Kriminologisk forskning har sedan länge fokuserat på brottslighet och antisocialt beteende. Däremot har en mindre grupp individer genomgående uppgett att de aldrig ägnat sig åt antisocialt beteende och avstår således från brottslighet. Forskning inom detta område har varit jämförelsevis begränsad, men det har föreslagits att individens avhållande bygger på ett uteslutande från kamratgrupper som ett resultat av dennes oönskade egenskaper (t.ex. stark moraluppfattning). Andra menar istället att det är den starka moralen i sig som avhåller personer från att begå brott, vilket är en hypotes som testas i denna studie. Det görs genom att jämföra personer som uppger att de aldrig har begått brott, med personer som endast gjort det vid enstaka tillfällen. Detta i ljuset av variablerna moral, umgänge med brottsliga kamrater och tid som spenderas med vänner i ostrukturerade miljöer. Vidare undersöks eventuella könsskillnader. Med utgångspunkt i data från det longitudinella projektet Malmö Individual and Neighbourhood Developmental Study (MINDS) har logistiska regressioner använts för att undersöka direkta och medierande effekter. Resultaten visar att hög moral predicerar ett avhållande från brott utan en medierande effekt av brottsliga kamrater. Umgänge med brottsliga kamrater predicerar istället brottslighet hos ungdomarna, medan spenderad tid i ostrukturerade miljöer varken predicerar avhållande eller brottslighet. Könsskillnader som fanns indikerar på starkare moral hos kvinnor och att effekten av densamma hos män är beroende av umgänge. Moral bör därför inte ses som en uteslutande egenskap utan snarare som en viktig brottshämmande faktor. / The scientific focus of criminological research has since long been on criminal and antisocial behaviours. However, a group of individuals reporting that they have never engaged in delinquent behaviour (delinquency abstainers) have consistently been identified and until only recently not rendered much scientific interest. It has by some been proposed that delinquency abstention is a result of individuals being excluded from peer groups due to undesired characteristics (e.g. high sense of moral beliefs), although this notion is contested. Morality has by others instead been perceived as having a direct effect on abstention, which is the hypothesis tested in this study. It does so by comparing delinquency abstainers to low-frequency non-abstainers with regards to moral belief, delinquent peer association, and time spent unsupervised with peers, and furthermore examines the effects across gender. Logistic regressions were run to examine direct and mediating effects using data from the longitudinal project Malmö Individual and Neighbourhood Developmental Study (MINDS). Results indicate that strong moral beliefs have a direct effect on abstention and are not mediated by delinquent peer association. Associating with delinquent peers did in turn predict non-abstention but spending time unsupervised with peers did neither predict abstention nor delinquency. Some gender differences found points towards stronger morality amongst females and that the effect of morality for males depends on peer association. Morality should therefore not be perceived as an undesirable characteristic which excludes individuals from peer groups but rather an important factor in the inhibition of delinquency.

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This thesis examines how members of a Muslim community (made up of migrants and their descendants from various parts of North Africa, West Africa, Turkey, and elsewhere) in a small town in France seek to become moral persons through Islam. I argue that this quest for moral recognition is informed simultaneously by Islamic and French Republican values, which my French Muslim interlocutors usually conceive of as being consistent with one another. I contrast this analysis with other scholarly approaches to Islam in France that have generally explored the way non-Muslims perceive Islam to be at odds with Frenchness, how Muslims are marginalized and kept from becoming full citizens, and how certain public figures challenge and resist that oppression through explicit forms of resistance. I argue that these accounts, by focusing on Muslims seeking political recognition (from the state) in the face of oppression, have failed to account for the life projects of French Muslims, like my interlocutors, who emphasize moral over political considerations. In contrast to previous approaches, I follow my interlocutors' lead in analyzing the ways in which they seek after moral personhood and recognition as moral persons in their everyday discourse and practice. Thus, I show how an understanding of the moral projects of French Muslims is key to moving beyond a focus on suffering, oppression, and resistance in scholarship examining the experiences of migrants in France.

The purpose of this study was to better understand how virtues and values affect marital intimacy. Ten married couples were given a marital satisfaction assessment and participated as individuals in 1-1/2 hour interviews which were audiotaped and then transcribed. Using grounded theory and also the constant comparative method, researchers were able to generate a theory involving a core theme of showing love for self and other, which strongly contributes to increased intimacy. This process is connected to living virtues and to becoming other-oriented. Two different ways of "being" were found to be connected both with showing love, living virtues, increasing intimacy: other-orientation (a focus on the other including her well-being) and self-orientation (a primary concern with meeting one's own needs and desires above all else). These orientations were connected with secure attachment style and insecure attachment styles, respectively. Secure attachment was connected with sets of beliefs and thoughts, affect, and behavior characteristic of this way of being that increase security in the relationship. Orientation and attachment style, whether other-oriented and secure or self-oriented and insecure, seemed to be mutually determining. A Virtue Cycle connected with these processes was described, in which one who lives virtues genuinely towards their partner often experiences an increased love for their partner and closeness in the relationship. The receiver often perceives virtuous actions given by her partner to be a sign of his love for her, which leads to feeling loved and feeling closer, and wanting to give to partner which leads her to increase her living of virtues, increasing her other-oreintation. Living of virtues was generally associated with increased intimacy for both Other-oriented and Self-oriented couples, though increases were greater and more lasting in Other-oriented (OO) couples. Implications are discussed.

Marriage and family research has its foundation in the positivist tradition, which dismisses the relevance of morality to the scientific enterprise. Yet morality is inherent in marriage and family studies—both in the topics studied and in methodology. In this conceptual research, positivist assumptions are explicated to show that positivist methodology relies on a stance of moral neutrality that turns out to be a hidden morality. This hidden morality requires that people be studied as other objects. The need for a methodology that has an explicit moral philosophy and that acknowledges that humans are not “things” is discussed. Levinas' relational philosophy of “being for the other” is shown to be one viable starting point for a methodology that takes the moral domain seriously. In contrast to methodologies that have their basis in positivism, this philosophy offers a coherent account of agency, a relational alternative to individualism, and an explicit moral stance intended to strengthen marriage and families. A method of evaluating research based on criteria of “being for the other” is outlined and used to evaluate three research articles to demonstrate how an explicit moral philosophy can strengthen the meaningfulness of empirical marriage and family research.

This study analyzed moral psychology's “moral judgment-moral action gap” research and found that morality was being described as a secondary phenomenon produced by underlying substrates (such as identity and self constructs, “brain modules,” and “evolved emotional systems”) which are themselves non-moral. Deriving morality from “the non-moral” presents a kind of ontological gap in the moral psychology research. Researchers implicitly close this gap assuming it is possible to get moral judgments and actions out of non-moral substrates. But the difficulty remains how the moral as “moral” becomes infused into any moral psychology models. Morality is not a secondary phenomenon arising out of something else. This study argues that there is a need to shift our understanding of what it means to be human, to a view in which the moral is fundamental. An alternative foundation for assessing the moral is found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas who sees ethics as a metaphysical concern. This means that he sees the essential moral character of human life and the reality of human agency as ontologically fundamental, or constitutive of human nature itself. In other words, the ethical is the “first cause” in regards to understanding the nature and action of the self. Thus morality is not merely epiphenomenal to some more fundamental reality. Levinas holds that as humans, we are called to the Other. This call of obligation to the Other comes before all other human endeavors. After presenting Levinas's alternative foundation of obligation to the Other which herein is labeled Felt Moral Obligation (FMO), C. Terry Warner's conceptualizations of FMO in relation to the moral judgment-action gap are presented. In light of these conceptualizations, this study argues that there is actually no moral judgment-moral action gap, but only holistic events of moral self-betrayal. Warner illustrates that rejecting FMO is a single moral event, a holistic act performed by a moral agent that involves moral responses of self-justification, offense-taking, and rationalization. The person finds him or herself in a state of self-betrayal. Levinas and Warner implicitly assert that such self-betraying responses are not fundamentally biological or rational, but rather, fundamentally moral.

The purpose of this study was to show by the use of the opinions of LDS athletes who have excelled in sports whether or not excellence in gospel living contributes to excellence in sports.Religion has played a role in sports from very early history and has continued to the present time. The degree of religious influence has been determined by the society of the time, whether it played a minor or a positive role.The results of the study pointed out the following:The teachings of the LDS Church had a positive influence, according to LDS athletes, on the fourteen qualities of sports that were selected by coaches representing excellence in sports. The areas they were positive in were moral laws, word of wisdom, and priesthood responsibilities. The athletes were in conflict on whether the Sabbath day was an influence or not on excellence in sports, and they determined that keeping current on Church happenings and paying Church financial obligations had no bearing on the athletic qualities.

This dissertation analyzes the careers of three Afrikaner missionaries, David Bosch, Carel Boshoff, and Nico Smith, who gained international reputations for pioneering alternatives to the South African Nation Party’s (NP) policy of apartheid over the second half of the 20th century. Afrikaners looked to missionaries to be moral leaders on questions of race relations, and missionaries’ public theologies carried significant moral weight. While numerous historians have argued that from the 1930s through the 1950s Afrikaner missionaries played a key role in developing and promoting the moral basis of apartheid in South Africa, they have not, however, addressed how Afrikaner missionaries responded to the political, social, and moral failure of apartheid. By the 1970s, the dissonance between the ideal and the actual implementation of apartheid led Bosch, Smith, and Boshoff—by that time leading public theologians—to a crisis of confidence in the NP, and they began to endorse divergent moral visions for the country’s future. David Bosch and Nico Smith embraced racial unity while Carel Boshoff pursued ethnic separatism. By the mid-1970s, Bosch became a leading proponent of “reconciliation,” which gave Afrikaners new moral language for thinking about themselves as part of a non-racial society. By the mid-1980s, both Bosch and Smith were key leaders in ecumenical and interracial organizations that endorsed a negotiated end to apartheid. They helped to form a growing interracial solidarity of Christians that encouraged and facilitated the democratic transition of 1990/1994. Conservative theologians, like Boshoff, attempted to stem the popularity of reconciliation in Afrikaner political and civil organizations. He was unable to successfully coordinate efforts with other conservatives, and he was increasingly marginalized. Ultimately, Boshoff opted for negotiated ethnic separatism with the African National Congress. This study demonstrates that far from being monolithic, Afrikaner religiosity and racial morality were dynamic and contested. Secondly, it shows that a number of Afrikaner public theologians and moral leaders were actively involved in ending white minority rule in South Africa. Conversely, it also shows that conservative religious leaders were able to transform Afrikaner nationalism, thereby prolonging its influence into the 21st century.

The expansion of the Roman Empire had compelled disparate cultures to mingle and assimilate. In relation to education this fact meant that teachers used a variety of curricula to convey an amalgamation of cultural dynamics. Evidence for this phenomenon is found in the content Colloquia, a fourth-century elementary language textbook, which displays aspects Greek and Roman culture through the explicit and implicit instruction of the text. The existence of this mixture education displays the motivations of the author, as well as information about the values of the contemporary culture.