Morality

About: Morality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 22623 publications have been published within this topic receiving 545733 citations. The topic is also known as: moral & morals.

Moral Reputation: An Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective

Abstract: From an evolutionary point of view, the function of moral behaviour may be to secure a good reputation as a co-operator. The best way to do so may be to obey genuine moral motivations. Still, one's moral reputation maybe something too important to be entrusted just to one's moral sense. A robust concern for one's reputation is likely to have evolved too. Here we explore some of the complex relationships between morality and reputation both from an evolutionary and a cognitive point of view. People may behave morally because they intrinsically value doing so—a genuine moral reason—or in order to gain the approval of others—an instrumental reason. Both moral and reputational concerns are commonly involved in moral behaviour and cannot be pried apart without understanding their intricate relationships. Here we aim at contributing to such an understanding by investigating the role, content, and mechanisms of moral reputation. 1. Function and Motivation of Moral Behaviour

Caring: Nurses, Women and Ethics

Abstract: Preface. 1. Two Nurses. 2. A History of Subservience. 3. Advocacy or Subservience for the Sake of the Patients? 4. Ethics. 5. Women and Ethics - Is Morality Gendered? 6. Care Versus Justice : An Old Debate in New Clothes? 7."Yes" to Caring - but "No" to a Nursing Ethics of Care. 8. Just Caring at the End of Life. 9. Nursing - The Slumbering Giant. Bibliography.

Feminist Values in Public Relations

Abstract: This article explores the parallels between feminist values and the effective, ethical practice of public relations. It begins by establishing a link between feminine gender and feminist values, which include cooperation, respect, caring, nurturance, interconnection, justice, equity, honesty, sensitivity, perceptiveness, intuition, altruism, fairness, morality, and commitment. The article provides conceptual definitions for such central terms as gender, sex and sex roles, femininity and masculinity, feminists and feminism, and women. Throughout, the values associated with the feminine gender are juxtaposed with the norms of public relations practice. The goal is to help establish the field as a vital and ethical organizational function. The article concludes with the suggestion that teaching values is a critical precursor to teaching ethics along the way to incorporating feminist values into professional practice.

Liberalism and Communitarianism

Abstract: It is a commonplace amongst communitarians, socialists and feminists alike that liberalism is to be rejected for its excessive ‘individualism’ or ‘atomism,’ for ignoring the manifest ways in which we are ‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ in various social roles and communal relationships. The effect of these theoretical flaws is that liberalism, in a misguided attempt to protect and promote the dignity and autonomy of the individual, has undermined the associations and communities which alone can nurture human flourishing. My plan is to examine the resources available to liberalism to meet these objections. My primary concern is with what liberals can say in response, not with what particular liberals actually have said in the past. Still, as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts, if nothing else, I hope to show how my arguments are related to the political morality of modem liberals from J.S. Mill through to Rawls and Dworkin. The term ‘liberal’ has been applied to many different theories in many different fields, but I’m using it in this fairly restricted sense. First, I’m dealing with a political morality, a set of moral arguments about the justification of political action and political institutions. Second, my concern is with this modem liberalism, not seventeenth-century liberalism, and I want to leave entirely open what the relationship is between the two. It might be that the developments initiated by the ‘new liberals’ are really an abandonment of what was definitive of classical liberalism. G.A. Cohen, for example, says that since they rejected the principle of ‘self-ownership’ which was definitive of classical liberalism (e.g. in Locke), these new liberals should instead be called ‘social democrats.’My concern is to defend their political morality, whatever the proper label.

Greek tragedy and political theory

Abstract: Preface Political philosophy is tragic thought. . . . Without a dramatic sense of fate and mutability no rational intelligence would turn to this . . . subject. —Judith Shklar on the occasion of the death of Hannah ArendtThree related developments are responsible for my interest in editing a volume on the subject of Greek tragedy and political theory. The first is the crisis of American culture. I have no intention of rehearsing what is by now well known, and better said by others, except to note the obvious: as people, and as a people, we seem more confused than usual about what is worth cultivating, caring for, and nourishing. The second development is a parallel crisis in political theory. From one point of view the proliferation of journals and panels at professional conferences is a sign of political theory's vitality, as the preoccupation with method is indicative of its philosophical or scientific maturity. But from another point of view this proliferation simply replicates the division of labor and esoteric expertise that characterizes both the university and society in general; and the preoccupation with method has isolated theorists from politics. What makes all this ironic is that the great paradigmatic theorists aspired to integrate human activities, relationships, and beliefs into a theoretical whole so as to repair, reform, or transform a political whole. A third development is a recent shift in the interpretation of classical texts and culture. Somewhere Goethe writes of classical Greece as a magic mirror in which, when living men and women gaze seeking the image of a culture long dead, they see not unreturning ghosts but the half-veiled face of their own destiny. What we now see in that mirror is Nietzsche. For whatever reasons—the trauma of the newly past Holocaust and the threat of a new, nuclear one, the disappointment of revolutionary hopes (including those of the 1960s), the relentless brutality of "small" wars, the increasing centralization of the state and bureaucratization of society, the erosion of permanent ties of place and person, the corruption of our institutions and the blatant failures of our foreign policy—we read tragedy differently than previous generations. For those no longer enamored of technological utopias, less sure that history means progress and that more is better, and more aware of the finitude of our power and powers, the image of classical Greece is less one of serenity, proportion, and rationality than of turbulence, dissonance, and an ambivalent morality that plagues action and passion. As Charles Segal argues in his essay in this volume, it is the darkness tragedy contains and discloses that increasingly fascinates contemporary critics and readers. They find in it both the hidden patterns of contemporary life that the conscious mind is largely unwilling or unable to face, and the resources to explore "beneath the surface of [their] own highly rationalized, desacralized, excessively technologized culture." As this language suggests, the new interpretation of tragedy invigorates and gives depth to the pessimism of such modern social theorists as Max Weber (as evident in the concluding page of the Protestant Ethic), Jacques Ellul, the Frankfurt School, and Michel Foucault. Bernard Knox gives an example of this shift in sensibility. Reviewing the Fagles translation of the Oresteia, he notes that an earlier generation read the trilogy as the triumph of civilization over the darkly mysterious forces of a sinister primitivism. For that generation the promise of wisdom born of suffering, the triumph of an ultimately benevolent Zeus, the joint human and divine consecration of a just Athens, in which all conflicting forces and principles were accorded due place and honor, seemed to mirror their achievements. But we are no longer so sure of ourselves, and so we read and watch Greek tragedy differently. Knox recalls a performance of The Eumenides in which the audience was roused to a high pitch of emotions, not by the plea of extenuating circumstances, or Orestes' acquittal of murder, but by the Furies' warning, "There is a time when terror helps," which Athene echoes: "Never / banish terror from the gates" (699). It is no wonder that Brian Vickers concludes his chapter on the trilogy by observing, "Reading the Oresteia makes one afraid for one's life."