ABSTRACT Through an interdisciplinary literature review, this propositional paper explores the emergence and unfolding of professionals’ moral identity conflicts involving important but contrasting values. Building on the exemplary case of physicians’ professional-religious dilemmas in End-of-Life circumstances, we develop a multilevel model of professional-personal identity conflict dynamics in ethically-charged situations in which we integrate individual-level mechanisms with organizational-level boundary conditions, namely peer social support and ethical climate, in relation to psychological well-being. Our conceptual model contributes to the (...) ethics, identity and human behavior literature by advancing suggestions of how professionals may prevent or/and resolve moral conflicts concerning also other identities and contexts. (shrink)

Background When conducting qualitative research, participants usually share lots of personal and private information with the researcher. As researchers, we must preserve participants’ identity and confidentiality of the data. Objective To critically analyze an ethical conflict encountered regarding confidentiality when doing qualitative research. Research design Case study. Findings and discussion one of the participants in a study aiming to explain the meaning of living with HIV verbalized his imminent intention to commit suicide because of stigma of other social (...) problems arising from living with HIV. Given the life-threatening situation, the commitment related to not disclosing the participant’s identity and/or the content of the interview had to be broken. To avoid or prevent suicide, the therapist in charge of the case was properly informed about the participant’s intentions. One important question arises from this case: was it ethically appropriate to break the confidentiality commitment? Conclusion confidentiality could be broken if a life-threatening event is identified during data collection and participants must know that. This has to be clearly stated in the informed consent form. (shrink)

The book intends to interpret how different religions articulate their territories and manage the relationship with other religions, understanding systems and multiple everyday spaces, in a dynamic that is not only a component of contemporary reality, but is central to living it. The underlying thesis is that religion is the great geopolitical issue of our time, but an interpretation is only possible in terms of religious plurality and how ideas, symbolism, subjectivities and practices are incorporated in the daily life of (...) those who share the religious times and spaces, producing territorial identities and imaginary concrete cartographies as world projects. The volume has articles that focus on the religious space being gestated, expanded, contracted, celebrated or represented as a foundation for common life, as well as inter-religious conflicts arising in a world of diverse and differential coexistence. It is not a debate about classical geopolitics, but how geopolitical relations cross cultural-religious experience. (shrink)

Constructive deviance, rule-breaking to benefit the organization, is an emerging topic in the scholarly research and is considered to be an ethical decision. Despite the value of guiding constructive deviance in organizations, the effect of ethics-oriented leadership on employees’ constructive deviance remains unclear. This research identifies leader moral humility as a new antecedent of constructive deviance and examines how and when leader moral humility influences employee constructive deviance. Drawing on social–cognitive theory, we propose that leader moral humility (...) fosters employee moral identity, which in turn triggers employees to exhibit constructive deviance. Moreover, the mediating effect of moral identity is more pronounced when normative conflict with organizational rules is high, as this conflict inspires identity-driven behavior. Two studies with scenario-based experimental and time-lagged field methods provided general support for our hypotheses. Study 1 reveals that leader moral humility positively affects constructive deviance via employee moral identity. Study 2 replicates and extends Study 1 to support the moderating role of normative conflict. These findings enrich the understanding of constructive deviance by shedding light on the moral cognitive process in the relationship between leader moral humility and employee constructive deviance and by identifying the boundary condition for the relationship. (shrink)

This qualitative study explores how business leaders narrate their personal ways of recognizing, reasoning, and resolving moral conflicts and what these stories reveal about their moral identity processes within organizational contexts. Based on interviews with 25 business leaders, 4 moral identity statuses were identified: achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion. The moral identity statuses were based on how leaders approached and interpreted moral conflicts and what the influence of the organizational context was in (...) their moral decision-making processes. Some remained steadfast in adhering to their previous value commitments, while others tried to avoid taking any clear moral standpoint. Still others experienced moral conflicts as disequilibrating events that triggered reflective processes and developmental cycles of moral identity change. These moral identity statuses hold implications for facilitating moral identity development among business leaders in the context of work. (shrink)

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

Everyday identity change is common after conflict, as people attempt to move away from oppositional group relations and closed group boundaries. This article asks how it scales up and out to impact these group relations and boundaries, and what stops this? Theoretically, the article focusses on complex oppositional configurations of groupness, where relationality and feedback mechanisms (rather than more easily measured variables) are crucial to change and continuity, and in which moral authority is a key node of (...) reproduction. It uses the normatively weighted concept of transformation to augment existing research on boundary and identity change, while elaborating it to recognise the role of everyday agency in furthering change and moral inertia in impeding it. Substantively, the article compares the processes of everyday transformation of groupness in three cases that are very similar in historical depth, social embeddedness, symbolic opposition and everyday change, but very different in time-scale and with contrasting outcomes: successful transformation of reformation religious groupness; partial transformation of national groupness; and failed transformation of complexly-configured ethnic groupness in Northern Ireland. This allows tracing of the patterns and mechanisms at work. To anticipate, the article argues that everyday identity change can erode the moral authority of groupness. Its impact is generational and dependent on institutional linkages. The article highlights the importance of moral mechanisms as drivers of and obstacles to change; and it suggests ways that the obstacles could be overcome by radical policy interventions. (shrink)

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

What is the meaning of perestrojka? There is no doubt that it led to the end of the Cold War and had a huge impact on the international situation. Nevertheless, there is no consensus as to the outcomes of perestrojka. Perestrojka brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. This fact might be interpreted positively: it opened the possibility to restore historical truth and to create independent democratic states. From another perspective, it can be conceived negatively as a destruction of (...) the integrity of the Soviet Union and the loss of a part of the territory as well as the economy of Russia (according to the President of the Gorbačev Foundation, Viktor Kuvaldin, during the conference “Revisiting Perestroika—Processes and Alternatives”). Perestrojka has no one definite general meaning, but it has a very specific one for Lithuania. In this paper I ask: What is the meaning of perestrojka for contemporary Lithuania and for post-Soviet life? Was perestrojka a failure or a success? I approach perestrojka from a moral point of view, suggesting that the perestrojka made possible a fundamental choice between several alternatives. Once the choice was made the specificity of future goals and evaluation of the past opened up. I concentrate on the moral value of the act of accommodation (and resistance) to the Soviet regime, on the conflict of values represented by the “nation’s own” and the goodness of the political order, and on the role of freedom and determinism in history. Immanuel Kant’s conception of duty and the categorical imperative is used as a model for the analysis of the situation of choice. (shrink)

Based on the conflict-of-values theory, this study examines the influences of Machiavellianism and ethical values on anxiety in college students when they face moral dilemmas. Questionnaires on the Chinese equivalent of Machiavellianism, moral identity, and anxiety were completed by 115 Chinese college students. The results suggest that Machiavellianism and ethical values influence anxiety, and the interaction between ethical values and Machiavellianism is significant—among individuals with high ethical values, those with high levels of Machiavellianism exhibit markedly higher (...) levels of anxiety than those with low levels of Machiavellianism. However, among individuals with low ethical values, there is no difference in anxiety between those with low or high levels of Machiavellianism. This research, depicting complex relationships among anxiety, Machiavellianism, and ethical values, suggests that leading people to do good deeds not only requires high ethical values but also necessitates the resistance to negative values such as Machiavellianism. (shrink)

What is the meaning of perestrojka? There is no doubt that it led to the end of the Cold War and had a huge impact on the international situation. Nevertheless, there is no consensus as to the outcomes of perestrojka. Perestrojka brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. This fact might be interpreted positively: it opened the possibility to restore historical truth and to create independent democratic states. From another perspective, it can be conceived negatively as a destruction of (...) the integrity of the Soviet Union and the loss of a part of the territory as well as the economy of Russia · Perestrojka has no one definite general meaning, but it has a very specific one for Lithuania. In this paper I ask: What is the meaning of perestrojka for contemporary Lithuania and for post-Soviet life? Was perestrojka a failure or a success? I approach perestrojka from a moral point of view, suggesting that the perestrojka made possible a fundamental choice between several alternatives. Once the choice was made the specificity of future goals and evaluation of the past opened up. I concentrate on the moral value of the act of accommodation to the Soviet regime, on the conflict of values represented by the "nation's own" and the goodness of the political order, and on the role of freedom and determinism in history. Immanuel Kant's conception of duty and the categorical imperative is used as a model for the analysis of the situation of choice. (shrink)

Basing its understanding on the two uses of the notion of violence in Honneth’s theory of recognition, this paper aims at developing a framework for the analysis of the thesis of the moral justification of political violence, whenever forms of political violence can be defined as legitimate struggles of recognition. Its contention is that the requalification of some forms of collective violence as recognition conflicts makes it possible to establish a hierarchy of justification for forms of violence which cannot (...) be constructed through a priori criteria, but should rather be the result of a descriptive social philosophy enquiry. (shrink)

Caring for critically ill and dying patients often triggers both professional and personal growth for physician trainees. In pediatrics, the neonatal intensive care unit is among the most distressing settings for trainees. We used longitudinal narrative writing to gain insight into how physician trainees are challenged by and make sense of repetitive, ongoing conflicts experienced as part of caring for very sick and dying babies. The study took place in a 45-bed, university-based NICU in an urban setting in the United (...) States. From November 2009 to June 2010 we enrolled pediatric residents and neonatology fellows at the beginning of their NICU rotations. Participants were asked to engage in individual, longitudinal narrative writing about their “experience in the NICU.” Thematic narrative analysis was performed. Thirty-seven physician trainees participated in the study. The mean number of narratives per trainee was 12; a total of 441 narratives were available for analysis. Conflict was the most pervasive theme in the narratives. Trainees experienced conflicts with families and conflicts with other clinicians. Trainees also described multiple conflicts of identity as members of the neonatology team, as members of the medical profession, as members of their own families, and as members of society. Physician trainees experience significant conflict and distress while learning to care for critically ill and dying infants. These conflicts often led them to question their own morals and their role in the medical profession. Physician trainees should be educated to expect various types of distress during intensive care rotations, encouraged to identify their own sources of distress, and supported in mitigating their effects. (shrink)

Volume 17, Issue 4, September 2020, Page 470-473.

The present research used archaeological data, i.e., the data obtained from kamekan jar burials in the Mikuni Hills of the northern Kyushu area in the Mid- dle Yayoi period, to test the parochial altruism model. This model argued that out-group hate and in-group favor coevolved via prehistoric intergroup conflicts. If this model is accurate, such an out-group hate and in-group favor could be re- flected in the archaeological remains, such as pottery making; the more frequent intergroup conflicts are and the (...) more each group is opposed, the more independent and coherent each group will be and more evident cultural identity could be estab- lished within each group. We employed an elliptic Fourier analysis for the shapes of kamekan jar burials. We examined whether frequent intergroup conflicts in the period influenced kamekan jar pottery between subareas of the Mikuni Hills. The results suggested that the shapes of kamekan jar burials after the KIIIa type are slightly different between subareas, which is partially consistent with the model. However, the results do not support the model directly. (shrink)

From some perspectives, it seems obvious that emotions and feelings must be both reasonable and morally significant: from others, it may seem as obvious that they cannot be. This paper seeks to advance discussion of ethical implications of the currently contested issue of the relationship of reason to feeling and emotion via reflection upon various examples of affectively charged moral dilemma. This discussion also proceeds by way of critical consideration of recent empirical enquiry into these issues in the literature (...) of so-called emotional intelligence. In this regard, despite ambiguities in their accounts of the relationship of reason to emotion, advocates of emotional intelligence generally incline to therapeutic conceptions of emotional health which are not inconsistent with currently fashionable cognitivist accounts of feeling and emotion. All the same, it is arguable that therapeutic or other strategies which overplay the possibility of cognitive or other resolution of emotional conflict are prey to certain difficulties. First, they underemphasise those passive but identity-constitutive aspects of affect which are not obviously rationally accountable. Secondly, they insufficiently recognise the extent to which emotional conflicts can be significantly implicated in moral diversity. In view of either or both of these points, they may fail to appreciate the moral inappropriateness of attempts to resolve certain forms of emotional conflict or tension. (shrink)

On the powerful qualities view, every fundamental property is both dispositional and qualitative. Identity theory is the standard account of the view, which makes the stronger claim that a property’s dispositionality and qualitativity are identical to each other, and identical to the property itself. Recent defences of the powerful qualities view have involved novel theories of powerful qualities which are not also variants of identity theory. Giannotti (Erkenntnis 86:603–621, 2021a) has suggested a novel theory of his own, the (...) dual aspect account, which makes use of a particular notion of aspects. For Giannotti, dispositionality and qualitativity are each an aspect of a property, and an aspect is a property’s way of being. The importance of aspects is twofold. Firstly, by introducing aspects to identity theory, the theory becomes more precise. Secondly, aspects allow for a novel theory of powerful qualities, the dual aspect account, which maintains that dispositionality and qualitativity are aspects, but rejects the identity claim. Giannotti’s aim is to show that even if identity theory is false, the dual aspect account remains an available theory for advocates of powerful qualities. This paper will be a critical examination of Giannotti’s ideas. Firstly, I will clarify Giannotti’s notion of aspects, explaining how it involves a misunderstanding of supervenience, and why it does not offer the advantages that he claims it does. Secondly, in light of my discussion of aspects, I will argue that the dual aspect account lacks relative advantages over the compound view of powerful qualities. (shrink)

Physicians frequently encounter situations in which their professional practice is intermingled with moral affordances stemming from other domains of the physician’s lifeworld, such as family and friends, or from general morality pertaining to all humans. This article offers a typology of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ as well as a new theoretical framework for dealing with them. We start out by arguing that established theories of professional ethics do not offer sufficient guidance in situations where professional (...) ethics overlaps with moral duties of other origins. Therefore, we introduce the moral theory developed by Christine M. Korsgaard, that centres around the concept of practical identity. We show how Korsgaard’s account offers a framework for interpreting different types of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ to provide either orientation for solving the conflict or an explanation for the emotional and moral burden involved in moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Multiculturalism is higher on the daily political agenda than it has ever been. Leading politicians and public commentators speak with an unparalleled bluntness about the perceived limitations of multiculturalism while representatives of cultural, minorities express concern about marginalisation. This debate is taking place against a background of fear about terrorism, the integrity of national identities and a loosely construed ‘clash of civilizations’. Secularism is pitted against religious fundamentalism, respect for difference against the right of freedom of speech, integration against self-determination, (...) and duties of citizenship against minority rights. This book confronts the reality of moral conflict in the debate on multiculturalism while resisting the simplification which too frequently accompanies daily commentary on both sides of an increasingly polarised debate. The volume as a whole marks an important step in the attempt to examine the underlying concepts, of the nature and legitimate extent of disagreement, of secularism, the nature of power, the state and citizenship, which inevitably constitute key assumptions in the debate. Bringing together leading scholars on multiculturalism: Gerald Gaus, Peter Jones, John Horton, Tariq Modood, Chandran Kukathas, Bhikhu Parekh, Matthew Festenstein and Cecile Laborde, this book discusses the latest developments in the field. It will be of strong interest students and scholars of multiculturalism, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy and anthropology. (shrink)

Multiculturalism is higher on the daily political agenda than it has ever been. Leading politicians and public commentators speak with an unparalleled bluntness about the perceived limitations of multiculturalism while representatives of cultural, minorities express concern about marginalisation. This debate is taking place against a background of fear about terrorism, the integrity of national identities and a loosely construed ‘clash of civilizations’. Secularism is pitted against religious fundamentalism, respect for difference against the right of freedom of speech, integration against self-determination, (...) and duties of citizenship against minority rights. This book confronts the reality of moral conflict in the debate on multiculturalism while resisting the simplification which too frequently accompanies daily commentary on both sides of an increasingly polarised debate. The volume as a whole marks an important step in the attempt to examine the underlying concepts, of the nature and legitimate extent of disagreement, of secularism, the nature of power, the state and citizenship, which inevitably constitute key assumptions in the debate. Bringing together leading scholars on multiculturalism: Gerald Gaus, Peter Jones, John Horton, Tariq Modood, Chandran Kukathas, Bhikhu Parekh, Matthew Festenstein and Cecile Laborde, this book discusses the latest developments in the field. It will be of strong interest students and scholars of multiculturalism, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy and anthropology. (shrink)

When visual attention is directed away from a stimulus, neural processing is weak and strength and precision of sensory data decreases. From a computational perspective, in such situations observers should give more weight to prior expectations in order to behave optimally during a discrimination task. Here we test a signal detection theoretic model that counter-intuitively predicts subjects will do just the opposite in a discrimination task with two stimuli, one attended and one unattended: when subjects are probed to discriminate the (...) unattended stimulus, they rely less on prior information about the probed stimulus’ identity. The model is in part inspired by recent findings that attention reduces trial-by-trial variability of the neuronal population response and that they use a common criterion for attended and unattended trials. In five different visual discrimination experiments, when attention was directed away from the target stimulus, subjects did not adjust their response bias in reaction to a change in stimulus presentation frequency despite being fully informed and despite the presence of performance feedback and monetary and social incentives. This indicates that subjects did not rely more on the priors under conditions of inattention as would be predicted by a Bayes-optimal observer model. These results inform and constrain future models of Bayesian inference in the human brain. (shrink)

In depicting five “spheres of morality” occupied by physicians Doernberg and Troug provide an impressive analysis on physicians’ various commitments and role conflicts which are excellently illustr...

Many physicians are involved in relationships that create tension between a physician's duty to work in her patients’ best interest at all times and her financial arrangement with a third party, most often a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose primary goal is maximizing sales or profit. Despite the prevalence of this threat, in the United States and globally, the most common reaction to conflicts of interest in medicine is timid acceptance. There are few calls for conflicts of interest to be banned, and, (...) to our knowledge, no one calls for conflicted practitioners to be reprimanded. Contrast our attitudes in medicine with public attitudes toward financial conflicts among government employees. When enforcement of rules against conflict of interest slackens in the public sector, news organizations investigate and publish their criticism. Yet even when doctors are quoted in the media promoting specific drugs, their personal financial ties to the drug maker are rarely mentioned. Policies for governmental employees are strict, condemnation is strong, and criminal statutes exist. Yet the evidence that conflict is problematic is, if anything, stronger in medicine than in the public sector. Policies against conflicts of interest in medicine should be at least as strong as those already existing in the public sector. (shrink)

Politics is about managing conflict, about how we should live together. Many traditions of thought and political thinkers have nonetheless taken this shared space of conflict, this we the people, as a given. The people is considered as a necessary precondition for politics. What happens when a part of this we disagrees with that? When, for some, this shared community is not taken as a given and claim their right to secede and build their own independent political community. (...) Such claims bear on the fundamental questions: who is the “ demos ”? who are the people entitled to self-government?’. (shrink)

Se discuten dos argumentos del diálogo Protágoras sobre la relación entre las virtudes individuales. En primer lugar se defiende -frente a Terry Penner- la tesis de Vlastos de que cuando Sócrates dice que "la justicia es justa", "la justicia es piadosa", etc., está destacando la mutua implicación entre las virtudes, y no su identidad; y se formula una hipótesis para explicar la razón de tal reciprocidad. En segundo lugar, se examina el argumento de que, puesto que la insensatez se opone (...) tanto a la moderación como a la sabiduría, y un término contrario no puede tener más de un contrario, moderación y sabiduría serían "una sola cosa". Se asevera que Platón quiere que rechacemos esta última conclusión, basada en el fondo en la idea de que las distintas virtudes se relacionan entre sí como las partes de un mismo rostro. Se concluye que los argumentos analizados no implican realmente la idea contraintuitiva de la identifi cación mutua de las virtudes.Two arguments from the Protagoras on the unity of the virtues are here dwelt with. First, it is claimed - with G. Vlastos and contra T. Penner - that when Socrates says that “justice is just”, “justice is pious”, etc. he wants to highlight the reciprocity of the individual virtues, not their mutual identity . Second, it is argued that Plato does not really want us to infer from folly’s opposition to both temperance and wisdom the need to identify these two virtues . He is only drawing our attention to their close relationship. This is enough to reject the hypothesis initially defended by Protagoras, i.e. that the different virtues relate to each other as the parts of a face. I conclude that the two aforesaid arguments do not really support the mutual identity of the virtues. (shrink)

RESUMEN La filosofía hegeliana en general, y en particular la “Ciencia de la lógica” y el tratamiento que en esta se hace sobre nociones como las de identidad y diferencia, generaron desde el momento mismo en que vio la luz, un sinnúmero de posiciones críticas tales como las de Schelling, los hegelianos de izquierda y, en general, de todos aquellos filósofos que, en virtud de las posibles implicaciones prácticas de una filosofía de la identidad buscaron “expurgar la semilla del dragón (...) del panteísmo hegeliano”, entre las cuales es necesario mencionar la legitimación de estados totalitarios y los genocidios asociados a ellos. Esta búsqueda, fue realizada sobre la afirmación de que el pensamiento hegeliano, al estar soportado sobre la identidad, implica una negación y, por tanto, aniquilación y reducción de la diferencia. En este sentido, el presente artículo busca examinar la noción hegeliana de la identidad, la correspondencia o no de las críticas que sobre el particular se han hecho sobre Hegel y, finalmente, analizar una de las salidas que, desde las interpretaciones hegelianas más recientes, se han hecho para responder a las críticas: la filosofía hegeliana in stricto sensu, una filosofía de la diferencia. ABSTRACT The Hegelian philosophy in general, and in particular the “Science of Logic” and the treatment that in this is made about notions as identity and difference, generated since its conception a countless critical positions such as those of Schelling, the left Hegelian and, in general, of all those philosophers who, accordingly with the posible practical implications of a philosophy of identity sought to “purge the dragon’s seed from Hegelian pantheism” among which it is worth to mention the legitimization of totalitarian states and genocide associated with them. This search was made on the assertion that Hegelian thought, being supported on the identity, implies a negation and, therefore, annihilation and reduction of the difference. In this sense, the present article seeks to examine the Hegelian notion of identity, the correspondence or not of the criticisms that have been made about Hegel and, finally, to analyze one of the outlets that, from the most recent Hegelian interpretations, have been made to respond to the criticisms: the Hegelian philosophy in stricto sensu, a philosophy of the difference. (shrink)

The framework of the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict has evolved over the last half century through an instrumentalization of violence by the parties concerned. Two alternating "structures of violence" have emerged to define this instrumentality: the one Israeli, the other Palestinian. I call these structures of violence "alternating" rather than merely "reciprocating" because the one not only feeds off the other and actually practices on the other that which is merely fancied and projected as the other's intention but also because (...) they have inverse periodicities: The "Great Revolt" of 1936-1939 introduced the principle of "armed struggle" into the practice and lore of a fractured and often factional antiBritish and anti-Zionist insurgency. It was effectively countered by British might coupled with an essentially defensive Jewish posture of consensus and "restraint". By contrast the current Palestinian "Uprising" has the Arab side preaching restraint if not always nonviolence, through a pluralistic consensus on the immediate national ends such practice aims to achieve. Against this is an avowed Israeli policy of "the iron fist" that for the first time since independence has broken the general Zionist consensus with regard not only to the utility and morality of violent means but also to national goals. (shrink)

In contemporary society, identities—culture; race; ethnicity; gender; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender —are at the heart of discourses of belonging and related collectivist constructions of meaning. As distinct social markers, they clearly demarcate the society in ways that also have political implications. The discussion of identity politics below takes a nominally genealogical approach beginning with modern philosophy’s individualistic account. It then decenters this narrative and posits that the field has been ill-equipped to grapple with the power of (...) class='Hi'>identity as a source of belonging, a moral critique, and as a site of political conflict. Education is the primary context of the discussion, which is framed as the quest for cultural and social pluralism. Although the term identity has roots in Western philosophy and more recently in psychology, identity politics is a highly contested expression in education, political theory and in philosophy. Bernstein :47–74, 2005) traced its origin as a formal term to 1979, where social science scholars coined the phrase as a label for a type of activism. Its initial iteration pertained to persons with disabilities who challenged prevailing societal perceptions. Over the next two decades, scholars broadened its use to mean a category of collective action that included violent ethnic conflict and activist nationalism. Below, the discussion of the term begins with its semantic and philosophical provenance and explores its discursive engagement with the ever modifying meanings of gender, race or ethnicity and sexual orientation in society and education. It is association with these categories as forms of joint group membership that ipso facto gives rise to political activism to advance beliefs, bring about change or to promote a given worldview. (shrink)

Many physicians are involved in relationships that create tension between a physician's duty to work in her patients’ best interest at all times and her financial arrangement with a third party, most often a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose primary goal is maximizing sales or profit. Despite the prevalence of this threat, in the United States and globally, the most common reaction to conflicts of interest in medicine is timid acceptance. There are few calls for conflicts of interest to be banned, and, (...) to our knowledge, no one calls for conflicted practitioners to be reprimanded. Contrast our attitudes in medicine with public attitudes toward financial conflicts among government employees. When enforcement of rules against conflict of interest slackens in the public sector, news organizations investigate and publish their criticism. Yet even when doctors are quoted in the media promoting specific drugs, their personal financial ties to the drug maker are rarely mentioned. Policies for governmental employees are strict, condemnation is strong, and criminal statutes exist (allowing for corruption charges). Yet the evidence that conflict is problematic is, if anything, stronger in medicine than in the public sector. Policies against conflicts of interest in medicine should be at least as strong as those already existing in the public sector. (shrink)

This book challenges the World Medical Associationâ (TM)s (WMA) International Code of Ethics statement in 2004, which declared that â ~medical ethics in armed conflict is identical to medical ethics in times of peaceâ (TM). This is achieved by examining the professional, ethical, and legal conflicts in British Military healthcare practice that occur in three distinct military environments. These are (i) the battlefield, (ii) the operational environment and (iii) the non-operational environment. As this conflict is exacerbated by the (...) need to achieve Operational Effectiveness, this book also explores the dual loyalty conflict that Military Health Care Professionals (MHCPs) encounter between following military orders and professional codes of practice. The method used to challenge the WMAâ (TM)s statement and explore these conflicts is the use of real-life problem-solving vignettes, which mirror actual ethical and professional conflicts and dilemmas that may occur in the three environments. The areas of law analysed similarly reflect the difficulties that MHCPs face when caring for the sick and wounded in violent locations when under attack. In particular, the book questions whether it is right for a MHCP to owe their patients a duty of care in hostile environments. This leads on to questioning if any MHCP could be protected by combat immunity where no duty of care is owed to fellow soldiers in the battlefield. The book also questions whether the standard of care should be variable in hostile environments. It also explores the dual loyalty conflict of a wounded senior officer refusing treatment from a junior officer. In addition, it examines the difficulties of a doctor maintaining patient confidentiality when a soldier refuses treatment for a psychological injury but wishes to redeploy to the battlefield. The book successfully challenges the WMAâ (TM)s statement. It also concludes by suggesting that neither a military-focused approach nor a professional healthcare-focused approach towards military healthcare is the best way to solve the dual loyalty conflict. (shrink)

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse (...) and coalition-building across deep moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the 'mess' of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and (...) procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses. (shrink)

We examine corruption across three Central and Eastern Europe countries through a social psychology framework which integrates social identity theory, social cognitive theory and moral disengagement mechanisms. We illustrate how various social identities influence individual and collective action in terms of ethical behavior and corruption, thereby creating, maintaining and perpetuating petty, grand and systemic public/private corruption through triadic co-determination via cognition, behavior and the environment. Despite growing research on corruption normalization, less is known about the cognitive and behavioral (...) mechanisms in ethical decision making, the cognitive workings of how individuals reconcile unethical behavior and the social psychological processes behind corruption in society and organizations. Expert interviews reveal internally conflicted multi-layered social identities perpetuating corruption, some embedded in nationalistic history and others tied to the European Union, which supports the divergent paths of CEE countries since the fall of communism. Some moral disengagement mechanisms are common across all three countries, while others are linked to specific circumstances. Social identity mechanisms feed into moral disengagement, which individuals draw upon to reconcile the conflict between unethical behavior and moral codes. Patterns of moral disengagement aggregate to the country level and explain normalization of corruption in CEE society and organizations. (shrink)

Rawls's political constructivism in Political Liberalism maintains that the two principles of justice will be accepted and endorsed by persons who are both reasonable and rational. A Theory of Justice explains the motivation to endorse the political conception on the basis of a Kantian moral psychology. Both Leif Wenar and Brian Barry argue that despite Rawls's claims to the contrary, the later work still supposes a Kantian moral psychology. If so, political constructivism fails to account for stability in (...) society among a plurality of reasonable conceptions of good. This paper draws on Rawls's distinction in Political Liberalism between the political and nonpolitical moral sell characterizing each citizens' moral identity in claiming that the two parts of the sell correlate to two sets of motivation, political and moral motivation. This account explains resolution of conflict in the agent in favor of the political conception without invoking a Kantian moral psychology. (shrink)

In Morality and Ethics of War, which includes a foreword by Major General Susan Coyle, ethicist Deane-Peter Baker goes beyond existing treatments of military ethics to address a fundamental problem: the yawning gap that exists between the diverse moral frameworks defining personal identity in a multicultural society on the one hand, and the professional military ethic on the other. Baker argues that overcoming this chasm is essential to minimising the ethical risks that can lead to operational and strategic (...) failure for military forces engaged in today's complex conflict environment. He contends that spanning the gap is vital in preventing moral injury from befalling the nation's uniformed servants. Drawing on a revised account of what he calls 'the Just War Continuum', Baker develops a bridging framework that combines conceptual clarity and rigour with insights from cutting edge psychological research and creates a practical means for military leaders to negotiate the moral chasm in military affairs. (shrink)

Rawls's political constructivism in Political Liberalism maintains that the two principles of justice will be accepted and endorsed by persons who are both reasonable and rational. A Theory of Justice explains the motivation to endorse the political conception on the basis of a Kantian moral psychology. Both Leif Wenar and Brian Barry argue that despite Rawls's claims to the contrary, the later work still supposes a Kantian moral psychology. If so, political constructivism fails to account for stability in (...) society among a plurality of reasonable conceptions of good. This paper draws on Rawls's distinction in Political Liberalism between the political and nonpolitical moral sell characterizing each citizens' moral identity in claiming that the two parts of the sell correlate to two sets of motivation, political and moral motivation. This account explains resolution of conflict in the agent in favor of the political conception without invoking a Kantian moral psychology. (shrink)

A new volume of philosophical essays by Bernard Williams. The book is a successor to Problems of the Self, but whereas that volume dealt mainly with questions of personal identity, Moral Luck centres on questions of moral philosophy and the theory of rational action. That whole area has of course been strikingly reinvigorated over the last deacde, and philosophers have both broadened and deepened their concerns in a way that now makes much earlier moral and political (...) philosophy look sterile and trivial. Moral Luck contains a number of essays that have contributed influentially to this development. Among the recurring themes are the moral and philosophical limitations of utilitarianism, the notion of integrity, relativism, and problems of moral conflict and rational choice. The work presented here is marked by a high degree of imagination and acuity, and also conveys a strong sense of psychological reality. The volume will be a stimulating source of ideas and arguments for all philosophers and a wide range of other readers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The philosophical tradition approaches to morals have their grounds predominantly on metaphysical and theological concepts and theories. Among the traditional ethics concepts, the most prominent is the Divine Command Theory (DCT). As per the DCT, God gives moral foundations to the humankind by its creation and through Revelation. Morality and Divinity are inseparable since the most remote civilization. These concepts submerge in a theological framework and are largely accepted by most followers of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, (...) and Islam: the greatest part of the human population. Holding faith and Revelation for its grounds, the Divine Command Theories are not strictly subject to the demonstration. The opponents to the Divine Command conception of morals, grounded in the impossibility of demonstration of its metaphysical and religious assumptions, have tried for many centuries (albeit unsuccessfully) to devalue its importance. They held the argument that it does not show material evidence and logical coherence and, for this reason, cannot be taken into account for scientific nor philosophical purposes. It is just a belief and, as so, should be understood. Besides these extreme oppositions, many other concepts contravene the Divine Command theories, in one or another way, in part or in full. Many philosophers and social scientists, from the classic Greek philosophy up to the present date, for instance, sustain that morality is only a construct, and thus culturally relative and culturally determined. However, this brings many other discussions and imposes the challenge to determine what is the meaning of culture, which elements of culture are morally determinant, and finally, what are the boundaries of such relativity. Moral determinists claim that everything related to human behavior, including morality, is determined, once free will does not exist. More recently, modern thinkers argued that there is a strict science of morality. However, the scientific method alone, despite explaining several facts and evidence, cannot enlighten the entire content and full meaning of ethics. Morals’ understanding requires a broader perception, and an agreement among philosophers, which they have never achieved. All of these questions have many different configurations depending on each philosophical strand, and start complex analysis and endless debates, as long as many of them are reciprocally conflictive. The universe and the atmosphere involving this thesis are the dominions of all these conceptual conflicts, observed from an objective and evolutionary standpoint. Irrespective of this circumstance and its intrinsic importance, however, these questions are far distant from the methodological approach of an analytical discussion on objective morals, what is, indeed, the aim and scope of this work. We should briefly revisit these prominent traditional theories because this thesis shelters a comparative study, and its assumptions at least differ profoundly from all traditional theories. Therefore, it becomes necessary offering direct and specific elements of comparison to the reader, for the right criticism, dispensing interruptive researches. However, even revisiting the traditional theories, for this comparative and critical exposure purpose, they will be kept by the side of our main concerns, as “aliena materia.” Irrespective of the validity of any or all of the elements of this discussion, and their meaning as the philosophical universe of this thesis, the purpose of this work is demonstrating and justifying the existence and meaning of prehistoric moral archetypes arisen directly from the very first social needs and efforts for survival. These archetypes are the definition of the essential foundation of ethics, its aggregation to the collective unconscious and corresponding logic organization and transmission to evolutionary stages of the human genome and different relations space-time, irrespective of any contemporary experience of the individuals. The system defined by these archetypes composes an evolutionary human social model. Is this a metaethical position? Yes, it is. Moreover, as in any metaethical reasoning, we should look carefully for the best and coherent routes, as the Analytical Philosophy offers them. Thus, this work should reasonably demonstrate that morals are not a cultural product of the civilized men or modern societies and that despite being subject to several cultural relative aggregations and subtractions, its essential foundations are archetypal and have never structurally changed. This reasoning induces that morality is an original attribute of the “homo sapiens”; it is not a property and nor an accident: it integrates the human essence and belongs to the realm of the ontological human identity. The human phenomena is a continuing process, playing its role between random determination and free will, and we need to question how morality began and how did it come to us in the present. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from an analysis (Callaway 1992, pp. 239-240) of a role of conflict in the origin of value commitments, a pervasive sociological pattern in the development of unifying group values which transforms personal conflicts, or differences, into large-scale collective conflicts. I have urged that these forces are capable of distorting even the cognitive processes of science and that they are a chief reason why value claims are regarded as incapable of objective evaluation. The thesis of the present (...) paper is that romantic collectivism (uncritical attachment to an identification group) renders members passive with respect to the ideals or content embodied in collective identity and that this is often exploited to convert groups into instruments of personal power. The issue is examined by reference to Reinhold Niebuhr's 1932 thesis of the inevitability of group egoism and inter-group conflicts and an opposing pragmatist conception of moral development, self-identity, and the individual's relationship to reference communities. (shrink)

Allies are extremely important to LGBT rights. Though we don’t often enumerate what tasks we expect allies to do, a fairly common conception is that allies “support the LGBT community.” In the first section I introduce three difficulties for this position that collectively suggest it is conceptually insufficient. I then develop a positive account by starting with whom allies are allied to instead of what allies are supposed to do. We might obviously say here that allies are allied to the (...) LGBT community, but I will argue that this community is better thought of as a loose coalition because there are often intersectional issues and conflicting interests that challenge any unified sense of community. I argue that people typically become allies because a friend or family member is experiencing some kind of specific harm; if that harm or discrimination is what causally explains why people become allies, then allies are required to do more than we commonly think. Although allies have a prima facie obligation to honor what members of a subcommunity identify as a harm, this obligation is defeasible if an ally believes fulfilling the obligation would be harmful. I conclude by looking at how we can understand what an ally is in terms of a larger discussion about moral obligations. If people already have these obligations, whatever they are, because morality requires it, then the status “ally” is redundant. I conclude by showing that certain social statuses can not only transform or reprioritize prior moral commitments, but can also introduce new kinds of responsibility that an agent did not have before. (shrink)

The project takes as its starting point our conflicting intuitions about personal identity exposed by Bernard Williams' thought experiment involving the switching of bodies in "The Self and the Future." The conflicted intuitions are identified as animalist and psychologist and correspond roughly with the two major approaches to personal identity. The traditional strategy to resolve the conflict---thought experiments---is critically examined and the project concludes that proper thought experiments will reveal the conflict but are unlikely to resolve (...) it. A new reading of the conflict is proposed. The concept of the person is a cluster concept with distinct components: biological human beings, rational agency and psychological continuity, where the latter is construed as the temporal analog of phenomenological unity at a time. The project then suggests that moral theory is best pursued not by a naturalist conception of persons that unites the components of the cluster, but by a novel conception that separates them. This can be accomplished best by eliminating the concept of the person altogether. Objections that the concept of the person is ineliminable are considered and rejected, as are objections that the nature of conflict is not reason enough to abandon the concept. Personhood's centrality for value theory is questioned and the eliminativist strategy is defended on the grounds that responsibility, self-concern and moral rights are best analyzed with the component concepts instead of the cluster concept. Eliminativism is therefore preferable to competing accounts of personal identity because the former is better suited for moral theory. Among the advantages are the ability to: attribute responsibility to group agents without calling them persons, make sense of our conflicting demonstrations of self-concern without taking them as evidence for conflicting theories of personal identity, and attribute moral rights to entities who fail to meet traditional criteria for personhood but who are nonetheless entitled to moral respect. (shrink)

We argue that animalism is the only materialist account of personal identity that can account for the autonomy that we typically think of ourselves as possessing. All the rival materialist theories suffer from a moral version of the problem of too many thinkers when they posit a human person that overlaps a numerically distinct human animal. The different persistence conditions of overlapping thinkers will lead them to have interests that conflict, which in many cases prevents them both (...) from autonomously forming and acting on the same intentions. These problems are exacerbated by problems of self-reference plaguing the overlapping thinkers. We contend that the impossibility of simultaneous autonomous action by animals and persons provides a reason to favor animalism over Neo-Lockeanism, Four-Dimensionalism, Constitution theory, and brain-size views of the person. We anticipate and reject arguments that the autonomy of the person and the animal can be shown to be compatible by relying upon either the Parfitian thesis that identity isn’t what matters or claiming that animals acquire the interests of the person they constitute. (shrink)

Moral outrage is a response to the behavior of others, never one's own. It is a response to infringements or transgressions on what people perceive to be the immunities they, or others with whom they identify, can expect on the basis of their rights and privileges and what they understand to be their reasonable expectations regarding the behavior of others. A person's culturally defined social identities and the rights and privileges that go with them in relationships to which those (...) identities can be party make up the contents of that person's social persona and also constitute that person's social territory. Infringements of rights and privileges in the social and symbolic worlds in which humans live are the equivalent of encroachments on territory among animals, and moral outrage can be understood as the human expression of what we perceive as territorial behavior in animals. As emotion, outrage is affected by such clinical processes as displacement, rationalization, projection, and reaction formation. Outrage has an essential role in the maintenance of viable social groups, but it also exacerbates conflict among people who perceive one another as “others.”. (shrink)

Tomasello describes how the sense of moral obligation emerges from a shared perspective with collaborative partners and in-group members. Our commentary expands this framework to accommodate multiple social identities, where the normative standards associated with diverse group memberships can often conflict with one another. Reconciling these conflicting obligations is argued to be a central part of human morality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 260-272 [Access article in PDF] Tragic Conflict and Greatness of Character Ariel Meira IT IS A SURPRISING FACT that some of our best literary examples of greatness of character are of persons acting in a way that involves them in a terrible burden of guilt. As spectators we perceive Oedipus, in Sophocles's Oedipus the King, 1 as one who upon discovering the (...) class='Hi'>identity of his father and mother affirms that he bears guilt for killing the former and committing incest with the latter, and we typically concur in some vague way with his affirmation. 2 We do not, after all, think that his affirmation is merely the consequence of some confusion about morals on his part, and that he would have been more justified in treating his discovery with a light conscience. Furthermore, it seems that our conception of his greatness is intimately bound up with our being acquainted with him as someone who acted so as to render himself profoundly guilty in this way. What is paradoxical is that moral taint would be expected to reduce our admiration for a character and our attribution of greatness to it. Why then should noteworthy paradigms of greatness of character be morally tainted characters? Can we make sense of the idea that some kinds of guiltiness might be constitutive of greatness of character?As it is well-known, Aristotle says that in order for a tragedy best to achieve its desired effect, it should portray a protagonist "who is not pre-eminent in moral virtue, who passes to bad fortune not through vice or wickedness, but because of some hamartia...." 3 The term "hamartia" is variously translated as "piece of ignorance," "miscalculation," and "error of judgment," but as O. B. Hardison notes, it must be treated as designating a moral flaw, because it renders the protagonist [End Page 260] less than "pre-eminent in moral virtue." 4 However, even if the term is interpreted as covering what I have described as the moral taint associated with greatness of character, it should be clear that Aristotle does not provide here an answer to my question. At best he can be viewed as explaining why morally tainted characters of this sort are crucial to achieving tragic effect. He is not explaining how it is that such characters can be viewed as paradigms of greatness.I propose not to treat this paradox in its most general form, but rather by confining my attention to an interesting subclass of cases. What I have in mind are cases in which a protagonist finds himself or herself in what I shall call circumstances of tragic conflict. Such circumstances determine that a choice must be made between two (or perhaps more) courses of action, even though each of the courses involves the violation of an important moral claim, or the destruction of a crucial value. As spectators or readers, we typically perceive the protagonist as emerging with a heavy burden of guilt (much in the way noted above regarding Oedipus), and we recognize that he or she was bound to emerge guilty, no matter which course of action would have been chosen. Cases such as that of Agamemnon (bearing guilt for the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in Aeschylus's Agamemnon), 5 of Jephthah (again bearing guilt for the sacrifice of his daughter, in Judges 11), 6 and of Orestes (bearing guilt for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra in Euripides's Orestes) 7 belong quite uncontroversially to this subclass. 8These protagonists make difficult choices, and carry them out with courage and resolution, qualities which explain to some extent our perception of them as possessing greatness of character. But in making their choice, they necessarily render themselves guilty, whether or not they have made the correct choice (assuming there is a correct choice in the circumstances). And we sense that suffering the peculiarly poignant pain which accompanies their guilty action is at least partly constitutive of their greatness. Clearly, we are faced again with the paradox of the association of guilt with greatness of character.In... (shrink)

In this book of essays, he argues that morality cannot be defined solely by rational and universal principles; instead, a major place must be found for changing and conflicting ideals, values peculiar to specific times and cultures.