Moral prejudices

One sign of the influence of these core ideas is that they have profoundly influenced the shape of the modem social sciences, thanks especially to the work of Max Weber. Now, understandably eager to enjoy the power and prestige of the natural sciences, modem social sciences have sought to imitate them. One visible sign of this is the widespread use of modem mathematics in the study of society the flip side of this is the effort to exclude values from the subject matter. The modem social sciences are to be value free to the extent possible and to avoid the value laden questions that would keep them from claiming to be sciences properly understood. But perhaps the most eye- and ear-catching thinker to stress the resistance of values to philosophic justifications was Friedrich Nietzsche, who went so far as to say our preference for truth over falsehood is itself merely a value. As he put it, It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world. ... 

Moral" condemnation by the majority of Americans of some substances and not others is little more than a transient prejudice in favor of some drugs and... 

In the first stages of society, education was purely domestic. Children were educated by their fathers, either by working with them or by being instructed by them in such arts as they knew they received from them the small stock of traditions that made up the history of the tribe or of the family they learnt the various myths that were preserved and they acquired a knowledge of the national customs, principles or prejudices which constituted a crude moral code. Songs and dances and military exercises were learnt in the company of friends. 

Plant and mineral history were studied on the lines that he had laid down, but with less precision and from a narrower and less philosophical point of view. The progress of anatomy was very slow, not only because religious prejudices were opposed to the dissection of corpses, but because popular opinion regarded contact with them as a kind of moral defilement. 

This is a story of striking juxtapositions—a snapshot of an American life, as it were, that captures in a single frame racial prejudice in the United States, the horror of the war in Europe, and the human impact of the atomic bomb. And yet we read this brief personal account, chapter after terse chapter, with a persistent sense of how decent and constructive the human spirit can be. James Yamazaki, pediatrician and medical researcher, made an early commitment to making children whole. Son of an Episcopal priest, his own vision has been consistently humanistic, his moral sense as solid as a rock. 

Theodore Chiricos, Moral Panic as Ideology drugs, violence, race and punishment in America , in M. J. Lynch and E. B. Patterson, eds. Justice with Prejudice race and criminal justice in America, Harrow and Heston, Guilderland NY, 1997. 

Unfriendly work environments affect LGBT employees sense of safety and morale, and impact individual productivity as well as organizational effectiveness. The lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) employee may have to steer between two extremes stay in the closet (not disclose sexual orientation) to advance but suffer the stress of being less than authentic, or come out (reveal the fact, for example, that their life-parmers are of the same gender). Either way, LGBT employees may face prejudice that may not only preclude advancement but present day-to-day attitudinal problems on the part of co-workers—sometimes subtle, sometimes overt—that hamper productivity. 

Thirdly, there are rules that we accept, more or less willingly, because they make social or professional life easier or because the consequences of breaking them might be unfortunate. Drive on the left is an excellent example of such a rale. It is one that we obey, not from any moral conviction or authoritative teaching, but because the consequences of breaking it would be unfortunate. Furthermore, it is clearly relative in that it varies from country to country (and even sometimes from time to time in the same country). While the nature of such rales is not a matter for ethical debate, our attitude to them is if we ignore them, we may prejudice the well-being of other people and that is an ethical matter. 

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