Showing papers on "Morality published in 1978"

Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations

Abstract: This classic work examines the issues surrounding military theory, war crimes, and the spoils of war from the Athenian attack on Melos to the My Lai massacre.. A revised and updated classic treatment of the morality of war written by one of our country's leading philosophers. Just and Unjust Wars examines a variety of conflicts in order to understand exactly why, according to Walzer, "the argument about war and justice is still a political and moral necessity." Walzer's classic work draws on historical illustrations that range all the way from the Athenian attack on Melos to this morning's headlines, and uses the testimony of participants-decision makers and victims alike-to examine the moral issues of warfare.

Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology

Abstract: A collection of 17 essays exploring the central issues of the philosophy of the mind, and human interaction with psychology and evolutionary biology. This book questions the relationship between psychology and morality as well as exploring the concept of human intentionality. It argues that intentional attributes such as desires, goals, beliefs and knowledge are purely mechanistic. The author also considers the meaning of mental imagery, sensations, pain and other puzzling aspects of consciousness. Central to the discussion of the book is the question of whether psychology can support a vision of humans as moral agents, free to choose what they do and responsible for their actions.

Reason and Morality

Abstract: "Most modern philosophers attempt to solve the problem of morality from within the epistemological assumptions that define the dominant cultural perspective of our age. Alan Gewirth's "Reason and Morality" is a major work in this ongoing enterprise. Gewirth develops, with patience and skill, what he calls a 'modified naturalism' in which morality is derived by logic alone from the concept of action. . . . I think that the publication of "Reason and Morality" is a major event in the history of moral philosophy. It develops with great power a new and exciting position in ethical naturalism. No one, regardless of philosophical stance, can read this work without an enlargement of mind. It illuminates morality and agency for all."-E. M. Adams, "The Review of Metaphysics" "This is a fascinating study of an apparently intractable problem. Gewirth has provided plenty of material for further discussion, and his theory deserves serious consideration. He is always aware of possible rejoinders and argues in a rigorous manner, showing a firm grasp of the current state of moral and political philosophy."-"Mind"

Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920

Abstract: Part One. The Jacksonian Era 1. The Urban Threat Emerges: A Strategy Takes Shape 2. The Tract Societies: Transmitting a Traditional Morality by Untraditional Means 3. The Sunday School in the City: Patterned Order in a Disorderly Setting 4. Urban Moral Reform in the Early Republic: Some Concluding Reflections Part Two. The Mid-Century Decades: Years of Frustration and Innovation 5. Heightened Concern, Varied Responses 6. Narrowing the Problem: Slum Dwellers and Street Urchins 7. Young Men and the City: The Emergence of the YMCA Part Three. The Gilded Age: Urban Moral Control in a Turbulent Time 8. "The Ragged Edge of Anarchy": The Emotional Context of Urban Social Control in the Gilded Age 9. American Protestantism and the Moral Challenge of the Industrial City 10. Building Character among the Urban Poor: The Charity Organization Movement 11. The Urban Moral Awakening of the 1890s 12. The Two Faces of Urban Moral Reform in the 1890s Part Four. The Progressives and the City: Common Concerns, Divergent Strategies 13. Battling the Saloon and the Brothel: The Great Coercive Crusades 14. One Last, Decisive Struggle: The Symbolic Component of the Great Coercive Crusades 15. Positive Environmentalism: The Ideological Underpinnings 16. Housing, Parks, and Playgrounds: Positive Environmentalism in Action 17. The Civic Ideal and the Urban Moral Order 18. The Civic Ideal Made Real: The Moral Vision of the Progressive City Planners 19. Positive Environmentalism and the Urban Moral-Control Tradition: Contrasts and Continuities 20. Getting Right with Gesellschaft: The Decay of the Urban Moral-Control Impulse in the 1920s and After Notes Index

Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy

Abstract: Preface to 2002 Edition Preface Introduction Acknowledgements 1. Virtues and Vices 2. The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect 3. Euthanasia 4. Free Will as Involving Determinism 5. Hume on Moral Judgement 6. Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values 7. Moral Arguments 8. Moral Beliefs 9. Goodness and Choice 10. Reasons for Actions and Desires 11. Morality as a System for Hypothetical Imperatives 12. A Reply to Professor Frankena 13. Are Moral Considerations Overriding? 14. Approval and Disapproval Index

Public and private morality

Abstract: 1. Morality and pessimism Stuart Hampshire 2. Public and private morality Stuart Hampshire 3. Politics and moral character Bernard Williams 4. Ruthlessness in public life Thomas Nagel 5. Rights, goals and fairness T. M. Scanlon 6. Liberalism Ronald Dworkin.

The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II

Abstract: Middleton undertakes to describe the essential spirit of Ricardian Poetry. By means of a survey that includes Chaucer, Langland, Gower, Thomas Usk, and the Lollard Knights, Middleton suggests that the essential feature of this late-fourteenth century literature is its aim "to be a 'common voice' to serve the 'common good'" (95). This public poetry is not topical in nature, but is rather defined by "a constant relation of speaker to audience within an ideally conceived worldly community, a relation which has become the poetic subject" (95). This is a secular poetry, and "its central pieties are worldly felicity and peaceful, harmonious communal existence" (95). It "speaks for bourgeois moderation, a course between the rigorous absolutes of religious rule on the one hand, and, on the other, the rhetorical hyperboles and emotional vanities of the courtly style" (95). As a result, even the topic of love has a clearly public dimension. Thomas Usk, in his Testament of Love presents himself as "a vernacular philosopher of love," but his more immediate concern is with the trials of his public career. Gower's Testament of Love, the CA, is likewise written out of the understanding that love is above all "a communal and historical bond" (97) rather than a transcendental force or a merely erotic drive. The notion of public poetry also reveals the similarities between Gower and Langland. Both are "essentially 'one-poem' writers" (98) who revised their work to keep it socially current. In addition, their poetry addresses the entire community rather than a coterie or patron. Even when Gower writes to Richard II, the king "is not the main imagined audience, but an occasion for gathering and formulating what is on the common mind" (107). This understanding of audience may also have occasioned Gower's cancellation of his reference to Chaucer in the CA, for such a reference, while accessible to a coterie audience, would not suit the "commune" at large. The attempt to speak for all citizens, also evident in Gower's "In Praise of Peace," brings with it a unique style. Middleton calls it a "plain style" that is "socially and psychologically well suited to the presentation of lay morality and large experiential truths" (98). For instance, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represents an attempt to let each pilgrim present his own experience of the world in his own speech, and so the narratorial "I" stretches itself "to the point of transparency" by occupying "the whole field of moral vision" (99). Another word that describes this plain style is "common," whether in its adjectival form (for instance, in the Ciceronian "common profit," or res publica) or as a noun (either to denote the commonwealth as a whole, or specifically the third estate, the commons). All of these forms demonstrate "its uniformly non-abstract, non-speculative cast" (101) as well as the fact that the word is hardly ever used in a pejorative sense. The style of public poetry is well suited to a vision of poetry as "a mediating activity" (101). Ricardian poets invariably seek out a "middle style" (101), between "ernest and game," and "sumwhat of lust, sumwhat of lore" (qtd on 101-02). For Gower this medial course implies "a perspective less exclusively detached and cosmic, more implicated in, and circumscribed by, the mortal world" (102). This perspective is evident in the character of Gower-as-Amans, which Middleton calls "an implicated speaking presence" (102). Moreover, the whole enterprise of telling old exempla presents "a 'middle weie' between past and future, between truth and our need for it" (102). In the Latin colophon to the CA this middle way is associated with a notion of labour, for Gower locates his enterprise "between work and leisure" ("inter labores et ocia"; qtd on 101). The view that poetic composition for the instruction of others is a fully legitimate way of doing one's share of the world's work lends surprising dignity to the otherwise fairly modest claims of poetry. Gower claims to speak for the "common vois" and what this voice seeks is above all peace and social harmony. This explains why Gower writes "In Praise of Peace," as well as why Amans opposes Genius' argument that war confers glory which wins love. In relation to Amans, Middleton suggests that we should not dismiss the figure of the persona (Chaucer-the-Pilgrim, Gower-the-lover, Will-the-truthseeker) as merely a fictive character and therefore dramatically circumscribed. Even though the persona might not precisely represent the opinions of the author, we should nevertheless take him "seriously" (108), for the suggestion he offers is that in this life we will never transcend worldly experience. As such, the persona represents a heroic effort to achieve a common vantage point, an effort that is finally not treated satirically (incidentally, here and in the Appendix Middleton interacts with John Peter's work on satire and complaint). Indeed, this reality of living experientially is demonstrated by the fact that the figures of instruction (Genius as well as Will's teachers) are "a remarkably inept lot and not especially well disposed to help the seeker" (110). The limits to knowledge and perfection in the here and now are also evident in the lack of poetic closure in Piers Plowman and the CA, for these works do not end "in world-transcendence, but in some form of return to the world" (111). In her own form of closure, Middleton leaves it for others to speculate as to the historical causes for the public poetry that flourished in Ricardian England. [CvD]

La famille et l'amour sous le Haut-Empire romain

Abstract: The family and love in the Early Roman Empire ; ; Between the age of Cesar and that of Marcus Aurelius, sexual morality and sexual practice underwent a profound transformation A sexuality in which the essential thing was to be active, was generally replaced by a heterosexual sexuality; a morality of obligatory acts gave way to a morality of conjugal love, in which the couple was the normal unit; and, finally, marriage became an institution adopted throughout the society More generally, a morality of statutory acts (which differed according to social class) and of interdictions rooted simply in the feeling of shame gave way to universalist morality of interiorized virtues, in which the forbidden became a matter of morality or of immora- lity The causes of this transformation were political (transition from a competitive feudal system to a service nobility) and psychological (capacity of self-affirmation plebian conservatism and self-repression) Now, this pagan morality of the time of the Antonines is identical to Christian morality; yet it took form before the spread of Christianity This suggests not that we should reverse the relationship morality-religion but rather that we should split up the aggregate called "religion" into a number of distinct aspects

Moral Evaluations and Judgments of Responsibility

Abstract: There has been a failure to distinguish between moral evaluations and responsibility in the literature on moral judg- ment. Consequently, interpretive problems have occurred because the dependent measures of each have been discussed as if they were equivalent. An attempt was made in the present research to examine the comparability of moral evaluations and respon- sibility judgments. Factor analyses of the ratings of an ag- gression and an accident story by 94 women and 85 men revealed that moral evaluations (e.g. praise-blame) and responsibility judgments are distinct and cannot be interpreted interchangeably.

Violence and Responsibility

Abstract: Originally published in 1980 this book argues that we are all responsible for the harm we could have prevented and explores the effect of this conclusion on a morality which makes fundamental the belief that we ought not to harm others if we can possibly avoid it. A theory of responsibility is developed and defended which has consequences for the way we live as well as for a number of problems in contemporary moral, political and social philosophy, and in jurisprudence. In particular, the author attacks the view that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die and proposes a radical conception of violence. Among other controversial issues covered in the book are neutrality, the ethics of organ transplants and the allocation of scarce resources.

Developmental Stages in Children's Aesthetic Responses

Abstract: For some time we have been trying to identify developmental stages in children's responses to paintings. This article is primarily a description of our findings to date. Although the findings are still tentative, the line of thought presented might nevertheless be of interest to readers of this journal. A few explanatory remarks seem necessary before we present our findings, though we keep them to a minimum here in order to save space for the descriptive material. The responses of individuals to paintings differ on many dimensions. Our central problem has been to discover which of these many kinds of differences are cognitive-developmental in character. In looking for answers we have had in mind a parallel with the work of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Selman: we were seeking a cognitive-developmental account of aesthetic response. One motivation was a conviction about the autonomous character of aesthetic experience, i.e., a belief that it is sui generis in an important sense. Aesthetic experience is not moral experience, just as morality is not science. Many philosophers have regarded these three as basically different modes of experience.1 This suggests, to a cognitive-developmentalist, that each of the three will have its own developmental history, distinct in the way that Kohlberg's stages of moral judgment are distinct from Piaget's stages of scientific

Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction

Abstract: This text covers core issues in the philosophy of religion. This second edition includes new material on a variety of topics: God's moral goodness and its relation to human morality; ordinary experiences of God; the soul-making theodicy advanced by John Hick; and religious beliefs without evidence (including Alvin Plantinga's position). In addition, a new chapter discusses how religions differ from each other and the problems these differences raise for the justification of religious belief.

Public and Private Morality: RUTHLESSNESS IN PUBLIC LIFE

Abstract: The great modern crimes are public crimes. To a degree the same can be said of the past, but the growth of political power has introduced a scale of massacre and despoliation that makes the efforts of private criminals, pirates, and bandits seem truly modest. Public crimes are committed by individuals who play roles in political, military, and economic institutions. (Because religions are politically weak, crimes committed on their behalf are now rare.) Yet unless the offender has the originality of Hitler, Stalin, or Amin, the crimes don't seem to be fully attributable to the individual himself. Famous political monsters have moral personalities large enough to transcend the boundaries of their public roles; they take on the full weight of their deeds as personal moral property. But they are exceptional. Not only are ordinary soldiers, executioners, secret policemen, and bombardiers morally encapsulated in their roles, but so are most secretaries of defense or state, and even many presidents and prime ministers. They act as office-holders or functionaries, and thereby as individuals they are insulated in a puzzling way from what they do: insulated both in their own view and in the view of most observers. Even if one is in no doubt about the merits of the acts in question, the agents seem to have a slippery moral surface, produced by their roles or offices.

The Cognitive‐Developmental Approach to Morality: a Reply to Kurtines and Greif

Abstract: A recent critique of Kohlberg's cognitive‐developmental approach to morality by Kurtines and Greif is examined in detail. It is found to contribute some useful indications of studies which were then needed, and many of which have been published since the critique appeared. A careful analysis of the literature on moral development, however, shows Kurtines and Greif s criticisms to be largely unfounded, and in several cases misrepresentative of research findings. As a result the empirical support for the ‘stage’ and ‘sequence’ components of Kohlberg's theory is underestimated, as is the evidence in favour of a relationship between moral judgment and moral action. The misunderstandings largely reflect a common and mistaken attempt to reduce structural development in cognition to static psychometric traits, an attempt which confuses developmental theories with measurement instruments.

Principles for a Catholic morality

Abstract: • Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. • Jesus came to teach us God’s ways and Commandments. • Obeying Jesus’ moral teachings leads to life. • Disobeying Jesus’ moral teachings leads to destruction for individuals and society. • Example of pride: makes an individual feel very self sufficient, an attitude that eventually leaves him at a loss at times of sickness, death, loss of job and the like. • Example of lying: leads to destruction of trust within society.

Western conceptions of a universal moral order

Abstract: I Am not concerned in this paper to discover what is peculiarly western about western conceptions of a world moral order, but merely to assemble some ideas about morality that recur in western thought - which may or may not be features of other civilizations as well. It is my ignorance of other civilizations that prevents me from undertaking the seductively neat task of deciding what is unique about western values, but it is the same ignorance that saves me from making the mistake of arriving at what is essentially western by subtracting from its history that which it shares with other cultures. “Western Values in International Relations” is a field that has been pioneered by Martin Wight in such a way as to stay the hand of a glossator, but it is the word “universal” in my title that distinguishes the present undertaking from Wight's work. His aim was to follow some lines of thought derived from domestic politics in the West into the field of diplomacy and international relations. My aim is to pursue them further, beyond international society to world society, and to take into moral account not merely the state and the order of states, but also the individual and certain actors and institutions in world politics whose concerns have been regarded conventionally as falling outside the domain of ‘diplomacy and international relations’.

Entrepreneurship, Entitlement, and Economic Justice

Abstract: Nozick's entitlement theory of justice plays a crucial role in his carefully and brilliantly crafted case for the minimal state. Acceptance of the theory, it appears, sweeps away with one stroke all those demands for state interference with the market that rest on the claims of distributive justice. The persuasive elegance with which Nozick develops his position can leave few thoughtful, moralist critics of un curbed capitalism unimpressed, at least, by the strong claims which Nozick advances, precisely on the grounds of economic justice, for the free market. It will be the thesis of this paper, how ever, that Nozick's theory of entitlement, im portant though it undoubtedly is for any de fense of the morality of laissez faire, does not at least without significant reformulation solve all the difficulties that may be alleged to exist in respect of the justice of the market. Pursuing this theme, we will offer a suggestion for supplementing (or perhaps reformulating) Nozick's theory which may not only equip it to handle the difficulties to which the paper draws attention, but may, in fact, render its defense of the morality of the market even more straightforward and subject to fewer qualifica tions than Nozick apparently believes to be necessary. Nozick's theory depends, in its application to the market, largely on the view that with few definite exceptions, the market reflects ad herence to the principles of justice both in the original acquisition of holdings (from the natu ral state) and in subsequent transfers of holdings in market transactions. The difficulties to which this paper draws attention pertain to the claim that the market is fully consistent with the principles of justice in transfer. This claim carries conviction, it will be shown, only if we are prepared to incorporate into our entitlement theory certain somewhat novel views concern ing the morality of the entrepreneurial role. But, we will then argue, recognition of this aspect of the entrepreneurial role makes it no longer useful to distinguish, as sharply as Nozick does, between justice in original acquisition, on the one hand, and justice in transfer on the other. So that, while the entitlement theory may, it will turn out, indeed be deployed to defend the morality of the market?and with fewer reservations, perhaps, than in Nozick's own statement?this will have been achieved only through a fairly substantial reformulation of that theory.

A meta-ethics for professional morality.

Abstract: In the ordinary course of events, we expect to hear people give advice or voice positions on issues by virtue of their professional capacity. As philosophers, we expect this in the case of 'technical hypotheticals' ("In my professional capacity as an engineer, I advise that, if you want that bridge to stand up, you will need more struts.") Somewhat more difficult, but still explicable, is the 'technical imperative.' ("As your doctor, I must tell you that you must never work that hard again.") But in addition to these covert and overt acknowledgments of professional expertise, we sometimes attribute to professionals a morality of their own, attached to their professional role. By that I mean to say, we feel that in reaching decisions professionals are more constrained by their professional values thank are nonprofessionals and, conversely, take into less account those considerations which ordinarily apply. Now this is truly puzzling and will take some explanation; for morality is not, after all, like ajacket which you may put on or take off (perhaps exchanging it for a white coat or even a cardigan sweater). For our standard academic conception of morality is one of a unitary construct, applying in the same way and with equal force to all human beings (with account taken for morally relevant differences). This is the underpinning to the principle of generalization in ethics. Are we merely wrong when we speak of a discrete professional morality? Is this perhaps just a loosefafon de parler; or, does the concept of professional morality' point to some real complication in our description or reconstruction of moral discourse?

The European witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries

Abstract: In this study, Professor Trevor-Roper reveals the social and intellectual background to the witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries. Orthodoxy and heresy had become deeply entrenched notions in religion and ethics as an evangelical church exaggerated the heretical theology and loose morality of its opponents. Gradually, non-conformists as well as whole societies began to be seen in terms of stereotypes and witches became the scapegoats for all the ills of society.