Moral psychology has developed increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring moral judges: their values, ideological styles, and responses to sacrificial dilemmas. It has also developed substantial resources for constructing and validating moral stimuli. What remains underdeveloped is a framework for describing the moral structure of the scenarios being judged. This matters because case-level moral judgment is best understood as a person × situation phenomenon: to study that interaction, judge-side measures must be paired with scenario-side descriptions. I propose a provisional scenario-side framework that organises moral scenarios around three higher-order dimensions — Orientation, Cost, and Moral Authorship — which can later be decomposed into more specific coding questions. These dimensions ask, respectively, who or what the act is for, what is harmed, risked, sacrificed, or imposed, and whether, and how, the morally salient outcome is attributable to an agent. I defend these axes through a contrast-case argument: if a framework cannot distinguish cases that differ only in Orientation, Cost, or Moral Authorship, then it describes moral scenarios too coarsely. The proposed framework does not determine which acts are right or wrong; its task is prior, preserving the structural distinctions on which such verdicts depend.
I present findings from a 4-month Martin Seligman-inspired wellbeing intervention of keeping a diary of 1) at least one positive emotion experienced, 2) personally enacting and 3) socially modelled at least one of Christopher Peterson and Seligman’s 24 character strengths daily as a New Zealend intermediate school teacher aide. Strengths enacted were mainly my greater ones as measured by Seligman’s Values In Action test and my judgement. Strengths modelled were informed mainly by the VIA test, professional education resources, counselling theory, and Michelle Borba’s moral education research. I engage with Carol Ryff’s critiques of Seligman’s positive psychology, but Seligman’s character strength research resonates with my main previous wellbeing practice, spirituality especially meditation, and Aristotle’s eudaimonian ethics. Interpreting Aristotle, the good life comprises a contemplative and an active element, the contemplative leading to eudaimonia, and the active centrally involving cultivation of virtue. Some philosophers argue Aristotle’s social praxis surpasses his contemplative Theoria in goodness. My meditation maintains “high-quality wellbeing,” “flourishing,” according to Edward Diener and Katherine Ryan’s subjective wellbeing criteria: positive affect, limiting negative affect, increasing mental engagement and meaning in life. I observe whether TA work as social contribution, less contemplative, equals meditation in sustaining eudaimonic wellbeing.
In this presentation I demonstrate how many of the problems with utilitarianism and rights-based theories of morality can be solved by a kind of consequentialism based on freedom. I show how this avoids happy torturers, resolves conflicts between rights, and applies better to all possible persons. I also demonstrate how freedom can be weighed sufficiently for consequentialist calculus to take place.
Let ‘gossip’ be the practice of discussing a person’s character, conduct, or relationships in that person’s absence. Commonplaces about gossip include that it is an ordinary and ubiquitous part of human life, that it plays important social and even evolutionary roles, and that the mores of various times and places nonetheless view it with suspicion. What major ethical theories should say about gossip remains ambivalent. On the one hand, ethicists have called it a pleasant and often harmless pastime, praised its ability to promote self-knowledge and social cohesion, and recommended it as a tool for combatting pernicious power imbalances. On the other hand, ethicists have also wondered why gossip sometimes inspires feelings of guilt in its practitioners, cautioned that it runs a risk of disrespecting the personhood of those involved, and worried that it might foster undeserved isolation. In this talk, I focus on a distinctly epistemic cost of gossip. I argue that gossip eliminates opportunities to garner ‘acquaintance’—understood in the technical sense as a relationship of direct awareness—between those whose story the gossip narrates and those who listen. This matters because, according to influential views in epistemology, acquaintance so understood possesses a special kind of value.
