Kryachkov 2!indd

F
ix Modern Society!
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Английский язык для магистратуры
America” he writes that the US “is being judged by other nations and it is judged by itself in terms 
of its compliance with the moral standards it has __________ (9) for itself”.
Morality should be related to goals — short-run and long-run. The _________ (10) of nuclear war 
is already a declared objective of many countries’ foreign policy. But much more than a nuclear war 
should be _________ (11). Today more attention should be given to _________ (12) all use of military 
force among nations. Though the lazy equation of a “moral” foreign policy with denunciation and/
or threats of military _________ (13) deeply misunderstands the role of morality in foreign policy. 
A _________ (14) moral foreign policy would be _________ (15) to saving lives whenever possible.
Therefore __________ (16) should also be on positive peacemaking, on the use and strength-
ening of multilateral __________ (17). Foreign policy objectives take on a new dimension with 
our __________ (18) to protect the global environment and to cooperate in the use of such unal-
located resources as those in the ocean beds for the __________ (19) of all the world’s peoples.
Needless to say, __________ (20) must be set in regard to means. Ends do __________ (21) 
means, but there is no end that that __________ (22) every means. There was great moral revul-
sion in the US when it was __________ (23) that the CIA had been __________ (24) in plots to 
assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders. When assassination takes place as an episode in for-
eign policy, not only does it __________ (25) questions and __________ (26) the revulsions which 
we should associate with all such acts of violence against persons, but also there is no way of 
__________ (27) the spreading distrust and the international poison which would follow it.
Ex. 37. 
a) Read the following extract from an article and identify its topic and thesis. 
b) Think of a possible title.
c) Comment on the ideas of the article.
Suppose you actually do have an angel over your shoulder telling you the right thing to do. 
That angel probably wouldn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. A recent study in Science 
aimed at uncovering how we experience morality in our everyday lives suggests that religious 
people are no more moral — or immoral — than non-religious people. Whether or not we believe 
that divine precepts give us guidance, our behavior is remarkably similar.
The fact that atheists are apparently as moral as believers will be counterintuitive to some. In Fyodor 
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov famously worries, “But what will become of 
men then…without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?”
Yet Dmitri Karamazov is wrong. People who don’t fear that justice will be meted out in an after-
life are apparently no more vicious, cruel, or licentious than a believer.
The current study breaks new ground in a few different ways. Perhaps most importantly, pre-
vious psychological studies of moral responses relied on observations in laboratory settings. 
This study, however, uses a method that allows researchers to escape the lab and catch glimpses 
of how participants think about morality as they go about their lives. Researchers using the 
method, known as “ecological momentary assessment,” periodically contact participants to re-
port their feelings.
In this study, over 1,200 people were texted five times a day over the course of three days. 
The texts asked if they’d committed, experienced, or heard moral or immoral acts in the previous 
hour. If a participant answered yes, there were follow-up questions that prompted him or her to 
describe the event and some of his or her reactions to it. The researchers collected over 13,000 

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UNIT I
Д. А. Крячков
responses, almost 4,000 of which described a moral or immoral event. The acts ranged from the 
mundane to the unexpected.
“There have been hundreds of morality studies, and the vast majority have involved presenting 
people with hypothetical scenarios or dilemmas and directly asking them to make moral judg-
ments,” wrote Jesse Graham, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern Cali-
fornia. “This has told us a lot, but it hasn’t told us much about how morality plays out in daily life. 
This study’s use of smartphone technology allows for a more ecologically valid picture of what 
kinds of moral events and situations people actually encounter outside the lab.”
The main notable difference between religious and non-religious people was that while both 
groups reported experiencing similar moral emotions, such as shame and gratitude, religious peo-
ple who described their feelings were somewhat more intense.
The study did not limit itself to comparing views of religious and non-religious people. It also 
compared the views of people with different political ideologies. According to one recently pro-
posed psychological theory, the Moral Foundations Theory, there are several different grounds for 
finding an act moral or immoral. One act may be considered immoral because it harms someone. 
Another act, however, may be considered immoral not because it is harmful but because it evinces 
disloyalty. Previous laboratory experiments using the Moral Foundations Theory framework had 
shown that liberals and conservatives emphasize different moral foundations. For example, con-
servatives are more likely to cite acts that exhibit respect for authority as moral, while liberals are 
more likely to consider acts that exhibit fairness as moral. The current study confirmed these dif-
ferences between liberals and conservatives outside the laboratory, but not to a striking degree.
The researchers deliberately refrained from defining “moral” and “immoral” for study partici-
pants. Leaving the definition of “morality” open enabled the researchers to see the variety of acts 
that some people considered moral or immoral. “There’s always the tradeoff between the clarity 
of telling participants exactly what you’re looking for, and the risk of missing important aspects of 
their moral lives,” said Graham. “For instance, if I think morality is fundamentally about fairness and 
justice, and define it as such for participants, then I will get a more precise and specific set of moral 
events from them, but I will miss a lot of what they find morally good or bad.”
There’s some reason, though, to think most people were pretty much on the same moral page. 
All the moral and immoral acts that participants texted to researchers were each independently 
rated by several judges who did not know the purpose of the study nor anything about the par-
ticipants. There was a remarkable level of agreement. The judges in aggregate differed from the 
participant in their opinion of the morality of an act less than 1 percent of the time.

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