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In this article, I explore how the Mencius explains the concept of evil as a choice between the original mind and the body. Mencius? conception of self serves as the subjective foundation of free will and therefore justifies the freedom of human decision in ethics. The concept of freedom has always been seen as western in origin, but through the comparative analysis presented here, it becomes evident that it is implied in the notion of the human self in the Mencius. I argue that in the philosophies of St. Augustine (354-430) and I. Kant (1724-1804), the foundation of evil is involved in the concept of the human self and that free will is a precondition for evildoing because of a reversed view of moral order. According to this analysis, the concept of humans as evildoers can be explained according to the text of the Mencius as the free will to choose between the original mind as self-valuation and the human body as selfdevaluation. People identified as evil in the text relinquish their inner moral compass and willfully allow their corporeal body to control their behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper overviews the phenomenon of the meta-conventionalisation of interpersonal practices in the context of computer-mediated communication. The term 'meta-conventionalisation' refers to the coding of the conventional interpersonal practices of a particular group, or various groups, in the form of entertainment as films and novels. The word 'meta' refers to the fact that such pieces of artwork narrate a set of conventional practices from a quasi-observer point of view, without involving their audience in these practices as language users – in this sense they are different from good practice guides (typically described as 'netiquette, in the context of e-pragmatics), which assume that readers will internalise the practices they describe. Meta-conventionalisation has been an understudied phenomenon, in spite of representing an important aspect of our daily lives. We illustrate how this phenomenon operates by examining a Japanese case study: a popular novel which features the online interactions of a group of otaku, that is, asocial young people who lock themselves up and interact in highly specific ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the strategies and techniques of hate speech in online discourse (on online discourse or computer-mediated communication in general cf. e.g., Schwarzhaupt-Scholz 2004; Schmidt 2013; Dittler and Hoyer 2014; Seargeant and Tagg 2014). Based on a collection of online texts belonging to different genres (discussion forums, blogs, social media, tweets, homepages), this paper will provide a qualitative analysis of destructively impolite utterances in online interactions. This analysis will make use of the standard typologies of impoliteness and their recent extensions (such as Culpeper 1996, 2005, 2011; Kienpointner 1997, 2008; Kleinke and Bös 2015), but some modifications and elaborations of these typologies will also be taken into account. Moreover, social, cultural and political reasons for the recent dramatic increase in hate speech in online interactions will be explored. Finally, the problem of how to deal with this destructive use of language will be briefly discussed and some possible solutions will be suggested (cf. Banks 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, eSports, online gaming, and live computer game streaming have grown into a global, multi-million dollar industry. In the context of online gaming, however, there is a prevailing moral order (Kádár 2017) that allows and perhaps even encourages impoliteness against female gamers, positioning them as inferior, unwelcome, or peripheral. Drawing from a corpus of over 150 hours of live game streams and concurrent open-forum chat, this paper identifies rituals and tropes (such as spam and banter) that reinforce gendered practices as they relate to the moral order in the online gaming setting. It then explores strategies used by one female gamer to manipulate the expectations of the online gaming medium and its hegemonic notions of femininity. In this way, she can resist a moral order which positions her as disempowered, and thereby gain social capital within the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses political scandals connected to the contemporary populist parties of Denmark, Finland and Sweden. The dramaturgies of these scandals repeat the general patterns of political scandals identified in previous studies, but they also share special characteristics that make them a specific type of neo-populist scandal. The starting point of the typical neo-populist scandal occurs due to the moral transgression of a member of a populist movement, usually through the use of unacceptable language or behaviour, insulting non-native inhabitants or other minorities within the population. However, provocation and playing the role of the underdog are common strategies employed by populists, and a populist movement may even benefit from a scandal, though the consequences of the scandal depend on the life phase of the movement and on the status of the member involved in the scandal. The moral transgressions and political consequences of neo-populist scandals may serve as an indicator of the condition liberal democracy enjoys, but also reveal contextual differences in particular societies and their moral order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While studies devoted to impoliteness have been increasing in number, only scant attention has been paid to how impoliteness can be viewed as a reaction against attributes or social actions that are deemed undesirable. The current study is concerned with the relationship between ‘impoliteness’ and the notion of ‘moral order’. More specifically, we examine the aggressive comments directed towards the official Facebook page of an Iranian actress, living in exile, after posting a nude photograph of herself. We consider the impolite language used in the comments under investigation to have been occasioned by an implicature, and subsequently argue that such an aggressive language originates from a set of similar assumptions and expectations which seem to be part of the moral order. As the study reveals, considerations of impoliteness are heavily dependent upon the development of communities whose members apparently share, and demand, common beliefs and similar social values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Participant evaluations have been at the heart of recent discursive (im)politeness research, yet despite their importance, there has been little consideration of how we identify such behaviours and how we can substantiate their worth in an analysis. In this paper, it is proposed that we need to distinguish between different, ordered, categories of evaluation because these provide different levels of evidence for participants' understandings of (im)politeness. Using online comments from Daily Mail articles relating to the Penelope Soto court hearings, I show that apparent agreements in the classification of linguistic behaviour as (im)polite can mask disagreements in the underlying rationales for those judgements. It is these rationales that provide the strongest warrant for analysts because they represent the ideological basis behind an individual's understanding of politeness - why people should behave in this way. This links to Haugh's (2013) use of 'moral order' and also Eelen's (2001) key, but underdeveloped, notion of argumentativity. The rationale behind an individual's judgement provides the argumentative link between metapragmatic behaviour and the social order. Classifications and positive/negative assessments of person are only clues to this underlying rationale, and need to be treated as such. Understanding these differences will assist analysts in assessing the ideological weight of metapragmatic behaviour and provide better-informed warrants for their analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melanchthon referred to the concept of ordo regarding both the natural order of the world and the moral order infused in each person, which enables one to distinguish good from evil. The insistence on the presence of natural law in the mind of man and on the possibility of it being rationally understood links Melanchthon to the tradition represented by Cicero and Thomas Aquinas, despite the fact that intellectuals of the Reformation refused to accept Scholastics. Melanchthon is also in tune with some of the most influential Protestant and Catholic German jurists, who revitalised the reflection on natural law and its relationship with the moral and positive law. Melanchthon believed that the natural order and the moral order had a common origin in the mind of God, thus they are connected to one other in a superior harmony, within which man retains the freedom to choose whether to respect it or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses problems with swearing on the internet. The opening section of the paper defines swearing (uttering offensive emotional speech) as a ubiquitous form of impolite human behavior. Swearing can occur wherever humans communicate with each other and that it appears in computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not surprising. The second section documents how swearwords appear in email, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube and in other practices and sites (trolling, 4chan). Swearword use is situated in the context of emerging research on impoliteness and moral order (politeness norms and standards that govern internet behavior). Online swearword use is a function of moral order, as well as users’ interpersonal characteristics such as age (younger more likely than older users), gender (men more likely than women), the time of day (later in the day and evening), and a website’s social composition (adversarial and male dominated more than homogeneous friendly sites). The paper concludes with suggestions for dealing with internet swearword use where regulation is desirable and feasible. Websites and communities should develop moral order norms that at a minimum restrict illegal forms of speech (e.g., credible threats of violence, workplace sexual harassment). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly said that anticipation is a phenomenon that precedes a given action or situation, both timewise and logically speaking. In this article, we focus in detail on how anticipation reconfigures the action anticipated. By ‘in detail’, we mean through the meticulous observation and analysis of ordinary interactions. The corpus is constituted of learning interactions between trainer and dogs in training, in which anticipating an action, particularly by assessing it ahead of time, contributes to a great extent to (re) configure it. This point leads us to develop a pragmatic conception of action, seen as an emerging and collaborative process accomplished collectively.