of things, not just persons.

Two-Sided Messages Promote Openness for Morally Based Attitudes

This research demonstrates that two- versus one-sided counterattitudinal messages can encourage people with a strong moral basis for their attitudes to be more open to contrary positions. Studies 1A/B demonstrated that the interaction between moral basis and message sidedness was present not just for a controversial issue with balanced views in society but also for a topic with a majority opinion. In Study 2, the relative effectiveness of two- over one-sided messages for people with a moral attitude basis was shown to occur only when the two-sided message respectfully acknowledged the recipient’s side. In Study 3, the effect was replicated in a preregistered experiment. Furthermore, moral bases provided unique predictive power beyond alternative attitude strength indicators. Across all studies, perceived appreciation of the speaker acknowledging the recipient’s view mediated the impact of the independent variables on openness.

Moral Disagreement and Reason-Giving

According to practical expressivism, moral disagreement is a species of disagreement in attitude whereby agents have moral commitments that advocate incompatible policies of action and reaction. This follows from a unified general account of disagreement as involving mental states that cannot collectively fulfil their constitutive functions, and the practical expressivist hypothesis that the constitutive function of moral attitudes is to advocate and reinforce collective patterns of action and reaction. To reason in favour of a moral claim is to cite a feature of the world to which the related moral attitude is a response, typically in order to alter the attitudes of others. Further, the constraint of ascriptive supervenience and a standing preference for ‘guiding’ over ‘goading’ in moral discussion make sense in light of the practical function that practical expressivism attributes to moral practice. A general pattern for some aspects of moral discourse can be discerned, and this pattern can be applied to the phenomenon of moral avoidability.

Subsentential Metasemantics

A subsentential metasemantics provides an explanation of the meaning of subsentential parts. Practical expressivism holds that moral predicates’ contribution to the explanation of meaning is a function from the subject of a sentence to a moral attitude directed at that subject. Similarly, non-moral or descriptive predicates contribute a function from the subject of a sentence to a descriptive representation (a belief) that attributes a property to that subject. These claims are consistent with standard views of quantifiers as allowing us to make claims about the scope of the correct application of the predicates they govern, and tenses as delineating the range of subjects to which those predicates apply. The explanation of meaning provided by practical expressivism is potentially compatible with truth-conditional semantic theories so long as practical expressivists can claim that moral sentences are truth-apt.

Practical Expressivism, Expression, and Quasi-Realism

According to practical expressivism, moral judgements express moral attitude types insofar as they advertise a claim of objective authority for them, where this involves a preparedness to defend them and to insist upon their acceptance by others. Such insistence is sincere when it coheres with one’s higher-order views about the proper ways of forming moral attitudes. Practical expressivism also embraces the quasi-realist programme of seeking to show how the forms and assumptions of moral practice can be vindicated on these expressivist grounds—a project best described as ‘weaving the propositional clothing’ for moral discourse.