“It is those people”: Religious Scripts and Organizing Compassion

The literature describes religious behavior as triggered by cognitive schemata, but we know little of how emotions and values influence organizational religious scripts. Drawing from an ethnographic and longitudinal qualitative case study in a faith-based institution, this paper analyzes how organizational religious scripts encode and enact compassionate activities. In this article, a process of acknowledging religious history, noticing pain, and living ethical spirituality is identified as forming compassionate behavior that enhances the script. The institutional context as well as the emotional experience of pain, suffering, and inequality can be a pervasive aspect of organizational spiritual life and frame organizational activities to reproduce and replicate organizational religious scripts and the moral engagement of reaching out to the sick and marginalized.

False Signaling and Personal Moral Failings: Two distinct pathways to hypocrisy with unequal moral weight

Moral engagement is a key feature of human nature: we hold moral values, condemn those who violate those values, and attempt to adhere to them ourselves. Yet moral engagement can make us appear hypocritical if we fail to behave morally. When does moral engagement risk triggering ascriptions of hypocrisy? And when do hypocrites—moreso than ordinary wrongdoers—earn particular moral outrage? Across four studies (total n = 1,787), we provide evidence of two distinct pathways to hypocrisy: (1) violating a moral value that you have signaled to others that you adhere to (i.e., engaging in false signaling) and (2) violating a moral value that you genuinely hold (i.e., committing a personal moral failing). Furthermore, we show that these pathways have unequal moral weight, such that false signaling is evaluated more negatively. In Study 1, we confirm that paradigmatic hypocrites activate judgments associated with both pathways. In Studies 2-3, we investigate case studies designed to activate one pathway but not the other. We find evidence that both pathways are sufficient to trigger ascriptions of hypocrisy, but false signalers are more likely to be penalized for their hypocrisy (and thus deemed less moral than non-hypocritical transgressors). Finally, Study 4 demonstrates that a target who violates a stated value, but avoids activating either pathway, is judged as neither hypocritical nor immoral—confirming that at least one pathway is necessary for hypocrisy. Together, these findings suggest that false signaling and personal moral failings constitute two distinct pathways to hypocrisy with unequal moral weight.

Nurses' Moral Experiences of Ethically Meaningful End-of-Life Care: Distress, Resilience, Responsibility, and Care

BackgroundMoral distress, the phenomenon in which an agent is constrained in acting on their ethical choice, is a reoccurring theme in the literature on nurses' experiences of end-of-life care (EOLC). Understanding moral engagement solely through a lens of moral distress can be limiting—as such, we sought to explore the diverse experiences nurses consider ethically meaningful in their palliative and EOLC practice.Purpose and MethodsThis article presents an exploration and analysis of stories told to us, within an interpretive description study, by five nurses practicing in EOLC in diverse settings across Canada. Although these stories were told to us in a research context, the purpose of this theory article is to explore what these stories demonstrate about the moral engagement of nurses caring for dying patients.FindingsOur analysis suggests that while moral distress is a feature of nursing stories, so too are many other dimensions of moral experience, including resilience, responsibility, and care.Implications for PracticeExpanding how we understand nurses' moral engagement in the care of dying patients has implications for how we account for the many responsibilities that nurses shoulder in striving to provide “good” care to people at the end of life.

Restorying the Earth

The first chapter introduces the reader to a number of theoretical tools and analytical lenses for understanding ecopiety and consumopiety, defining more closely the meaning and use of those terms in this book and their relationship to one another. This chapter also explains the concept of what the author calls “restorying the earth”―the ongoing processes of mediated moral engagement in recrafting or remaking storiesof earth and our place in it in an age of environmental crisis. The author presents theories of “media intervention,” considering how media interventions become “moral interventions” in popular narratives of ecopiety. The chapter’s theoretical discussion also plays upon therapeutic uses of the term “intervention” in popular discourse in order to think through associations between practices of environmental virtue and notions of “denial, addiction, and recovery.”

Young Mothers, Moral Experience, and the Politics of Care

This introductory chapter reflects on three strands of scholarship that shape analysis of moral experience and care among young mothers. The chapter begins with the story of a young mother who expresses her desire to live on her own, just with her child, a statement that challenges ideals of Andean relatedness and hegemonic Hispanic ideologies of patriarchal families. This story sets the stage to argue that moral engagement is part of ordinary life. Attention to broad structural inequalities and the micro-politics of interactions are crucial to account for the complex meanings of her statement and the moral and practical dilemmas she, and other young mothers, face in the Peruvian Andes. In addition to detailing the ethnographic context, research methodology, and ethics, the chapter incorporates discussion of recent anthropological scholarship on morality; on the dialogical or joint production of language, subjectivity, and sociality; and on reproduction, relatedness, and the intimate labor of care.

State of play: Video games and moral engagement

In this article we examine three recent examples of ‘ethically notable games’ (Zagal 2010) and highlight unusual or innovative design features for facilitating moral engagement. Drawing on the work of Miguel Sicart to frame our analysis, our goal is to highlight current trends in ENG (ethically notable games) design and see how commercial games are moving beyond reductive ‘morality meters’ and treating moral choice with greater nuance, resulting ‐ for the most part ‐ in a more morally engaging experience.

The Moral Agency of Abortion Providers

Until very recently, only negative claims of conscience related to abortion provision were recognized; that is, conscience-based refusal to provide abortion care was recognized but conscience-based provision was not. In fact, to the contrary, abortion providers were and are routinely stigmatized as being devoid of conscience or moral principles. This chapter takes up the moral agency of abortion providers. It deepens understanding of the concept of conscientious provision and considers the intersection of stigma and conscience claims. In addition to stigma, deep social polarization on abortion prevents abortion providers from feeling that they can safely and freely speak about their work. This means that the lived experiences of abortion providers, including their openness to the moral ambiguities and complexities of abortion, remain hidden. Ultimately the chapter suggests that abortion providers’ capacities to live in contested arenas, to see the complexities of abortion, and to hold a “tension of opposites” are a manifestation of deep moral engagement, a potential path out of our current polarized state, and a model for civic engagement on any number of issues.

Second-parenthood realities, third-age ideals: (grand)parenthood in the context of poverty and HIV/AIDS

Within contexts of poverty and HIV/AIDS in (South) Africa, this chapter positions itself at the interface of the historical-moral engagement of grandparents caring for grandchildren and contemporary social realities and aspirations. The phenomenon of the oldest generation caring for younger generations builds on a long-established continuum of social structures and norms related to intergenerational support. However, in the context of HIV/AIDS they are increasingly being forced to take sole responsibility for their grandchildren, including legal guardianship. In this chapter I argue that the point of departure for these grandmothers is an obligatory contribution perspective which often overrides their own needs and aspirations with implications for their own care futures. During the past decade, however, an increasingly more rights-based / corrective discourse developed through which expectations and demands of younger generations are questioned and the obligatory contribution discourse is contested or at least relativized through negotiation..

Dress, gender and the embodiment of age: men and masculinities

The study explores the role of clothing in the constitution of embodied masculinity in age, contrasting its results with an earlier study of women. It draws four main conclusions. First that men's responses to dress were marked by continuity both with their younger selves and with mainstream masculinity, of which they still felt themselves to be part. Age was less a point of challenge or change than for many women. Second, men's responses were less affected by cultural codes in relation to age. Dress was not, by and large, seen through the lens of age; and there was not the sense of cultural exile that had marked many of the women's responses. Third, for some older men dress could be part of wider moral engagement, expressive of values linked positively to age, embodying old-fashioned values that endorsed their continuing value as older men. Lastly, dress in age reveals some of the ways in which men retain aspects of earlier gender privilege. The study was based on qualitative interviews with 24 men aged 58–85, selected to display a range in terms of social class, occupation, sexuality, employment and relationship status. It forms part of the wider intellectual movement of cultural gerontology that aims to expand the contexts in which we explore later years; and contributes to a new focus on materiality within sociology.