Value (ethics)

About: Value (ethics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 21347 publications have been published within this topic receiving 461372 citations.

Between affiliation and autonomy: navigating pathways of women's empowerment and gender justice in rural Bangladesh.

Abstract: Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent" They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh It draws on their narratives to explore the collective strategies through which these organizations sought to empower the women and how they in turn drew on their newly established "communities of practice" to navigate their own pathways to wider social change It concludes that while the value attached to social affiliations by the women in the study is clearly a product of the societies in which they have grown up, it may be no more context-specific than the apparently universal value attached to individual autonomy by many feminists

Recovering our sense of value after being labeled mentally ill.

Abstract: 1. People with mental illness must know that mental illness does not mean they can no longer lead full lives. Role models--successful people who have mental illness--are needed. 2. There is a great danger in labeling a person as an illness. Once people believe they are an illness, there is no one left inside to take a stand toward the illness; they give up control and others take responsibility for them. 3. "High functioning" and "low functioning" are not attributes that exist inside a person. They are value judgments that are put on a person. There are no high-functioning or low-functioning people. There are people whose contribution we are able to see and value and there are those whose gifts we have failed to see and have failed to value.

Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa

Abstract: There are three major reasons why ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality in today's South Africa. One is that they are too vague; a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom; and a third is that they fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct a moral theory grounded on Southern African world views, one that suggests a promising new conception of human dignity. According to this conception, typical human beings have a dignity by virtue of their capacity for community, understood as the combination of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them, where human rights violations are egregious degradations of this capacity. I argue that this account of human rights violations straightforwardly entails and explains many different elements of South Africa's Bill of Rights and naturally suggests certain ways of resolving contemporary moral dilemmas in South Africa and elsewhere relating to land reform, political power and deadly force. If I am correct that this jurisprudential interpretation of ubuntu both accounts for a wide array of intuitive human rights and provides guidance to resolve present-day disputes about justice, then the three worries about vagueness, collectivism and anachronism should not stop one from thinking that something fairly called 'ubuntu' can ground a public morality.

The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

Abstract: Henri Bergson inquires into the nature of moral obligation, into the place of religion and the purpose it has served since primitive times, into static religion and its value in preserving man from the dangers of his own intelligence; into dynamic religion or mysticism as a means of producing man's forward leap beyond the limits of the closed society for which nature intended him and into the open society which is the brotherhood of man.