Does moral cleansing moderate the effect of evolutionary altruism on helping intention? An exploratory study

There is strong evidence for social evolutionary motivations for helping (e.g., reciprocal altruism) and also growing support for the influence of the social cognitive theory of moral cleansing on prosociality. Where the former motivation is interpersonal, the latter is intrapersonal. This experimental study hypothesized that, in addition to main effects of evolutionary altruism and moral cleansing on helping intention, an interaction would occur between these theoretical motivations. Using three situational helping scenarios as dependent measures, the effect of participants’ morally-valenced recalled behavior (moral/immoral/achievement/failure) and the effect of their social proximity to a helping target (cousin/colleague/stranger) on helping intention was determined. Overall, 616 Australian participants (90.1% female) completed the online experiment. Two-way ANOVA demonstrated a consistent main effect of social proximity on helping intention across all three helping scenarios, supporting evolutionary social psychological explanations for helping. However, instead of moral self-regulation effects, moral identity consistency effects were induced by the moral behavior recall manipulation. A main effect of behaviour recall on helping intention occurred, with moral recall increasing helping intention. The problem of theoretical ambiguity regarding moral identity consistency and moral self-regulation is discussed, as is the useful role of null result publications in informing effective experimental design.

The sampling and remix dilemma: what is the role of moral rights in the encouragement and regulation of derivative creativity

The borrowing and rearrangement of musical content, especially in the digital context, raises difficult questions for copyright law. There is significant community support for a loosening of the restrictions on the derivative (and particularly creative) use of copyright material. Law reform is called for. This paper discusses the possible introduction of a new exception to copyright infringement but notes that in the drafting of any such exception not only the economic rights but also the moral rights of the originating author need to be taken into account.

Russia’s anti-gay laws: the politics and consequences of a moral panic

The issue of LGBT rights in Russia first properly came to mainstream international attention in March 2012, when the St Petersburg Duma passed a law prohibiting “public acts aimed at the propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism amongst minors“. The law provoked an international outcry, including calls for tourists to boycott St Petersburg, sister-cities to consider cut off ties with Russia’s “window on Europe”, and condemnation from the EU, with the European Parliament passing a resolution noting that it was “gravely concerned by developments which restrict freedom of expression and assembly on the basis of misconceptions about homosexuality and transgenderism” and calling on Russia and other countries considering the adoption of similar legislation to “demonstrate, and ensure respect for, the principle of non-discrimination”.

Needle fixation and moral panic

This thesis weighs into the contemporary debate regarding needle fixation, utilising recent theory from addiction discourse. Freud and Lacan to specuate an unconscious cause for the compulsion to self-inject regardless of substance. It then applies this revelation to analyse the world of the 'needle fixator' and society's moral panic reaction.

Moral rights and Australian contemporary architecture : recent professional dilemmas and the thoughts of Peter Muller in this discourse

The moral rights of contemporary design projects has arisen as a difficult ethical dilemma in Australian architectural discourses, and is more complex when matters of heritage are implicated. This paper considers the position of moral rights under the AustralianCopyright Act 19682 having regard to the Australian exemplars of Peter Muller. Muller is one of the most highly regarded Australian architects of the twentieth century possessing a passion for organic architecture realised in several significant Australian and Indonesian design exemplars. The paper considers recent Australian debates about moral rights and projects that implicate several architectural and landscape architecture projects, the current legal interpretations, and explains the ideas, values, and opinions and practice of Muller in this context. A clear conclusion is that while the Act confers rights, there is no mechanism to ensure adherence to these rights, and particularly in the situation of a living designer where one of their designs is being accorded heritage status.

Conceptual overlap between moral norms and anticipated regret in the prediction of intention: implications for theory of planned behaviour research

Moral norms and anticipated regret are widely used extensions to the theory of planned behaviour, yet there is some evidence to suggest that these constructs may conceptually overlap as predictors of intention. Two health-related behaviours with distinct moral implications (Study 1: organ donation registration, N = 352 and Study 2: condom usage, N = 1815) were therefore examined to ascertain whether moral norms and anticipated regret are indeed conceptually distinct. While evidence consistent with conceptual overlap was identified in Study 1, the evidence for such overlap in Study 2 was more ambiguous. In Study 3, a meta-analysis of existing literature revealed that the relationship between moral norms and anticipated regret was moderated by the extent of the moral implications arising from the behaviour under examination. Taken together, these findings suggest that conceptual overlap between moral norms and anticipated regret is more likely to occur among behaviours with obvious moral implications. Researchers wishing to examine the predictive utility of moral norms and anticipated regret among such behaviours would therefore be advised to aggregate these measures to form a composite variable (personal norms).

Kierkegaard's mirrors: Interest, self, and moral vision

What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations not just as morally compelling, but as making personal demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us individually and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's unique and challenging answers to these questions. Beginning with the structural account of consciousness offered in Johannes Climacus, this book develops a new phenomenological interpretation of what Kierkegaard calls 'interest': a self-reflexive mode of thought, vision and imagination that plays a central role in moral experience. Tracing this concept across Kierkegaard's work takes us through topics such as consciousness, the ontology of selfhood, ethical imagination, admiration and imitation, seeing the other, metaphors of self-recognition and mirroring, our need for transcendent meaning, and the relationship between scholarship and subjective knowledge. 'Interest' equips us with a new understanding of Kierkegaard's highly original normative, teleological account of moral vision.

Ethical trust and social moral norms simulation : a bio-inspired agent-based modelling approach

The understanding of the micro-macro link is an urgent need in the study of social systems. The complex adaptive nature of social systems adds to the challenges of understanding social interactions and system feedback and presents substantial scope and potential for extending the frontiers of computer-based research tools such as simulations and agent-based technologies. In this project, we seek to understand key research questions concerning the interplay of ethical trust at the individual level and the development of collective social moral norms as representative sample of the bigger micro-macro link of social systems. We outline our computational model of ethical trust (CMET) informed by research findings from trust, machine ethics and neural science. Guided by the CMET architecture, we discuss key implementation ideas for the simulations of ethical trust and social moral norms.

Interplay of ethical trust and social moral norms : environment modelling and computational mechanisms in agent-based social simulation

In many agent-based models theoretical and computational mechanisms are needed for model abstraction and design. However, it can be challenging to arrive at the appropriate mechanisms and models. This research on the interplay of ethical trust and social moral norms addresses that challenge via an analytical framework on the spread of moral norms, the modelling of social environment and the selection of spread mechanisms as applied to agent-based social simulation. We describe the mechanism alignment mapping, two forms of interaction modelling between the social environment and agents, and the results obtained from the simulation of our computational model. These results provide an insight into how the agent-based paradigm can be applied as a technique of investigation for normative moral processes in computational social sciences.