Getting Away With It:Corruption, Moral Indignation and the Limits of Legal Accountability

In this paper we address the idea of ‘legal but corrupt’ through a discussion of two cases: abuse scandals in the Irish Catholic Church and the financial services industry in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. We identify two important dynamics that generated the scandals: that they were driven by strong and stable groups existing within a peculiar kind of ‘accountability space’ that we describe as ‘monastic’ and that those groups persisted with tacit or explicit support from the state. ‘Legal but corrupt’ is, we argue, a matter of insider incomprehension sustained by the ceding of sovereignty over some aspect of social or economic life.

"No Artist has Ethical Sympathies": Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

Harmful transgressions qua moral transgressions: A deflationary view

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterization of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope, which, according to them, characterizes these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently, many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel’s sense. In this article, we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry.

Ethnic Segregation, Moral Panics and Social Class: A Comparative Study of the Experiences and Perspectives of Working Class and Middle Class Children in Belfast

This paper begins by describing the moral panics that have tended to emerge sporadically in Northern Ireland over the last few years with regard to young people’s involvement in sectarian violence in Belfast. Within this, while these young people have been cast in the traditional role of folk devils, the paper will show how younger children also tend to be explicitly identified and named in an ambiguous way through such moral panics; playing a deviant role as participators, and sometimes instigators, of sectarian violence but also carrying the symbolic responsibility of representing Belfast’s future. It will be shown that it is because of this ambiguous position that it is adults rather than the children themselves that tend to be held responsible for their actions; either as rioters using the children as political pawns or as parents guilty of neglect. With this as a starting point the paper then explores the perspectives and experiences of two groups of 10-11 year old children living in Belfast and the impact of these moral panics on them. One group of children, living in affluent middle class areas were found to be appropriating and re-working these broader moral panics into more general discourses of derision that tended to pathologize working class children and communities more generally. For the other group of children, living in economically deprived areas with high levels of sectarian tensions and violence, their experiences of such violence and their participation in it are discussed. It will be shown that for these children, the broader moral panics that exist tend to have the effect of reinforcing the processes that tend to segregate and exclude them.

NEOShield: An European Project to Address Impact Hazard Mitigation Issues

The European Union NEOShield project is desribed.The primary aim of the project is to investigate in detail the three most promising mitigation techniques: the kinetic impactor, blast deflection, and the gravity tractor, and devise feasible demonstration missions.

Moral asymmetries in judgments of agency withstand ludicrous causal deviance

Americans have been shown to attribute greater intentionality to immoral than to amoral actions in cases of causal deviance, that is, cases where a goal is satisfied in a way that deviates from initially planned means (e.g., a gunman wants to hit a target and his hand slips, but the bullet ricochets off a rock into the target). However, past research has yet to assess whether this asymmetry persists in cases of extreme causal deviance. Here, we manipulated the level of mild to extreme causal deviance of an immoral versus amoral act. The asymmetry in attributions of intentionality was observed at all but the
most extreme level of causal deviance, and, as we hypothesized, was mediated by attributions of Blame/credit and judgments of action performance. These findings are discussed as they support a multiple-concepts interpretation of the asymmetry, wherein blame renders a naïve concept of intentional action (the outcome matches the intention) more salient than a composite concept (the outcome matches the intention and was brought about by planned means), and in terms of their implications for cross-cultural research on judgments of agency.

Old Town Glasgow: Squalor, Agitation and City Improvements

In 1862, Glasgow Corporation initiated the first of a series of three legislative acts which would become known collectively as the City Improvements Acts. Despite having some influence on the nature of the built fabric on the expanding city as a whole, the most extensive consequences of these acts was reserved for one specific area of the city, the remnants of the medieval Old Town. As the city had expanded towards all points of the compass in a regular, grid-iron structure throughout the nineteenth century, the Old Town remained singularly as a densely wrought fabric of medieval wynds, vennels, oblique passageways and accelerated tenementalisation. Here, as the rest of the city began to assume the form of an ordered entity, visible and classifiable, one could still find and addresses such as ‘Bridgegate, No. 29, backland, stair first left, three up, right lobby, door facing’ (quoted in Pacione, 1995).

Unsurprisingly, this place, where proximity to the midden (dung-heap) was considered an enviable position, was seen by the authorities as a major health hazard and a source not only of cholera, but also of the more alarming typhoid epidemic of 1842. Accordingly, the demolitions which occurred in the backlands of the Old Town under the first of the acts, the Glasgow Police Act of 1862, were justified on health and medical grounds. But disease was not the only social problem thought to issue from this district. Reports from social reformers including Fredrick Engels suggested that the decay of the area’s physical fabric could be extended to the moral profile of its inhabitants. This was in such a state of degeneracy that there were calls for a nearby military barracks to be relocated to more salubrious climes because troops were routinely coming into contact ‘with the most dissolute and profligate portion of the population’ (Peter Clonston, Lord Provost, June 1861). Perhaps more worrying for the city fathers, however, was that the barracks’ arsenal was seen as a potential source of arms for the militant and often illegal cotton workers’ unions and organisations who inhabited the Old Town as well as the districts to the east. In fact, the Old Town and East End had been the site of numerous working class actions and riots since 1787, including a strike of 60,000 workers in 1820, 100,000 in 1838, and the so-called Bread Riots of 1848 where shouts of ‘Vive La Revolution’ were reported in the Gallowgate.

The events in Paris in 1848 precipitated Baron Hausmann’s interventions into that city. The boulevards were in turn visited by members of Glasgow Corporation and ultimately, it can be argued, provided an example for Old Town Glasgow. This paper suggests that the city improvement acts carried a similarly complex and pervasive agenda, one which embodied not only health, class conflict and sexual morality but also the more local condition of sectarianism. And, like in Paris, these were played out spatially in a extensive reconfiguration of the urban fabric of the Old Town which, through the creation of new streets and a railway yard, not only made it more amenable to large scale military manoeuvres but also, opened up the area to capitalist accumulation. By the end of the works, the medieval heritage of the Old Town had been almost completely razed, the working class and Catholic East End had, through the insertion of the railway yard, been isolated from the city centre and approximately 70,000 people had been made homeless.

Are there different moral domains? Evidence from Mongolia

In this paper we report a study conducted in Mongolia on the scope of morality, that is, the extent to which people moralize different social domains. Following Turiel’s moral-conventional task, we characterized moral transgressions (in contrast to conventional transgressions) in terms of two dimensions: authority independence
and generality of scope. Different moral domains are then defined by grouping such moral transgressions in terms of their content (following Haidt’s classification of morally relevant domains). There are four main results of the study. First, since all five Haidtian domains were moralized by the Mongolian participants, the study provides
evidence in favour of pluralism about moral domains. However, the study also suggests that the domain of harm can be reduced to the fairness domain. Furthermore, although the strong claim about reduction of all moral domains to the domain of fairness seems not to hold, a significant number of participants did indicate considerations of fairness across domains. Finally, a significant amount of participants moralized conventional transgressions a la Turiel, but it did not reach a statistical significance.