Search Results (557)

The news framing of assisted death in Portugal and the United Kingdom from 2016 to 2024 was analyzed across two dimensions. The first examined the overall frames through source positions and occupations. The second observed argumentative structures by coding argument characteristics: manifestation, origin, level, and evaluation. A total of 7464 structures were identified from 1731 published stories in Expresso, Público, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. The research utilized a methodological framework based on framing theory, creating direct connections between frame analysis and argumentative structures to improve the validity of valence and thematic framing mechanisms. The findings indicated significant differences between countries. The Portuguese news media showed a marked inclination to present concentrated opposing arguments with a higher argumentative density. In contrast, British newspapers displayed a greater diversity of arguments in favor of assisted death, along with a more cohesive representation among pro-assisted death sources. Three distinct argumentative profiles were identified, each showing different divisions between Portugal and the UK. These results reveal that argumentative structures in assisted death coverage reflect deeper systemic values and news media structures, positioning these quality newspapers as influential actors in representing arguments about moral legitimacy around bioethical issues. The study makes a valuable contribution by offering a comprehensive understanding of how these four newspapers frame arguments about assisted death while proposing an innovative analytical model applicable to comparative studies of other news media. Full article

In this paper I aim to draw attention to the continued emphasis on ‘moral tales in stories of family construction. In research projects on both conventional family practices such as marriage and non-conventional ones such as living apart together (LAT) and mixed-sex civil partnerships, morality continues to emerge as a core guiding principle for how relationships are organised and maintained. Yet beyond the importance of children in these moral tales, little consideration is given to the other dimensions and shapes that this ‘morality’ may take. Here I bring together three qualitative research projects to illustrate the strong drive of moral obligations in the face of family fluidity, relationship plurality, and individualised therapeutic discourse. With this data I argue that obligations continue to organise relationship decision-making, and we can imagine these obligations as formed of three interrelated dimensions: (1) social ‘oughts’, formed of culture, norms, and values (e.g., we ought to get married because that is the normal thing to do in our society), (2) relational ‘oughts’, including children, family, friends, life/family course, death, health (e.g., we ought to live apart to protect the children), and (3) individual ‘oughts’, which involve strongly held personal beliefs, and an ethic of self-care (e.g., we ought to get a civil partnership because it aligns with my feminist values). Understanding the shape of contemporary intimate morality is an important step in developing future theory, policy, and practice in the field. Full article

In the hospitality industry, corporate social responsibility practices are getting more recognition as a strategic driver of stakeholders’ sustainable behaviors. This study creates and tests a moderated serial mediation model that connects hotel CSR activities to guests’ pro-environmental behavior (PROE). In addition, moral elevation (ME) and pro-social behaviors of guests (PSO) are posited as affective and behavioral mediating mechanisms, whereas the perceived transparency (TRA) of hotel actions is investigated as a moderator. The survey data were collected from 426 hotel guests who had stayed in hotels in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze it. The findings reveal that CSR does have a positive effect on ME, which sequentially makes ME affect PSO and PROE behavior positively. The research shows that the moderator TRA also amplifies the relationship strength between CSR and ME, which suggests that transparent actions of hotels do have a positive emotional impact on guests. The research contributes to hospitality literature and also sustainability literature by identifying ME as an emotional mechanism and TRA as a moderating condition that alter guests’ behaviors. As managerial implications, the research underlines the value of creating CSR practices that are both transparent and authentic to guests and stakeholders to ultimately maximize the engagement of guests in the context of sustainability. Full article

This study investigates the “insurance-like effect” of corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance amid financial restatement events among Chinese listed firms and examines the moderating role of ESG rating divergence. Employing an event study methodology on a sample of 1552 financial restatement events in China’s A-share market from 2013 to 2023, we measure market reactions using the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) over a [−1, +1] day window. Our findings reveal that strong ESG performance significantly mitigates the negative market reactions triggered by financial restatements. However, this protective effect of ESG is significantly weakened by the inconsistency in ESG assessments among rating agencies, known as ESG rating divergence, particularly when such divergence is persistent. We argue that the underlying mechanism is that rating divergence creates signal conflicts, exacerbates information asymmetry, and erodes the credibility of ESG signals. This, in turn, undermines the stakeholder trust and moral capital that underpin the insurance-like effect. This research sheds light on the complex impact of ESG rating divergence on the value-protective mechanism of ESG and contributes new empirical evidence to the literature on ESG and its insurance-like effect, especially within the context of an emerging market. Full article

Despite growing interest in transmedia edutainment, its limits—especially those experienced by students embedded in non-western educational cultural settings—remain underexamined. This article offers a theoretically grounded and empirically supported analysis of the cultural–pedagogical frictions shaping transmedia edutainment in Hong Kong higher education, focusing on students whose learning dispositions have been historically and institutionally formed by examination-oriented meritocracy and instrumentalist epistemologies. Using a mixed qualitative design combining focus-group interviews and classroom ethnographic observations, we show why implementation efforts frequently stalled and how they were ultimately absorbed by a prevailing neoliberal–Confucian educational culture that moralizes achievement and standardizes value recognition. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, we interrogate how students’ educational illusio—animated by content instrumentalism, grade-oriented compliance, and meritocratic time-discipline—recasted multimodal engagement as instrumentalized participation optimized for legibility, security, and risk minimization. Moving beyond prevailing emphases on technological access or digital divides, we foreground habitus–field incongruence as the mechanism structuring ambivalent participation and deculturation from the intended ethos of creativity, critical inquiry, and collaborative participation. We conclude by calling for culturally responsive pedagogical shifts necessary for cultivating more genuine participatory cultures in transmedia learning environments. Full article

As online spaces have become increasingly hostile, some internet users have begun to organize collectively to counter hatred through what is known as counterspeech. This article explores how loosely affiliated individuals come to feel a strong sense of community in such efforts, even when they have never met in person. Using digital ethnographic data collected on the international counterspeaking group #iamhere, I argue that participants build imagined rhetorical communities: affective bonds forged through shared moral language and collective communicative action. Although members are geographically dispersed and largely unknown to one another offline, they nonetheless experience a sense of solidarity rooted in their common linguistic and ethical framework. This article shows how rhetorical practices, particularly those focused on empathy and civil discourse, become the glue that holds these activist formations together. By examining the ways moral discourse enables both individual agency and collective identity in counterspeech, this work offers new insight into how human groups form online to resist hatred and assert shared values. Full article

This entry explores the implications of generative AI for the underlying foundational premises of copyright law and the potential threat it poses to human creativity. It identifies the gaps and inconsistencies in legal frameworks as regards authorship, training-data use, moral rights, and human originality in the context of AI systems that are capable of imitating human expression at both syntactic and semantic levels. The entry includes: (i) a comparative analysis of the legal frameworks of the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany, using the Berne Convention as a harmonising baseline, (ii) a systematic synthesis of the relevant academic literature, and (iii) insights gained from semi-structured interviews with legal scholars, AI developers, industry stakeholders, and creators. Evidence suggests that existing laws are ill-equipped for semantic and stylistic reproduction; there is no agreement on authorship, no clear licensing model for training data, and inadequate protection for the moral identity of creators—especially posthumously, where explicit protections for likeness, voice, and style are fragmented. The entry puts forward a draft global framework to restore legal certainty and cultural value, incorporating a semantics-aware definition of the term “work”, and encompassing licensing and remuneration of training data, enhanced moral and posthumous rights, as well as enforceable transparency. At the same time, parallel personality-based safeguards, including rights of publicity, image, or likeness, although present in all three jurisdictions studied, are not subject to the same copyright and thus do not offer any coherent or adequate protection against semantic or stylistic imitation, which once again highlights the need for a more unified and robust copyright strategy. Full article

This chapter examines shifting genealogies of knowledge and moral authority in Western Kenya by unsettling the hierarchical opposition between “indigenous” and “scientific” knowledge regimes as ways of knowing and acting. Treating pedagogy as a critical mode of social reproduction, it juxtaposes practices of taboo in the Mount Elgon region, as inherited prohibitions that regulate relations among people, animals, and land, with the deployment of animated educational media in Mumias by Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) as a technocratic apparatus for imparting new agrarian knowledge and practices. By staging an encounter between these two modes of social knowledge reproduction—both understood as moral technologies that shape conduct, sustain ecological balance, and transmit communal values (one grounded in taboo, the other in technical instruction)—the paper re-situates an “indigenous”/“scientific” inequality within longer genealogies spanning precolonial, colonial, and contemporary postcolonial and developmental formations. By foregrounding commitments to these knowledge traditions, the paper stages how taboos and educational animations alike can embody evolving modes of community self-determination and ethical stewardship. It ultimately argues that the force of the “indigenous < scientific” inequality lies primarily not in correcting its hierarchical opposition but in the ongoing struggle over which modes of life will be allowed to endure. Decolonizing these genealogies requires attending to the marked/unmarked distinctions that structure bodies, discourse, and social reproduction in the present. Full article

James Sterba recently presented arguments against theories which ground morality in God and attempted “to provide an account of the norms on which an ethics without God can be appropriately grounded ….” In particular, Sterba noted that “Robert Adams is best known for his attempt to ground morality in God’s nature” and “[r]ecently, Adam Johnson significantly developed Adams’s view ….” In 2024, Sterba and I had a public debate concerning this issue at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in which I argued that the trinitarian God of Christianity provides the best explanation for objective morality whereas Sterba argued that morality can be objective without God and proposed a nontheistic account. In this paper, I argue that my theistic theory, which I call Divine Love Theory, is a better explanation of objective morality than Sterba’s nontheistic theory. First, I provide a summary of both my theory and Sterba’s. Second, I respond to Sterba’s arguments against theories which ground morality in God. Third, I provide reasons to conclude my Divine Love Theory is a better explanation for objective morality than Sterba’s theory. Full article

Biology overlaps for humans and non-humans; so, there is only one biology and humans are animals. All human biological functions can also be found, to some degree, in other animal species. Examples mentioned are DNA and characteristics; cell type and structure; efficiency of muscles and other locomotor mechanisms; efficiency of immune and other body protection mechanisms; sensory functioning; cognition and memory; specific cognitive abilities; and ability to have moral concepts and behave in a moral way. What is the current status of humans? Humans are destroying many other species in the world, as well as whole habitats and ecosystems. Since resources important for humans are amongst those being harmed, and there is, at present, little sign of sufficient change in human behaviour, humans themselves are amongst the species that could be destroyed. Long before this happens, immoral damage to many non-human individuals and much of the rest of the world is occurring. The change in attitude needed for all humans is to place less value on immediate human benefit and more value on benefit for our fellow beings in the world. When the word ‘we’ is used, it should not just include humans. It should, at least, include all sentient beings. Full article

Fractured fairy tales are adaptive retellings of traditional stories that employ humor, irony, and narrative innovation to transform established meanings. As a distinctive literary genre, these works combine entertainment with subversion, reshaping familiar plots, characters, and morals to engage readers in both imaginative and critical reflection. The genre gained prominence in the mid-twentieth century, when classic tales began to be rewritten to reflect modern cultural values and shifting audience expectations. Through techniques such as parody, reversal, and alternative endings, fractured fairy tales challenge inherited norms while offering renewed interpretive possibilities. Beyond their literary appeal, they have been recognized for their pedagogical importance: their familiarity lowers barriers to reading, while their inventive variations foster creativity, analytical reasoning, and language development. Collectively, these attributes affirm fractured fairy tales as a genre of lasting significance, uniting artistic reinterpretation with educational relevance in ways that continue to enrich both literary and literacy learning. Full article

The dual-process theory of moral judgment asserts that moral judgments come about because of the operation of either of two independent decision processes, often described as a cognitive/rational process and an intuitive/affective process. In some cases, these processes are seen to operate in competition. We trace the development of this account and highlight how the neural and behavioral evidence almost universally relies on the validity of a series of untested statements that, collectively, we call the dual-process assumptions. We show how these assumptions produce experimental methods that cannot falsify the dual-process account. We provide an in-depth and critical analysis of the kind of neurophysiological and behavioral evidence that has been used to support the theory and conclude that it is tenuous, equivocal, or both. Full article

Background: Ethical decision-making in medical care increasingly requires balancing clinical values, professional duties, and organizational reasoning. Understanding how healthcare professionals navigate moral dilemmas necessitates examining the philosophical orientations that shape their ethical judgments. Alongside traditional medical ethics, a business ethics perspective highlights organizational and managerial dimensions of healthcare, offering a more comprehensive understanding of ethical decision-making in modern clinical contexts. Aim: This study aims to examine how healthcare professionals reason about ethical dilemmas by mapping their moral orientations and decision-making patterns across five ethical frameworks-idealism, relativism, objectivism, legalism, and Machiavellianism-integrating both medical and business ethics perspectives. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with 277 participants (medical doctors and students). Two validated instruments were used: the Attitudes Toward Business Ethics Questionnaire (ATBEQ) to assess moral orientations and the Clinical Ethical Dilemmas Questionnaire (Richeux & Duquéroy) to evaluate ethical decision patterns. Data were analyzed using correlation, multiple regression, and k-means cluster analyses. Results: Among the five orientations, Legalism negatively predicted “It depends” responses (i.e., higher Legalism scores were associated with fewer indecisive responses), indicating greater decisiveness in ethically ambiguous situations. Unexpected positive correlations were also found between traditionally opposing constructs-such as Ethical Relativism and Moral Objectivism-suggesting moral pluralism. The overall regression model was not statistically significant (R² = 0.04, p = 0.08). Cluster analysis identified four distinct ethical reasoning profiles: High Machiavellian Idealists, Pragmatic Relativists, Context-Sensitive Objectivists, and Ethical Purists. Conclusions: Abstract philosophical orientations showed limited predictive power for contextual ethical decision-making, highlighting the complex and multidimensional nature of moral reasoning in healthcare. Findings inform the design of context-sensitive ethics education programs that integrate philosophical reflection with case-based learning to strengthen ethical competence among medical professionals. Full article

Insects constitute a vital component of terrestrial ecosystems, yet their ongoing global decline underscores the urgency of identifying the factors that facilitate or hinder public engagement in their conservation. This study identifies the key psychological drivers of insect-related conservation behavior within a Romanian context, an understudied geographical and sociocultural setting. Using data collected from 346 adult respondents via an online questionnaire, the predictive performance of the Value–Belief–Norm (VBN) theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and an integrated VBN–TPB framework was examined through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The VBN model exhibited superior explanatory power relative to TPB, with biospheric values, ecological worldviews, and personal moral norms emerging as the most influential determinants of behavioral intention and self-reported action. Although participants demonstrated moderate levels of general entomological knowledge, awareness of specific insect-friendly practices was notably limited and frequently characterized by misconceptions. Perceived barriers, particularly informational deficits, time constraints, and financial considerations, exerted significant inhibitory effects on conservation engagement. The findings indicate that effective interventions must extend beyond knowledge transmission, incorporating strategies that activate moral norms, strengthen affective and identity-based motivations, and reduce structural barriers to action. Full article

This study investigates how cultural context shapes memorable tourism experiences at dark-tourism sites by comparing young visitors (aged between 18 to 34) from the Czech Republic and India. The Czech Republic and India were selected for this study because they offer two culturally and historically distinct contexts that allow for meaningful examination of cross-cultural variation in dark tourism experiences. It specifically aims to examine whether and how the seven dimensions of the Memorable Tourism Experience Scale (MTES), hedonism, refreshment, local culture, involvement, knowledge, meaningfulness, and novelty vary across these two cultural settings. A cross-sectional, comparative survey design was employed using a convenience sample of 100 Czech and 108 Indian university students who had previously visited dark-tourism attractions. Data were collected through a self-administered questionnaire based on the MTES, and analyzed using factor analysis and independent-sample t-tests to validate the scale and test for cross-cultural differences. Significant differences emerged for hedonic value and meaningfulness, with Indian participants reporting higher scores on both dimensions, while local culture, involvement, knowledge, novelty, and refreshment did not differ significantly between the two samples. The study contributes to the memorable tourism experience literature by demonstrating that dark tourism represents a hybrid eudaimonic–hedonic experience in which cognitive learning and reflective appraisal coexist with pleasure and arousal, and by showing that cultural context modulates affective and meaning-related dimensions more than cognitive ones. Practically, the findings suggest that dark-tourism managers should priorities interpretive designs that integrate knowledge acquisition with emotionally and morally resonant narratives, while tailoring hedonic and meaning framings to the cultural profiles of target markets. Full article