Toward a reconceptualization of "choice": challenges by women at the margins

It has been suggested that recent first world and third world feminist movements have gained impetus from a shared emphasis on "body politics" (abortion, rape, and domestic violence). It has been made clear by other writers, however, that first and third world women (including women of color in the first world) have very different conceptions of which policies and practices should be pursued to change their reproduction experiences (because the overriding experiences of their entire lives are so very different). Likewise, the concept of "the right to choose" has been challenged on the grounds that it ignores the external conditions (such as economics) which, in fact, dictate "choice." Eugenics also influences which "choices" are promoted among populations considered "undesirable." The dilemmas associated with reproductive choices are further highlighted by debate about the use of amniocentesis in India for sex determination and female feticide. At the center of this debate is whether calling for a ban on this practice would support or violate a woman's choice. The rhetoric of choice arose in the first place because women who wanted to end a pregnancy had "no choice" but to seek illegal abortions. However, working class women and Black women in the US object to the narrowness in the abortion rights agenda dictated by the use of this term. To assert women's "choice" absolves all others of the responsibility for a pregnancy. The "choice" concept is also vulnerable to political manipulation. "Choice" also evades ethical problems such as sex selection. Disabled feminists have also pointed out that it is as important to create conditions which include "the choice to have a disabled child" as it is to choose not to be a mother. Can feminists oppose the selective abortion of female fetuses while leaving the choice to abort a defective or unwanted fetus of either sex up to the mother? Objection to sex determination can be categorized as consequentialist (based on various predicted social and psychological consequences, such as more men would lead to more violence in the world) or nonconsequentialist (based on the inherent immorality of selective abortion). The benefits of sex selection would possibly include a reduction in sex-linked diseases and a reduction in the overall birth rate. Most US feminists support the moral, but not the legal, condemnation of sex selection. In India, where sex selection is openly practiced, feminists have tried to achieve legal prohibition of the use of tests for this purpose. This difference from the US position may be due to the difference in the abortion context in the 2 countries. Whether feminists support legal and/or moral prohibition of sex selection, however, almost all call for the longterm structural changes which must be made in the context of imperialism, racism, and poverty which would allow true "choices" to prevail.     

"EPISTEMOLOGY" AS A SEMANTIC POLLUTANT

Some family therapists, following Bateson, use "epistemology" in a peculiar, non-traditional way. Nothing is gained, and much appears to be lost, by this practice. Its main effect is to promote the idea that systemic and psychological modes of explanation are incompatible. In fact, a kind of cognitive psychology is implicit in what family therapists say about reframing. By appropriating the territory of psychology and calling it epistemology instead, family therapists merely pollute the semantic environment,¹ muddying the very things that theoretical terms are supposed to clear up.     

The Unwed Father: a "Non-Deviant" Rule Breaker

By and large, men (unwed fathers) responsible for impregnating unmarried women have successfully avoided being labeled deviant and have been largely overlooked as sociological research subjects. After they responded to newspaper advertisements, 140 men responsible for 176 extramarital pregnancies were interviewed to determine how they avoid being identified and sanctioned despite their apparent culpability. Factors investigated include: lack of a sense of moral trespass (including the double standard, perception of the pair relationship, and contextual moral meanings), visibility, and social distance. The apparent inconsistency between culpability of behavior and absence of labeling is reconciled by consideration of the "morality of consequences" and the "morality of intentions." It is suggested that consideration of the interaction of rules based on these moralities contributes to an understanding of the labeling process.     

Answered Callings,Unanswered Callings,or No Calling: Examining a Nationally Representative Sample

Research suggests that workers with unanswered callings have poorer outcomes than those without callings; however, these studies have used small or homogeneous samples (Berg et al., 2010; Gazica & Spector, 2015). We aimed to replicate this finding using a nationally representative sample of 445 full-time workers. We compared key work and life criterion variables across three groups: individuals with answered callings, unanswered callings, and no calling at all. Results linked answered callings to benefits but, unlike earlier studies, suggested that unanswered callings were no worse than lacking a calling. These findings call into question the narrative that unanswered callings are associated with adverse effects, suggesting that career counselors may be able to facilitate discernment of a calling without having a negative impact on those for whom that calling goes unanswered. Research designed to test causal influences of these dynamics is an important next step for understanding the experiences of individuals with answered callings, unanswered callings, or no calling at all.     

A minor office: the variable and socially constructed character of death certification in a Scottish city

Those doctors in a Scottish city who had completed the most death certificates in 1985 were identified, interviewed about their certifying practices, and asked, for comparative purposes, to complete a series of dummy death certificates, based on case summaries. Analysis of the dummy certificates indicated substantial inter-practitioner variations in practice. From the interview data it is clear that the completion of death certificates is a very minor office: for most certifying doctors, death certification is an unsupervised, unreported, invisible, and unconsidered activity. It is argued that doctors who write large numbers of certificates conduct their certifications in Schutz's "world of routine activities" (Schutz 1970). It is this routinized orientation to certification that allows the practitioner to dwell within the "habitus" (Bourdieu 1977) of the medical collectivity but outside a normative order. Death certification may stand as an exemplar of a large number of medical activities, where wide and largely unacknowledged variations in practice occur with each practitioner investing his or her own practices with moral worth. Routinization ensures a moral order in the habitus, but not a normative order.     

"Free- Will Talk" and Sociology

Hardcore positivistic or humanistic sociologies are rare. In the history of sociology the two extremes have tended to converge, producing an awkward hybrid. A watered-down positivism is brought to the rescue of a stalled Verstehen sociology, or vice versa, and a difficulty like the free nature of human action is covered over with a veneer of pragmatism. Here it will be argued that Paul Tibbetts'recent recasting of the positivism-humanism debate in sociology into an arbitrary choice between linguistic grids perpetuates this unsatisfactory practice. Five propositions will be advanced in opposition to Tibbetts'perspective. First, it will be argued that Tibbetts'discussion clouds the real issues at stake through his failure to really transcend the positivist framework of analysis. Second, it will be shown that the humanistic pre-supposition of voluntarism involves an ontological commitment to a model of rational agency which provides a methodological base for the "scientific" treatment of human freedom. Third, this commitment constitutes a necessary presupposition of all sciences of human action. Fourth, this fact means there are good epistemological reasons why a sociologist's choice of a linguistic grid is not arbitrary. Finally, it will be proposed that the most promising pattern of convergence between humanistic sociology and positivism stems from the formulation of a rough spectrum of principles of rationality to undergird a differentiation of "degrees" and not "kind" between what Tibbetts calls "free-will talk" and "causal-deterministic talk."     

U.S. public relations educators' identification and perception of the discipline

In this study of U.S. public relations educators, previous research was confirmed that calling and identification influence work meaningfulness. The research highlights the discipline's division about importance of practical experience and research. Participants with an orientation to practical experience had significant positive correlations with calling, not to identification or meaningfulness. Those with a theory/research orientation had a significant positive correlation with organizational identification and meaningfulness, not with calling. This suggests that a practice orientation leads to a stronger public relations calling but not a calling to academia. Those with theory/research identification have less calling to the public relations profession.     

The Dilemma of "Authentic Self" Ideology in Contemporary Japan

This paper examines dilemmas inherent in the pursuit of the modern ideology of "authentic self", which first emerged in the 1960s and is now widespread in contemporary cultures. The ideology is exemplified, in a religious scene, as "self-transformative" religions wherein seekers seek to transform themselves spiritually in order to realize their authentic, or "sacred" selves. Through an examination of Aum Shinrikyo, which began as a typical "self-transformative" religion but later transformed into a destructive cult, I will explain the intrinsic moral imperatives of the ideology of "authenticity". This study of Aum explores the introverted lifestyle and extreme desocialization, which resulted in obsession with the central guru, being legitimated by the ideology. This search for "authenticity" resulted in the members cutting themselves off from the reality of the world. The final analysis suggests that possible consequences of the endless pursuit of the "authentic self" are a "vacuum" self and a loss of empathy with other people. The ontological conditions created by this bring about potential destructiveness, either internal or external.     

"I HATE MY VOICE":

This article presents a narrative, autoethnographic, theoretical account of the public and private negotiation of "minor bodily stigmas," which are mild physical "imperfections" that make us fear we stand out and might be rejected. To examine the situated complexity of stigmatized identity, I tell a story that shows concrete interactional details of an episode in which minor bodily stigmas evolved into a significant topic of conversation between strangers. My personal narrative explores the felt experience of minor bodily stigmas from the perspective of the experiencing and interacting holder. Thus, my work problematizes Erving Goffman's sociological approach to stigmas, which examines inclusively all forms of stigmas from a distanced observational stance of beholder that privileges the outsider perspective of how others see us. Using minor bodily stigmas as a heuristic category, I emphasize how they are experienced as a double bind in interaction (to notice or not to notice) and a double bind in personal feelings (of moral character as well as physical appearance). I seek to connect theoretical and categorical understandings of minor bodily stigmas to their concrete felt experience in day-to-day life in order to examine possibilities for resisting and reframing stigmas in everyday life.     

Careful The Tale You Tell Fairy tales,drama and moral education

SUMMARY: In this article, I examine theories which argue both for and against the educational potential of fairy tales, with special attention to the field of moral learning. I conclude that, in the contemporary world, stories have a particular importance for such learning but that the hidden moral values conveyed by many traditional tales may well be disquieting for a teacher. I propose that educational drama offers an appropriate pedagogy for exploring such values with children and describe in some detail a case study, in which I used a version of a traditional Hindu tale for these purposes. I offer a brief analysis on how the strategies employed by drama teachers can be harnessed for moral educational purposes and suggest that drama can offer children much needed opportunities to actively and creatively engage with stories and their values in a communal framework.     

On morality and chemistry

Cartesian separation and enlightenment have led to a widespread conceptual separation of science and technology. Consequently a certain philosophical tradition holdspure science as a metaphysical striving for irrefutable truth that is morally neutral and only (dirty?) applications as morally accountable. An opposite extreme position holds scientists responsible for everything that is done with their discoveries. Based on an interpretation of science to be a social construct and the observation that moral criteria are the results of social processes the paper demonstrates by the example of synthetic chemistry that science is not an elite end in itself and as such is not free from obligation to moral criteria. The moral responsibility of a scientist, which arises from his professional expertise, is limited to the available knowledge of his discipline. The moral responsibility, which he carries beyond that as responsible acting human, derives from the cultural identity and the normative values under which his action is carried out. This conclusion is illustrated by the examples of DDT, Aspirin and Heroin.     

Teaching or Preaching? The Holocaust and intercultural education in the UK

This paper looks at the manner in which the Holocaust is taught in the UK and some of the major controversies surrounding the teaching of this topic. These issues include to what extent teaching about the Holocaust is, or should be, a pure lesson in history, or whether there should be a focus on universal moral lessons. I look at various case studies in which students are confronted with moral dilemmas as a path to understanding human behaviour in the past. I also examine to what extent "shock tactics" are useful as an educational tool.     

“低碳城市”的道德之维及实践路径

面对城市现代化带来的负面效应挑战，“低碳城市”理念应运而生。从伦理学视角来看，“低碳城市”是一种对于人的生存方式和发展模式的道德诠释，它的出发点是“人”，实践理念是人与自然关系的和谐，价值归宿是“人，诗意的栖居”。要实现真正的“低碳城市”必须从根本上进行生产变革，同时，个体要进行“生活革命”。     

Vicissitudes of the sacred

Conclusions Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, American sociologists have been made increasingly aware, mostly by Marxist and phenomenological critics, of the latent moral or practical implications of what often purports to be objectively impersonal scientific theories. Whereas Goffman's imaginative writing style and intensely personal observational technique never allowed him to be easily placed in the camp of the positivist objectivists, the profound moral issues and assumptions of his work, as Friedson's statement implied, never fully appeared in a clear light either, probably because of Goffman's strategic decision to accommodate his moral insights somewhat to the positivist intellectual milieu of the 1950s. The present analysis reveals, however, that, even more than allowing tacit moral assumptions to operate in the back-ground of his work, Goffman focussed centrally on an investigation of the various levels of moral understanding, a project for which he used the Book of Job as his signpost. Goffman's inquiry, it should be emphasized, was not conducted through an external observation of other people's consciousness but rather by means of an intensely personal reflection upon the governing frames of his own consciousness as it looked out upon the everyday social world. What we have chronicled in this essay is the dramatic evolution of Goffman's own moral consciousness, not the moral understandings of the subjects of his studies, the latter, of course, changing as Goffman's own moral understandings evolved. exact nature and purpose of his moral investigation. As we have seen, an ongoing reference for Goffman's moral inquiry was not a rationalist philosophical treatise, but rather one of the most poetic and profound narratives of the Bible, a work in which the radical mystery and transcendence of the Sacred, beyond all structures of nature, society, and the human ego, are asserted. The symbolic and narrative features of the Job text accord well with its emphasis on the mystery of Being, whose fundamental depth and power could not easily be compressed within the outlines of abstract rationalist propositions. Goffman, likewise, combines a final emphasis on the mystery of Being, beyond all finite frames and fabrications, with a pervasively symbolic and narrative style in his writing. In directing our attention toward the ultimate mystery of Being, of which finite frames provide only a tentative revelation, Goffman mounts an additional critique of Durkheim, not only for naively assuming that sacred representations must always reflect the social rather than the individual inclinations of human nature, but also for assuming that the social dimension of homo duplex alone serves as the ultimate and final reference for sacred forms. Much like contemporary existentialists who emphasize human finitude and the mystery of Being, Goffman uses Job's increasingly open psyche as his basis for understanding that beyond nature, beyond society, and beyond the individual lies a mystery of Being that continually surpasses, indeed itself engenders the ever-changing outlines of these other finite structures of existence. In the end, Goffman is perhaps more mythmaker than moralist, a religious poet who, for an age in which the traditional symbols of Being have been displaced by new cognitive forms, particularly those of science, magically transformed contemporary scientific language into archetypal symbols of the Sacred. Goffman's task was extremely difficult, one that would have strained the intellectual ingenuity and linguistic resources of a less talented man, namely the task of conveying to large numbers of relatively unprepared, deeply preoccupied and increasingly self-absorbed moderns a message about a completely unfashionable, economically useless and essentially ego-threatening mystery. Let us hope the large silence that now exists in his absence will not be filled by words less meaningful than his own.     

Moral Challenges When Suspecting Abuse and Neglect in School Children: A Mixed Method Study

The World Health Organization (WHO), concludes that child maltreatment is a global concern calling for a multi sectoral interdisciplinary approach. School professionals, such as social workers, teachers, and health care professionals are in positions to discover and report maltreatment enabling social workers to intervene. However, a variety of reports reveal an evident gap between incidences and frequency of number of cases reported. A review of relevant research indicates that the problem of “not reporting” suggests that moral conflicts are activated in the process of decision-making. The aim was to gain a deeper understanding of school professionals’ experiences of reporting suspected neglect and abuse to the Social Welfare Board. In a mixed method approach 32 school professionals, such as teachers, social workers, nurses and psychologists participated in interviews and responded to questionnaires. Findings from the qualitative content analysis were compared to the quantitative analysis in a meta-analysis. Moral conflicts occur when faced with making decisions about how to best deal with a child’s situation. Thoughts about the child’s best interest and relationship with his/her parents as well as the informants´ own safety, were central. The comparative meta- analysis of both data sets revealed these conflicts commence with a moral sensitivity of possible negative consequences for the child. Moral sensitivity can be viewed as a “good” personal attribute, it paradoxically might lead to moral stress despite an open ethical climate. Based on the results of this study, further research on the interpersonal aspects of dealing with moral conflicts involved in reporting suspected child abuse is indicated.

     

The Moral Economy of Money between the Gold Standard and the New Deal

In this article, I show that Depression‐era popular opposition to gold standard orthodoxy had an identifiable impact on New Deal policy. Popular pressure was rooted in a political‐economic vision I call the “moral economy of money.” The moral economy of money included a critique of the gold standard and creditor classes and advocated a democratization of control over money and credit to restore social justice. Against many odds, Roosevelt narrowly defeated congressional majorities connected to popular groups bent on mandating Treasury currency issue. At the same time, he pioneered a discourse that became generalized in the following decades and discouraged a reemergence of the moral economy of money.     

Crusading for Moral Authority: Christian Nationalism and Opposition to Science

Numerous studies show biblicist Christianity, religiosity, and conservative political identity are strong predictors of Americans holding skeptical attitudes toward publicly controversial aspects of science, such as human evolution. We show that Christian nationalism—meaning the desire to see particularistic and exclusivist versions of Christian symbols, values, and policies enshrined as the established religion of the United States—is a strong and consistent predictor of Americans’ attitudes about science above and beyond other religious and political characteristics. Further, a majority of the overall effect of political ideology on skepticism about the moral authority of science is mediated through Christian nationalism, indicating that political conservatives are more likely to be concerned with particular aspects of science primarily because they are more likely to be Christian nationalists. Likewise, substantial proportions of the well-documented associations between religiosity and biblical “literalism” with views of science are mediated through Christian nationalism. Because Christian nationalism seeks to establish a particular and exclusivist vision of Christianity as the dominant moral order, adherents feel threatened by challenges to the epistemic authority undergirding that order, including by aspects of science perceived as challenging the supremacy of biblicist authority.     

COLLECTIVE MOBILIZATION AND IDENTITY FROM THE UNDERGROUND: The Deployment of "Oppositional Capital" in the Harm Reduction Movement

Within social movement literature, the concept of collective identity is used to discuss the process through which political activists create in-group cohesion and distinguish themselves from society at large. Newer approaches to collective identity focus on the negotiation of boundaries as social movement agents interact with social structural forces. However, in their adoption of a perspective that holds identity as a process, these social movement studies neglect the more tangible cultural elements that actors manipulate when they express collective identity. This research project adopts a subcultural perspective in the Birmingham tradition to address the question of how social movement actors reapporpriate symbolic expressions of identity and what meaning systems they draw from that enable them to redefine "stigmatization" as "status" This article offers the concept of "oppositional capital" as a general framework for analyzing the symbolic work that social movement actors perform in their expressions of collective identity. For the purposes of analysis, the primary elements of oppositional symbolic expressions are divided into the four categories of distinction, antagonism, political activism, and popular cultural aesthetics. This article applies the concept of oppositional capital to representations of collective identity of a radical branch of political activism within the social movement of harm reduction. Specifically, it analyzes the zine, Junkphood to describe how actors within this social movement cohort are able to present their collective identity as part of an alternative status system by drawing from an economy of signs that are generally recognized as oppositional.