Value (ethics)

About: Value (ethics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 21347 publications have been published within this topic receiving 461372 citations.

Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research in Practice Between Imaginaries of Collective Experimentation and Entrenched Academic Value Orders

Abstract: Over the past decades, we have witnessed calls for greater transdisciplinary engagement between scientific and societal actors to develop more robust answers to complex societal challenges. Althoug...

Towards a Rational Society

Abstract: In Towards a Rational Society, Habermas stated his commitment to the need for the subordination of technical rationality to a broader understanding of rationality discovered through democratic participation and communication.1 From the onset, he assumed that the problem of how to develop science and technology in society was to be solved by ensuring democratic institutions and structures mediate the rational development of scientific and technological progress. As a result of democratic mediation, the bounds of rationality will be progressively tested and developed, providing that scientists and technicians do not overstep the limits of their specialisation and people understand the cultural meaning and practical value of science and technology. In this way, science and technology can be developed freely as a means to discover the truth and improving technical systems, while also being subordinated to the democratic processes of deliberating shared cultural meanings and understandings in terms of lifeworld experiences. Habermas’ account of scientific and technical progress was consciously developed to support his theory of societal development. It was for this reason that he argued that the premises of social theory must be independent of the results of particular sciences and he was concerned with the use of scientific concepts and representations, such as those taken from theories of natural evolution, to explain society.2 Following on from his earlier work, Habermas’ analysis of the historical conditions and structures of the trajectories of scientific thought and practice was developed in order to explain them in terms of the moral and practical development of society.

Value self-confrontation as a method to aid in weight loss.

Abstract: The impact on weight loss of an adaptation of the Rokeach(1973) value self-confrontation method was investigated in a field experiment. This method confronts people who have ranked their own values with information about the value priorities that discriminate between a positive and a negative reference group. A preliminary study revealed that successful weight losers differ from unsuccessful weight losers in valuing "wisdom" more than "happiness." Eighty-seven overweight adults were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: value self-confrontation, group discussion, or nontreatment control. Value self-confrontation subjects lost more weight than the other subjects over 2 months, and this weight loss persisted for an additional year. Changes in value priorities during the first 2 months suggest that weight loss was mediated by an increase in the importance attributed to wisdom relative to happiness. Implications for the theory of value-behavior relations and for practical application in weight loss programs are discussed. The method of value self-confrontation (VSC) developed by Rokeach (1973) seeks to change people's behavior by changing the value priorities underlying that behavior. This method has been applied successfully to influence such behaviors as joining the NAACP, making eye contact with Blacks, contributing money to programs fostering gender or minority group equality, supporting antipollution measures, consulting about career planning, smoking cigarettes, and classroom teaching (summarized in Ball-Rokeach, Rokeach, & Grube, 1984; Schwartz, in press). Our first aim is to report an application of the Rokeach method to a new behavior: dieting and persistent weight loss. The VSC method has produced significant behavior change in half of its 16 published applications. Surprisingly, however, there has been little research on whether the key theoretical process presumed to underlie the behavior change is indeed the mediator of that change. More specifically, does the behavior change in fact follow from a change in those particular value priorities brought to the subjects' attention by VSC? Evidence from the two studies that did address this question (Greenstein. 1982; Grube, Greenstein, Rankin. & Kearney. 1977) fails to support the theoretical mediating process. Our second aim is to examine this question in a more adequate manner.

The Body and Geography

Abstract: TRADITIONALLY," which is to say in most times and places prior to the "New Geography" of early modern Europe, the tie between the body and geography ("description of the earth") has been primordial, intimate, and manifold. According to modern phenomenology, the body is made for earthly space, as--in an immediate sense--earthly space becomes manifest through the perceiving and feeling body. Bodies not only perceive space or things-in-space through any combination of their five senses, but their very design--their "handedness," their slightly uneven bifurcatedness--orientates or situates them qualitatively within space and fits them to manipulate things-in-space. Bipedalism not only equips the body to move through space but propels it as well. Little wonder, then, if traditional geographies or pictures of the earth are deeply imprinted by the body. One primordial entail of the body is "the practice of dividing the circle of the horizon into four cardinal directions," which (as a historian of religion writes) "is almost universal." Only with the development of a concept of azimuth (whereby one point was fixed on the horizon) did this directional scheme become "more abstract and useful." Azimuth itself, however, is also keyed to the body; to the felt value of one direction over (and indeed against) another. East is sacralized in Jewish and Christian tradition ("and, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came by the way of the East," Numbers 2.2.3). West and north are ominous. However, as east is (roughly) the direction of the rising sun, it tended to be sacralized by other religions as well. For this reason, and because of the growing importance of Jerusalem, the Jewish (and the traditional Christian) geographies tended to be keyed to Jerusalem as to a sacred center rather than to the sacred direction. As such, they resembled other omphalos- (or navel) centered cosmographies, such as ancient Greek and Chinese. In such cosmographies, geographic boundaries are equally valorized if somewhat paradoxical. Conceding that there is indeed earth beyond the boundaries of the earth, such boundaries assert the limits of the properly human or habitable. Beyond the limits of the Greek oikumene (or "house-world") are wild beasts, monstrous bodies, impassible deserts, mountains, ocean, insufferable heat or cold. Even within the oikumene, the rooms (continents) were of variable quality. Following Herodotus, the Hippocratic treatise Airs Waters Places pronounces that Europeans "will be well nourished, of very fine physique and very tall," because Europe is "situated midway between the heat and the cold [and] is very fruitful ... very mild." Asiatics, on the other hand, are "less homogeneous ... because of the changes of the seasons and the character of the region." If human races tend to be geographically imprinted in traditional geographies, so too the geographic image--the imago mundi--fairly glows with affect. (To the Beowulf poet, the earth is "wlite-beorhtne wang, swa waeter bebugeth" or "a gleaming plain girdled with waters.") From late Roman thought (primarily Macrobius) into the Renaissance, it was commonplace to think of the world as a macrocosm in which the human body was recapitulated as microcosm. Again, the "world of earth" (Orbis Terrarum) was astrologically predicated by the environing spheres. In all these contexts, the primary fact about early modern geography is the emptying of the body from the world picture. The so-called "New Geography" can be thought of as an amalgam of the new geographic discoveries (vast new lands and oceans) with the dramatic developments in cartographic science that had made these discoveries possible. In none of the three standard narratives of the New Geography is the body a real player. For the post-Baconian, scientistic narrative, the key development is an "objective" spatial awareness predicated on a mathematical "graticule" (keyed to itself alone) from which precisely the bodily "geography of myth and dogma" is absent. …

Why We Punish in the Name of Justice: Just Desert versus Value Restoration and the Role of Social Identity

Abstract: Two different notions of justice might motivate people to demand punishment of an offender. The offense could be seen as lowering the victim’s and community’s status/power position relative to the offender, requiring a degradation of the offender to restore a moral balance (just desert). Or, the offense could be seen as questioning community values, requiring a reaffirmation of those values through social consensus (value restoration). Two studies referring to tax evasion and social welfare fraud yielded supportive evidence. Just desert was related to traditional punishment, especially when participants did not identify with a relevant inclusive community (Australians). Value restoration was related to alternative (restorative) punishment, especially when community values were regarded as diverse and requiring consensualization. It tended to be related to traditional punishment when community values were regarded as clear and consensual.