Black bodies at risk: Exploring the corporeal iconography of the anti-police brutality movement

Black bodies at risk are in constant conversation with each other. The Black witness who films a fatal police encounter on her phone is talking to the Black victim, promising not to leave him in his final moments. The distant Black witness who sees that video then talks back to the witness and the victim, creating powerful imagery that amplifies the tragic footage. In this manner, those working under the broad banner of the Black Lives Matter movement have reimagined a dynamic Black visual public sphere, where moral arguments about police brutality are sustained through an assemblage of strategic visual appeals. In this essay, I argue that this call-and-response of Black corporeal iconography forms the vanguard of embodied protest journalism in the 21st century. I explain how the concepts of “strong objectivity,” which is rooted in feminist standpoint theory, help validate and liberate the flesh witnessing of the marginalized. Moreover, I offer two broad categories of imagery that Black activists create most often in response to fatal police shootings: historic juxtapositions and symbolic deaths.

Changing Americans’ Attitudes about Immigration: Using Moral Framing to Bolster Factual Arguments

How can the effect of appeals on immigration attitudes be bolstered? Partisans’ tendency to interpret facts consistent with their priors impedes evidence-based persuasion. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here we propose that appealing to moral values can bolster the persuasive power of information. Across three experiments (total N = 4,616), we find that an argument based on the value of in-group loyalty, which emphasized that immigrants are critical to America’s economic strength, combined with information about the economic impact of legal immigration, significantly increased Americans’ support for legal immigration. Additionally, we found a significant effect of the moral component of this message, whereas the effect of the information alone was of similar size but only marginally significant. These results show that moral arguments can strengthen the persuasiveness of informational appeals.

Misguided Ancients

Although the ancient Greeks and Romans have long been appreciated as foundations for Western civilization, for these textbooks, the Greeks’ philosophy, gods, and immorality tar them as godless humanists. Nonetheless, the Greeks and the Romans allow these curricula to introduce several key social, political, and moral arguments. They assess whether ancient civilizations implemented the “family values” of the political right as it emerged in the 1970s. Thus the Greeks were commendable in excluding women from the public sphere and the Romans for their strong patriarchal families. But Rome fell when it failed to maintain family values. These textbooks disparage the Romans to downplay their influence on the American founding. Furthermore, the rise of Islam reveals the presence of Satan in the world. These curricula’s repudiation of the classical tradition reflects not only contemporary concerns of the religious right but also American anti-intellectualism.

‘Dams and flows’: boundary formation and dislocation in the financialised firm

Mainstream economic theories of the firm argue that the boundary between firm and market is determined by efficiency-enhancing logics which optimise coordination or bargaining outcomes. Drawing on social anthropological work, this paper critiques these accounts, arguing instead that firms are socially embedded and that firm boundary formation should therefore be understood as an attempt to fix the limits of certain relational rights and obligations that are moral in their conception. Consequently, boundaries are often contested and subject to renegotiation. We employ the parsimonious concepts of ‘dams and flows’ to examine how attempts to curtail the claims of some stakeholders and extend the claims of others at any one historical moment produce boundaries of different kinds. To illustrate this, we first trace the moral arguments used to advance limited liability rights to shareholders during the Companies Act in the mid-nineteenth century, which cut or ‘dammed’ obligations at a particular point and moment, directing new flows of obligation and wealth. We then explore the different moral reasoning of agency theory—the foundation of the financialised firm—which foregrounds the property rights of shareholder principles and obligations of managerial agents to them. We argue that this moral reasoning led to new dams and flows that have changed corporate governance and accounting practice, producing—counterintuitively—a reinvigorated form of managerialism, leaving the firm financially and morally unstable; its boundaries increasingly unable to contain its relational tensions.

Pluricentric linguistic justice: a new ethics-based approach to pluricentricity in French and other languages

Drawing on the example of the French-speaking world, this article makes the case for the valuable contribution of a systematic ethics-based approach to understanding linguistic pluricentricity. Following a critical review of three key definitional dimensions of the concept - political, linguistic and representational/attitudinal - it argues for the inclusion of a fourth ethical dimension to assess whether there are moral arguments which might also favour the recognition of distinct national standards. It builds on the recent linguistic justice literature in the fields of political theory and political philosophy to propose the notion of “pluricentric linguistic justice” as a framework for evaluating the ethics of local norm-setting and enforcement in pluricentric contexts. To demonstrate how pluricentric linguistic justice might be assessed, it examines a series of valued-based arguments discussed in the linguistic justice literature relating to the instrumental and identity functions of language, considering how they might apply to specific contexts in the French-speaking world. Besides contributing to existing theory, the notion of pluricentric linguistic justice has the potential to help advance social equality, by drawing attention to some of the social and political injustices associated with diatopic variation in spatially diffused languages more generally.

ISLAMIC ETHICS, ISLAMIC LAW, AND THE PROPER MANAGERIAL BEHAVIOR

The paper is dedicated to two main issues, namely (1) the representation of general Islamic ethics, the analysis of its specific methodology of moral validation by referring to the Qur'an and Sunna, and its interconnectivity with the Islamic law – Shari’a, as well as to (2) presenting Islamic managerial ethics as a derivative from the general Islamic ethics when it comes to both building moral arguments and propagating the proper moral behavior by promoting moral virtues and normatively analyzing what is right and wrong in the particular business situation. Among the used methods, there was content analysis, comparable analysis, inference, and the evolution of the normative theories. Then, the very Islam-specific confluence of ethics and law is discussed. These data are presented and analyzed as a required context for proper understanding of applied ethics in Islam, and in the case of this paper – Islamic managerial ethics.

Moral Expressions in 280 Characters or Less: An Analysis of Politician Tweets Following the 2016 Brexit Referendum Vote

Ideas about morality are deeply entrenched into political opinions. This article examines the online communication of British parliamentarians from May 2017-December 2019, following the 2016 referendum that resulted in Britain's exit (Brexit) from the European Union. It aims to uncover how British parliamentarians use moral foundations to discuss the Brexit withdrawal agreement on Twitter, using Moral Foundations Theory as a classification basis for their tweets. It is found that the majority of Brexit related tweets contain elements of moral reasoning, especially relating to the foundations of Authority and Loyalty. There are common underlying foundations between parties, but parties express opposing viewpoints within a single foundation. The study provides useful insights into Twitter’s use as an arena for moral argumentation, as well as uncovers the politician’s uses of moral arguments during Brexit agreement negotiations on Twitter. It contributes to the limited body of work focusing on the moral arguments made by politicians through Twitter.

By the Strength of Their Enemies: The Virtue of the Stereotypical Antagonist in Terry Pratchett's 'Witches' Novels

<p><b>The comic fantasy Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) are marked by their clear and insightful approaches to complex ethical issues. This has been noted in academic approaches from the beginning, with Farah Mendlesohn’s chapter “Faith and Ethics” appearing in the early collection Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature (2000) and many others since touching on the issues Pratchett raises. However, this thesis’s investigation into the use of stereotypes in characterisation and development of the antagonist figures within the Discworld novels breaks new ground in mapping the course of Pratchett’s approaches across six Discworld novels. </b></p><p>This argument will focus on the ‘Witches’ sequence of novels: Equal Rites (1987), Wyrd Sisters (1988), Witches Abroad (1991), Lords and Ladies (1992), Maskerade (1995), and Carpe Jugulum (1998). Unlike other sequences in the Discworld series, these novels have a strong metatextual focus on the structural components of narrative. In this context, stereotypes facilitate both the humour and the moral arguments of these novels. Signifiers of stereotypes invoke expectations which are as often thwarted as they are fulfilled and, while resulting in humour, this process also reflects on the place of the individual within the community, the nature of right and wrong, and how we as people control the narratives which define our lives and ourselves. In closely examining the role of antagonists in the development of an ethical thread through the sequence, I argue that the careful use of stereotypes in these texts serves as a key shorthand in engaging the reader in the philosophical bent of the novels.</p>

By the Strength of Their Enemies: The Virtue of the Stereotypical Antagonist in Terry Pratchett's 'Witches' Novels

<p><b>The comic fantasy Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) are marked by their clear and insightful approaches to complex ethical issues. This has been noted in academic approaches from the beginning, with Farah Mendlesohn’s chapter “Faith and Ethics” appearing in the early collection Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature (2000) and many others since touching on the issues Pratchett raises. However, this thesis’s investigation into the use of stereotypes in characterisation and development of the antagonist figures within the Discworld novels breaks new ground in mapping the course of Pratchett’s approaches across six Discworld novels. </b></p><p>This argument will focus on the ‘Witches’ sequence of novels: Equal Rites (1987), Wyrd Sisters (1988), Witches Abroad (1991), Lords and Ladies (1992), Maskerade (1995), and Carpe Jugulum (1998). Unlike other sequences in the Discworld series, these novels have a strong metatextual focus on the structural components of narrative. In this context, stereotypes facilitate both the humour and the moral arguments of these novels. Signifiers of stereotypes invoke expectations which are as often thwarted as they are fulfilled and, while resulting in humour, this process also reflects on the place of the individual within the community, the nature of right and wrong, and how we as people control the narratives which define our lives and ourselves. In closely examining the role of antagonists in the development of an ethical thread through the sequence, I argue that the careful use of stereotypes in these texts serves as a key shorthand in engaging the reader in the philosophical bent of the novels.</p>