This article presents an ethics support instrument for healthcare professionals called CURA. It is designed with a focus on and together with nurses and nurse assistants in palliative care. First, we shortly go into the background and the development study of the instrument. Next, we describe the four steps CURA prescribes for ethical reflection: (1) Concentrate, (2) Unrush, (3) Reflect, and (4) Act. In order to demonstrate how CURA can structure a moral reflection among caregivers, we discuss how a case (...) was discussed with CURA at a psychogeriatric ward of an elderly care home. Furthermore, we go into some considerations regarding the use of the instrument in clinical practice. Finally, we focus on the need for further research on the effectiveness and implementation of CURA. (shrink)

In this article I seek to show the importance of spirituality for a neo-Aristotelian account of ‘the good life’. First, I lay out my account of spirituality. Second, I discuss why the issue of the place of spirituality in the good life has often either been ignored or explicitly excluded from consideration by neo-Aristotelians. I suggest that a lot turns on how one understands the ‘ethical naturalism’ to which neo-Aristotelians are committed. Finally, I argue that through a deeper exploration of (...) the evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life as ‘meaning-seeking animals’ we can come to better appreciate the importance of spirituality for human beings throughout recorded history up to the present and why we can be described as homo religiosus. (shrink)

Here is an appealing position: one reason to pursue interaction with people from backgrounds that differ from our own is that doing so can improve our moral judgment. As some scholars have noticed, this position seems pedigreed by support from the famed philosophers of human sociability, David Hume and Adam Smith. But regardless of whether Hume or Smith personally held anything like the appealing position, neither might have had theoretically grounded reason to do so. In fact, both philosophers explain moral (...) judgment in ways that seem to present obstacles to the acceptance of the appealing position. This paper entertains the possibility that either of their moral theories contains resources to overcome these obstacles and implies the appealing position. I argue that Smith's theory does so more straightforwardly than Hume's does. This difference, I also argue, reveals something important about the Hume-Smith philosophical relationship. I close by sketching a way to fit the source of the appealing position in Smith's moral psychology with his focus on the desire for mutual sympathy. (shrink)

In his Art and Knowledge, the distinguished Canadian philosopher of art, James O. Young, takes on the daunting task of defending his opening claim that ‘every item properly classified as a work of art can contribute to human knowledge’. His assertion is a general one, intended to apply to any and every prospective artwork, not merely to sub-genres like the moral novel or the ‘Shock-Headed Peter’ school of didactic bedtime terror-fest. Thus, according to Young, works such as The Well-Tempered Clavier (...) and Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl do not qualify as art unless they can provide knowledge about topics that are important to us as human beings. A work does not become artworthy by inspiring us to meditate, ruminate, or reflect unless the work also leads us to true beliefs that are, in some sense, justified. Furthermore, it’s not enough for a work to provide knowledge about, say, abstruse issues in eighteenth-century counterpoint or the cult of painterly flatness; to count as art, a work must, in some way, supply answers to questions that are important to us as human beings living in the world. Young also argues that artworks have their own method of conveying knowledge. Hence, he buttresses his cognitive definition of art with an epistemology of art. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 342-355, April 2022.

The Platonic view that art is incapable of providing us with knowledge is sufficiently widely held as to merit a serious attempt at refutation. Once it is acknowledged that there are alternative forms of knowledge other than propositional, then it is possible to establish the truth of the claim that the knowledge which art affords has a value on a par with that provided by other disciplines. Art, it is argued, has a unique potential to provide imaginative insights by reference (...) to which we may understand what it is like to experience and to feel, in ways very different from those with which we may be familiar. It is shown to be instrumental in enabling us to refine our moral concepts as well as in determining what is salient from the moral point of view. As a powerful tool in the education of the emotions, artworks have the power to increase our moral sensitivity and to sharpen our perception of what is required of us inways that are otherwise unobtainable. (shrink)

I argue in this paper for the rich and subtle connections between moral philosophy and literature as they are articulated and explored in the work of the contemporary American philosopher, Cora Diamond. In its significance for broader educational debates—specifically, debates regarding the value of the arts and humanities in a context of global economic collapse—Diamond's work is strikingly original. I argue that it offers much more to educators than the related work of her Anglo-American contemporaries, among them Martha Nussbaum and (...) Richard Rorty. In development of my position, I read Diamond's 2008 essay, The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, withA Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the debut novel of Irish writer Eimear McBride. (shrink)

I am extremely grateful to Mikio Akagi, Nick Hughes, and Alison Springle for their insightful and challenging comments on Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds (Machery 2017). In this response, I wil...

Although much has been written about the nature of philosophy and how the discipline can be defined, little attention has been paid to the ways we develop the facility to reflect philosophically or why cultivating this ability is valuable. This article develops a conception of “philosophical sensitivity,” a perceptual capacity that facilitates our awareness of the philosophical dimension of experience. Based in part on Aristotle's notion of a moral perceptual capacity, philosophical sensitivity starts with most people's natural inclinations as children (...) to reflect about life's fundamental mysteries; when this capacity is cultivated with training over time, our attentiveness to the philosophical features of ordinary life becomes almost second nature. In much the same way an aesthetically sensitive person notices certain qualities of experience not readily perceptible by others, philosophical sensitivity involves the development of a particular way of seeing the world. (shrink)

I develop two different epistemic roles for emotion and desire. Caring for moral ends and people plays a pivotal though contingent role in ensuring reliable awareness of morally salient details; possession of various emotions and motives is a necessary condition for autonomous understanding of moral concepts themselves. Those who believe such connections compromise the "objective" status of morality tend to assume rather than argue for the bifurcated conception of reason and affect this essay challenges.

: Although philosophers often focus on the essays of Leopold's Sand County Almanac, especially "The Land Ethic," there is also a normative argument present in the stories that comprise most of the book. In fact the shack stories may be more persuasive, with a subtlety and complexity not available in his prose piece. This paper develops a narrative ethics methodology gleaned from rhetoric theory, and current interest in narrative ethics among literary theorists, in order to discern the normative underpinnings of (...) the stories in Part 1. The narrative ethics approach sidesteps the need to ground the land ethic in ethical theory—which has been a reconstructive and problematic task for the philosophical interpreters of Leopold—and suggests, instead, that it emerges in Leopold's very effort to narrate his, professional, personal, and practical experience with nature. The involves examining the stories in terms of their emotional, logical and performative aspects. The result is an analysis that shows not only how these stories express normative claims, but also justify them. One conclusion of the analyses is that, in the narratives, there is less emphasis on the problematic notion of an over-arching "community" than in the prose pieces, and more emphasis on the metaphor of other living things as "fellow travelers" in the "odyssey of evolution." Second, the narratives take on an ironic attitude toward the ecological order, less discernable in the prose essays. The order itself may not be ethically admirable, but should be preserved since it makes possible any ethical relations within it. Thus, the narrative reading suggests some temperance to the usual holistic interpretation of his land ethic and its concomitant criticisms especially the charge of ecofacism. We should not take the land ethic imperative at its face value, in the sense that the good of the order itself is an intrinsic good. In the narratives, individuals are shown not merely to be means to the ecological whole, but the focus of sympathy and concern, in a manner that demands their good should also be an object of moral consideration. (shrink)

Though there are significant points of overlap between Michelle Kosch's reading of Fear and Trembling and my own, this paper focuses primarily on a significant difference: the legitimacy or otherwise of looking to paradigmatic exemplars of faith in order to understand faith. I argue that Kosch's reading threatens to underplay the importance of exemplarity in Kierkegaard's thought, and that there is good reason to resist her use of Philosophical Fragments as the key to interpreting the 'hidden message' of Fear and (...) Trembling. Key to both claims is the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I also briefly sketch an alternative reading of the 'hidden message', one in which Kierkegaard's Christian commitments play a notably different role. (shrink)

While the idea of art as self-expression can sound old-fashioned, it remains widespread—especially if the relevant ‘selves’ can be social collectives, not just individual artists. But self-expression can collapse into individualistic or anthropocentric self-involvement. And compelling successor ideals for artists are not obvious. In this light, I develop a counter-ideal of creative receptivity to basic features of the external world, or artistic objectivity. Objective artists are not trying to express themselves or reach collective self-knowledge. However, they are also not disinterested (...) or emotionless. They can be unmoved by personal feelings and human concerns, but they are still receptive—just attuned to the more elemental forces that creatively inspire them. I elaborate this ideal in dialogue with John Ruskin’s influential critique of the pathetic fallacy. By contextualizing Ruskin’s view vis-à-vis Romantic and Modernist poetics, post-Kantian aesthetics, modern environmental art, and contemporary theories of expressiveness, I show how it indirectly motivates my account. (shrink)

Narrative representations can change our moral actions and thoughts, for better or for worse. In this article, I develop a theory of fictions' capacity for moral education and moral corruption that is fully sensitive to the diversity of fictions. Specifically, I argue that the way a fiction influences our moral actions and thoughts importantly depends on its genre. This theory promises new insights into practical ethical debates over pornography and media violence.

The question, what measures to address the shortage of transplantable organs are ethically permissible? requires careful attention because, apart from its impact on medical practice, the stance we espouse here reflects our interpretations of human freedom and mortality. To raise the number of available organs, on utilitarian grounds, bioethicists and medical professionals increasingly support mandatory procurement. This view is at odds with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, according to which ‘[o]rgan donation after death is a noble and meritorious act’ (...) but ethically impermissible absent consent. Those who concur with this position, but would oppose conscription on independent philosophical grounds, have not yet found a voice in the Western tradition comparable in strength to the utilitarian basis of the policy’s support, for Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, too, lend themselves to a requirement that we make our organs available to others when they can no longer serve ourselves. One finds an ethical wedge against conscription in an unexpected philosophical locale: the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger’s Being and Time, where pertinent individual choices arc protectively over what happens post mortem. Heidegger’s perspective on this issue thus meshes, not with other philosophical voices, but with Catholic doctrine—a surprising convergence of atheistic and theistic approaches to our flourishing whose ground I address in the article’s conclusion. (shrink)

The use of qualitative research in empirical bioethics is becoming increasingly popular, but its implementation comes with several challenges, such as difficulties in aligning moral epistemology and methods. In this paper, we describe some problems that empirical bioethics researchers may face; these problems are related to a tension between the different poles on the spectrum of scientific paradigms, namely a positivist and interpretive stance. We explore the ideas of narrative construction, ‘genres’ in medicine and dominant discourses in relation to empirical (...) research. We also reflect on the loss of depth and context that may occur with thematic or content analyses of interviews, and discuss the need for transparency about methodologies in empirical bioethics. Drawing on insights from narrative approaches in the social sciences and the clinical-educational discipline of Narrative Medicine, we further clarify these problems and suggest a narrative approach to qualitative interviewing in empirical bioethics that enables researchers to ‘listen (and read) in new ways’. We then show how this approach was applied in the first author’s research project about euthanasia decision-making. In addition, we stress the important ethical task of scrutinizing methodologies and meta-ethical standpoints, as they inevitably impact empirical outcomes and corresponding ethical judgments. Finally, we raise the question whether a ‘diagnostic’, rather than a ‘problem-solving’, mindset could and should be foregrounded in empirical ethics, albeit without losing a commitment to ethics’ normative task, and suggest further avenues for theorizing about listening and epistemic (in)justice in relation to empirical (bio)ethics. (shrink)

This article presents material from my ethnographic study in Śringēri, south India, the site of a powerful 1200yearold Advaitic monastery that has been historically an interpreter of ancient Hindu moral treatises. A vibrant diverse local culture that provides plural sources of moral authority makes Sringeri a rich site for studying moral discourse. Through a study of two conversational narratives, this essay illustrates how the moral self is not an ossified product of written texts and codes, but is dynamic, gen dered, (...) and emergent, endowed with historical and political agency and an aesthetic capacity that mediates many normative sources to articulate "appropriate" conduct. In so doing, the essay shows the value of including oral narrative in ethical inquiry, especially in narrative ethics, which, for most part, has focused on written sources. (shrink)

In this essay, I demonstrate the value of the Bildungsroman for philosophy of education on the grounds that these narratives raise and explore educational questions. I focus on a short story in the Bildungsroman tradition, Thomas Hardy’s “A Mere Interlude”. This story describes the maturation of its heroine by narrating a series of events that transform her understanding of what it means to lead a human life. I connect her conceptual shift with two paradigms for leading a human life. One (...) stresses the exercise of distinct human capacities like agency and autonomy, whereas the other stresses human vulnerability to fate or moral luck. I conclude by offering important reasons for educators to adopt the later paradigm over the former. (shrink)

This article draws out the political implications of some of the avatars of ancient skepticism in modern fiction. It relies on Martha Nussbaum’s claim that fiction can provide some of the best lessons in moral philosophy to refute her claim that ancient skepticism was a bad influence on morals. It surveys references to skepticism from Shakespeare through such diverse writers as Isabel de Charrière, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Anatole France, and Albert Camus down to recent writers such as Orhan Pamuk (...) and Michel Houellebecq. The most substantial treatment is of Naguib Mahfouz’sCairo Trilogy, which is interpreted in two ways: one, as an example ofisostheniaor equipollence in arguments on both sides of questions about gender in the Islamic world, and two, as the biography of a person who claims to be a self-conscious skeptic. Skepticism emerges as a multi-faceted concept in modern literature, but there are definite references back to the ancient skeptics, including mention of the name Pyrrhonism and knowledge of the writings of Sextus Empiricus. The political implications militate against dogmatic claims to truth and knowledge of a one-dimensional justice. (shrink)

Although the suggestion that Kant offers a significant contribution to Virtue Ethics might be a surprising one, in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant makes virtue central to his ethics. In this paper, I introduce a Merleau-Pontian phenomenological perspective into the ongoing study of the convergence between Kant and Virtue Ethics, and argue that such a perspective promises to illuminate the continuity of Kant’s thought through an emphasis on the implicit structure of moral experience, revealing the insights his perspective contains for (...) establishing an embodied phenomenology of virtue. These two aims are accomplished by exploring Kant’s ‘proto-phenomenological’ descriptions of the weight of the moral law, his implicit ‘existential’ account of human nature, and his notion of the art of navigating the complex moral terrain that involves a certain Spielraum. When thus viewed, Kant’s virtue ethics sketches out a subtle understanding of embodiment and temporality. (shrink)

The article clarifies the way in which ‘the aesthetic’ is conceptualised in relation to business ethics in order to assess its potential to inform theory building and developmental practices within the business ethics field. A systematic review of relevant literature is undertaken which identifies three ontologically based accounts of the relationship between the aesthetic and business ethics: ‘positive’ ones, ‘negative’ accounts and ‘Postmodern’ renderings. Five epistemologically based approaches are also made explicit: those in which the aesthetic is thought to develop (...) enhanced perceptual discernment, those in which the aesthetic catalyses emotional sensitivity, those in which the aesthetic contributes to imaginative capacity, those in which the aesthetic prompts integrative apprehension and those in which the aesthetic is seen to foster critical reflexivity. The review reveals two key findings: firstly, the dearth of empirically based research to substantiate claims made about the aesthetic’s ability to foster ethical capabilities, which leads to proposals for further research; secondly, the analysis indicates the significance of critical reflexivity both in resolving the apparent dichotomy between ontologically based perspectives asserting the aesthetic’s ability to lead to ethically sound or egregious behaviour, and in underpinning the capacities of perceptual discernment, emotional connectivity, imagination and integrative apprehension which epistemologically based approaches assert the aesthetic can foster. (shrink)

Are there aesthetic obligations, and what would account for their binding force if so? I first develop a general, domain‐neutral notion of obligation, then critically discuss six arguments offered for and against the existence of aesthetic obligations. The most serious challenge is that all aesthetic obligations are ultimately grounded in moral norms, and I survey the prospects for this challenge alongside three non‐moral views about the source of aesthetic obligations: individual practical identity, social practices, and aesthetic value primitivism. I conclude (...) by raising questions for further work in this area. (shrink)

Applied ethicists’ interest in narratives and narratives ethics has grown steadily. Some thinkers position narratives as supplements to ethics, while others see narratives as new form of ethics comparable to virtue or deontological ethics. In this paper, I analyze some of the main ethical claims being made on behalf of business and literary narratives from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. I argue that, while narratives can significantly contribute to the development of our character, to a better grasp of virtues (...) and vices, and to a clarification of a virtue ethics framework, this contribution is highly nuanced. In particular, Aristotelian virtue ethics enable us to sensibly and helpfully distinguish the ethical value of _narratives within business ethics_ from _narrative business ethics _per se. This paper has three parts. Part One offers a provisional definition of narrative and sketches some of the large claims that literary critics, philosophers, theologians, and others have made for narratives’ relevance to and value for ethics. In Part Two, using narratives drawn from business and literature, I take up each of these claims in turn and examine whether the claim makes sense and is compelling from an Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective. Part Three gathers together the threads of the arguments in Part Two to specify the modest, but nonetheless significant, legitimate roles narratives might play within Aristotle’s virtue ethics. I also point to some limitations inherent in an Aristotelian critique of narrative ethics and suggest some questions for future research. (shrink)

The ancient philosophers aimed to turn us away from thinking about particularizing affection to thinking about justifiable human relations. The aim of their protreptic discourses was to get their readers, who were citizens, sons, and fathers, to think about their lives by putting these relations into question. I show how this conversion works and explore its political consequences by reading the accounts of friendship in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and then comparing those accounts with the views on the causes and (...) justifications of human relations of Rousseau, of Christians and post-Christian Kantians, and of the Hebrew Bible and its Rabbinic commentators. (shrink)

This article draws on recent research in the medical humanities to analyze two contemporary Chinese films: Zhang Yuan's Sons (1996) and Zhou Xiaowen's The Common People (1998). By portraying psychic and physical anguish in ways that refuse to divorce biology from culture, such films offer rare moral dialogues on biomedical issues and contribute a cross-cultural perspective invaluable to the task of responding to illness and suffering.

Ethical choice and action in the built environment are complicated by the fact that moral agents often get stuck as they pursue their goals. A common way of getting stuck has its roots in human cognition: the failure of moral imagination, which shows most clearly when moral agents stand on either side of a sharp cultural divide, like the traditional divide between city and suburb. Being stuck is akin to bad moral luck: it is a situation beyond the control of (...) the moral agent for which that agent might nevertheless be held responsible. (shrink)

Many people report that reading first-person narratives of the experience of illness can be morally instructive or educative. But although they are ubiquitous and typically sincere, the precise nature of such educative experiences is puzzling—for those narratives typically lack the features that modern philosophers regard as constitutive of moral reason. I argue that such puzzlement should disappear, and the morally educative power of illness narratives explained, if one distinguishes two different styles of moral reason: an inferentialist style that generates the (...) puzzlement and an alternative exemplarist style that offers a compelling explanation of the morally educative power of pathographic literature. (shrink)

Many recent attacks on consequentialism and several defenses of pluralism have relied on arguments for the incommensurability of value. Such arguments have, generally, turned on empirical appeals to aspects of our everyday experience of value conflict. My intention, largely, is to bypass these arguments and turn instead to a discussion of the conceptual apparatus needed to make the claim that values are incommensurable. After delineating what it would mean for values to be incommensurable, I give an a priori argument that (...) such is impossible. It is widely accepted that value is conceptually tied to desire. I argue that, more specifically, it is proportional to merited desire strength. This connection gives one a metric of all value if there is any such thing. This metric entails that value is a complete ordering over all states of affairs, or, in other words, that value is commensurable. (shrink)

This essay examines Aquinas's discussions of hatred in Summa Theologica I-II, Q. 29 and II-II, Q. 34, in order to retrieve an account of what contemporary theorists of the emotions call its cognitive contents. In Aquinas's view, hatred is constituted as a passion by a narrative pattern that includes its intentional object, beliefs, perceptions of changes in bodily states, and motivated desires. This essay endorses Aquinas's broadly "cognitivist" account of passional hatred, in line with his way of treating passions in (...) general. I suggest that Aquinas's account of hatred's arising out of attachment is compelling. However, I also argue that if Aquinas's treatment of hatred is to help us understand the phenomenon of hate, where classes of people are abominated for an identity they bear, and to avoid equating an oppressor's hatred with that of the oppressed for the oppressor, the cognitive pathway to hatred must be broader than through envy. (shrink)

This article engages the considerations of imagination in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur to argue for a moral dimension of the imagination and its objects. Imaginary objects are taken to be mental representations in images and narratives of people or courses of action that are not real in the sense that they are not actual, or have not yet happened. Three claims are made in the article. First, by drawing on the category of possibility, a conceptual distinction is established between imagination and (...) fantasy, (1) I claim that imagination has a moral dimension because it is engaged in considering real-life possibilities. Second, (2) drawing on Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, it is argued that mental representations of selfhood in imagination have a moral dimension because they essentially allow people to understand the development of agency in human selfhood by means of representations of would-be selves and narrative figurations of the self. Third, (3) mental representations of human selves have a moral dimension because they form important points of reference for moral orientations in the field of human praxis (moral pointers). (shrink)

The question of how well we need to be known, to be loved, is considered. A ‘second-person’ model is argued for, on which love requires that the beloved’s demands to be known be respected. This puts pressure on the idea that lovers need to make a beloved’s interests their own, taking that to require comprehension of the beloved’s interests: a lover would have to appreciate the normative intelligibility and motivating force of an interest. The possibility of love with failure of (...) comprehension is defended, using illustrations from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. (shrink)

In her work on virtue ethics Rosalind Hursthouse has formulated an Aristotelian criterion of rightness that understands rightness in terms of what the virtuous person would do. It is argued here that this kind of criterion does not allow enough room for the category of the supererogatory and that right and wrong should rather be understood in terms of the characteristic behavior of decent persons. Furthermore, it is suggested that this kind of approach has the added advantage of allowing one (...) to make sense of the centrality of negative precepts in commonsense morality. (shrink)

How can stories contribute to ethical education, when they reach people who have already been shaped by many stories, including ethically problematic ones? This question is pursued here by considering Plato’s allegory of the cave, focusing on a reading of it offered by Jonathan Lear. Lear claims that the cave allegory aims to undermine its audience’s inheritance of stories. I question the possibility and desirability of that project, especially in relation to ethical education. Some works of contemporary fiction by Jenny (...) Erpenbeck and J. M. Coetzee are discussed as stories that use more complex strategies for ethically constructive engagement with story-saturated audiences. (shrink)

Why has James been relatively absent from the neopragmatist revival of the past twenty years? I argue that part of the reason is that his psychological projects seem to hold little promise for a socially and culturally progressive philosophical project, and that his concern with religious issues makes him seem like a religious apologist. Bringing together James's psychological writings with his philosophical writings shows these assumptions to be wrong. I offer a reading of “The Will to Believe” and The Principles (...) of Psychology to support my position (a) that James's philosophical methodology and his psychological works lend themselves to a naturalized approach to philosophical inquiry, which both allows for a reshaping of traditional philosophical questions and offers a check on scientism, and (b) that, contrary to many commentators' claims, James is not defending religion against science but is instead using science to address epistemic and moral issues more broadly. I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which James's naturalism demands a reconsideration of the nature of philosophical inquiry, as well as a revised view of a scientific psychology that avoids scientism. (shrink)

In Anger and Forgiveness, Martha Nussbaum offers a magisterial brief against what she calls “retribution” and “garden‐variety anger.” She does not write as a Christian, but there is much for a Christian ethicist to admire in her learned and creative treatment of moral emotion, including her defense of generosity. Professor Nussbaum is not far from the kingdom of God. I argue, nevertheless, that she blurs or erodes four important distinctions, between justice and love, anger and hatred, retribution and revenge, and (...) utility and sanctity. The upshot is that her call for compassion degenerates into injustice. To justify this appraisal, I lay out Nussbaum’s normative case, identify three major theoretical difficulties with that case, examine briefly the teachings of Socrates and Jesus in relation to revolutionary justice, then note an admitted complexity. (shrink)

According to the view we may term “strong cognitivism”, all reasons for action are rooted in normative features that the motivated subject takes objects to have independently of her attitudes towards these objects. The main concern of this paper is to argue against strong cognitivism, that is, to establish the view that conative attitudes do provide subjects with reasons for action. The central argument to this effect is a top-down argument: it proceeds by an analysis of the complex phenomenon of (...) love and derives a conclusion regarding the nature of more basic mental phenomena—particular desires. More specifically, its starting point is the crude intuition that the significance conferred by love upon its objects is of a distinctively personal kind—an intuition that is expressed by the apparent non-substitutability of two similar subjects only one of whom is loved with respect to their importance for the lover. I argue that the initial notion of non-substitutability can be refined and modified so as to form a real challenge to all versions of strong cognitivism and to establish the existence of attitude-dependent reasons. (shrink)

According to an influential characterisation of reflective equilibrium, it is a kind of algorithm for licensing explicitly normative claims in philosophical inquiries. Call this the machine-view of reflective equilibrium. The machine-view implies a causal relation between input and output data that is devoid of human agency in any significant sense. In this paper, I argue for a neo-Aristotelian alternative view. According to this view, the judgement that is called forth in the decision procedure of reflective equilibrium is a rational response (...) of an epistemic agent, which integrates the whole of her character as a knower, both cognitive and affective, and which cannot be reduced to the explicit following of rules or an algorithm. Unlike the machine-view, this alternative account is able to support the dynamic structure and the normative status of the decision procedure. (shrink)

It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglect central intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts' attempts to reduce them to other mental states and toward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions' distinctive function is to engage us (...) with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions' work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives. (shrink)

Bioethics case reports generally treat aspects of moral fathomability, characterised and addressed in different ways. This paper reads the case as a textual model of scenarios and draws attention to its structure, narrative shape, linguistic register, and the effects of tone and temporality on reader expectation and responsiveness. Such textual elements of case composition reflect authorial purpose and influence the interpretation, including moral and ethical interpretation, of bioethics cases.

ABSTRACTThis article scrutinises one of the mainstream views of how one grows into responsible membership of society; the view based on Jürgen Habermas’, Lawrence Kohlberg’s and Jean Piaget’s theories. Habermas praises Kohlberg’s and Piaget’s psychological theories and uses them as empirical sources crucial for his theoretical work. We argue that this view should be revised in light of new empirical findings as Habermas’ Kohlberg’s and Piaget’s view is based on a false understanding of the development and functioning of human reason (...) and morality. We do not, however, defend a view that reduces normative questions to empirical facts. In contrast, we agree with Habermas that in an adequate theory, both philosophical and empirical dimensions have to be taken into account but argue that the empirical research results he has utilized are fallacious in light of current research findings. Finally, we discuss the relevance of our argument for educational theorisation. (shrink)

The embodied human subject is dynamically connected to his or her historico-sociocultural context, the soil from which a person’s psyche is nourished as multiplex meanings are absorbed and enable personal development. In each culture certain towering artistic works embody this perspective. The Dream of the Red Chamber introduces Jia Bao-yu—a scion of the prestigious Jia family—and his relationships with a large cast of characters. Bao-yu is controversial but, at the time of the family’s tragic collapse, he can be seen as (...) embodying a spiritual struggle in which his instinct, nature, sensitivity, and creativity are grounded in his transcendent relationship with a fragment of the world stone, an eternal source of energy and creativity. We are invited to draw on a metaphysical level of thought to consider his struggles with man-made hierarchies and a situated historico-sociocultural order in such a way as to live out his spiritual being. As such, the novel is closely relevant to questions of spirituality in bioethics. Through personal experiences, passions, creativity, and relationships with others, the body is inscribed, forming the soul, which may be misconstrued (for instance, through a medical or Cartesian reformulation of events) but which can be seen as the site of ethical and spiritual thought. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to vindicate the belief that many teachers have that their intuitions, insights, or perceptions are legitimate—and indispensible—guides for their teaching. Perceptions can constitute knowledge. This runs counter to some number of views that emphasize ‘reflective practice’ and teachers as ‘reflective practitioners.’ I do not deny that reflection can be important, but it is a derivative task, dependent on teachers being the ‘right sort of subject,’ having the ‘right orientation’ to their work, at the service of (...) achieving that orientation. That orientation is a matter of virtue, where virtue is manifested in the capacity to read situations correctly for what is required to serve persons’ welfare, for them to do well. This entails that good teaching is more experienced-based than research-based. Ultimately, it is life experience that provides for teachers’ ability to see well. (shrink)