Results for 'perfectionism'

137 found
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  1. Explanatory perfectionism: A fresh take on an ancient theory.Michael Prinzing - 2020 - Analysis (4):704-712.
    The ‘Big 3’ theories of well-being—hedonism, desire-satisfactionism, and objective list theory—attempt to explain why certain things are good for people by appealing to prudentially good-making properties. But they don’t attempt to explain why the properties they advert to make something good for a person. Perfectionism, the view that well-being consists in nature-fulfilment, is often considered a competitor to these views (or else a version of the objective list theory). However, I argue that perfectionism is best understood as explaining (...)
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  2. Perfectionism, Public Reason and Excellences.Franz Mang - 2023 - Analysis 83 (3):627-639.
    Much of contemporary political philosophy revolves around debates over perfectionism, which is the view that the state may, or should, promote valuable conceptions of the good life and discourage conceptions that are worthless or bad. Collis Tahzib has recently proposed a unique theory of perfectionism. I examine two central aspects of his theory: the amalgamation of public reason and perfectionism, and the employment of the Rawlsian lexical priority. I argue that Tahzib’s idea of perfectionist public reason has (...)
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  3. Liberal Perfectionism and Quong’s Internal Conception of Political Liberalism.Paul Billingham - 2017 - Social Theory and Practice 43 (1):79-106.
    Debates between political liberals and liberal perfectionists have been reinvigorated by Jonathan Quong’s Liberalism Without Perfection. In this paper I argue that certain forms of perfectionism can rebut or evade Quong’s three central objections – that perfectionism is manipulative, paternalistic, and illegitimate. I then argue that perfectionists can defend an ‘internal conception’ of perfectionism, parallel in structure to Quong’s ’internal conception’ of political liberalism, but with a different conception of the justificatory constituency. None of Quong’s arguments show (...)
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  4. Confucianism, Perfectionism, and Liberal Society.Franz Mang - 2018 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 17 (1):29-49.
    Confucian scholars should satisfy two conditions insofar as they think their theories enable Confucianism to make contributions to liberal politics and social policy. The liberal accommodation condition stipulates that the theory in question should accommodate as many reasonable conceptions of the good and religious doctrines as possible while the intelligibility condition stipulates that the theory must have a recognizable Confucian character. By and large, Joseph Chan’s Confucian perfectionism is able to satisfy the above two conditions. However, contrary to Chan (...)
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  5.  91
    Nietzsche’s Perfectionism and the Ethics of Care: A Brief Treatment.Justin Remhof - 2023 - In McNeal Michael J. (ed.), Nietzsche on Women and the Eternal-Feminine: A Critique of Truth and Values. Bloomsbury. pp. 153-159.
    Nietzsche appears antithetical to care ethics. He often mocks human dependency, for instance, sometimes in ways that appear sexist, and he famously challenges the legitimacy of compassion. Nietzsche’s positive ethical position is arguably some form of anti-egalitarian perfectionism which holds that goodness is constituted by individual human excellence. Perfectionism, however, coupled with a rejection of the ethical significance of dependency and virtues like compassion, can seem dangerous to modern sensibilities—especially to those in the care tradition. I think we (...)
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  6. Telic Perfectionism and the Badness of Pain.Antti Kauppinen - forthcoming - In Mauro Rossi & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Perspectives on Ill-Being. Oxford University Press.
    Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have (...)
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  7.  63
    Perfectionism from Wolff to Kant.Courtney D. Fugate - 2024 - In Courtney D. Fugate & John Hymers (eds.), Baumgarten and Kant on the Foundations of Practical Philosophy. Oxford University Press. pp. 181-202.
    This chapter traces the origins of Kant's perfectionism, and so of his moral law, to the formal conception of 'nature' that emerges from his reflection on the work of Wolff and Baumgarten. The conceptual preparation for this move turns upon two hinges, both of which trace to Baumgarten's subtle modifications of Wollffian perfectionism, namely, his fuller articulation of a non-consequentialist, internal morality of actions and what I call a 'hyper-Leibnizian' account of the idea and formal structure of nature (...)
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  8. Perfectionist Liberalisms and the Challenge of Pluralism.Mats Volberg - 2015 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 8:113-127.
    Based on Steven Wall's work I take perfectionism in political philosophy to include two components: the objective good and the non-neutral state. Some perfectionist theories aim to be liberal. But given the objective good component perfectionism seems to be unable to accommodate the commitment to value pluralism found in liberalism, this is what I call the challenge of pluralism. The perfectionist reply is to claim that their objective good can also be plural and thus there is no conflict. (...)
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  9. Perfectionism and Dignity.Pablo Gilabert - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (1):259-278.
    Perfectionism about well-being is, at a minimum, the view that people’s lives go well when, and because they realize their capacities. It is common to link perfectionism with an idea of human essence or nature, to yield the view that what constitutes people’s well-being is the development and exercise of characteristically human capacities. The first part of this paper considers the very serious problems associated with the idea of human nature or essence, and argues that perfectionism would (...)
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  10. Negative Perfectionism.Jeppe von Platz - 2012 - Philosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche 2 (1):101-122.
    In this essay I defend a variety of political perfectionism that I call negative perfectionism. Negative perfectionism is the position that if some design of the basic structure of society promotes objectively bad human living, then this should count as a reason against it. To give this hypothetical some bite, I draw on Rousseau’s diagnosis of the maladies of his society to defend two further claims: first, that some human lives are objectively bad, and, second, that some (...)
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  11. A Painful End for Perfectionism?Guy Fletcher - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46:233-250.
    This paper examines perfectionist attempts to explain the prudential badness of pain (its badness for those who experience it). It starts by considering simple perfectionist explanations, finding them wanting, before considering the most sophisticated perfectionist attempt to explain prudential badness: Gwen Bradford’s tripartite perfectionism. The paper argues that Bradford’s view, though an improvement on earlier perfectionist proposals, still does not satisfactorily explain the full set of prudentially bad pains. It ends by showing how this provides grounds for a general (...)
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  12. Tusian Perfectionism.Reza Hadisi - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics.
    I offer a reconstructive reading of Ṭūsī’s (1201-1274) account of natural goodness in the Naserian Ethics. I show that Ṭūsī’s version of Aristotelian ethics is especially well-suited to accommodate an intuition that is hard to integrate into a theory of natural goodness: human good is nobler or more elevated than animal and vegetative goods. To do this, I analyze Ṭūsī’s discussion of the relationship between different kinds of perfection from non-living material compounds to vegetative, animal, human, and divine beings. I (...)
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  13. Perfectionism, Political Justification, and Confucianism.Mang Franz - forthcoming - In J. D. Rooney & Patrick Zoll (eds.), Freedom and the Good: Beyond Classical Liberalism. Routledge.
    Broadly understood, perfectionism is the view that the state may, or should, promote valuable conceptions of the good life and discourage conceptions that are bad or worthless. This paper distinguishes between two types of perfectionist theory: comprehensive perfectionism and moderate perfectionism. Comprehensive perfectionism claims that perfectionism should be grounded in some comprehensive moral doctrine, while moderate perfectionism claims that perfectionism does not have to be based upon any comprehensive moral doctrine. Moderate perfectionism (...)
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  14. Teleological Dynamics of Organizational Performance: From Process to Practice and Perfectionism.Sidharta Chatterjee - 2016 - IUP Journal of Knowledge Management 14 (2):7-27.
    Workforce education forms one of the core aspects of organizational learning which aims for performance as well as efficiency. Learning is goal-oriented in business organizations. Organizations' activities are highly-oriented towards customer satisfaction. Organizations learn from practice and delivery of services to meet consumer needs and necessities. Perfection, efficiency and smart practices define today's multinational organizational culture. But how do the multinational organizations achieve such perfections in their business operations? This paper addresses this issue by linking teleological aspects of learning and (...)
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  15. Liberal Neutrality and Moderate Perfectionism.Franz Mang - 2013 - Res Publica 19 (4):297-315.
    (Winner of The Res Publica Essay Prize) This article defends a moderate version of state perfectionism by using Gerald Gaus’s argument for liberal neutrality as a starting point of discussion. Many liberal neutralists reject perfectionism on the grounds of respect for persons, but Gaus has explained more clearly than most neutralists how respect for persons justifies neutrality. Against neutralists, I first argue that the state may promote the good life by appealing to what can be called “the qualified (...)
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  16. (1 other version)Mill’s Perfectionism.Piergiorgio Donatelli - 2006 - Prolegomena 5 (2):149-164.
    J. S. Mill lays great emphasis on the importance of the notion of the individual as a progressive being. The idea that we need to conceive the self as an object of cultivation and perfection runs through Mill’s writings on various topics, and has played a certain role in recent interpretations. In this paper I propose a specific interpretation of Mill’s understanding of the self, along the lines of what Stanley Cavell identifies as a “perfectionist” concern for the self. Various (...)
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  17. Liberal Perfectionism, Moral Integrity, and Self-Respect.Anthony Taylor & Paul Billingham - 2018 - American Journal of Jurisprudence 63 (1):63-79.
    This paper presents a dilemma for Matthew Kramer’s view, as defended in his _Liberalism with Excellence_. A central aim of that book is to critique existing liberal perfectionist theories, which he labels “edificatory,” and to defend a different such theory, which he calls “aspirational.” Edificatory perfectionism holds that governments ought to promote citizens’ well-being directly by inducing them to live lives that are more wholesome, cultivated, or autonomous. Aspirational perfectionism, meanwhile, holds that governments ought to promote the conditions (...)
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  18. Who’s afraid of Perfectionist Moral Enhancement? A Reply to Sparrow.Pei-hua Huang - 2020 - Bioethics (8):865-871.
    Robert Sparrow recently argues that state-driven moral bioenhancement is morally problematic because it inevitably invites moral perfectionism. While sharing Sparrow’s worry about state-driven moral bioenhancement, I argue that his anti-perfectionism argument is too strong to offer useful normative guidance. That is, if we reject state-driven moral bioenhancement because it cannot remain neutral between different conceptions of the good, we might have to conclude that all forms of moral enhancement program ought not be made compulsory, including the least controversial (...)
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  19. Perfectionism, Economic (Dis)Incentives, and Political Coercion.Oran Moked - 2009 - Les ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 4 (2):214-225.
    May a government attempt to improve the lives of its citizens by promoting the activities it deems valuable and discouraging those it disvalues? May it engage in such a practice even when doing so is not a requirement of justice in some strict sense, and even when the judgments of value and disvalue in question are likely to be subject to controversy among its citizens? These questions have long stood at the center of debates between political perfectionists and political neutralists. (...)
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  20. Introduction: Confucian Perfectionism's Wary Embrace of Democracy.Yvonne Chiu - 2017 - Philosophy East and West 67 (1):1-2.
    With the stunning spread of democracy over large swathes of the globe since 1975 seemingly coming to a halt and perhaps receding in recent years, we revisit the question of whether democracy is really compatible with all types of cultures and philosophies, particularly those from Asia, where nearly two-thirds of the world’s population lives. Joseph Chan’s *Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times* (Princeton University Press, 2014) reconstructs Confucianism in order to meld it with democracy in a mutually (...)
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  21. Perfectionism and Non-Perfectionism in Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus.Iddo Landau - 2013 - In Beatrix Himmelmann (ed.), On Meaning in Life. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 139-152.
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  22. Hegel's Perfectionism and Freedom.Loughlin Gleeson & Heikki Ikäheimo - 2018 - In Douglas Moggach, Nadine Mooren & Michael Quante (eds.), Perfektionismus der Autonomie. Brill Fink. pp. 163-182.
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  23. On Political Legitimacy, Reasonableness, and Perfectionism.Thomas M. Besch - 2013 - Public Reason 5 (1):58-74.
    The paper advances a non-orthodox reading of political liberalism’s view of political legitimacy, the view of public political justification that comes with it, and the idea of the reasonable at the heart of these views. Political liberalism entails that full discursive standing should be accorded only to people who are reasonable in a substantive sense. As the paper argues, this renders political liberalism dogmatic and exclusivist at the level of arguments for or against normative theories of justice. Against that background, (...)
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  24. Love, Poetry, and the Good Life: Mill's Autobiography and Perfectionist Ethics.Samuel Clark - 2010 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (6):565-578.
    I argue for a perfectionist reading of Mill’s account of the good life, by using the failures of development recorded in his Autobiography as a way to understand his official account of happiness in Utilitarianism. This work offers both a new perspective on Mill’s thought, and a distinctive account of the role of aesthetic and emotional capacities in the most choiceworthy human life. I consider the philosophical purposes of autobiography, Mill’s disagreements with Bentham, and the nature of competent judges and (...)
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  25. Devotion and Well-Being: A Platonic Personalist Perfectionist Account.Philip Woodward - 2024 - Journal of Value Inquiry 58 (3):403-423.
    According to the traditional Christian understanding, being devoted to God is partly constitutive of human welfare. I explicate this tradition view, in three stages. First, I sketch a general theory of well-being which I call ‘Platonic Personalist Perfectionism.’ Second, I show how being devoted to God is uniquely perfective. I discuss three different components of the posture of devotion: abnegation (surrender of one’s will to God), adoration (responding to God’s goodness with attention, love and praise), and existential dependence (receiving (...)
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  26. Autonomy-minded Anti-perfectionism: Novel, Intuitive, and Sound.Ben Colburn - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Research 37:233-241.
    John Patrick Rudisill purports to identify various problems with my argument that the state promotion of autonomy is consistent with anti-perfectionism, viz. that it falsely pretends to be novel, is unacceptably counterintuitive because too restrictive and too permissive, and that it deploys self-defeating formal apparatus. I argue, in reply, that my argument is more novel than Rudisill gives me credit for; that properly understood my anti-perfectionism implies neither the implausible restrictions nor the unpalatable permissions that Rudisill claims; and (...)
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  27. Knowing as Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism.William Day - 2000 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2):99-111.
    This essay presents an approach to understanding improvised music, finding in the work of certain outstanding jazz musicians an emblem of Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of self-trust and of Stanley Cavell's notion of moral perfectionism. The essay critiques standard efforts to interpret improvised solos as though they were composed, contrasting that approach to one that treats the procedures of improvisation as derived from our everyday actions. It notes several levels of correspondence between our interest in jazz improvisations and the (...)
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  28. My Duty and the Morality of Others: Lying, Truth, and the Good Example in Fichte’s Normative Perfectionism.Stefano Bacin - 2021 - In Stefano Bacin & Owen Ware (eds.), Fichte's _System of Ethics_: A Critical Guide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 201-220.
    The aim of the paper is to shed light on some of the most original elements of Fichte’s conception of morality as expressed in his account of specific obligations. After some remarks on Fichte’s original classification of ethical duties, the paper focuses on the prohibition of lying, the duty to communicate our true knowledge, and the duty to set a good example. Fichte’s account of those duties not only goes beyond the mere justification of universally acknowledged demands, but also deploys (...)
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  29. Cavell’s “Moral Perfectionism” or Emerson’s “Moral Sentiment”?Joseph Urbas - 2010 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2 (2):41-53.
    What is properly Emersonian about moral perfectionism? Perhaps the best answer is: not much. Stanley Cavell's signature concept, which claims close kinship to Emerson's ethical philosophy, seems upon careful examination to be rather far removed from it. Once we get past the broad, unproblematic appeals to Emerson's “unattained but attainable self,” and consider the specific content and implications of perfectionism, the differences between the two thinkers become too substantive – and too fraught with serious misunderstandings – to be (...)
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  30. Is the debate between Rawlsians and liberal perfectionists about aesthetics?Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    Does the debate between Rawlsians and liberal perfectionists boil down to the following: for liberal perfectionists, the government should fund aesthetic projects that are in good taste; for Rawlsians, the government should be neutral on the aesthetic value of anything? If so, liberal perfectionists are committed to the view that there is objective aesthetic value. In this paper, I argue that within the Rawlsian system is a thesis that is difficult to reconcile with objectivity about aesthetics.
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  31. A Chariot Between Two Armies: A Perfectionist Reading of the Bhagavadgītā.Paul Deb - 2021 - Philosophy East and West 71 (4):851-871.
    Interpretations of the ethical significance of the Bhagavadgītā typically understand the debate between Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa in terms of a struggle between consequentialist and deontological doctrines. In this paper, I provide instead a reading of the Gītā which draws on a conception of moral thinking that can be understood to cut across those positions – that developed by Stanley Cavell, which he calls ‘Emersonian Moral Perfectionism’. In so doing, I emphasise how Kṛṣṇa’s consolation of Arjuna can centrally and fruitfully (...)
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  32. The Limits of Spinoza's Perfectionism.Leonardo Moauro - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (35):947-976.
    Spinoza is often described as an ethical perfectionist—one who accepts an account of the good centered on the development of our natural capacities. Perfectionists typically accept a perfectionist theory of value, in which the properties of good and evil are grounded in a normative property of perfection. Yet I argue that Spinoza rejects a perfectionist theory of value because he believes it conflicts with the doctrine of necessitarianism. This leads him to conclude that attributions of perfection in ethical contexts must (...)
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  33.  94
    Introducing the symposium : Spinoza on perfectionism and education.Johan Dahlbeck & Klas Roth - forthcoming - Theory and Research in Education.
    This paper introduces the symposium on Spinoza on perfectionism and education. It frames the key issue of Spinoza’s perfectionism in terms of a perennial educational problem and introduces the different contributions to this special issue, where Steven Nadler’s main paper is followed by a series of full paper responses by a group of Spinoza scholars and educational theorists. To round off the special issue, Nadler comments on the responses to his main paper.
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  34. Examining a Late Development in Kant’s Conception of Our Moral Life: On the Interactions among Perfectionism, Eschatology, and Contentment in Ethics.Jaeha Woo - 2024 - TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (1):30-51.
    In the first half, I suggest that Kant’s conception of our moral life goes through a significant shift after 1793, with reverberations in his eschatology. The earlier account, based on the postulate of immortality, describes our moral life as an endless pursuit of the highest good, but all this changes in the later account, and I point out three possible reasons for this change of heart. In the second half, I explore how the considerations Kant brings up to argue for (...)
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  35. Some Further Concerns with Colburn's Autonomy-minded Anti-perfectionism.Ben Colburn - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Research 37:243-248.
    In this rejoinder to Ben Colburn, I (1) further press, while modulating, my charge that his autonomy-minded anti-perfectionism is insufficiently novel, (2) articulate a new and distinct worry about the formal analysis that is at the center of his argument, and (3) enhance my criticism that the view Colburn defends is too permissive.
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  36. What are the varieties of liberalism? Don’t forget backdoor liberal perfectionism.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    Jonathan Quong classifies varieties of liberalism based on two yes-or-no questions. I show that there is a kind of perfectionist liberalism that cannot be located on his map. I call it backdoor liberal perfectionism.
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  37. Language Impairment and Legal Literacy: Is a Degree of Perfectionism Unavoidable?Cristian Timmermann - 2017 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 8 (1):43-45.
    Wszalek offers a detailed examination of the challenges involved in assisting people with language and communication impairments in the comprehension of legal language and concepts (LLC). If we settle for a minimum threshold of LLC comprehension, we are likely to observe that some people will not meet this threshold due to personal choices, such as not having practiced reading sufficiently or having avoided intellectually stimulating social interactions.
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  38. “I Saw a Different Life. I Can't Stop Seeing It”: Perfectionist Visions in Revolutionary Road.Paul Deb - 2021 - Film-Philosophy 25 (3):251-271.
    In this article, I claim that Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is a recent version of the film genre that Stanley Cavell calls the “melodrama of the unknown woman”. Accordingly, my discussion focuses on two key elements of that identification: the film's overriding dramatic and thematic emphasis on conversation; and the central characters’ relation to the wider social and political concerns of America.
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  39. Epistemic Welfare Bads and Other Failures of Reason.Antti Kauppinen - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46:251-279.
    Very plausibly, there is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality – even if, as in a kind of Truman Show scenario, intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive standards. One of these self-defining capacities, or capacities whose exercise (...)
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  40. Wolff, the Pursuit of Perfection and What We Owe to Each Other: The Case of Veracity and Lying.Stefano Bacin - 2024 - In Sonja Schierbaum, Michael Walschots & John Walsh (eds.), Christian Wolff's German Ethics: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 237-252.
    My chapter deals with an important part of how Wolff pursued the normative ambitions of his ethics in giving practical guidance with regard to specific moral issues. I first consider how Wolff’s ethics tackles the duties to others, which traditionally represent a difficult issue for moral perfectionism. In this regard, I argue that Wolff’s strategy combines two aspects: (a) he includes in perfection non-active aspects and (b) operates with an agent-neutral notion of perfection, in spite of important passages that (...)
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  41. Neutrality and Excellence.Mark R. Reiff - 2022 - In Mark McBride & Visa A. J. Kurki (eds.), Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 271-296.
    In Liberalism with Excellence, Matthew Kramer makes an argument for how excellence may enter in into liberalism, despite liberalism’s strong commitment to neutrality. Kramer seeks to challenge not only the uncompromising rejection of this position by liberals such a Jonathan Quong, but also the so-called “blended” approach of “soft-perfectionist” scholars such as Joseph Raz and George Sher. In this essay, I do not so much challenge Kramer’s approach as offer an alternative for accomplishing the same thing. Under my proposal, certain (...)
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  42. The Attack on Liberalism.Mark R. Reiff - 2007 - In Michael D. A. Freeman & Ross Harrison (eds.), Law and philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Liberalism is today under attack. This attack is being fought along two fronts, and so appears to be coming from different directions, but it is actually coming exclusively from the right. One source is Islamic fundamentalism, and the other is American neo-conservatism, which in turn unites elements of Christian fundamentalism with elements of neo-Platonic political philosophy and neo-Aristotelian moral theory. Both Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-conservatism are perfectionist views, and while perfectionist attacks on liberalism are nothing new, there is a (...)
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  43. Must We Be Perfect?: A Case Against Supererogation.Megan Fritts & Calum Miller - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63.
    In this paper we offer an argument against supererogation and in favour of moral perfectionism. We argue three primary points: 1) That the putative moral category is not generated by any of the main normative ethical systems, and it is difficult to find space for it in these systems at all; 2) That the primary support for supererogation is based on intuitions, which can be undercut by various other pieces of evidence; and 3) That there are better reasons to (...)
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  44. Fichte’s Normative Ethics: Deontological or Teleological?Owen Ware - 2018 - Mind 127 (506):565-584.
    One of the most controversial issues to emerge in recent studies of Fichte concerns the status of his normative ethics, i.e., his theory of what makes actions morally good or bad. Scholars are divided over Fichte’s view regarding the ‘final end’ of moral striving, since it appears this end can be either a specific goal permitting maximizing calculations (the consequentialist reading defended by Kosch 2015), or an indeterminate goal permitting only duty-based decisions (the deontological reading defended by Wood 2016). While (...)
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  45. Not Always Worth the Effort: Difficulty and the Value of Achievement.Sukaina Hirji - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2):525-548.
    Recent literature has argued that what makes certain activities ranging from curing cancer to running a marathon count as achievements, and what makes achievements intrinsically valuable is, centrally, that they involve great effort. Although there is much the difficulty-based view gets right, I argue that it generates the wrong results about some central cases of achievement, and this is because it is too narrowly focused on only one perfectionist capacity, the will. I propose a revised perfectionist account on which an (...)
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  46. Nussbaum, Kant, and the Capabilities Approach to Dignity.Paul Formosa & Catriona Mackenzie - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (5):875-892.
    The concept of dignity plays a foundational role in the more recent versions of Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities theory. However, despite its centrality to her theory, Nussbaum’s conception of dignity remains under-theorised. In this paper we critically examine the role that dignity plays in Nussbaum’s theory by, first, developing an account of the concept of dignity and introducing a distinction between two types of dignity, status dignity and achievement dignity. Next, drawing on this account, we analyse Nussbaum’s conception of dignity and (...)
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  47. Confucianism and Public Political Discussion.Franz Mang - 2023 - Comparative Political Theory 3 (2):154-168.
    What role, if any, should Confucianism play in the politics of our time? In some of my previous works, I claimed that modern liberal states are not permitted to promote Confucian values on the basis of their intrinsic merits. Yet, drawing insights from Joseph Chan’s moderate state perfectionism and John Rawls’s wide view of public political culture, I proposed the “wide view of moderate perfectionism.” According to this view, in public political discussion, citizens should be allowed to deliberate (...)
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  48. The Case of M and D in Context: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell and Moral Teaching and Learning.Lesley Jamieson - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (2):425-448.
    Iris Murdoch's famous case of M and D illustrates the moral importance of learning to see others in a more favourable light through renewed attention. Yet if we do not read this case in the wider context of Murdoch's work, we are liable to overlook the attitudes and transformations involved in coming to change one's mind as M does. Stanley Cavell offers one such reading and denies that the case represents a change in M's sense of herself or the possibilities (...)
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  49. Illiberal Socialism.Robert S. Taylor - 2014 - Social Theory and Practice 40 (3):433-460.
    Is “liberal socialism” an oxymoron? Not quite, but I will demonstrate here that it is a much more unstable and uncommon hybrid than scholars had previously thought and that almost all liberals should reject socialism, even in its most attractive form. More specifically, I will show that three leading varieties of liberalism—neutralist, plural-perfectionist, and deliberative-democratic—are incompatible with even a moderate form of socialism, viz., associational market socialism. My paper will also cast grave doubt on Rawls’s belief that justice as fairness (...)
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  50. Autonomy and Moral Rationalism: Kant’s Criticisms of ‘Rationalist’ Moral Principles (1762-1785).Stefano Bacin - 2018 - In Stefano Bacin & Oliver Sensen (eds.), The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 48-66.
    This paper sheds light on Kant’s notion of autonomy in his moral philosophy by considering Kant’s critique of the rationalist theories of morality that Kant discussed in his lectures on practical philosophy from the 1760s to the time of the Groundwork. The paper first explains Kant’s taxonomy of moral theories and his perspective on the history of ethics. Second, it considers Kant's arguments against the two main variants of ‘rationalism’ as he construes it, that is, perfectionism and theological voluntarism, (...)
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