Expressions of moral sentiment play a fundamental role in political framing, social solidarity, and basic human motivation. Moral rhetoric helps us communicate the reasoning behind our choices, how we feel we should govern, and the communities to which we belong. In this paper, we use shortpost social media to compare the accuracy of text analysis methods for detecting moral rhetoric and longer...

The actual Italian legislation on medically assisted procreation (Law 40 – February 192004) is one of the most restrictive in Europe. Following an anthropological approach,this paper seeks to analyze the text of this law in relation to the respective public debate.The objective of the analysis is to highlight the moral values legislators want to convey,the role they attribute to...

The “moral values vote” in the 2004 American presidential election should be interpreted more broadly than as a reflection of concerns about same-sex marriage and abortion. Instead of specific hot-button social policy issues, a general personality trait of moralism—the tendency to perceive a moral dimension in everyday decisions—may have contributed to the election outcome. Specifically, we hyp...

A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends ...

Since the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment as a progressive mandate that draws its meaning from “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” In applying this standard, the Court looks to such objective considerations as legislative enactments, patterns of jury dec...

The theory of moral intuitionism views moral judgment as emotion-driven, universal, and evolutionarily-derived. Expanding on that theory is the idea that all moral judgment stems from five foundations of moral intuition: harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. Terror management theory proposes that individuals are motivated to adhere to a cultural worldview in order to prevent the an...

positive political metatheory based on the naturalistic ontology concerning unity of method in science, implies reducing social and political issues to naturalistic one and study the emperical regularities in a similar methodology. therfore, behaviors political fields conciderd to be subjected to a causal order that implies explanation and prediction according to deductive structure of scientif...