Preface

This book is about identifying and making sense of a group of moral emotions, specifically shame, guilt, pride, and hubris in political messages and news media content. Such knowledge is imperative for those who aim to assess the role of morality in public discussions. It is a timely topic in the light of recent observations concerning the past few decades when moral debates have deepened the public divide on a number of topics, including abortion, foreign aid, capital punishment, migration, LGBTQ+ rights, gender issues, taxation, freedom of speech, and many others (Federico et al., 2013; Fischer, 2020; Permoser, 2019). All have recently been at the front of a resentful culture war where arguments have developed into political struggles between groups with different social values and moral intuitions for dominating the discussion about the nature of moral authority (Jensen, 1997; Stieb, 2022).