What are the conditions required for becoming better human beings? What are our limitations and possibilities? I understand “becoming better” as a combined improvement process bringing persons “up from” a negative condition and “up to” a positive one. Today there is a tendency to understand improvement in a one-sided way as a movement up to the mastery of cognitive skills, neglecting the negative conditions that can make these skills mis-educative. I therefore tell six stories in the Western tradition about conditions (...) for a combined improvement process. The first three stories belong to our cultural ABC: an Aristotelian story about moral wisdom which brings people up from being enslaved by passions and up to a good life of virtues; a Biblical story about God’s word bringing listeners up from a self-centred life and up into creative work as God’s fellow workers, and a short Cave story by Plato about liberation—up from living by common illusions and up to enlightenment from what is perfectly good. The subsequent three stories interpret and actualise these basic stories in different ways: a story about moral wisdom and divine love (Thomas Aquinas), a story about individual freedom and rationality (Immanuel Kant), and a story about the love that builds us up as equal human beings (Søren Kierkegaard). These stories may directly guide us adults—and indirectly the children and youth who learn from our examples—when we struggle to become better human beings. (shrink)

This paper elucidates Kierkegaard’s notion of the “simultaneity of factors” in order to reveal the intimate connection between reason and emotion. I begin with the romantic vision of aesthetic education as embodied in Friedrich Schiller, which Kierkegaard himself inherited, though in a critical and nuanced manner. Next, I explore Kierkegaard’s pointed critique of the romantics, namely through his conviction that they had misrepresented the role of imagination to the detriment of harmony in the individual. Finally, I present Kierkegaard’s positive view (...) of the simultaneity of factors, emphasizing his improvement on the romantics through the central category of “inwardness.” Throughout, I underline that Kierkegaard gave higher status neither to emotion nor reason, taking them as complimentary aspects of human existence and thereby inviting their reunion in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Ida B. Wells (1862?1931) was a considerable figure in her day. But she has not been accorded posthumous acclaim in parallel. This oversight is either just, or an unprecedented historical falsification ? enabled largely through unhappy, gendered misperception. African?American thought for long turned round dispute between accommodation (Washington) and protest (Du Bois) as forms of leadership. Yet this contrast may mislead. First, Washington was more white placeman than black leader. Second, Du Bois, more than anyone, helped diminish, even extinguish, the (...) Wellsian intellectual legacy. If Wells?s arguments (on violence) have critical significance, and Washington?s are insubstantial and time?serving, then the important struggle within African?American leadership may come to be relocated within the protest tradition ? as between Du Bois (romantic Pan?Africanist) and Wells (universal defender of human rights), both recovered by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Wells possibly more fittingly. (shrink)

Given the socio‐economic incentives for academic relevance, the sceptic may well challenge the academic integrity of the evolving discipline of business ethics. For, the question is, how could such an emerging field of enquiry constitute applied philosophy? I critically examine certain arguments, principally advanced by Michael Oakeshott and Stephen Clark, which might be thought to underwrite such scepticism, via a wholesale suspicion of applied ethics. Yet, I argue, philosophy can be and is properly concerned with our practical experience and actions. (...) The significance of more general, abstract ethical questions derives, in great part, from their bearing upon our practical deliberations and actions. Moreover, reflection about the nature and role of ethical principles need not deny a role for moral judgement. Although for contingent reasons we may be right to be worried, I present an argument to show that, as a matter of principle, the sceptical challenge regarding business ethics can be refuted. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper consists of a story about unorthodox assessment procedures in theology, and a discussion of their implications. Among the issues raised are the possibility of testing values, the relationship of test validity to test reliability and ethical questions involved in assessment.

The question of whether the normative testimony of ethics experts should be admissible under the rules of evidence has been the subject of much debate. Professor Imwinkelried's paper is an effort to get us, for a moment, to change that subject. He seeks to turn our attention, instead, to a means by which bioethics experts’ normative analyses might come before the court without regard to the rules of evidence - a means lying formally outside those rules’ jurisdiction. The court, he (...) argues, may freely consider evidence from expert bioethicists so long as it is performing a legislative rather than an adjudicative function. The rules of evidence apply to the court's efforts to find the facts of a particular case, Imwinkelried argues, but they do not constrain the court's investigations relative to its creative law-making efforts. (shrink)

The question of whether the normative testimony of ethics experts should be admissible under the rules of evidence has been the subject of much debate. Professor Imwinkelried's paper is an effort to get us, for a moment, to change that subject. He seeks to turn our attention, instead, to a means by which bioethics experts’ normative analyses might come before the court without regard to the rules of evidence - a means lying formally outside those rules’ jurisdiction. The court, he (...) argues, may freely consider evidence from expert bioethicists so long as it is performing a legislative rather than an adjudicative function. The rules of evidence apply to the court's efforts to find the facts of a particular case, Imwinkelried argues, but they do not constrain the court's investigations relative to its creative law-making efforts. (shrink)

In this paper I propose and develop a social account of global autonomy. On this view, a person is autonomous simply to the extent to which it is difficult for others to subject her to their wills. I argue that many properties commonly thought necessary for autonomy are in fact properties that tend to increase an agent’s immunity to such interpersonal subjection, and that the proposed account is therefore capable of providing theoretical unity to many of the otherwise heterogeneous requirements (...) of autonomy familiar from recent discussions. Specifically, I discuss three such requirements: (i) possession of legally protected status, (ii) a sense of one’s own self-worth, and (iii) a capacity for critical reflection. I argue that the proposed account is not only theoretically satisfying but also yields a rich and attractive conception of autonomy. (shrink)

Auguste Comte's doctrine of the three phases through which sciences pass (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive) allows us to explain what John Stuart Mill was attempting in his magnum opus, the System of Logic: namely, to move the science of logic to its terminal and 'positive' stage. Both Mill's startling account of deduction and his unremarked solution to the Humean problem of induction eliminate the notions of necessity or force—in this case, the 'logical must'—characteristic of a science's metaphysical (...) stage. Mill's treatment had a further surprising payoff: his solution to the Problem of Necessity (what today we call the problem of determinism and freedom of the will). (shrink)

Insights from social science are increasingly used in the field of applied ethics. However, recent insights have shown that the empirical branch of business ethics lacks thorough theoretical grounding. This article discusses the use of the Rawlsian methods of wide reflective equilibrium and overlapping consensus in the field of applied ethics. Instead of focussing on one single comprehensive ethical doctrine to provide adequate guidance for resolving moral dilemmas, these Rawlsian methods seek to find a balance between considered judgments and intuitions (...) concerning particular cases on the one hand and general principles and theories on the other. In business ethics this approach is promissing because it enables decision-making in a pluralist context with different stakeholders who often endorse different or even conflicting cultural and moral frameworks without giving priority to any of them. Moreover, the method is well founded in political theory. A taxonomy of different kinds of applications is developed, and classified according to the purpose, the content, and the type of justification. On the basis of this taxonomy an inventory of 12 recent applications is made. In terms of the purpose and content of the method the applications are rather diverse. Two conceptual obstacles for applying Rawlsian methods are identified, viz. inclusiveness and the communitarian objection that people have to become detached from their personal life. It is found that methodological questions, such as the question how to retrieve the relevant empirical data, are scarcely addressed in the literature. To advance the use of empirical approaches in general, and that of Rawlsian approaches in particular, it is important not only to use empirical data but to use methodological insights from social sciences in order to further advance the field of empirical ethics. It is recommended that stakeholders be given a more active role in the assessment and justification of these methods. (shrink)

Education lies at the heart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’. However, when education is mentioned in the philosophical literature on human rights, or even within the literature on educational policy, it is usually within the context of its being treated as a specific right—as education as a human right rather than human rights education. (...) Taking rights and obligations to be intimately tied within a full human rights educational regime, I argue for the role of education in establishing and realizing freedom from poverty as a human right. The arguments for why this freedom should be considered a human right are compelling. I offer five educational moments in the human rights movement in general, and the arguments for freedom from poverty as a human right, more specifically, in my discussion of human rights education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent educational theorising about the nature of teaching, learning and assessment has made much of a distinction between processes and products and of so-called process models of education und curriculum. Following on from reflections on the historical provenance and subsequent evolution of process talk in psychology and the philosophy of mind it is argued in this article that such talk can only import serious conceptual confusion and ambiguity into our attempts to understand clearly and adequately the business of human (...) learning. In the light of this it would be altogether better for us to expunge the language of process from the discourse of education. (shrink)

The notion of a non-sensory mental state or event that plays a prominent role in coming to understand, an epistemic achievement distinct from mere knowledge, featured prominently in historical writings on philosophy, and philosophical methodology. It is, however, completely absent from contemporary discussions of the subject. This paper argues that intuition plays an epistemic role in understanding, including philosophical understanding, and offers an explanation of how intuition manages to play this role, if and when it does. It is argued, subsequently, (...) that this role is autonomous, in the sense that a source of understanding cannot be reduced to a source of justification, evidence, or reason. Finally, it is noted that such autonomy implies that popular forms of skepticism about intuition do not impugn intuition’s epistemic significance with respect to its status as a source of understanding. (shrink)

MORAL COMMITMENT OF THE REALISTIC, MODERNIST AND POSTMODERN NOVEL S u m m a r y The present paper discusses moral ideas expressed in the contemporary novel of the realistic, modernist and postmodern conventions. More precisely, it tries to define how the poetics of a given convention determines the novel’s ethical thought. It is argued that both the modernist and postmodern fiction, which are often perceived as amoral or relativist, are morally committed, though perhaps not as much as the realistic (...) convention. The shape of this moral commitment is consistent with the dominant of each convention (epistemological in modernism and ontological in postmodernism). These theoretical considerations are subsequently illustrated with three case studies of Virginia Woolf’s novels (each of which represents a different convention). Throughout the whole essay the emphasis falls on the meaning of the novelistic form, i.e. on the way that the novel’s form conveys the novel’s interpretation of reality. (shrink)