Moral Judgement (moral + judgement)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Moral Cognitivism and Character

PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, Issue 3 2005
Craig Taylor
It may seem to follow from Peter Winch's claim in ,The Universalizability of Moral Judgements' that a certain class of first-person moral judgments are not universalizable that such judgments cannot be given a cognitivist interpretation. But Winch's argument does not involve the denial of moral cognitivism and in this paper I show how such judgements may be cognitively determined yet not universalizable. Drawing on an example from James Joyce's The Dead, I suggest that in the kind of situation Winch envisages where we properly return a different moral judgement to another agent it may be that we accept their judgement is right for them because we recognise that it is determined by values that, simply because of the particular people we are, we could never know or understand in just the same way. [source]


,She's manipulative and he's right off': A critical analysis of psychiatric nurses' oral and written language in the acute inpatient setting

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MENTAL HEALTH NURSING, Issue 2 2006
Bridget Hamilton
ABSTRACT:, Remarks such as ,she's manipulative' and ,he's right off' are familiar to psychiatric nurses. This paper critiques the language nurses use in acute inpatient psychiatry services, highlighting the diverse discourses implicated in nurses' writing and speaking about patients. Based on a review of the literature, this paper examines ethnographic studies and discourse analyses of psychiatric nurses' oral and written language. A prominent debate in the literature surrounds nurses' use of standardized language, which is the use of set terms for symptoms and nursing activities. This review of spoken descriptions of patients highlights nurses' use of informal and local descriptions, incorporating elements of moral judgement, common sense language and empathy. Research into written accounts in patient files and records show nurses' use of objectifying language, the dominance of medicine and the emergence of the language of bureaucracy in health services. Challenges to the language of psychiatry and psychiatric nursing arise from fields as diverse as bioscience, humanism and social theory. Authors who focus on the relationship between language, power and the discipline of nursing disagree in regard to their analysis of particular language as a constructive exercise of power by nurses. Thus, particular language is in some instances endorsed and in other instances censured, by nurses in research and practice. In this paper, a Foucauldian analysis provides further critique of taken-for-granted practices of speech and writing. Rather than censoring language, we recommend that nurses, researchers and educators attend to nurses' everyday language and explore what it produces for nurses, patients and society. [source]


Probing the "moralization of capitalism" problem: Democratic experimentalism and the co-evolution of norms

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 185 2005
Christian Arnsperger
The most fundamental issue raised by any discussion around the ,moralization of capitalism' is the puzzle of second-order morality: How exactly is it possible to pass a moral judgement on our categories of moral judgement? How can our norms of morality be said to be immoral, thus calling for (re-)moralization? The answer depends on the observation that norms and interaction structures in capitalism have co-evolved, and hence can be taken neither as autonomous with respect to one another nor as obeying a hidden functionality. This implies that, paradoxically, the moralization problem cannot be solved in moral terms, but calls for a political approach, to make best use of which we need to come to terms with capitalism as a fully fledged cultural system. The ideology inherent in that cultural system can only be attacked from within the system itself, through decentralized processes of democratic decision-making rather than by mere prophetic denunciation or moral invectives. Because the particular version of the capitalist culture in which we live now is a radically contingent result of history, it makes sense to support a framework of democratic experimentalism which embeds multiple institutional experimentation within a system of experience-building and experience-formation analogous to the system of information-utilisation and information-dissemination offered by the Hayekian market. Only by thus creating the real and concrete democratic presuppositions for alternative capitalist practices can we begin to make sense of the puzzle inherent in the "moralization of capitalism" problem. [source]


Agriculture and ,Improvement' in Early Colonial India: A Pre-History of Development

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 4 2005
DAVID ARNOLD
The doctrine of ,improvement' has often been identified with the introduction , and presumed failure , of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal in 1793. Although recognized as central to British agrarian policies in India, its wider impact and significance have been insufficiently explored. Aesthetic taste, moral judgement and botanical enthusiasm combined with more strictly economic criteria to give an authority to the idea of improvement that endured into the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Concern for improvement also reflected dissatisfaction with India's apparent poverty and deficient material environment; it helped stimulate data-collection and ambitious schemes of agrarian transformation. A precursor of later concepts of development, not least in its negative presumptions about India and the search for external agencies of change, improvement yet shows many of the false starts and intrinsic limitations early attempts to transform rural India entailed. This article reassesses the significance of improvement in the first half of the nineteenth century in India, especially as illustrated through contemporary travel literature and through the aims and activities of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India. [source]


Responsible business decisions: an over-arching framework

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 3-4 2006
Alan Gully
Contemporary businesses face increasing pressures on formulating, implementing and monitoring their strategic policies. Their long-term success in attaining these strongly relies on developing a proactive two-way, or even multi-way, stakeholder dialogue to become aware of the moral aspects of decisions. Openness and transparency should help to provide stakeholders with information on how and why particular courses of action have been adopted. In order to be effective and efficient, responsible business decision-making requires the willpower and commitment by management to implement, monitor and evaluate the ethical action which ought to be based on the organisation's evolving values and priorities. Although inclusive relationships may be accomplished in several ways, the normative interpretation of stakeholder theory is the most appropriate methodology to enable moral judgement to be made. An over-arching framework is presented to assess, review and re-balance the different techniques for any business to achieve its intended outcomes through the triple bottom line. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Moral Nativism: A Sceptical Response

MIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 3 2010
KIM STERELNY
In the last few years, nativist, modular views of moral cognition have been influential. This paper shares the view that normative cognition develops robustly, and is probably an adaptation. But it develops an alternative view of the developmental basis of moral cognition, based on the idea that adults scaffold moral development by organising the learning environment of the next generation. In addition, I argue that the modular nativist picture has no plausible account of the role of explicit moral judgement, and that no persuasive version of the ,poverty of the stimulus' applies to moral cognition. [source]


Moral Cognitivism and Character

PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, Issue 3 2005
Craig Taylor
It may seem to follow from Peter Winch's claim in ,The Universalizability of Moral Judgements' that a certain class of first-person moral judgments are not universalizable that such judgments cannot be given a cognitivist interpretation. But Winch's argument does not involve the denial of moral cognitivism and in this paper I show how such judgements may be cognitively determined yet not universalizable. Drawing on an example from James Joyce's The Dead, I suggest that in the kind of situation Winch envisages where we properly return a different moral judgement to another agent it may be that we accept their judgement is right for them because we recognise that it is determined by values that, simply because of the particular people we are, we could never know or understand in just the same way. [source]


Ethics in the termination of analysis,

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, Issue 2 2008
Alessandro Garella
The author argues that the termination of analysis raises not only theoretical and technical issues but also problems of evaluation that are both moral (what is good or bad with regard to termination) and ethical (what is the best way of achieving the intended objective). Broadly speaking, he considers that the subject can be addressed from three different aspects: (a) a psychoanalysis of ethics; (b) an ethic of psychoanalytic treatment; (c) an area of intersection between psychoanalysis and ethics that has to do with mankind,'s norms and values. The termination is particularly well suited to investigation of the intertwining of ethics with other aspects of psychic functioning. A specific description is given of the conflict between the ,limit' and ,completeness', the limit being connected with the analysis and the wish, while completeness is the possibility of experiencing the analysis and one's personal life as endowed with the ,sense of an end-point'. The conflict may be expressed in dramatic or tragic forms that can be productively explored through the Aristotelian concepts of peripeteia and recognition. The termination process offers material for establishing an ethics of the limit, highlighting the psychic role of moral judgement and the need to evaluate this role if a satisfactory termination is to be achieved. [source]


I,The Relativism of Blame and Williams's Relativism of Distance

ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY SUPPLEMENTARY VOLUME, Issue 1 2010
Miranda Fricker
Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism,the ,relativism of distance'. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical (he thought it often involved a certain ,fantasy'). I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate,moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. [source]


The influence of culture on ethical perception held by business students in a New Zealand university

BUSINESS ETHICS: A EUROPEAN REVIEW, Issue 4 2010
Margaret Brunton
The demand for principled and transparent corporate moral judgement and ethical decision making in the workplace makes it necessary for business students as future managers to understand the expectations of ethical workplace conduct. Corporate scandals mean that there is enhanced interest in ensuring that ethical content is included in curricula in universities. In this study, we re-visit the question of whether culture has an influence on ethical perceptions of workplace scenarios, using students enrolled in a College of Business in a New Zealand (NZ) university as respondents. Consistent with current research, this study demonstrated mixed results. However, we also found evidence to suggest some identifiable patterns in the data across cultural groups. Overall, Chinese and Other respondents were more likely than NZ European to consider the scenarios as ethical. On the other hand, Chinese respondents were significantly less likely to report that their peers would carry out ethically questionable actions. [source]


Ethical perception: are differences between ethnic groups situation dependent?

BUSINESS ETHICS: A EUROPEAN REVIEW, Issue 2 2010
Jo Ann Ho
This study was conducted to determine how culture influences the ethical perception of managers. Most studies conducted so far have only stated similarities and differences in ethical perception between cultural or ethnic groups and little attention has been paid towards understanding how cultural values influence the ethnic groups' ethical perception. Moreover, most empirical research in this area has focused on moral judgement, moral decision making and action, with limited empirical work in the area of ethical perception. A total of 22 interviews were conducted and the questionnaire survey yielded 272 managerial responses. Three implications were obtained based on the findings of the study. The first implication is that differences in ethical perception can exist when one culture attributes moral significance to something that another culture does not. The results of the study also suggest that similarities in ethical perception can occur when a situation is viewed as an accepted and institutionalised part of doing business. Finally, the findings of the study also show that the influence of culture on ethical perception varied according to the different types of scenarios. [source]


Co-operation despite disagreement: from politics to healthcare

BIOETHICS, Issue 2 2003
Noam J. Zohar
Political interaction among citizens who hold opposing moral views commonly requires reaching beyond toleration, toward actual co-operation with policies one opposes. On the more personal level, however, regarding (e.g.) interactions between healthcare providers and patients, several authors emphasise the importance of preserving integrity. But those who oppose any ,complicity in evil' often wrongly conflate instances in which the other's position is (and should be) totally rejected with instances of legitimate, although deep, disagreement. Starting with a striking example from the context of a particular tradition, I argue generally that in the latter sort of disagreements, talk of ,complicity' should be largely replaced with a more co-operative moral stance, grounded in a pluralistic framework. Co-operation Despite Disagreement (CDD) should be sought either for institutional reasons , akin to the political , or for relational reasons. CDD involves sharing another's perspective and sometimes calls for adopting another's moral judgements in preference to one's own. I seek to identify some of the conditions and circumstances that would justify such a shift, particularly in scenarios involving assistance, such as physician-assisted suicide (PAS) or the role of an anaesthesiologist in abortion. This discussion is meant to provide examples of the kind of second-order reasons appropriate for determining the terms for CDD , in distinction from first-order considerations (e.g., the much-contested ,active/passive' distinction) which are likely to be the subject of the initial disagreement and hence cannot serve to resolve it. [source]