Some virtue ethicists are reluctant to consider principles and standards in business ethics. However, this is problematic. This paper argues that realistic Personalism can be integrated into virtue-based business ethics, giving it a more complete base. More specifically, two principles are proposed: the Personalist Principle (PP) and the Common Good Principle (CGP). The PP includes the Golden Rule and makes explicit the duty of respect, benevolence, and care for people, emphasizing human dignity and the innate rights of every human being. (...) The CGP entails cooperation to promote conditions which enhance the opportunity for the human flourishing of all people within a community. Both principles have practical implications for business ethics. (shrink)

This essay describes a visionary philosophy of education at Morehouse College. The educational process at Morehouse, construed here as a form of pedagogical personalism, is personified in three luminaries of Morehouse College: Benjamin Elijah Mays, Howard Washington Thurman, and Martin Luther King. The educational process at Morehouse should be interpreted as an ambivalent response to segregation and discrimination in Jim Crow America. Like all black institutions in the South, Morehouse was subject to racist constraints; Morehouse was created and existed in (...) large part due to just such constraints. I attempt to more accurately describe in order to more sensitively appreciate not only how historically black colleges and universities helped to shape the spiritual or intellectual blueprint of the civil rights movement but also how they served—and continue to serve—as ongoing experiments in democratic education. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the pedagogical personalism espoused and practiced at Morehouse College during what has been called her golden age, i.e., 1940–1967, constitutes a significant contribution to the history of higher education in America. (shrink)

Approaching Martin Luther King Jr. as a constructive political theorist, I present a synthetic view of his thought that is able to make cogent and compelling sense of prominent concepts and lines of reasoning in his writings. I contend that King's political thought, which is grounded in his moral, metaphysical, and theological convictions, is best understood as structurally teleological and oriented to the construction of an inclusive, democratic community as its end. To make this case and fill out the picture (...) of his view, I offer an analysis of King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and argue that his account of nonviolence, which provides the key to understanding his political thought, ought to be understood as operating within and on behalf of this teleological vision by patterning what I term dialogical relations between persons. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A growing body of research suggests that political polarization in the United States is at a forty-year high, and that it is rooted less in disagreements over policy than in hostile attitudes toward political opponents. Such attitudes explain the manifest increase of intolerant behavior in American culture and politics in recent years. But what explains the attitudes themselves? One significant contributor may have been the rise of scientism in the early twentieth century, which undermined the metaphysical, epistemic, and institutional (...) foundations of the type of morality required to transcend our instinctual tribalism. (shrink)