Moral assessments in judicial reasoning

W artykule stawiamy dwa pytania: czy formułowanie przez sędziów ocen moralnych wymaga od nich posiadania szczególnych kompetencji moralnych oraz czy rozumowanie moralne ma charakter rozumowania racjonalnego? Odpowiadając na pierwsze pytanie, uważamy, że w sytuacji formułowania ocen moralnych sędziowie nie posiadają jakichś szczególnych kompetencji moralnych do rozstrzygania dylematów moralnych. Nie ma podstaw, by sądzić, że moralne eksperymenty myślowe, które nieodłącznie pojawiają się w pracy umysłowej sędziego, pozwalają przyjąć, iż rozumowanie sędziów jest bardziej moralne/ lepsze moralnie aniżeli rozumowanie innych podmiotów działających w sferze publicznej. Odpowiadając na drugie pytanie, uważamy, że skoro zazwyczaj ludzie są nieświadomi tego, co wpływa na ich oceny moralne, można przyjąć, że również sędziowie mogą być nieświadomi tego, co powoduje ich osądy moralne, błędnie przy tym przyjmując, że racjonalnie podejmują decyzje. Intuicje pełnią ważną rolę w dokonywaniu ocen moralnych również w przypadku osób wykonujących zawody prawnicze, od których to oczekuje się, by opierały się na racjonalnym rozumowaniu oraz obiektywnym rozpatrywaniu różnych argumentów.There are two questions posed in this text: (i) does the formulation of moral assessments by judges require from them any special moral competences and (ii) does the moral reasoning have a character of rational reasoning. Answering the first question we claim that when it comes to formulating moral assessments, judges do not have any special moral competences to adjudicate in difficult moral dilemmas. Thus there is no reason to state that moral thinking experiments which are an inseparable element of a judge’s reasoning process, allow to adopt a thesis that the reasoning of judges is morally better or more moral than the reasoning of other entities operating in the public sphere. Answering the second question, we believe that since people are generally unaware of what influences their moral judgements, it may also be so that the judges may not know what makes them adopt and pursue certain moral judgements, when they believe, erroneously, that their decisions have been rationally made. Intuition plays an important role in the making of moral judgements, also when it comes to the legal profession, since the latter are expected to base their attitudes on rational reasoning and an objective consideration of differing arguments

Public Relations strategies in Social Media: Campaigning for social change in the education sector

In this paper we will discuss the use of social media when campaigning for social change in the education sector, thought the analysis of the PR strategy in use: the collection of real testimonials and the development of storytelling, as contents that enhance affinity and engagement towards social change. In order to do this analysis, we developed two case studies that discuss the social campaigns of two NGOs in the educational sector, developed via social media: «#LeonorDejaLaEscuela» by Fundación Secretariado Gitano in Spain, from 2015, and «#Amigo-Bagos-Douro» by Bagos de Ouro in Portugal, from 2017. The first one was implemented mainly on Twitter, one of the most well-known social network in use today, and the other one used WhatsApp, the most popular mobile messenger, as means for campaigning to broaden education access. This study looked to answer the following research question: what is the role of social media in nonprofit organizations PR strategies? This equation expressed two scientific objectives: (1st) to deepen the knowledge on the ability of social media to produce communicative interaction; and (2sd) to (re)frame Public Relations within communication for development strategies. The analysis demonstrates that social media have greatly contributed to the way Public Relations strategies within the third sector are conducted. Social media can have a key role in nonprofit communication: to lobby for social causes, to create alliances, to raised money, to mobilized volunteers, to engaged traditional media and community relations, or to advocated for policy reform.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Text mining and dimension reduction method application into exploring isomorphic pressures in corporate communication on textual tweet data about sustainability in the energy sector

The study analyses the isomorphism pressures within the context of sustainability by exploring the Twitter communication in the energy sector. Recently, there can be observed the increasing focus on interactive and communicative construction of an institution to understand how the organizations sustain the institutional pressures. The rhetorical commitments that create narrative dynamics in organizational communication are central to institutional diffusion and change. Social Media, Twitter, in particular, has been demonstrated as the new opportunity to explore the linguistic dimension in corporate communications. We propose the use of Social Media linguistic data (tweets with their hashtags and keywords) and the triangulated method (text mining, web mining, and linguistic and content analysis) to examine the tweets´ trends in each company. Based on the institutional theory of organizational communication, the paper examines the relation between the idea of sustainability and isomorphism that leads to the adoption of similar models and attitudes among the organizations. It applies the text mining and correspondence methods within the R software. The energy sector tweets in English (from 2016) were treated by the text mining processes of the statistical linguistic analysis in the R tool. Text mining, involving the linguistic, statistical, and the machine learning techniques reveals and visualizes the latent structures of the content in an unstructured or weakly structured text data in a given collection of documents.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Homo sum – amicus sum, or about the Christian Terence by Hrotsvit from Gandesheim

The most famous line from Terence, homo sum etc. (Heautontimoroumenos 77), has been interpreted in different ways under different circumstances by authors ranging from Cicero and Seneca in antiquity and Erasmus at the beginning of the modern age to figures of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bataille, and Thomas Mann. Augustine of Hippo was the first to refer to Terence within a broader Christian context, and in the 12th century John of Salisbury equated the presumed philanthropic attitude of the Roman comedian and imitator of Menander with charity, the ultimate Christian virtue. Whereas most of the testimonia to the reception of Heautontimoroumenos 77 have already been identified and in part analyzed, a refined indirect ῾quotation᾿ of the line in question has been neglected: In a sort of réécriture of the initial scene of Terence’s drama, Roswita (Hrotsvit) of Gandersheim (10th century), in her hagiographic comedy ῾Abraham᾿, interpreted the even then proverbial sentence by introducing for the attitude of ῾humanity towards one’s neighbour᾿ both the Aristotelian definition of friendship (῾one soul in two bodies᾿) and a reference to the ideal of a Christian society with ‘one heart and one soul᾿ (Acts 4, 32). Thus the Terentian humanum is bothparaphrased by and identified with both an other classical and a Christian concept of mutual human affection.The most famous line from Terence, homo sum etc. (Heautontimoroumenos 77), has been interpreted in different ways under different circumstances by authors ranging from Cicero and Seneca in antiquity and Erasmus at the beginning of the modern age to figures of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bataille, and Thomas Mann. Augustine of Hippo was the first to refer to Terence within a broader Christian context, and in the 12th century John of Salisbury equated the presumed philanthropic attitude of the Roman comedian and imitator of Menander with charity, the ultimate Christian virtue. Whereas most of the testimonia to the reception of Heautontimoroumenos 77 have already been identified and in part analyzed, a refined indirect ῾quotation᾿ of the line in question has been neglected: In a sort of réécriture of the initial scene of Terence’s drama, Roswita (Hrotsvit) of Gandersheim (10th century), in her hagiographic comedy ῾Abraham᾿, interpreted the even then proverbial sentence by introducing for the attitude of ῾humanity towards one’s neighbour᾿ both the Aristotelian definition of friendship (῾one soul in two bodies᾿) and a reference to the ideal of a Christian society with ‘one heart and one soul᾿ (Acts 4, 32). Thus the Terentian humanum is bothparaphrased by and identified with both an other classical and a Christian concept of mutual human affection

Employing David Dyzenhaus’ conception of the culture of authority and the culture of justification for analysing changes proposed by the Act on the Supreme Court

Celem artykułu jest charakterystyka dwóch kultur prawnych, tj. kultury władzy oraz kultury uzasadniania, sformułowanych przez Davida Dyzenhausa. Powyższa dystynkcja kultur zaproponowana przez kanadyjskiego teoretyka prawa stanowi interesujący głos w dyskusji nad tym, w jaki sposób wybrnąć z problemu wyznaczenia granic sprawowania władzy publicznej, a w konsekwencji również problemu bezkonfliktowego realizowania zasady podziału władzy. Najogólniej rzecz ujmując, w kulturze władzy uzasadnianie dla działania władzy jest konieczne na etapie jej ustanawiania, w momencie zaś jej ustanowienia władza nie widzi potrzeby uzasadniania swoich decyzji. W kulturze uzasadniania w sytuacji, gdy władza już została ustanowiona, reguły kultury uzasadniania nakazują władzy uzasadniać swoje wszystkie decyzje. Rekonstrukcja powyższych idei kultur prawnych została zilustrowana ostatnimi propozycjami zmian w ustawie o Sądzie Najwyższym. W konkluzji artykułu wskazano, że zaproponowane zmiany funkcjonowania Sądu Najwyższego są oczywistymi przykładami działań władzy ustawodawczej opartych na dyrektywach kultury władzy, co prowadzić może do naruszeń zasad państwa prawa.The aim of this article is to describe two legal cultures, namely the culture of authority and the culture of justification, as formulated by David Dyzenhaus. This distinction between legal cultures proposed by the Canadian theorist of law makes an interesting contribution to the discussion on how to make headway with the problem of determining the limits of public authority and, consequently, the problem of implementing the principle of the separation of powers in such a way that conflicts do not arise. In general, with the culture of authority, justification of the actions of an authority is necessary only when it is being established, and once its authority has been established, the authority sees no further need to justify its decisions. Whereas in the cultureof justification, after an authority has already been established, the rules of the culture of justification require that the authority continue to justify all its decisions. The reconstruction of these conceptions of legal cultures are illustrated by the recently proposed Act on the Supreme Court in Poland. The conclusion of the paper indicates that the proposed changes to the functioning of the Supreme Court are clear examples of legislative action based on the directives of a culture of authority, which may lead to violations of the rule of law