The Concept of Nazi Ethic: Challenge to Moral Philosophy

Thinking about Auschwitz is bound to being moral, but Auschwitz turned into a challenge to the very idea of morality, the collapse of its entire conceptual con­tent. One of the main challenges lies in the concept of Nazi ethic: the prevailing understanding of morality in everyday consciousness and moral rhetory does not allow us to consider it as an oxymoron. This is indicated by abundant moral rhetoric, preoccupation with moral problems, the presence of everything which the idea of ​​morality is connected with – norms, values, the dominance of duty over inclination, appeal to moral imperativeness and conscience, ideas of good and evil, images and lists of virtues, moral evaluation of yourself and others, ideas of duty, dignity, responsibility, the primacy of morality over law. The idea of fighting evil, the image of which is set by the ideology of Nazism, became the moral basis of Auschwitz, reproducing the logic of a “just war”. At the heart of Nazi morality there is the gap between a virtuous person and his deed, which allows that killing does not makes someone a murderer. Killing is also seen divid­edly: the most important are its motives and how it is done, which should be “hu­mane”, clement both for the murderers and for the victims, and therefore morally sanctioned. The author shows that morality is an important part of Auschwitz me­chanics. Nazi morality is not opposed by any other expanded morality, but only by individual actions of rescue, not mediated by moral ideology. Disallowance of the concept of Nazi morality closes the idea of morality to non-killing as a pre-non-moral beginning that is not a norm or a prohibition mediated by moral ideas.

Purity, Nationalism, and Whiteness

Fundamentalist evangelicalism is an intricate grand narrative based upon the interrelated concepts of end times’ eschatology and purity. These two concepts created the conditions by which white evangelicals abandoned their traditional moral rhetoric and overwhelmingly helped elect Donald Trump. However, the eschatological and purity concepts have also created the conditions by which evangelicalism is fracturing along racial and gender lines. This article, written by a former evangelical fundamentalist, looks at the grand narrative and the ruptures occurring within the culture, including the #ChurchToo movement and the rise of the #Exvangelicals.

Resolving the Progressive Paradox: The Effects of Moral Reframing on Support for Economically Progressive Candidates

While progressive economic policies are popular, economically progressive candidates rarely win elections in the U.S., a pattern we call the “progressive paradox.” In the current paper, we examine whether the electoral disadvantage of economically progressive candidates results in part from the moral rhetoric these candidates commonly use to frame their policy platforms. Using a Moral Foundations Theory perspective, we combine previously validated machine learning based measures of economic ideology and new text-based measures of candidates’ moral rhetoric to analyze transcripts of 137 primary and general election presidential debates since 2000. We find economically progressive candidates, compared to economically conservative candidates, rely less on “binding” moral foundations (loyalty, respect for authority, and purity) relative to “individualizing” foundations (care and fairness). In addition, we conducted two experiments (total n = 4,138), including one nationally representative, pre-registered experiment, to test whether economically progressive candidates can build support beyond their liberal base by framing their economic policy platform in terms of binding moral values. Results show that a presidential candidate who used binding framing for his progressive economic platform as opposed to individualizing or a neutral framing, was supported significantly more by conservatives and, unexpectedly, by moderates as well. These results suggest that moral reframing offers an under-utilized solution to the longstanding puzzle regarding the gap between support for economically progressive policies and candidates.

Moral Foundations in the 2015-16 U.S. Presidential Primary Debates: The Positive and Negative Moral Vocabulary of Partisan Elites

Moral foundations theory (MFT) suggests that individuals on the political left draw upon moral intuitions relating primarily to care and fairness, whereas conservatives are more motivated than liberals by authority, ingroup, and purity concerns. The theory of conservatism as motivated social cognition (CMSC) suggests that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to threat and to negative stimuli. Because evidence for both accounts rests on studies of mass publics, however, it remains unclear whether political elites of the left and right exhibit these inclinations. Thus, this analysis uses the 2015-16 United States presidential primary season as an occasion to explore partisan differences in candidates’ moral rhetoric. The analysis focuses on verbal responses to questions posed during party primary debates, a setting that is largely unscripted and thus potentially subject to intuitive influences. The Moral Foundations Dictionary is employed to analyze how frequently candidates used words representing various moral foundations, distinguishing between positive and negative references to each. Consistent with CMSC, the Republican candidates were more likely to use negative-valence moral terminology, describing violations of moral foundations. The direction of some partisan differences contradicts the expectations of MFT. Donald Trump, a novice candidate, was an exception to the typical Republican pattern, making markedly lower overall use of moral-foundations vocabulary.

Challenging Moral Attitudes With Moral Messages

When crafting a message, communicators may turn to moral rhetoric as a means of influencing an audience’s opinion. In the present research, we tested whether the persuasiveness of explicitly moral counterattitudinal messages depends on how much people have already based their attitudes on moral considerations. A survey of the literature suggests several competing hypotheses that we tested across two studies. The results support a persuasive-matching pattern: A moral appeal was more persuasive than a nonmoral appeal to the extent that initial attitudes were based on moral concerns (i.e., attitudes were moralized), but the opposite was true when initial attitudes had less of a moral basis. Exploratory analyses also showed that these effects were mediated by valenced thoughts about the message and moderated by political orientation. These findings add new insight to literatures on both the effects of moral arguments and moralized attitudes.