Morality

About: Morality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 22623 publications have been published within this topic receiving 545733 citations. The topic is also known as: moral & morals.

The Chief, the Mine Captain and the Politician: Legitimating Power in Northern Ghana

Abstract: This article explores the strategies of acquiring and legitimating power in Ghana, taking the example of three ‘big men’ from the north, a paramount chief, a mine captain and a politician in the making. After offering some observations on the recent public debate on the (im)morality of power and ‘bigness’, it outlines the biographies of these three ‘big men’ and analyses how they skilfully combine different registers of power and legitimacy. It then analyses the strategies of legitimation and grounds of moral judgement which depend, at least to a certain degree, on the particular relationship of the ‘judge’ with the ‘big man’ in question. The article concludes by discussing the common ‘grammar’ that seems to regulate the debates on ‘bigness’, morality and interest.

The suffering stranger: medical anthropology and international morality.

Abstract: Addressing global inequities has come to define a domain of activist medical anthropology called social justice studies. In a recent flagship volume, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor, contributors describe the effect of global economic trends and neoliberal policies on the destitute and disadvantaged. In their advocacy, they use the voices and stories of the poor to explain the impact of structural adjustments. This paper uses Dying for Growth as an example through which to comment on the wider scholarly trend of using the local to validate global claims. The term "suffering stranger" describes those iconic figures whose experiences are presented in truncated first-hand accounts of suffering in order to validate broader theoretical aims. I argue that the suffering stranger masks the real absence of the voices of the poor and their suffering on the world stage. There is no international public sphere within which these voices might be heard; rather, there is a set of claims about justice and human rights. These claims, however, are themselves rooted in cultural values and are inextricably woven into global capital. I argue that, in using the voices of suffering to further a theoretical agenda, social justice activists assume the existence of a public, international domain within which those voices might be heard and that, in so doing, they further integrate the poor into destructive economic systems. Alongside the work of documenting health inequities, a truly effective activism may require assessing and critiquing existing claims of international morality.

The Philosophic Foundations of Human Rights

Abstract: Today, through the United Nations and its half century of enactments, an impressive body of human rights doctrine is embodied in international law This is in sharp contrast to the situation fifty years ago when there was no body of international human rights law Having come this far legally, why then should one still be concerned with the philosophic foundations of such international human rights law? To philosophize, Plato taught, is to come to know oneself Others say that the special function of philosophy is to deepen our understanding of truth Still others see the philosopher as a judge, assessing the varieties of human experience and pronouncing on the claim to knowledge1 Yet, still more reasons exist for exploring the philosophic underpinnings of human rights law First, one's own attitudes toward the subject of international human rights law are likely to remain obscure unless one understands the philosophies that shape them2 Piaget's statement that "morality is the logic of action" contains a striking insight

Cultural Influences on the Moral Status of Reciprocity and the Discounting of Endogenous Motivation

Abstract: Americans and Hindu Indians evaluated hypothetical situations in which helping was performed in response to prior reciprocity, in response to a monetary payment, or spontaneously. Reciprocity considerations increase the number of Indians viewing helping in moral terms but had no effect on moral judgment among Americans. Americans judged that helping is less endogenously motivated when undertaken in response to the norm of reciprocity than when spontaneous, whereas Indians viewed helping as equally endogenously motivated in those two cases. Results imply that interpersonal reciprocity is invested with a deontological moral status rather than viewed in purely utilitarian terms in cultures emphasizing interdependent, as contrasted with independent, views of the self: The findings also suggest that less of a dichotomy is drawn between communal and exchange relationships and between endogenous motivation and normative conformity in the former type of culture.

Postmodern Social Theory: Representational Practices*

Abstract: in the world that is alive and open, and not boring. The core of that sensibility is doubt that any discourse has a privileged place, any method or theory a universal and general claim to authoritative knowledge. Wherever truth is claimed, so is power; the claim to truth is a claim to power (Foucault 1978). So, micro or macro, positivist or naturalist, functionalist or conflict theorist, scientist and humanist-we all stand at last as distrusted co-equals in the postmodernist universe, all of us suspected of lusting in our theorizing hearts to shape the ongoing course of history. Once the veil of privileged truth is lifted, feminism, Afro-American, gay, and other disparaged discourses rise to the same epistemological status as the dominant discourse. With the monotone of power interests exposed, a multitude of voices speakssome with straightforward political and moral agendas, some still claiming innocence. The conversations at last are interesting, new, because the conversants are equally legitimate before the epistemological tribunal. With the deconstruction of epistemic privilege comes the possibility of alternative criteria for evaluating sociological production. Moral implications, practical applications, aesthetic pleasure, fun, performativity, credibility are other possible criteria for choosing one discourse rather than another. Sociology's Faustian bargain, in which the humanities were granted the domains of beauty and morality, science the domain of "the truth," can now be contravened. With philosophical impunity sociologists can interrupt their own discursive spaces, reflect on their modes of production, their power interests, and explore writing/performing/teaching/sharing sociology both as a "science" and as a public or aesthetic or practical or morally charged discourse. It is entirely obvious that persons whose power positions have been concealed behind notions of general, universal, Archimedean truth would resist postmodernism. I even have some compassion for their plight. They have no power to gain through postmodernism-only position to lose. Why would they voluntarily give up their dominion? They might gain intellectual consistency-the application of the sociological axiomatic, the sociohistorical location of knowledge, to their own productionsbut consistency is easily sacrificed before the altar of power. Postmodernism appeals to and benefits marginalized people who have been locally and historically denied