The purpose of this paper is to introduce a two level account of moral thinking that, unlike other accounts, does justice to three very plausible propositions that seem to form an inconsistent triad: (1) People can be morally virtuous without the aid of philosophy. (2) Morally virtuous people non-accidentally act for good reasons, and work out what it is that they ought to do on the basis of considering such reasons. (3) Philosophers engaged in the project of normative ethics (...) are not wasting their time when they search after highly general moral principles which could not be discovered or be justifiably accepted through non-philosophical thinking, and which specify the good reasons that virtuous people act on, as well as provide a criterion or criteria for determining what it is that people ought to do. (shrink)

We conducted an on-line survey to investigate the professor’s idea of “morality” and then to compare their moral thinking at the abstract level with their moral thinking in the real life situations by sampling 257 professors from the University of Novi Sad. We constructed questionnaire based on related theoretical ethical concepts. Our results show (after we performed exploratory factor analysis) that the professor’s idea of “morality” consists of the three moral thinking patterns which are simultaneously activated during (...) the process of their abstract moral thinking. We have identified these patterns in the following manner: deontological, formal and subjective pattern. In addition, our results show that of the three, the subjective pattern is more activated than the other two during their process of the moral thinking at the abstract level. We also discovered that there is a statistically significant difference between professor’s moral thinking patterns activation level at the abstract level and their moral thinking patterns activation level in the real life situation. (shrink)

헤어의 아크라시아에 관한 전기 입장을 살펴보면, 진실한 도덕 판단에 이르는 한, 아크라시아 현상은 불가능한 것이다. 하지만 헤어의 아크라시아에 관한 전기 입장은 언어 논리에 지나치게 치중한 나머지, 현실에서 종종 볼 수 있는 도덕적 갈등, 죄책감, 후회와 같은 일상의 경험을 설명하는 데 부족하다는 비판을 받는다. 이와 달리 헤어의 아크라시아에 관한 후기 입장은 인간학적 한계를 고려하여 현실의 인간을 설명함으로써 아크라시아 문제에 관해 좀 더 설득력 있는 논의를 펼친다. 헤어의 아크라시아에 관한 후기 입장은 도덕적 사유의 두 수준 이론을 통해, 아크라시아에 관한 논의를 2가지 관점에서 (...) 분석하여 아크라시아 문제를 바라본다. 즉, 비판적 수준의 도덕적 사유를 하게 되면 아크라시아 현상이 불가능하다는 입장을 따르게 되지만, 직관적 수준의 도덕적 사유를 하게 되면 아크라시아 현상은 가능한 것이다. 하지만 헤어의 아크라시아 논의가 타당성을 지니기 위해서는 실험윤리학의 연구 성과를 바탕으로 면밀히 검토하고 그 한계를 분석해 볼 필요가 있다. 비판적 수준의 도덕적 사유의 측면에서 바라본 아크라시아 문제에 관한 검토는 도덕주의자가 현실적으로 존재 가능성 유무와 설사 있다 하더라도 그들을 확인할 수 있는 객관적인 방법이 없기 때문에 실험윤리학적으로 검토하기는 쉽지 않을 것이다. 또한, 직관적 수준의 도덕적 사유의 측면에서 바라본 아크라시아 문제를 검토하기 위해 vmPFC 손상 환자에 관한 다양한 연구 결과를 살펴보았지만, 여전히 헤어의 아크라시아 문제를 정당화하기 위해서는 더 많은 경험 과학적 증거들이 필요한 시점이다. 결국, 헤어의 아크라시아 문제에 관한 논의는 더 많은 경험 과학적 증거를 통해 학문적 실효성이 검증될 필요가 있다. 따라서 제한된 연구 성과를 바탕으로 단정적인 결론을 내리는 것은 바람직하지 않기 때문에, 실험윤리학적 증거를 바탕으로 철저히 검토하여 더 나은 방향으로 발전하고 진화되어야 할 것이다. (shrink)

In this work, the author has fashioned out of the logical and linguistic theses of his earlier books a full-scale but readily intelligible account of moral argument.

Background In the globalizing world, nurses often meet humans from different cultures and values. This fact has led them to make ethical decisions, which do not comply with their own moral jurisdictions at care setting. Objectives The objective of the study was to investigate the relationships between moral development levels of the nurses and their scores of nursing principled thinking and practical consideration during decision making for ethical dilemmas. Methods This was a descriptive correlational study. Nursing Dilemma (...) Test, Moral Development Scale for Professionals and socio-demographic form were used. Study was conducted with 227 nurses. Ethical considerations: An institutional authorization, an ethics approval from non-interventional ethics committee of the respective university, permission from the authors of the scales used and informed consents from the nurses were obtained in order to conduct the study. Results In this study, nurses were found to be at post-conventional level according to Kohlberg’s moral development theory. Sociodemographic and working characteristics of the nurses have not affected their scores of moral development level and their scores of nursing principled thinking, practical consideration and familiarity (p > 0.05). Nurses take attention for moral principles during decision making although not at a desirable level, and they are relatively affected by environmental factors Conclusion Although nurses are familiar with ethical problems at scenarios including ethical dilemmas, they cannot make decisions in accordance with their moral development levels during decision making for ethical dilemmas. Nurses should be instructed and supported for ethical decision making by recognizing factors that may be effective on their decision making. (shrink)

PurposeHigher education in the past has been found to have a positive effect on the moral development of students from a variety of disciplines, decreasing conventional and increasing post‐conventional moral reasoning progressively at each level of study. This research aims to explore to what extent changes in moral judgement could be detected in students on computing degree courses, at three different stages of study, in order to establish if HE in the twenty‐first century has a similar effect (...) and what level of moral awareness computing graduates/practitioners exhibit.Design/methodology/approachThe research takes the form of an exploratory case study which aimed to investigate the current situation in one institution. The defining issues test questionnaire was used to gather data.FindingsResults showed little difference in the level of post‐conventional thinking between undergraduate students about to enter HE, final year undergraduates and students undertaking postgraduate studies.Research limitations/implicationsThis research questions if IT students moral judgement skills are at a level that enables them to be considered professionals.Practical implicationsRecommendations are made for different teaching approaches to be adopted which place greater emphasis on relating learning outcomes to professional codes of conduct, and for computing professional bodies to take a more active role in defining components of courses they accredit.Social implicationsGiven the ubiquitous nature of computers and society's high level of dependence on them it is argued that post‐conventional thinking skills are essential for people intending to work with computer technology.Originality/valueAlthough the DIT questionnaire is been used extensively, no other research has been found that has utilised it to analyse moral judgement levels of HE students within the same subject discipline, at different levels of study. (shrink)

Background Levels of care deemed as inappropriate generate moral distress among nurses and other intensive care professionals. Inappropriate levels of care and related moral distress are frequently broached as individual and psychological phenomena, reduced to how individuals feel and think about specific cases. However, this tends to obscure the complex context in which these situations occur, and on which healthcare professionals can act. There is thus a need for a more contextual and team-level lens on inappropriate (...) levels of care. Research objective This study aims to explore and understand the issue of inappropriate levels of care in an intensive care unit (ICU) through a contextual and team-level lens. Research design Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nurses, respiratory therapists, and intensivists. Thematic analysis focused on understanding the causes and consequences of inappropriate levels of care, as well as potential avenues for improvement. This study is part of a 5-phase participatory living lab project on inappropriate levels of care conducted in the ICU of a Montreal (Quebec, Canada) hospital. This paper relates the initial phases of the project, focusing on understanding the issue, with reported events spanning from June 2022 to May 2023. Ethical considerations Ethics approval was sought and granted by the Research Ethics Board of the CIUSSS de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal. Findings/Discussion Five broad themes intrinsically related to the phenomenon of inappropriate levels of care were explored with and by participants: (1) the process of determining levels of care, (2) the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate levels of care, (3) causes of inappropriate levels of care, (4) consequences of inappropriate levels of care and (5) potential avenues for improvement. Conclusion This research provides a comprehensive understanding of inappropriate levels of care in the ICU and emphasizes the relevance of team-level explorations of complex ethical issues. (shrink)

Dominic Scott compares the Republic and Nicomachean Ethics from a methodological perspective. He argues that Plato and Aristotle distinguish similar levels of argument in the defence of justice, and that they both follow the same approach: Plato because he thinks it will suffice, Aristotle because he thinks there is no need to go beyond it.

This study explores the relationship between moral intensity and the use of different sensemaking strategies in military critical incidents. First, narratives of military personnel were used to select prototypical high/low moral intensity critical incidents. In a follow-up, a scenario study was conducted with active duty military personnel to examine the relationship between moral intensity and the use of sensemaking tactics. This study offers three main conclusions. First, the use of sensemaking tactics is strongly tied to the level (...) of moral intensity in the situation. In high-intense situations, the servicemen draw on previous experiences, prediction of consequences, and help of others to recognize and interpret the situation. Less attention goes out to higher level critical thinking. Thus, it seems that in these critical incidents, the servicemen react without giving room for thorough consideration and deliberation. Second, the number of deployments a serviceman experienced influences the perceived seriousness and harmfulness of the situation negatively in low-intense situations. Finally, and in line with earlier studies, the results indicate that the concept of moral intensity is formed out of three rather than the six dimensions originally proposed by Jones. The implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

1492. The American continent was drawing Europeans on. Some saw in it the chance of a utopia, others saw it as utopia already coming about, in its natural state. All at once two processes of domination were triggered: one supported by the force of arms, and the other by the power of ideas and beliefs. If the defenders of utopian thinking were able to create a lasting achievement, it is because they managed to make their ideas fit with the principles (...) governing the social life of the indigenous peoples: thus a substantial part of what remains from the period of Don Vasco de Quiroga had preceded it. Cultures will not be able to transcend nationalisms and rise to the level of concerns shared by the whole of humanity until they can stand up for their own particular character against ‘globalizing’ trends. (shrink)

The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate why AI researchers’ attempts at developing projects of moral machines are a cause for concern regarding the way in which such machines can reach a certain level of morality. By comparing and contrasting Howard and Muntean’s model of a virtuous Artificial Autonomous Moral Agent and Bauer’s model of a two-level utilitarian Artificial Moral Agent, I draw the conclusion that both models raise, although in a different manner, some crucial (...) issues. The latter are recognized as deriving from the complex relationships between human cognition and moral reasoning, as refracted through the lens of the idea of moral AI. In this context, special attention is paid to the complications which are triggered by the analogical thinking regarding the processes of replication of human morality in the field of machine ethics. (shrink)

The article traces origins of the contradiction that calls into being the polemics on the moral status of duties to close persons. Special obligations are created by the unique life narrative of an actor that makes different recipients of her actions more or less distant. Those who are less distant are “close ones.” Those who are more distant are “strangers.” The basis of this distance can be different: individual sympathy, consanguinity, belonging to cultural, territorial and political communities. Special obligations (...) presuppose that the preferential treatment of “close ones” is not only permissible but obligatory. This feature of moral duties to close persons makes moral philosophers suspicious because they are prone to endow moral requirements with two interrelated properties: universality and the high level of generality. The main reason for this is that the typical moral duty is a duty of every human being to another human being without any further qualifications. Against the background of such duties, any preference to close persons looks like the breach of moral equality and manifestation of impermissible partiality. Though, common moral beliefs persistently include special obligations in the whole system of moral duty. R. Goodin thinks that they have a priority over positive general duties and yield to negative general duties. The empirical researches of moral evaluations which reviewed in this article in general confirm this conclusion. The ethical theory cannot ignore fundamental features of common moral beliefs. That is why it is doomed to look for ways of reconciling the moral equality and impartiality with the preferential treatment of close persons embedded into special obligations. (shrink)

Thirty years ago political philosophy in Britain was feared to be dead or dying; dying of meaninglessness and neglect.’ Political philosophy now enjoys a golden age, certainly in the English‐speaking world; but never has the level of political debate been lower. The memories are still painful of how, in the American presidential campaign of 1996 and the British general election of 1997, even sustained rhetoric, let alone attempts at reasoned, persuasive discourse, finally collapsed into sound‐bytes, and contingent sound‐bytes at that, (...) mainly reacting to relatively trivial, mainly opportunistic accusations and counter‐accusations, a plethora of sound‐bytes rarely exhibiting either Bagehot's ‘stream of tendency’ or a coherent ‘moral discourse’. All three main parties talked about restoring a sense of morality to politics, but found some difficulty in spelling out what they meant, or even spelling it at all. Never more political knowledge, either, with the growth of political science; but never less use made of it in public life, unless psephology is the name of the game. (shrink)

Rakić has serious misgivings about Wiseman's inability to frame ethical issues in the context of transcending existing realities with the aim of achieving what we believe is morally right. This inability to think beyond the present is misguided in ethics. He also criticizes Wiseman for making the unimaginative and unsubstantiated assumption that moral bioenhancement technologies have reached their zenith already. Rakić argues that MBE will become more effective in the time to come, that it ought to be optional for (...) every free individual, and that it should be directed at enhancing our motivation to act in line with how we believe we ought to act. He concedes however that the enhancement of our motivation to act morally can only be effective in a limited number of morally unambiguous cases. In response, Wiseman argues that Rakić's reflections epitomize a way of articulating MBE that is unhelpful, misguidedly optimistic, and missing the most important things needing discussion. Such reflections are based on inappropriate metaphors, a too future-oriented view detached from basic realities, and a false sense of what is possible on the global level should MBE be applied. Such ways of thinking about MBE are misguided from the outset, and indicative of the enthusiasm for a discourse in need of realignment. This should take the form of a more modest, synergistic outlook acutely aware of the inexorable limitations imposed on MBE by the internal complexity of moral goods, human agents, and the contexts in which moral action occurs. (shrink)

I greatly appreciate the opportunity provided by the editor of Zygon to further develop the ideas in my book Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science in conversation with four critical commentaries. It is an honor to have one's work focused upon so intently, and I greatly appreciate the time and effort of the critics. The book was quite intentionally written as a provocation, an attempt at agenda setting, and as a call for changing the (...) thinking of the entire religion and science academic community. In my previous writings I have kept close to the data, allowing myself at best mid‐level conclusions, but this book is a foray into the abstraction and inevitable lack of precision required for high‐level generalization. I hope that it continues to be generative of debate. (shrink)

The Fundamentals of Ethics is a textbook that introduces students to the central ideas of moral philosophy in a thorough yet compact and engaging way. It contains several chapters each on The Good Life, Normative Ethics, and Metaethics. It has greater breadth and depth than Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy, offering a substantial level of analysis while also keeping the student reader in mind. Writing in a lively style with many examples, the author reconstructs and carefully evaluates (...) over forty central arguments in moral philosophy, helping students to improve their critical thinking skills along the way. It is designed to be used on its own or in conjunction with The Ethical Life, the companion reader. (shrink)

A recurrent issue in the vast amount of literature on reasoning models in ethics is the role and nature of moral intuitions. In this paper, we start from the view that people who work and live in a certain moral practice usually possess specific moral wisdom. If we manage to incorporate their moral intuitions in ethical reasoning, we can arrive at judgements and (modest) theories that grasp a moral experience that generally cannot be found outside (...) the practice. Reflective equilibrium (RE) provides a framework for balancing moral intuitions, ethical principles and general theories. Nevertheless, persisting problems associated with the use of intuitions need to be addressed. One is the objection that moral intuitions lack the credibility necessary to guide moral reasoning. Ethicists have tried to solve this problem by formulating criteria to separate the “bad” intuitions from the “good” ones at the beginning of the reasoning process. We call this the credible input-justified outcome strategy. An example is the appeal to the common morality by Beauchamp and Childress. We think this approach is unsuccessful. As an alternative, we outline the good reasoning-justified outcome strategy. It connects to a variant of RE in which intuitions from different sources are incorporated. We argue that the elements of RE have different levels of justificatory power at the start of reasoning. In our strategy, each element can gain or lose justificatory power when it is tested in a reasoning process that meets several criteria. (shrink)

Exemplars have the power to help people navigate various levels of moral struggle, from the relatively straightforward problem of lacking motivation to the much deeper problem of failing to see the moral realities that surround us. But there are also serious moral risks in the appeal to exemplars: we romanticize them, we make use of them in authoritarian ways, and we tend to forget how our choice of exemplars is conditioned by oppressive cultural formations. I argue (...) that we need to develop a social model of exemplarity, attuned to social contexts of our exemplars themselves as well as the social processes of constructing and appealing to exemplars. More particularly, I argue that we need to develop space for thinking about exemplary groups, not just exemplary individuals, in order to develop the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in exemplarist moral theories. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the (...) developmental trajectory of this capacity. For this purpose, the thesis is organized as follow. In the first chapter, I make some methodological remarks and provide the general overview and plan for the dissertation. In the second chapter, I explain what my explanatory target is and why it matters. On the view I am defending, shared intentional psychology gives rise to a special form of psychology that enables us to engage in social normative thinking. These norms are represented as shared intentional states. Moral psychology, in contrast, is more diverse. For moral judgments define a quite heterogeneous class of mental states—although some moral judgments may involve the representation and execution of norms, certainly not all of them do. I show that although much of our distinctive social norm psychology can be explained within the framework of shared intentionality, moral judgments cannot be unified in the same way. In the third chapter, I provide the baseline of social-cognitive capacities that serve as starting point for my lineage explanation. I argue that hominin social cognition was for a very long period of our evolutionary history essentially a matter of low-level cognitive and motivational processes. On this picture, bottom-up affective processes regulated the social lives of early hominins without requiring any special top-down mechanism of normative thinking such as a capacity for understanding and representing social norms. In the fourth chapter, I argue that human-like social norm psychology evolved as a result of the selective pressures that gave rise to shared intentionality, especially the demands that came from collective hunting. Yet collective hunting was not the whole story of the evolution of shared intentionality, for our capacity to form shared intentional mental states emerged from the interplay between the selective pressures that led to cooperative breeding in humans as well as organized, goal-oriented, collective hunting. Thus, I propose an evo-devo account of shared intentionality and its normative dimension since I argue that explaining the evolution of this particular form of normative thinking crucially depends on information about the developmental trajectory of this capacity. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I focus on how social norms are acquired and how the way we learn them gives rise to some prototypical cluster of moral judgments. Thus, this chapter returns to some of themes and arguments of the first chapter by explaining how the distinction between moral judgments and nonmoral judgments can be culturally transmitted. (shrink)

The Renaissance development of science fulfilled the ancient ideal of integrating quantitative and qualitative thinking, but failed to recognize valuational thinking and thus deprived moral, aesthetic, and political thought of cognitive status. The task of this book is to reconstruct the concept of thinking in order to exhibit valuation, not reason, as the foundation for thinking and to integrate valuational with quantitative and qualitative modes. Part I explains the broad thesis, interpreting the problem of the foundations for thinking and (...) providing a general theory of value. Part II explains the role of valuation at the imaginative level of thinking with discussions of synthesis, perception, form, and art. The method of reconstruction requires a cosmology that is generated in successive waves. (shrink)

It has often been argued that if a clinician cannot decide which of two treatments to offer, a trial may be ethical, but it is unethical if she/he has a preference. Since individual clinicians usually have a preference, most trials could be judged unethical according to this line of argument. A recent important article in the New England Journal of Medicine argued that individual preferences are not as important as the collective uncertainty of informed clinicians. If clinicians are equally divided, (...) there is a state of collective equipoise and a trial is ethical. However, clinicians will seldom be exactly equally divided. We conducted an ethometric study to find out how much collective equipoise can be disturbed before the potential subjects in a trial think that it is unethical. Half of our subjects perceived a trial as unethical when equipoise was disturbed beyond 70:30. In other words, when 70 per cent of experts favour one treatment, 50 per cent of subjects would prefer that treatment to be administered rather than subjected to critical assessment. When equipoise is disturbed beyond 80:20, less than 3 per cent of subjects would consider human trials morally justifiable. (shrink)

Here are four examples of “seeing.” You see that something green is wriggling. You see that an iguana is in distress. You see that someone is wrongfully harming an iguana. You see that torturing animals is wrong. The first is an example of low-level perception. You visually represent color and motion. The second is an example of high-level perception. You visually represent kind properties and mental properties. The third is an example of moral perception. You have an impression of (...) moral properties. The fourth is an example of intuition. You intellectually grasp a general moral truth. Should moral perceptions be thought of as high-level perceptions or as intuitions? Most proponents of moral perception have thought of them as high-level perceptions. I give epistemological and methodological reasons for thinking that at least some are examples of what I call low-level intuitions—experiences in which we both apprehend abstract generalities and apply them to concrete particulars. (shrink)

Within the otherwise lively debate on neuroethics, little attention has been devoted to the peculiar methodological issues and challenges it faces. My aim is to track down its methodological specificities. Firstly, I will investigate to which traditional debates neuroethics bears similarity and to what extent it actually represents a novelty in ethical thinking. While the ethics of neuroscience is akin to bioethics, the neuroscience of ethics seems akin to moral psychology. And yet they differ as far as the level (...) of explanation of human moral behavior and reasoning is concerned. Thus, while the neuroscience of ethics and moral psychology share a family resemblance, they cannot be reduced to one another. Secondly, I will explore three different philosophical temperaments towards the role empirical findings can and should have in normative ethics and in metaethics. Prudential reasons would recommend openness to new sources of evidence without risking either reductionism nor neglect. -/- I metodi della neuroetica: la neuroscienza dell’etica è davvero una nuova sfida per la filosofia morale? Riassunto: Nonostante il dibattito in ambito neuroetico sia molto vivace, poca attenzione è stata dedicata alla questione relativa al suo metodo specifico e ai problemi a cui va incontro. Il mio scopo è quello di identificare le specificità metodologiche di questa disciplina. Anzitutto cercherò di determinare a quali dibattiti tradizionali la neuroetica può essere avvicinata e in che misura invece questa costituisce una novità all’interno del pensiero etico. Mentre l’etica della neuroscienza ha delle affinità con la bioetica, la neuroscienza dell’etica appare maggiormente simile alla psicologia morale, sebbene tali discipline siano diverse fra loro per via del livello a cui spigano il comportamento morale umano e il ragionamento. Pertanto, nonostante la neuroscienza dell’etica e la psicologia morale rivelino una certa somiglianza di famiglia, non è possibile ridurre l’una all’altra. In secondo luogo esplorerò tre diversi atteggiamenti filosofici rispetto al ruolo che i risultati empirici giocano o dovrebbero giocare rispetto all’etica normativa e alla metaetica. Ragioni di prudenza suggeriscono di rimanere aperti verso nuove fonti di evidenza evitando tanto il riduzionismo quanto la trascuratezza. (shrink)

This paper starts from the presupposition that moral codes often do not suffice to make agents understand their moral responsibility. We will illustrate this statement with a concrete example of engineers who design a truck’s trailer and who do not think traffic safety is part of their responsibility. This opinion clashes with a common supposition that designers in fact should do all that is in their power to ensure safety in traffic. In our opinion this shows the need (...) for a moral philosophy that helps engineers to interpret their responsibility and think more critically about it. For this purpose we will explore the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, which is particularly interesting because he locates the beginning of moral thinking in the daily practice of a profession. This is consistent with the history of moral codes, for codes are also the product of moral reflection by professionals. We will use MacIntyre’s philosophy to (1) explain what is wrong with the designers’ understanding of their responsibility and (2) show a possible way to bring their reflection to a more self-critical level. We will also inspect MacIntyre’s proposal critically. (shrink)

This paper starts from the presupposition that moral codes often do not suffice to make agents understand their moral responsibility. We will illustrate this statement with a concrete example of engineers who design a truck’s trailer and who do not think traffic safety is part of their responsibility. This opinion clashes with a common supposition that designers in fact should do all that is in their power to ensure safety in traffic. In our opinion this shows the need (...) for a moral philosophy that helps engineers to interpret their responsibility and think more critically about it. For this purpose we will explore the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, which is particularly interesting because he locates the beginning of moral thinking in the daily practice of a profession. This is consistent with the history of moral codes, for codes are also the product of moral reflection by professionals. We will use MacIntyre’s philosophy to (1) explain what is wrong with the designers’ understanding of their responsibility and (2) show a possible way to bring their reflection to a more self-critical level. We will also inspect MacIntyre’s proposal critically. (shrink)

Background: While nursing ethics education is commonly provided for undergraduate nursing students in most nursing colleges, consensus on the content and teaching modules for these ethics courses have still not been established. Objectives: This study aimed to examine the effects of nursing ethics education on the moral sensitivity and critical thinking disposition of nursing students in Korea. Research design: A one-group pre- and post-test design was used. Moral sensitivity was measured using the Korean version of the Moral (...) Sensitivity Questionnaire. Critical thinking disposition was measured using the Critical Thinking Disposition Questionnaire. Participants and research context: Participants were 70 undergraduate nursing students who were attending a university located in Seoul, Korea. The nursing ethics education was provided 7 times, from September to December 2010, and comprised 90-min sessions each week. Ethical considerations: This study was conducted in accordance with the Human Subject Research Ethics Committee guidelines. Findings: After the education, the levels for the patient-oriented care, a sub-domain of moral sensitivity, and inquisitiveness, a sub-domain of critical thinking disposition, significantly improved. There were no changes in overall scores for moral sensitivity and critical thinking disposition. There were significant positive correlations between moral sensitivity and critical thinking disposition both pre- and post-intervention. Conclusion: These results reflect the need for ongoing efforts to develop innovative content, structure, and instructional methods for undergraduate nursing ethics education programs. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall apply the idea of ‘moral relativism’ in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The concept of ‘moral relativism’ has been closely related to postmodernism, and in particular proponents of Aristotlian reject Nietzsche’s kind of relativism, yet the issues remained part of Nietzsche’s philosophy and prominently situated in his philosophical works. Nietzsche talks about morality as antinature, he thinks that how morality is repressive ‘relative’ to what we might concern as the unbridled manifestation of wants (...) and needs and appetites. In his famous publications of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche argues intensively and effectively about morality, his thought undoubtedly has a pronounced relativistic tendencies. Moral values are not universal and absolute, but are therefore conditional constructions of particular group at particular times with particular goals. Nietzsche speaks in the “interpretation” or “perspective” regarding morality or values in particular. According to Nietzsche, no one kind of morality is correct and neither is incorrect nor unacceptable for everyone; it should be noted that Nietzsche considers that each is correct for one type of person and incorrect for others. This makes it possible for Nietzsche to take a more important level on moral relativism. (shrink)

This book presents the notion that economic thinking cannot escape value judgments at any level and that this understanding has been the dominant view throughout most of history. It shows how, from ancient times, people who thought about economic matters integrated moral reflection into their thinking.

Should we conceive of corporations as entities to which moral responsibility can be attributed? This contribution presents what we will call a political account of corporate moral responsibility. We argue that in modern, liberal democratic societies, there is an underlying political need to attribute greater levels of moral responsibility to corporations. Corporate moral responsibility is essential to the maintenance of social coordination that both advances social welfare and protects citizens' moral entitlements. This political account (...) posits a special capacity of self-governance that corporations can intelligibly be said to possess. Corporations can be said to be "administrators of duty" in that they can voluntarily incorporate moral principles into their decision-making processes about how to conduct business. This account supplements and partly transforms earlier pragmatic accounts of corporate moral responsibility by disentangling responsibility from its conventional linkages with accountability, blame and punishment. It thereby represents a distinctive way to defend corporate moral responsibility and shows how Kantian thinking can be helpful in disentangling the problems surrounding the concept. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche's by Bernard ReginsterRobert GuayBernard Reginster, The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. viii + 202 pp. isbn: 978-0-19-886890-3. Cloth, $80.00.One might imagine making a rough division between two different modes of modern European philosophy. In one, the way that the world seems to proceed belies the actual ground (...) of things; the task of philosophy is to uncover the sources of our misunderstanding and identify the categories that account for genuinely real processes. The other mode of philosophy questions the determinacy and stability of the categories through which we make sense of the world. Here the task of philosophy is not to settle on the right categories or the actual ground, but to gain some purchase on our confusions and self-deceptions when we try to make sense of things. There may be some philosophers (Hegel and Wittgenstein, perhaps) who try to straddle the divide here. But in general the divide is great enough that if an interpreter mistakes one mode for the other it would be costly: no matter how circumspect the particular claims are, all the interpretive results will be misguided. Something like this, I want to claim, is the case with Bernard Reginster's The Will to Nothingness.There are many detailed discussions in Reginster's book. For the purpose of this review, however, I want to focus on the general critical argument, [End Page 104] in part because there is already at least one excellent review of the book (Mark Migotti's in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 1, 2022), and in part because I think it goes wrong at the level of its entire approach. On Reginster's account GM is composed of a series of "psychological studies" (3) of a version of Christian morality and its central aspects. These psychological studies treat moral judgments as symptoms of affective states, and in this way uncover the functional role that moralities play in the affective lives of agents. Moralities are "designed" (12), as it were, for emotional regulation. Christian morality, in particular, expresses the ressentiment of those beset by feelings of impotence and serves their will to power. Genealogical critique proceeds by uncovering the actual function of morality and then showing how well (or rather poorly) morality fulfills its proper function. Moral beliefs are supposed to enhance the agents' feeling of power, but instead work to sicken and enervate them, and indeed morality "incites" (46) such a pernicious functioning.While I am sympathetic to the idea that genealogy offers a functional assessment of morality, I think that Reginster has taken the wrong approach here. So now I want to draw a broad contrast between Reginster's approach and an alternative one, and then offer six sets of reasons for favoring the alternative approach.On Reginster's account, Nietzsche is interested in specifying and analyzing a precise conception of morality, with all of its attendant normative judgments, metaethical commitments, characteristic beliefs about moral psychology, and so on. These features were all, as constitutive of the morality in question, familiar to the believers in that morality. The purpose, then, of a historical account of origins is to give a unitary explanation for the adoption of the morality in terms of a single underlying affective condition and drive. Agents adopt moralities because, whether they realize it or not, holding moral beliefs facilitates a form of emotional self-regulation. To criticize these beliefs Nietzsche makes a sort of inverted teleological argument. He identifies the essential function of the beliefs and shows that they work against the fulfillment of their own function.Here, by contrast, is a different way of thinking about what Nietzsche is doing. He is not interested in explaining the moral beliefs of reflective, fully developed agents. Instead, he wants to explain how the semantic resources that contribute to morality could have become available at all. The puzzle, for Nietzsche, is how the basic terms of morality could ever even seem to make sense. So the historical account of genealogy is meant to suggest [End Page 105] social... (shrink)

Prison work creates ethical challenges for which a training program was initiated for Dutch prison staff to foster their Moral Craftsmanship (MCS). The concept of MCS is not yet defined and operationalized in literature. This explorative study aims to 1) define MCS, 2) identify conceptual elements of MCS, and 3) develop a measurement tool for MCS. A document and literature study provided input for the definition and selection of conceptual elements related within DCIA policy documents, identifying three conceptual (...) class='Hi'>levels of MCS: individual (cognition, attitude, and actions), team, and leadership. This first MCSQ consists of seventy-one items distributed across the domains: values and norms, judgment and reasoning, consultation, implementation, looking back, interactions, and leadership. We tested its usability via ‘think-aloud interviews.’ Validation of the current version of the MCS-Questionnaire and consensus among experts about what to include or exclude in the concept of MCS are needed for further development. (shrink)

Clanak sadrzi obrazlozenje teme kojom ce se autor baviti u okviru rada na projektu 'Mogucnost primene modernih filozofsko-politickih paradigmi na transformaciju drustva u Srbiji/Jugoslaviji' Instituta za filozofiju i drustvenu teoriju. U prvom delu izlaze se osnovna zamisao rada, te teorijska i prakticna relevantnost predlozene teme. U drugom delu ukratko se izlaze 'teorija dva nivoa' moralnog misljenja, koju je razradio utilitaristicki filozof Ricard Mervin Her. U trecem delu skicira se plan i sadrzina predstojeceg rada. Na kraju, data je osnovna i selektivna (...) bibliografija na koju ce se autor oslanjati u razradi predlozene teme. (shrink)

The construction industry is typically characterized as a fragmented, multi-organizational setting in which members from different technical backgrounds and moral values join together to develop a particular business or project. The most challenging obstacle in the construction process is to achieve a successful practice and to identify and apply an ethical framework to manage the behavior of involved specialists and contractors and to ensure the quality of all completed construction activities. The framework should reflect a common moral ground (...) for myriad people involved in this process to survive and compete ethically in today’s turbulent construction market. This study establishes a framework for moral judgment of behavior and actions conducted in the construction process. The moral framework provides the basis of judging actions as “moral” or “immoral” based on three levels of moral accountability: personal, professional, and social. The social aspect of the proposed framework is developed primarily from the essential attributes of normative business decision-making models identified in the literature review and subsequently incorporates additional attributes related to professional and personal moral values. The normative decision-making models reviewed are based primarily on social attributes as related to moral theories. The professional and moral attributes are established by identifying a set of common moral values recognized by professionals in the construction industry and required to prevent common construction breaches. The moral framework presented here is the complementary part of the ethical framework developed in Part I of this article and is based primarily on the personal behavior or the moral aspect of professional responsibility. The framework can be implemented as a form of preventive personal ethics, which would help avoid ethical dilemmas and moral implications in the first place. Furthermore, the moral framework can be considered as a decision-making model to guide actions and improve the moral reasoning process, which would help individuals think through possible implications and the consequences of ethical and moral issues in the construction industry. (shrink)

Taking the lead from Susan Wolf's and Linda Emanuel's work on systems thinking, and developing ideas from Moberg's, Seabright's and my work on mental models and moral imagination, in this paper I shall argue that what is often missing in management decision-making is a systems approach. Systems thinking requires conceiving of management dilemmas as arising from within a system with interdependent elements, subsystems, and networks of relationships and patterns of interaction. Taking a systems approach and coupling it with (...) class='Hi'>moral imagination, now engaged on the organizational and systemic as well as individual levels of decision-making, I shall conclude, is a methodology that encourages managers and companies to think more imaginatively and to engage in integrating moral decision-making into ordinary business decisions. More importantly this sort of thinking is a means to circumvent what often appear to be intractable problems created by systemic constraints for which no individual appears to be responsible. (shrink)

Though the art of compromise, i.e. of settling differences by mutual concessions, is part of communal living on any level, we often think that there is something wrong in compromise, especially in cases where moral convictions are involved. A first reason for distrusting compromises on moral matters refers to the idea of integrity, understood in the basic sense of 'standing for something', especially standing for the values and causes that to some extent confer identity. The second reason points (...) out the objective nature of moral values, which seems to make them immune from negotiation and barter. If one sincerely holds some moral conviction to be true, than compromising on that belief must be a sign of serious confusion.In order to reach a better understanding of these two reasons, I analyse what is involved in personal integrity and how this relates to moral integrity. I argue that the search for moral integrity naturally brings us to the question of how one could accept moral compromises and still uphold the idea that moral values and principles have an objective authority over us. To address this question I will present a version of moral pluralism which tries to capture the enormous complexity of what should matter to us as moral persons, and which explains why value-rankings are often deeply indeterminate. The general position I defend in this paper is that compromises involving moral values and norms may be morally required and, therefore, be laudable. To sustain this position I will arrive at a view of ethical objectivity that allows the possibility to negotiate about the truth of moral beliefs. (shrink)

I examine the two-level utilitarian case for humane animal agriculture (by R. M. Hare and Gary Varner) and argue that it fails on its own terms. The case states that, at the ‘intuitive level’ of moral thinking, we can justify raising and killing animals for food, regarding them as replaceable, while treating them with respect. I show that two-level utilitarianism supports, instead, alternatives to animal agriculture. First, the case for humane animal agriculture does not follow from a commitment to (...) two-level utilitarianism combined with a commitment to respecting animal lives. Secondly, the two-level utilitarian case falls prey to a compartmentalization problem and cannot uphold both respect and replaceability. What I call ‘humane lives’ are not appropriately valued by the lights of two-level utilitarianism itself. (shrink)

The problem of nonideal theory has been widely discussed in political philosophy in recent times. The problem has received much less attention, however, at the level of individual morality. Since the real world is a nonideal one, the problem is extremely relevant, if moral theory is to guide our action as moral agents. My purpose in this paper is mainly conceptual. I first clarify the distinction between different kinds of nonideal situation (natural accidents or limitations and partial compliance (...) with morality) and how different moral theories face those different kinds of imperfections. Secondly, I try to show that the distinction between the two main sources of imperfection is less straightforward and more complex than might be expected. Finally, I suggest that the role of partial compliance in nonideal moral theory is much more modest and difficult to defend than we might at first think. (shrink)

This article will explore the pattern of conflicts between secular thinking and religious beliefs from the perspective of critical thinking and analyse the potential that this conflict holds for increasing tolerance inside mixed society such as in Romania. It is often said that the ability of thinking critically deeply erodes the propensity towards religious faith and there are numerous study results that back up this assertion. This article tries to explain that religious faith becomes fully understandable only in some larger (...) pattern that shapes morality, cognitive strategies and social practices and this is true for secular thinking as well. We can name this patterns ascendant, respectively descendant. Ascendant thinking derives and explains higher level practices beginning from lower level entities through progress and emergence and for this kind of thinking, morality and cognition are an open fields that can be indefinitely improved. This kind of thinking embraces novelty and creativity and aims at human beings becoming capable of managing this novelty. The descending model derives from and explains the lower levels through complex and immutable entities and will tend to see novelty as change capable of breaking their models and therefore act towards neutralizing novelty through interpretation. Information and practices that cannot be neutralized will be counted as abnormous. The article comes forward with a comparative analysis between these two opposing patterns, showing that this interpretative frame is valid in retrodiction and that it can fundament concrete predictions. It will also show that critical thinking is permitted and can fundament a space for compromise and dialogue between religious and secular people. (shrink)

What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man's home or in his church," a former vice-president of a large firm observes. "What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you." Such sentiments pervade American society, from corporate boardrooms to the basement of the White House. In Moral Mazes, Robert Jackall offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and of how big organizations shape (...) moral consciousnss. Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, Moral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation. It is a world where hard work does not necessarily lead to success, but where sharp talk, self-promotion, powerful patrons, and sheer luck might; where intense competition is masked by cheerfully bland public faces; where intentions are cloaked and frankness is simply one of many guises; and where words are always provisional and accountability often depends on the ability to outrun mistakes. In this topsy-turvy world, managers must bring often unforgiving technology and always difficult people together to make money, an uncompromising task demanding continual compromises with conventional verities. Moral issues are translated into practical concerns and into issues of public relations. Sooner or later, managrs ask themselves: How does one act in such a world and maintain a sense of personal integrity? Moral Mazes is a brilliant, sometimes disturbing, often wildly funny study of corporate thinking, decision-making, and morality. It is an analytical work of great importance, one filled with compelling real life stories of the men and women charged with running the business of America. It is a book for anyone interested in how big organizations actually function, or who is concerned with the current moral malaise in our public life. (shrink)

Placing the analyses in an interdisciplinary manner, the present paper fallows to catch and value, form a moral-formative perspective, the interpretations of the ethical theories regarding the evolutions in a moral plan, in order to build a structural model of the morality development levels, with all the complex and dynamiccomponents that this one transmits. We have proposed that this should have as final purpose the transfer and focalization of this data over the significant space of forming the (...) human being as a moral, autonomous and responsible personality, by offering, we hope, in the terms in of efficiency, a rich space, a more complete and operational form about the levels of morality and moral education. The education in mostly very responsible for the step that defines the educated morality, of the community, of the society and a re-thinking, a restructuring and direction of the moral education on different levels is, we think, a way of responding to the challenges of today and tomorrow’s world. (shrink)

Using Hofstede's culture theory (1980, 2001 Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nation. Sage, NewYork), the current study incorporates the moral development (e.g. Thorne, 2000; Thorne and Magnan, 2000; Thorne et al., 2003) and multidimensional ethics scale (e.g. Cohen et al., 1993; Cohen et al., 1996b; Cohen et al., 2001; Flory et al., 1992) approaches to compare the ethical reasoning and decisions of Canadian and Mainland Chinese final year undergraduate accounting students. The results indicate that Canadian (...) accounting students' formulation of an intention to act on a particular ethical dilemma (deliberative reasoning) as measured by the moral development approach (Thorne, 2000) was higher than Mainland Chinese accounting students. The current study proposes that the five factors identified by the multidimensional ethics scale (MES), as being relevant to ethical decision making can be placed into the three levels of ethical reasoning identified by Kohlberg's (1958, The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in the Years Ten to Sixteen. University of Chicago, Doctoral dissertation) theory of cognitive moral development. Canadian accounting students used post-conventional MES factors (moral equity, contractualism, and utilitarianism) more frequently and made more ethical audit decisions than Chinese accounting students. (shrink)

Adam Smith and David Hume agree that first-level general rules of morality may be discovered by induction, and that reflection on these rules may influence human behavior. But Hume thinks a deeper, second level of moral general rules may also be discovered, and used to correct erroneous first-level rules. Thus on Hume's view, some reasoned reflection may be needed in order to feel the proper moral sentiment. Smith holds that, because of human inclination toward selfishness, first-level moral (...) rules should be habitually used to override immediate impulse in the motivation of behavior. This is a valuable habit, but since most people are not able to form such rules for themselves, it is a good idea for them to follow moral rules provided by religion. There is something respectable, according to Smith, in sincerely following flawed moral rules provided by religion. Hume disagrees, holding that it is foolish and blameworthy, indeed dangerous, to follow flawed moral rules provided by religion. (shrink)

The question of the legitimacy of the business world has received more attention in recent years, often leading to a call to 'increase' the moral thinking ofeconomic actors. I argue however that the latter has not decreased. Relying on Kohlberg's model of moral development, I suggest that most actors still show a conventional level of moral thinking, i.e., abide by the standards prevailing in their environment. What has however changed are those standards. In consequence, I suggest that (...) solving the actual legitimacy crisis requires a change of the norms of the business system, more than an increase of managers' morality. Leaders ready to set new standards and to develop alternative business research and teaching paradigms are needed. (shrink)

R. M. Hare has argued for and defended a ‘two-level’, view of moral agency. He argues that moral agents ought to rely on the rules of ‘intuitive moral thinking’ for their ‘everyday’ moral judgments. When these rules conflict or when we do not have a rule at hand, we ought to ascend to the act-utilitarian,‘critical’ level of moral thinking. I argue that since the rules at the intuitive level of moral thinking necessarily conflict much (...) more often than Hare supposes, and since we often do not have ready-made rules for our moral judgments, we must necessarily use critical moral thinking very frequently. However, act-utilitarian judgements at this level will sharply conflict with our strongly held ‘intuitive’ moral convictions. I show that Hare's attempt to balance these two aspects of moral judgment requires us to simultaneously adopt two conflicting sets of moral standards, and thus an attempt to inculcate such standards constitutes a ‘schizophrenic’ moral education. Finally, I briefly outline an alternative conception of moral education, based on Aristotelian phronesis. (shrink)