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Moral Community (moral + community)
Selected AbstractsThe Religious Institutional Base and Violent Crime in Rural AreasJOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 3 2006MATTHEW R. LEE Research on the relationship between religion and crime has typically focused on individual religiosity and delinquency, or moral communities and crime at the macro level. This study extends prior research by delineating the sociological implications of a strong religious institutional base, and investigating the ties between the religious institutional base and violent crime across rural communities. Multivariate regression analysis of Uniform Crime Report data on violent crime, Census of Churches and Church membership data, and U.S. Census data circa 2000 reveal that rural violent crime rates on average are consistently lower where there are more churches per capita. This relationship holds net of the overall adherence rates, the presence of civically engaged religious adherents, and the presence of conservative Protestant adherents. Moreover, regional variations are evident, with the South and the Midwest,two highly religious regions of the country,sustaining most of the observed institutional effects. [source] The Effect of Religiosity on Tax Fraud Acceptability: A Cross-National AnalysisJOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 3 2006STEVEN STACK Religion provides an important basis for social integration and the prevention of deviant behavior, such as tax fraud, a crime that costs society billions of dollars in lost revenue. The literature on tax fraud and tax fraud acceptability (TFA) has neglected religiosity as a social bond that may deter this type of behavior. Furthermore, existing work is based on the United States; there are no systematic cross-national studies. In particular, there is no research exploring the "moral communities" hypothesis that religiosity's effect on deviance will vary according to the strength of national moral communities. The present study addresses these two gaps in the literature by analyzing data on 45,728 individuals in 36 nations from the World Values Surveys. We control for other predictors of TFA, including social bonds, economic strain, and demographic factors. The results determined that the higher the individual's level of religiosity, the lower the TFA. Results on the moral community's hypothesis were mixed. However, in a separate analysis of individual nations, the presence of a "moral community" (majority of the population identifies with a religious group) explained 39 percent of the variation in the presence or absence of the expected religiosity-TFA relationship. Furthermore, the presence of a communist regime in a nation, often known for the oppression of religious groups who then may view the regime as illegitimate, diminished the impact of religion on TFA. [source] Minimal and maximal goal orientation and reactions to norm violationsEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Immo Fritsche Violations of social norms can either be evaluated in an absolute or in a gradual fashion depending on whether group goals are represented as minimal or maximal goals. Recent research has shown that absolute versus gradual deviations lead to increased levels of demanded punishment and inclination to exclude the deviant from the respective moral community. In this article, we investigate whether individual differences in orientation towards setting goals in either minimal or maximal terms predict reactions to norm violation. In three studies we found that a dominant minimal goal orientation (MIN) relative to maximal goal orientation (MAX) increased punishment inclinations and social exclusion tendencies towards norm violators. These effects were mediated by affective reaction and proved to be unique goal orientation effects when possible effects of need for closure, intolerance of ambiguity and regulatory focus were controlled for. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] The Effect of Religiosity on Tax Fraud Acceptability: A Cross-National AnalysisJOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 3 2006STEVEN STACK Religion provides an important basis for social integration and the prevention of deviant behavior, such as tax fraud, a crime that costs society billions of dollars in lost revenue. The literature on tax fraud and tax fraud acceptability (TFA) has neglected religiosity as a social bond that may deter this type of behavior. Furthermore, existing work is based on the United States; there are no systematic cross-national studies. In particular, there is no research exploring the "moral communities" hypothesis that religiosity's effect on deviance will vary according to the strength of national moral communities. The present study addresses these two gaps in the literature by analyzing data on 45,728 individuals in 36 nations from the World Values Surveys. We control for other predictors of TFA, including social bonds, economic strain, and demographic factors. The results determined that the higher the individual's level of religiosity, the lower the TFA. Results on the moral community's hypothesis were mixed. However, in a separate analysis of individual nations, the presence of a "moral community" (majority of the population identifies with a religious group) explained 39 percent of the variation in the presence or absence of the expected religiosity-TFA relationship. Furthermore, the presence of a communist regime in a nation, often known for the oppression of religious groups who then may view the regime as illegitimate, diminished the impact of religion on TFA. [source] Public Good, Private Protections: Competing Values in German Transplantation LawLAW & POLICY, Issue 2 2002Linda Hogle Organ transplantation has become almost routine practice in many industrialized countries. Policy, ethical, and legal debates tend to center on fairness of allocation rules or alternatives to promote greater numbers of donations. There are also certain beliefs about the use of bodily materials that are often presumed to be homogenous across Euro,American societies. In Germany, however, the idea of using the bodies of some for the good of others, and the right to proclaim some bodies dead for large,scale medical and political purposes is highly charged. This is due to the historical context of medical experimentation, selection, and euthanasia under National Socialism, and the former East German socialist policies which intervened in the private lives and bodies of citizens. This article is based on an ethnography of organ procurement practices during the period when German policymakers struggled with writing a transplant law. Active public resistance revealed deep concern about state intervention in private matters and amplified the growing unrest over definitions of moral community in a changing, post,reunification society. The article shows how public disputes about health policy become a way through which societies deal with other social conflicts. [source] Law and the demoralisation of medicineLEGAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2006Jonathan Montgomery In his Dimbleby Lecture in December 2002, the Archbishop of Canterbury examined the effect of the emergence of the market state on the legitimacy of government activity in areas of morality. He suggested that, while this is becoming limited, the continuing need to provide a moral context for social life provided an opportunity for religious communities to play a crucial role. This paper suggests that the increasing significance of market concepts in healthcare law poses a similar challenge to the moral basis of medical practice, threatening to drive moral argument outside the scope of the discipline, with the consequent effect of undermining the values that drive good healthcare. Thus, the de-moralisation of medicine is also demoralising for those within the health professions. To counteract this tendency, a strong sense of a common moral community needs to be maintained amongst those engaged with the discipline of healthcare law. This paper also examines the role of law in this area. Traditionally, legal scholars have attacked the reluctance of legislators and the judiciary to wrestle from the grip of doctors the authority to determine ethical issues. The dominant view has been that this was a failure to recognise the fact that society has a stake in these matters and that legal non-intervention was an abdication of responsibility that undermines the rule of law. However, the integration of medical and moral decision making into a collaborative enterprise can also be seen as a more effective defence against the forces of demoralisation than the separation that the orthodox approach implies. If this is correct, then a key task for healthcare lawyers, as yet undeveloped, is to consider how to establish a legitimate common moral community, and what role the law might have to play in that process. [source] VI,My Station and its Duties: Ideals and the Social Embeddedness of VirtuePROCEEDINGS OF THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY (HARDBACK), Issue 1 2002Julia Annas In the Stoics we find a combination of two perspectives which are commonly thought to conflict: the embedded perspective from within one's social context, and the universal perspective of the member of the moral community of rational beings. I argue that the Stoics do have a unified theory, one which avoids problems that trouble some modern theories which try to unite these perspectives. [source] Principle, Proceduralism, and Precaution in a Community of RightsRATIO JURIS, Issue 2 2006DERYCK BEYLEVELD Notwithstanding the deep moral consensus in Gewirthia, where citizens are fully committed to the Principle of Generic Consistency (requiring that agents respect one another's freedom and basic well-being), Gewirthians make no claim to "know all the answers." In consequence, public governance in Gewirthia needs a strategy for dealing with the many kinds of disputes,disputes that relate to matters of both principle and practice,that require authoritative settlement. In this context, having outlined the nature of (and justification for) the procedural strategy that Gewirthia adopts in order to resolve such disputes, we discuss the range of regulatory questions that are potentially moot in Gewirthia, and focus on three hard cases in which the State might argue for a precautionary licence,namely, where there is a dispute about indirect and speculative harm to rights-holders, about harm to arguable rights-holders, and about the possible corrosion of the conditions that are essential for the sustainability of a moral community. [source] Unspeakable Pasts as Limit Events: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Stolen GenerationsAUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 2 2003Simone Gigliotti This article examines the role of testimony in the production of the memory of the Holocaust and the practice of forcible removals in Australia as "limit events". A "limit event" is an event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community. The references are the stories of removal collated in Bringing Them Home, and eyewitness testimonies from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. By situating the stolen generations and the Eichmann trial as limit events, I argue that the effects of witnessing and story-telling exposed a cultural semantics of what was speakable and unspeakable in the narratives of judging historical injustice and remembering past traumas. [source] Tocqueville, Collingwood, history and extending the moral communityBRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2000David Boucher No one in the English-speaking world has done more to establish the autonomy and validity of history as a form of knowledge, integral to our self-understanding, both individually and collectively, and to our understanding of others, whether they are distant in time and mental outlook, or contemporary but nevertheless different, than R. G. Collingwood. Indeed, it has recently been said that he set the agenda for all Anglophone post-war discussion of problems in the philosophy of history. This is a somewhat modest assessment of his impact because it ignores the extent to which he also had a profound influence on the intellectual giants of the continental hermeneutic tradition, Bultmann, Gadamer, Pannenberg, Lonergan and Ricoeur. In this article I explore the extent to which Collingwood advances our understanding of the process by which the moral community can be extended to embrace common principles such as fundamental human rights, while respecting human differences and cultural identities quite different from our own. I argue that in addressing these questions he explicitly rejected relativism, without subscribing to the Hegelian notion of an objective rationality. [source] | |||||||||||||