A question of morals? The role of moral identity in support of the youth climate movement Fridays4Future

The role of moral integrity in the association between moral self and moral sensitivity among nurses: A mediation model

Aim: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between moral self, moral integrity, and moral sensitivity in decision-making among nurses.Background: nurses face moral dilemmas almost on a daily basis. Studies have demonstrated that nurses with high moral sensitivity make thoughtful decisions and exhibit professional responsibility. The current study seeks to examine personality variables that may be related to moral sensitivity among nurses.Design: A cross-sectional study.Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the IRB of the authors University's ethics committee (number: AU-HEA-LO-20220317). Written consent was obtained from all participants.Methods: A structured questionnaires were administered to a sample of 187 Israeli nurses.Results: The degree of nurses' moral self, moral integrity and moral sensitivity was relatively high. "Patient-centered care" was found to be the most significant component of moral sensitivity. The next component is "Using knowledge bases," followed by "Exercising professional judgment." While the concept of patient-centered care was found to be related to the nurses' moral self, the other components were found to be related to their moral integrity. The mediation model found that moral integrity mediates and even strengthens the moral self in its connection with moral sensitivity.Conclusions: Understanding the role of moral self and moral integrity in explaining moral sensitivity, can contribute to achieving a desirable combination of "the good and the right" in nursing practice, thereby enhancing nurses' work. From a practical perspective, these findings are also relevant to nursing education. Nursing education plays a pivotal role in fostering moral and ethical decision-making in both clinical aspects and ethical moral sensitivity. Strengthening the moral self and moral integrity among nursing students can aid in making balanced and morally sensitive decisions while also building moral and ethical support systems to assist students in distressing and emergency situations.

Paradoxical effects of altruism on efforts to mitigate climate change

It is common wisdom that altruism is a crucial element in addressing climate change and other public good issues. If individuals care about the welfare of others (including future generations) they can be expected to unilaterally adapt their behaviour to preserve the common good thus enhancing the wellbeing of all. We introduce a network game model featuring both altruism and a public good (e.g. climate) whose degradation affects all players. As expected, in an idealistic fully connected society where all players care about each other, increasing altruism results in a better protection of the public good. However, in more realistic networks where people are not all related to each other, we highlight an intrinsic trade-off between the effects of altruism on reducing inequality and the preservation of a global public good: the consumption redistribution generated by a higher altruism is partly achieved by lowering income transfers towards protection of the public good. Therefore, it increases overall consumption and is thereby detrimental to the public good. These results suggest that altruism, although good from a welfarist point of view, is not in itself sufficient to simultaneously solve public good and inequality issues.

Environmental Attitudes, Behaviors, and Responsibility Perceptions Among Norwegian Youth: Associations With Positive Youth Development Indicators

Young people's environmental attitudes and behaviors are essential for environmental conservation, hence the need to identify facilitating factors. Promoting positive development among young people may empower them to contribute actively to their environment through positive attitudes and behaviors. In the present study, we examine the associations between the 5Cs of Positive Youth Development (Character, Confidence, Connection, Caring, and Competence) and environmental concerns among Norwegian youth, measured through environmental attitudes, conservation behavior, and responsibility. Cross-sectional data on demographic variables, the 5Cs and environmental concerns were collected from high school students (N = 220, M age = 17.30, SD = 1.12). For results, Character was associated with several of the environmental variables (βs = 0.28-0.58, p < 0.05), followed by Competence (βs = 0.26-0.31, p < 0.05) and Caring (βs = 0.23, p < 0.05), and finally Confidence, which showed a negative association with conservation behavior (β = -0.29, p < 0.05). There was no significant association with Connection. While these preliminary findings pave the way for future research that should involve more representative samples, the significant associations between several of the 5Cs and the environmental factors may have some implications for policy and programs on youth development and sustainable behaviors.

The existential risk space of climate change

Climate change is widely recognized as a major risk to societies and natural ecosystems but the high end of the risk, i.e., where risks become existential, is poorly framed, defined, and analyzed in the scientific literature. This gap is at odds with the fundamental relevance of existential risks for humanity, and it also limits the ability of scientific communities to engage with emerging debates and narratives about the existential dimension of climate change that have recently gained considerable traction. This paper intends to address this gap by scoping and defining existential risks related to climate change. We first review the context of existential risks and climate change, drawing on research in fields on global catastrophic risks, and on key risks and the so-called Reasons for Concern in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We also consider how existential risks are framed in the civil society climate movement as well as what can be learned in this respect from the COVID-19 crisis. To better frame existential risks in the context of climate change, we propose to define them as those risks that threaten the existence of a subject, where this subject can be an individual person, a community, or nation state or humanity. The threat to their existence is defined by two levels of severity: conditions that threaten (1) survival and (2) basic human needs. A third level, well-being, is commonly not part of the space of existential risks. Our definition covers a range of different scales, which leads us into further defining six analytical dimensions: physical and social processes involved, systems affected, magnitude, spatial scale, timing, and probability of occurrence. In conclusion, we suggest that a clearer and more precise definition and framing of existential risks of climate change such as we offer here facilitates scientific analysis as well societal and political discourse and action.