View article

This article offers a psychosocial discursive analysis of audiences' responses to information about human rights abuses. The analysis of focus group members' justifications for their inaction is informed by a view of language as social action and Cohen's concept of denial, with its focus on the culturally available accounts of justifications and excuses that form the vocabulary of moral passivity within our society. Positioning theory is applied to study participants' moral positioning and the storylines used to account for their passivity, with a specific focus on the use of negative positioning of Amnesty International and charities in general.

Four storylines – ‘trust and truthfulness’, ‘misuse of resources’, ‘effectiveness of proposed action’, and ‘money and manipulation’ – are discussed in terms of how participants use them to weaken the standing of the appeal makers and to ascribe a moral position to themselves …