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.

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”).

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?

Dissolving Gender Difference – Female Teachers, Male Allies and the Creation of Islamic Sufi Authority in Afghanistan

This article offers a case study of contemporary female Sufi leadership and teaching within a branch of the Qadirriyah Sufi order originating with pir Allama Faizani. Based on ethnographic participant observation and oral history interviews, it traces the development of female inclusion within spiritual practice, such as meditative zikr [lit. remembrance], and religious leadership in urban Afghanistan. Addressing the paucity of writing on Afghan women as Muslim actors, the article considers how the founding pir became a moral exemplar for gender inclusive conduct, facilitating women's participation and inspiring a community ethos of male allyship. The Faizanis legitimize women's participation through recourse to the spiritual psychophysiological organ of the heart, rendering divine connection a non-gendered endeavor that transcends social categories. In addition to the discursive erasure of gender, the community navigates restrictive environments and expectations through practical adaptations such as new cultural organizations. This article examines how women train to access, navigate and control inner states during zikr and documents how this process is interlinked with the relational establishment and creation of spiritual authority.

The insignificant impact of the historical Jesus

There is a natural tendency in the church to idealise the historical Jesus. This may lead to believers turning Jesus into an ideal moral or religious exemplar or lead to a prosperity gospel by predominantly focusing on the miraculous power and accomplishments of the earthly Jesus. This depiction of Jesus is in sharp contrast to the rejected and crucified Lord. This article follows a systematic theological methodology by challenging the theological framework which leads to the idealised perception of Jesus as a super-hero. The article does so, by reconsidering the interpretive framework employed to understand the inter-relationship between the person and actions of the historical Jesus, and the kingdom of God breaking through. I argue that the eschatological hermeneutical approach to salvation history best accommodate the tension between ‘consistent’ and ‘realised eschatology’, and help the church overcome the temptation to turn Jesus into a universal spiritual symbol or moral exemplar. The eschatological hermeneutical approadch to salvation history often focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus, but I contend, should be expanded to include the life and ministry of Jesus. In this article it is argued that Jesus came to share in our human weakness and fallibility. Jesus fully experienced the ‘not yet’ of the Kingdom, by identifying and sharing in our lack of success. The unique character of Jesus as ‘God who became human’, sets him radically apart from all other humans and nullifies any attempt to idealise him. The resurrected and glorified Jesus whom the church worships, is and remains the crucified and rejected Messiah.Contribution: The implications of the research will radicalise the believers’ understanding of the significance of the incarnation. It challenges some of the assumptions regarding Jesus’ power to help believers be successful in life. The article also holds pastoral implications for all those who experience the pain of failure, rejection and insignificance.

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.

Introduction

The Introduction situates the fifteen chapters of the volume in the context of the sharp decline in Addison’s cultural and literary reputation since the beginning of the twentieth century, seeking to outline ways in which this collection might help reverse that decline, or at least challenge the ideological prejudices and critical misapprehensions that block a rounded appreciation of Addison and his writings. It is in three sections, each concerned with one of the subgroupings into which the volume’s chapters divide: first, the five chapters which treat Addison’s most definitive works, The Tatler, The Spectator, and Cato; then the four which deal with his works (now largely neglected) in verse and prose before The Spectator; and finally the five which assess his reception and influence in Britain and Europe from the eighteenth century through Romanticism to the Victorian age. This collection of essays, the first ever published on Addison that covers his career as a whole (rather than just the literary periodicals), reminds us of the range and variety of his work and of the correspondingly diverse responses it has occasioned through the ages. In doing so, the Introduction argues, it should help loosen the hold of the narrower conception of Addison as moral exemplar and epitome of bourgeois civility, deriving from partial constructions of The Spectator and Cato, which once underpinned his fame but now drastically imperils it.

Object Lessons: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sturm und Drang of Race Childhood

While originally referring to the use of material objects to convey abstract ideas, “object lesson” took on a second meaning at the turn of the twentieth century. This particular connotation—denoting a person and leader as moral exemplar—reveals fault lines between the thinking of W. E. B. Du Bois and G. Stanley Hall on young people. Through his own adoption of the German ideals of sturm und drang and bildungsroman, as well as “aftershadowing”—a recalibration of ideas and reflections on his own family genealogy, childhood, and intellectual lineages—Du Bois made ideological claims that were a counter-narrative to Hall’s recapitulation theory.

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.

The Philosophy and Ideals of Islamic Education

The philosophy of Islamic education covers a wide range of ideas and practices drawn from Islamic scripture, metaphysics, philosophy, and common piety, all of which accumulate to inform discourses of learning, pedagogy, and ethics. This provides a definition of Islamic education and yet also of Islam more generally. In other words, since metaphysics and ontology are related to questions of learning and pedagogy, a compendious and indigenous definition of “education” offers an insight into a wider spectrum of Islamic thought, culture, and weltanschauung. As such, there is no singular historical or contemporary philosophy of Islamic education which avails all of this complexity but rather there exists a number of ideas and practices which inform how education plays a role in the embodiment of knowledge and the self-actualization of the individual self to ultimately come to know God. Such an exposition may come to stand as a superordinate vision of learning framing Islamic educational ideals. Questions of how these ideas are made manifest and practiced are partly answered through scripture as well as the historical, and continuing, importance of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam; as paragon and moral exemplar in Islamic thought. Having said “I was sent as a teacher,” his life and manner (sunnah) offer a wide-ranging source of pedagogic and intellectual value for his community (ummah) who have regarded the emulation of his character as among the highest of human virtues. In this theocentric cosmology a tripart conception of education emerges, beginning with the sacred nature of knowledge (ʿilm), the imperative for its coupling with action (ʿamal), in reference to the Prophet, and finally, these foundations supporting the flourishing of an etiquette and comportment (adab) defined by an equanimous state of being and wisdom (ḥikma). In this sense, the reason for there being not one identifiable philosophy of Islamic education, whether premodern or in the modern context, is due to the concatenations of thoughts and practices gravitating around superordinate, metaphysical ideals. The absence of a historical discipline, named “philosophy of education” in Islamic history, infers that education, learning, and the nurturing of young minds is an enterprise anchored by a cosmology which serves the common dominators of divine laudation and piety. Education, therefore, whether evolving from within formal institutional arenas (madrasas) or the setting of the craft guilds (futuwwa), help to enunciate a communality and consilience of how human beings may come to know themselves, their world, and ultimately God.