Moral pornography or ethical rhetoric?

An Ethical Agenda in Disability Research: rhetoric or reality?

Inspired by the writings of disabled activists and scholars in the 1980s and 90s the emancipatory turn in social research has had a particularly important influence on disability researchers in the UK. The emergent critique of conventional wisdom and ways of theorising disability was extended to mainstream social research. The shift from explaining disability solely in terms of individual patho...

Measuring Moral Rhetoric in Text

In this paper we present a computational text analysis technique for measuring the moral loading of concepts as they are used in a corpus. This method is especially useful for the study of online corpora as it allows for the rapid analysis of moral rhetoric in texts such as blogs and tweets as events unfold. We use latent semantic analysis to compute the semantic similarity between concepts and...

The Moral Rhetoric of Climate Change

Communication in the media about climate change in the United States is complicated by the intensely ideologically polarized state of the debate surrounding the issue; moral rhetoric is an important dimension of how ideology is communicated. In this study we examined how moral rhetoric regarding this issue differs on the basis of a publication's perceived ideological lean. To address the questi...

Rhetoric, Comedy, or Shock? Bruce Gilley’s Case of Anachronism

Ethical Individualism and Moral Collectivism in America

From Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Bellah and Alan Wolfe, the many observers of the United States invariably call attention to its emphasis on individualism. In the popular culture of American television and movies, the autonomous individual stands out, whether as rebel against the system or as self-centered consumer of endless products, services, and other people. Then there are the advertis...