S VICTOR KUMAR - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by S VICTOR KUMAR

International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Systems, 2016

Social media has now emerged as an essential tool for tourists looking to not just plan their nex... more Social media has now emerged as an essential tool for tourists looking to not just plan their next vacation but also to use it during their vacation and beyond. This paper has brought to the fore, the motives behind the use of social media as a tool by tourists during the three phases of the tourist lifecycle; Pre-trip, In-Trip and Post-trip. From the primary data collected from domestic and international tourists, the motives that influenced their use of social media across the lifecycle phases have been identified using factor analysis and the relative importance of these factors have been analysed. Knowledge and understanding of these factors will enable destination marketing organizations and other tourism providers to utilize social media as a marketing tool to influence the tourists' travel planning.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2015

Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study... more Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study. Appiah's recent work on honor in moral revolutions is an important exception, but even he is careful to separate honor from morality, regarding it as only Ban allyô f morality. In this paper we take Appiah to be right about the psychological, social, and historical role honor has played in three notable moral revolutions, but wrong about the moral nature of honor. We defend two new theses: First, honor is an emotional and moral form of recognition respect that can hinder or aid moral progress. Second, honor, so conceived, can play a rational role in progressive moral change, as it did among the working class in the British abolition of slave trade, when the pressure of moral consistency moved them to protest American slavery as an affront to their honor without change in their moral belief that slavery is wrong. Keywords Honor. Respect. Morality. Moral judgment. Moral progress. Hybrid theory. Consistency reasoning Until recently, honor has been neglected among Western moral philosophers, perhaps because it connotes old fashioned or regressive values associated with status in a stratified social structure. We contend, however, that honor is an integral part of morality and can be an engine of rational and progressive moral change. On the view we defend, to be honorable is to merit feelings of moral respect in virtue of one's social identity. Though honor often fails to achieve the liberal ideal of full and equal respect for all persons (cf. Krause 2002; Cunningham 2013), changes and expansions in the scope of honor can drive moral progress. To develop our view of honor we draw on Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Appiah's historically important examples of moral revolutions include the disappearance of honor dueling among the aristocracy in nineteenth-century England, the eventual success early in the last century of the long campaign Ethic Theory Moral Prac

Philosophical Psychology, 2012

Experimental research in moral psychology can be used to generate debunking arguments in ethics. ... more Experimental research in moral psychology can be used to generate debunking arguments in ethics. Specifically, research can indicate that we draw a moral distinction on the basis of a morally irrelevant difference. We develop this naturalistic approach by examining a recent debate between Joshua Greene and Selim Berker. We argue that Greene's research, if accurate, undermines attempts to reconcile opposing judgments about trolley cases, but that his attempt to debunk deontology fails. We then draw some general lessons about the possibility of empirical debunking arguments in ethics.

Ethics, 2012

We present a unified empirical and philosophical account of moral consistency reasoning, a distin... more We present a unified empirical and philosophical account of moral consistency reasoning, a distinctive form of moral reasoning that exposes inconsistencies among moral judgments about concrete cases. Judgments opposed in belief or in emotion and motivation are inconsistent when the cases are similar in morally relevant respects. Moral consistency reasoning, we argue, regularly shapes moral thought and feeling by coordinating two systems described in dual process models of moral cognition. Our empirical explanation of moral change fills a gap in the empirical literature, making psychologically plausible a defensible new model of justified moral change and a hybrid theory of moral judgment. After Germany occupied Norway in World War II, Jan Baalsrud, a young Norwegian resistance fighter who was pursued by the Nazis, stumbled into a home in a small village. 1 Having barely survived an avalanche, he was snow blind and near death from cold and exhaustion. The family there faced the choice of turning him over to the Nazis or trying to get him well enough to attempt an escape, with the strong possibility that their efforts would be discovered and the whole village put to death in retaliation. Jan formed a friendship with Marius, a young man in the family. Marius favored helping Jan escape. Although Marius's mother pitied Jan and wanted to save him as a

Analysis, 2013

Suppose that Darwin is right that human morals or something like them originated and persisted am... more Suppose that Darwin is right that human morals or something like them originated and persisted among our remote ancestors as a set of adaptations fashioned through natural selection. Suppose further that in his new book Philip Kitcher (2011) is right that during the past 50 thousand years of cultural evolution our ancestors, living until the past 10 thousand mostly in small groups diversified by age and sex, built on these primitive quasimoral functions to create rules and precepts, in response to the tensions and difficulties of social living, and that they refined these functions and sometimes created new functions, similar enough to the others, to qualify as being moral or moral-like. The process of improving the old functions and creating new ones in response to new problems is iterative on his account, resulting in a long procession of small and large moral changes in diverse and changing populations. As we view them in retrospect, many of us perceive some changes as 'morally progressive', others as 'morally regressive'. Kitcher (2011: 140-1, 145-53, 153-62) gives, as examples of progressive change, the dropping of the idea of exact retribution-eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life-from the earliest legal codes, the abolition of slavery in 19th-century America, and important changes in the civil status of women in Western Europe and North America in the past two centuries. To suppose that this kind of story captures the essence of moral evolution is to endorse a type of moral naturalism that Kitcher calls 'pragmatic naturalism', since the moral changes in the story are pragmatically motivated as responses to practical difficulties in living together as interdependent humans. The question we address in this article is whether pragmatic naturalism can explain moral change in a way that allows it to be, at least at some later stages of evolution, objectively progressive (or regressive). More exactly, can progressive/regressive moral change as conceived within this theory of moral evolution be normatively objective in a way that is consistent with the theory's demand that moral change be explained with psychological realism? We will argue that it can, even given a surprisingly robust conception of normative objectivity. Consider the idea articulated by Russ Shafer-Landau (2003: 15) that an objective moral truth (or fact) must be 'stance-independent' in that it exists independently of all our evaluative attitudes, taken collectively, whether we have them now or would have them on reflection under ideal conditions. Sharon Street (2006) has argued that this conception of moral objectivity leads to scepticism about moral knowledge when combined with the above assumptions about moral evolution. Kitcher (2011: 178-86) offers an objection to the existence of such 'external' moral truths (or facts) that is related to

International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Systems, 2016

Social media has now emerged as an essential tool for tourists looking to not just plan their nex... more Social media has now emerged as an essential tool for tourists looking to not just plan their next vacation but also to use it during their vacation and beyond. This paper has brought to the fore, the motives behind the use of social media as a tool by tourists during the three phases of the tourist lifecycle; Pre-trip, In-Trip and Post-trip. From the primary data collected from domestic and international tourists, the motives that influenced their use of social media across the lifecycle phases have been identified using factor analysis and the relative importance of these factors have been analysed. Knowledge and understanding of these factors will enable destination marketing organizations and other tourism providers to utilize social media as a marketing tool to influence the tourists' travel planning.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2015

Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study... more Western philosophers have generally neglected honor as a moral phenomenon worthy of serious study. Appiah's recent work on honor in moral revolutions is an important exception, but even he is careful to separate honor from morality, regarding it as only Ban allyô f morality. In this paper we take Appiah to be right about the psychological, social, and historical role honor has played in three notable moral revolutions, but wrong about the moral nature of honor. We defend two new theses: First, honor is an emotional and moral form of recognition respect that can hinder or aid moral progress. Second, honor, so conceived, can play a rational role in progressive moral change, as it did among the working class in the British abolition of slave trade, when the pressure of moral consistency moved them to protest American slavery as an affront to their honor without change in their moral belief that slavery is wrong. Keywords Honor. Respect. Morality. Moral judgment. Moral progress. Hybrid theory. Consistency reasoning Until recently, honor has been neglected among Western moral philosophers, perhaps because it connotes old fashioned or regressive values associated with status in a stratified social structure. We contend, however, that honor is an integral part of morality and can be an engine of rational and progressive moral change. On the view we defend, to be honorable is to merit feelings of moral respect in virtue of one's social identity. Though honor often fails to achieve the liberal ideal of full and equal respect for all persons (cf. Krause 2002; Cunningham 2013), changes and expansions in the scope of honor can drive moral progress. To develop our view of honor we draw on Kwame Anthony Appiah's recent book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. Appiah's historically important examples of moral revolutions include the disappearance of honor dueling among the aristocracy in nineteenth-century England, the eventual success early in the last century of the long campaign Ethic Theory Moral Prac

Philosophical Psychology, 2012

Experimental research in moral psychology can be used to generate debunking arguments in ethics. ... more Experimental research in moral psychology can be used to generate debunking arguments in ethics. Specifically, research can indicate that we draw a moral distinction on the basis of a morally irrelevant difference. We develop this naturalistic approach by examining a recent debate between Joshua Greene and Selim Berker. We argue that Greene's research, if accurate, undermines attempts to reconcile opposing judgments about trolley cases, but that his attempt to debunk deontology fails. We then draw some general lessons about the possibility of empirical debunking arguments in ethics.

Ethics, 2012

We present a unified empirical and philosophical account of moral consistency reasoning, a distin... more We present a unified empirical and philosophical account of moral consistency reasoning, a distinctive form of moral reasoning that exposes inconsistencies among moral judgments about concrete cases. Judgments opposed in belief or in emotion and motivation are inconsistent when the cases are similar in morally relevant respects. Moral consistency reasoning, we argue, regularly shapes moral thought and feeling by coordinating two systems described in dual process models of moral cognition. Our empirical explanation of moral change fills a gap in the empirical literature, making psychologically plausible a defensible new model of justified moral change and a hybrid theory of moral judgment. After Germany occupied Norway in World War II, Jan Baalsrud, a young Norwegian resistance fighter who was pursued by the Nazis, stumbled into a home in a small village. 1 Having barely survived an avalanche, he was snow blind and near death from cold and exhaustion. The family there faced the choice of turning him over to the Nazis or trying to get him well enough to attempt an escape, with the strong possibility that their efforts would be discovered and the whole village put to death in retaliation. Jan formed a friendship with Marius, a young man in the family. Marius favored helping Jan escape. Although Marius's mother pitied Jan and wanted to save him as a

Analysis, 2013

Suppose that Darwin is right that human morals or something like them originated and persisted am... more Suppose that Darwin is right that human morals or something like them originated and persisted among our remote ancestors as a set of adaptations fashioned through natural selection. Suppose further that in his new book Philip Kitcher (2011) is right that during the past 50 thousand years of cultural evolution our ancestors, living until the past 10 thousand mostly in small groups diversified by age and sex, built on these primitive quasimoral functions to create rules and precepts, in response to the tensions and difficulties of social living, and that they refined these functions and sometimes created new functions, similar enough to the others, to qualify as being moral or moral-like. The process of improving the old functions and creating new ones in response to new problems is iterative on his account, resulting in a long procession of small and large moral changes in diverse and changing populations. As we view them in retrospect, many of us perceive some changes as 'morally progressive', others as 'morally regressive'. Kitcher (2011: 140-1, 145-53, 153-62) gives, as examples of progressive change, the dropping of the idea of exact retribution-eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life-from the earliest legal codes, the abolition of slavery in 19th-century America, and important changes in the civil status of women in Western Europe and North America in the past two centuries. To suppose that this kind of story captures the essence of moral evolution is to endorse a type of moral naturalism that Kitcher calls 'pragmatic naturalism', since the moral changes in the story are pragmatically motivated as responses to practical difficulties in living together as interdependent humans. The question we address in this article is whether pragmatic naturalism can explain moral change in a way that allows it to be, at least at some later stages of evolution, objectively progressive (or regressive). More exactly, can progressive/regressive moral change as conceived within this theory of moral evolution be normatively objective in a way that is consistent with the theory's demand that moral change be explained with psychological realism? We will argue that it can, even given a surprisingly robust conception of normative objectivity. Consider the idea articulated by Russ Shafer-Landau (2003: 15) that an objective moral truth (or fact) must be 'stance-independent' in that it exists independently of all our evaluative attitudes, taken collectively, whether we have them now or would have them on reflection under ideal conditions. Sharon Street (2006) has argued that this conception of moral objectivity leads to scepticism about moral knowledge when combined with the above assumptions about moral evolution. Kitcher (2011: 178-86) offers an objection to the existence of such 'external' moral truths (or facts) that is related to