Agency and Moral Psychology

This chapter articulates a view of Buddhist agency grounded in the theory of dependent origination. It addresses the Augustinian concepts of caused and uncaused actions. It argues that Buddhist conception of agency and moral evaluation are not grounded in this Western theory of freedom of the will, but of participation in a web of dependent origination, resulting in a deterministic action theory. The chapter explores the implications of this determinism, and the problems that arise from it. Also discussed is the distinction between the self and a person, the concept of twofold self-grasping and the duality it creates

Does Climate Change Put Ethics on a Collision Course with Itself?

The purpose of this paper is to outline an intuitive ethics of climate change, one that understands our maximizing values, according to which it makes things better to make things better for people, to be tempered by our existential values, according to which existence is just different: making things better for a person by way of bringing that person into existence doesn’t, on its own, make things better. Such a reconciliation, I argue, avoids the collision course we can otherwise anticipate between population ethics on the one hand and climate ethics on the other. The work of reconciliation is commenced by reference to what we can call the person-affecting, or person-based, intuition. It’s hard to get that intuition right; we need a formulation of the intuition that avoids the many pitfalls that many earlier formulations have fallen into. The principle I propose is, however, hardly immune to objection. In this paper, I consider and reply to two such objections both of which rely on the claim that probabilities are, in at least some cases, critical to moral evaluation. My counterargument will be that those objections evaporate just as soon as we clearly recognize that the probability facts underlying the one objection are very different from the probability facts underlying the other.

Speed Is Associated With, But Does Not Cause, Polarization in the Moral Evaluation of Real-World Images

In human perceptual decision-making, the speed-accuracy tradeoff establishes a causal link between urgency and reduced accuracy. Less is known about how urgency affects the moral evaluation of visual images. Here, we asked participants to give ratings for a diverse set of real-world images on a continuous scale from -10 (“very immoral”) to +10 (“very moral”). We used a cueing procedure to inform the participants on a trial-by-trial basis whether they could make a Self-Paced (SP) evaluation or whether they had to perform a Time-Limited (TL) evaluation within 2 seconds. In the SP condition, fast responses were associated with more extreme evaluations. Compared to the SP condition, the responses in the TL condition were much faster, indicating that our urgency manipulation was successful. However, comparing the SP versus TL conditions, we found no significant differences in the moral evaluation of the real-world images. The data indicated that, while speed is associated with polarization, urgency does not cause participants to make more extreme evaluations. Instead, the correlation between speed and polarization likely reflects the ease of processing. Images that are obviously moral or immoral are categorized faster and given more extreme evaluations than images for which the moral interpretation is uncertain.

“Why did I not die in the womb?” Job’s cursing the day of his birth in the interpretations of Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas (a comparative approach)

The Book of Job presents a just, blameless man, who after being afflicted with great pain and suffering begins to curse the day of his birth. The aim of the article is to elucidate the reasons for and the meaning of Job’s harsh words by comparing two different interpretations of the passage offered by Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Both expositions seem to be incompatible regarding: the reasons for and the aims of Job’s cursing, the moral evaluation of his cursing, the reasons for and the objects of Job’s sorrow, the virtuous way of expressing sorrow. On the other hand, they seem compatible concerning the admission of the fact of experiencing sorrow by Job and the moral imperative to tame sorrow. The incompatibilities appear to be rooted in two different approaches to passions (the Stoic versus the Peripatetic one) and in different evaluations of earthly life and goods. It is shown that Aquinas’ interpretation is more faithful to the text and relies on a more adequate anthropology and psychology.

What the Fall of Angels Tells Us about the Essence of Morality

The article describes two concepts of the sources of morality present in the evolutionist traditions (Evolution of Ethics and the Veneer Theory). Then, a modal argument against the evolutionist theory of morality is presented, based on the history of the fall of angels present in classical theism. This story is taken in the article as a possible example of the actions of individuals who operate outside of any evolutionary and social context, and of those whose ontic constitution excludes the possession of emotions. In this way, an attempt is made to present the essential features of anyone that is subject to moral evaluation, thus concluding that morality in its essence cannot be defined in biological and evolutionary terms.

Ethics and governance in the digital age

This article argues that ethics need not be toothless or side-lined in the technology governance debates. Rather, moral evaluation is necessary, even when legal compliance is already possible. Moral evaluation supplies answers not only to what is legal or illegal, but also to what is good and better for society. The article first defends a pragmatist ethics approach to uncovering the inevitability of values and norms embedded in digital technologies and related to their design and use. It then makes the case for policymakers engaging in the anticipatory ethics of technology. This approach provides a toolbox to tackle moral dilemmas and better understand what trustworthiness and ethics mean in certain contexts. The convergence of ethics and policy is not only worth pursuing but a necessity for good technology governance if we are to achieve a Europe fit for the digital age.

Linguistic legitimation strategies employed by members of an Indonesian political party

This study aimed at exploring legitimation strategies used by two members of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (or Partai Solidaritas Indonesia, abbreviated as PSI) in justifying their party leader’s controversial statement on the abandonment of Sharia Law. To do so, it employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) with Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies (2007, 2008) as its analytical tool. The data were obtained from two separate interviews with PSI members aired on two different Indonesian TV channels. The interviews were transcribed and translated. From this process, a 1.170-word corpus, from which the data were derived, was generated. The findings showed that moral evaluation is the most dominant legitimation strategy, followed by rationalization and authorization. In moral evaluation, abstraction occurs most often, followed by evaluation and analogy. In rationalization, theoretical rationalization is used more often than instrumental rationalization. Finally, in authorization, PSI utilized impersonal authority to reject the Sharia Law by referring to academic studies and legal documents which assess the law as being negative. Meanwhile, expert authority was used to build legitimation by reference to experts who support the negative effects of the law. This study implies the power of language to legitimize a controversial activity by using different linguistics strategies.

Live and let live? Morality in symbolic boundaries across different cultural areas

This article examines morality in taste judgements. In response to Bourdieu’s analysis of France in the 1960s, sociologists note that repertoires of moral evaluation vary across contexts. They typically highlight national variations, like Nordic egalitarianism weakens cultural boundaries, and temporal variations, with transformed values having made cultural hierarchies less defensible. The article investigates a neglected type of moral variation: contrasting cultural areas. In a study of class and culture in Stavanger, Norway, the authors combined oral interviews on taste with photo elicitation in the visual arts, literature and housing/architecture. While interviewees were often careful not to appear disdainful of other people’s tastes, and expressed ambivalence about cultural boundaries, their thoughts on housing/architecture diverged. Here, people did not hesitate to criticise other people’s taste, even to the point of ridiculing their houses. The authors discuss the implications for Lamont’s symbolic boundary perspective, which is predicated on a separation of three types of symbolic boundaries (cultural, socioeconomic, moral). Morality can both weaken and reinforce cultural boundaries, depending on the areas under investigation. In conclusion, the authors suggest ways cultural sociology may conceive of different moral modalities.