Moral psychologists tend to regard Humean philosophy favourably, although appear to have overlooked the updated version of Hume's treatise proffered by Prinz (2004a, 2004b, 2009). Three studies, ...targeted towards areas of contention between Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al., 2013) and the Theory of Dyadic Morality (Schein & Gray, 2018), show emotions are elicited by (im)moral events, can contribute to moralization, and may act to amplify or suppress judgements of severity - findings which appear supportive of Prinz's claim that morals are constructed from emotions. Study 1 provides a conceptual replication of Gray and Keeney's (2015) research, with results challenging their claim that violations of purity are just a weird type of harm. Associations found in Study 1, between harm-anger and impurity-disgust, were also apparent in Study 2 - which provides an open-ended test of, and finds support for, the emotion-content relationships hypothesized under Constructive Sentimentalism. Study 3 provides an extended conceptual replication of Seidel and Prinz (2013a), using a 'content-free' emotion induction paradigm in combination with the investigatory framework outlined by Cameron, Lindquist and Gray (2015), finding an influence of interoceptive awareness on moral judgements. Arguments are advanced to establish purity and harm as being at least equally important, and to contend that the vast majority of moral violations contain mixed moral content - explaining the frequent co-occurrence of anger and disgust in response to moral transgressions. Following Constructive Sentimentalism (Prinz, 2009), moral judgements are postulated to require two points of reference, whereby 'Autonomy', 'Harm', and 'Other' may be aligned to one axis, and 'Continuity', 'Purity', and 'Self' aligned to another. This approach is shown to accommodate different theories of morality into a common theoretical framework and provide a means of orientating research findings and themes within moral psychology via reference to the tools, methods and practices of navigation.
With regards to the behaviours of our social partners, how do we make judgments of moral relevance? For example, under what conditions do we assign responsibility, level blame, and determine and ...institute the appropriate responses? How do we determine what constitutes a moral transgression, who the valid victim is and what responses are the most appropriate? These questions lie in the gaps between the conceptual frameworks provided by philosophical ethics, philosophy of mind, and the empirical investigations of the cognitive and social sciences. Leveraging the stereotypical structure of everyday moral judgement (discussed below), this thesis highlights each specific element of that structure and aims to consolidate the most recent research on each element whilst also, across three papers, establishing novel findings for each element. Kurt Gray and colleagues (2011; 2012; 2014; 2015; 2018) outline what they consider to be the fundamental structure of moral judgement. One reacts to an agent who intentionally violates/harms a moral patient. This cognitive template forms part of the Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). Although the theory is more extensive, for now, this structure will form the basis for this chapter of this thesis. As written, there are five elements in this structure. 1. Harming/Violating, 2. Moral agents (the principal transgressors), 3. Reactions to those agents, 4. Ascriptions of intentionality, and 5. Moral patients. These five elements are discussed, respectively, as the five sections of the Introduction. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 contain the three papers that form the empirical work for this thesis. Finally Chapter 5 summarises how this novel work fits into the overview established in Chapter 1. 1.1 covers what kind of actions constitute moral harms, how psychologists have disagreed about the centrality of harm over other kinds of violation (e.g., violations that appear to not contain actual physical or emotional harm to a victim) and discusses current pluralist accounts of moral psychology that argue for a range of different kinds of moral violation. 1.2 focuses on judgments that go beyond the act to inferences over the moral agents themselves. Recent work has discovered that a great deal of moral psychology entails character-based rather than act-based judgments and this section discusses how this is important for the understanding of different kinds of moral transgression. 1.3 covers how we react to transgressors including emotional responses, ascriptions of blame and wrongness and how these emotions and judgments drive our different behaviours towards the transgressor. There is a specific focus on the behaviours of Partner Choice (avoidance and ostracization) and Partner Control (punishment). These first sections of Chapter 1 then guide the hypotheses of the first paper, 2.1, Reacting to Wrongdoers: Harm Leads to Partner Control and Impurity to Partner Choice. 1.4 covers our current understanding of how people ascribe intentionality, especially how cognitive psychology has highlighted significant deviations from the most prominent normative theories of intentionality ascription. This lays the foundation for the second paper, 2.2, Does Counterfactual Requirement Explain the Side-Effect Effect? Finally, 1.5 covers judgments with regard to the victims of moral transgressions. For example, how do we perceive the minds of moral patients and why does this matter for moral judgement and also whether we are especially sensitive to human moral patients compared to our cousins in the animal kingdom. This establishes the open questions explored in the third paper, 2.3, Suffering and Dying: How Speciesism Matters for Assessing Extreme Harms.
In this thesis, I develop a theory of the 'principle of legality', the method of statutory interpretation used by judges of UK courts where fundamental common law rights and principles are at issue. ...While both judges and public law theorists have engaged with this method of interpretation at length, I identify a number of important questions about it that remain unanswered. In order to develop answers to these questions, I first argue that any theory of statutory interpretation must be premised on a broader theory of general jurisprudence, that is, a theory about the nature of legal rights and obligations. I endorse a non-positivist account of legal obligations, wherein such obligations are viewed as genuine moral obligations. In particular, I argue that Ronald Dworkin's theory of 'law as integrity' makes the best sense of the principle of legality. On this view, the correct interpretation of a statute is determined by principles of political morality. When judges employ the principle of legality, they are engaged in first order moral questions about the obligations that obtain in virtue of the statute's enactment. This view, I argue, does a better job of accounting for key aspects of the practice than other theories, in particular those that view the principle of legality as a method of working out the intentions of the legislature. I show that a non-positivist theory of the principle of legality leads us to better answers to the outstanding questions identified at the beginning of the thesis.
This study was conducted to explore the current situation and enhancement strategies of university teachers’ moral construction in China. Based on the cognitive and behavioral status of university ...teachers’ morality, we set up and distributed a survey questionnaire on university teachers’ morality. The survey results found that the construction of teachers’ morality in China has been fruitful, but the current level of university teachers’ morality still needs to be improved. On this basis, we put forward some practical strategies to promote the construction of teachers’ morality by strengthening the top-level design, improving the reward and punishment supervision system, inheriting and carrying forward the fine tradition of respecting teachers and attaching importance to education, and enhancing teachers’ subjective consciousness.
This work was based on my thesis project approved for admission to the Doctoral Program at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). This paper studied four reasons why the tax morality ...should be investigated.KEYWORDS: Tax Morality--tax law--moral reasoningO presente trabalho foi baseado em meu projeto de tese para ingresso no Programa de Doutorado da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Neste artigo esboco quatro motivos pelos quais os estudos sobre a moralidade no direito tributario deveriam ser aprofundados.PALAVRA-CHAVE: Moralidade Tributaria--Direito Tributario--Fundamentacao moral
This work was based on my thesis project approved for admission to the Doctoral Program at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). This paper studied four reasons why the tax morality ...should be investigated.
