Enkinaesthesia: Proto-moral value in action-enquiry and interaction

It is now generally accepted that human beings are naturally, possibly even essentially, intersubjective. This chapter offers a robust defence of an enhanced and extended intersubjectivity, criticising the paucity of individuating notions of agency and emphasising the community and reciprocity of our affective co-existence with other living organisms and things. I refer to this modified intersubjectivity, which most closely expresses the implicit intricacy of our pre-reflective neuro-muscular experiential entanglement, as ‘enkinaesthesia’. The community and reciprocity of this entanglement is characterised as dialogical, and in this dialogue, as part of our anticipatory preparedness, we have a capacity for intentional transgression, feeling our way with our world but, more particularly, co-feeling our way with the mind and intentions of the other. Thus we are, not so much ‘mind’-reading, as ‘mind’-feeling, and it is through this enkinaesthetic ‘mind’-feeling dialogue that values-realising activity originates and we uncover the deep roots of morality.     

THE EXPERIENCE OF HOME AND THE SPACE OF CITIZENSHIP

I argue that, although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally “public” beings. Rather, to become a public being, that is, a citizen—in other words, to act as an independent and self‐controlled agent in a community of similarly independent and self‐controlled agents and, specifically, to do so in a shared space in the public arena—is something that we can successfully do only by emerging from our familiar, personal territories—our homes. Finding support in texts from philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, I construe the claim that citizenship is a developed stance as a spatial issue. I conclude that a state (or, for that matter, a philosophy) that takes the human being to begin as an isolated individual agent fails to recognize the essential spatial relationships on which we depend—namely, those arising through our way of being‐at‐home in the world; and, as a result, such a stance not only misconstrues the parameters on which citizenship is itself possible but also risks developing a social situation that encourages behaviors we see in the agoraphobic—namely, the behaviors of alienated and fundamentally homeless human beings.     

The Metabolic Core of Environmental Education

I consider the case of the “simplest” living beings—bacteria—and examine how their embodied activity constitutes an organism/environment interaction, out of which emerges the possibility of learning from an environment. I suggest that this mutual co-emergence of organism and environment implies a panbiotic educational interaction that is at once the condition for, and achievement of, all living beings. Learning and being learned from are entangled in varied ways throughout the biosphere. Education is not an exclusively human project, it is part of the ancient evolutionary process of elaborating and diversifying the relational possibilities inherent in metabolism that has brought forth our diverse and flourishing world. Abstracted from context, “education” appears as a set of ways in which humans actively engage and take responsibility for the learning outcomes of relationships with each other. Insofar as we consider this distinction absolute rather than a performed construct to be assessed by its consequences, we blind ourselves to the educative dimension of other species as well as our many miseducative engagements with them. If learning processes are inherent and constitutive of ecological communities, education theorists should devote their pedagogical sensitivities and insights to the crucial challenge of developing educative sustainable human–nature relations.     

NATURAL GOODNESS AND NATURAL EVIL

In Natural Goodness Philippa Foot gives an analysis of the concepts we use to describe the characteristics of living things. She suggests that we describe them in functional terms, and this allows us to judge organisms as good or defective depending on how well they perform their distinctive functions. Foot claims that we can judge intentional human actions in the same way: the virtues contribute in obvious ways to good human functioning, and this provides us with grounds for making moral judgements. This paper criticises Foot’s argument by challenging her notion of function. I argue that the type of judgement she makes about living things requires an evolutionary biological account of function. However, such an account would render her meta‐ethical claims implausible, since it is unlikely that human beings are adapted to be maximally virtuous. I conclude that Foot is wrong about the logical structure of our judgements of human action.     

The Biology of Morality

Abstract. The morality of human beings, defined here as our ability to determine whether our actions are right or wrong, depends not just on following rules but also on understanding the impact of our actions on another person. How we understand the impact of our actions on another person depends on our state of consciousness, which is mediated by our brain and nervous system. We describe how we understand our morality to flow naturally from the biological state we are living in and how we see our biology and our morality as mutually interactive. A change in one changes the other. Another way of saying this is that changing either our morality or our biology changes both—changes who we are and what we do.     

Phenomenology of the Body and its Implications for Humanistic Ethics and Politics

This paper explores the question of embodiment/disembodiment discussed by Hwa Yol Jung mainly in his recent work, Rethinking Political Theory (1993a) in tandem with an examination of some recent developments in Korean scholarship on the same subject. To sum up, the following three points are emphasized. First, this living body does not exist except in specific modalities. In this sense, Gabriel Marcel's paradigmatic affirmation that I am my body requires an elaboration of the specific modalities of the living body as a being in the world. Second, the way a living body exists is not exclusively mental or physical, but both. In short, it is phenomenal. Third, the point of the whole argument can be summed up as follows: to conceal one's own body is natural, but to forget it is dangerous. The primary task of phenomenology is not to denude human beings, but to reawaken ourselves to the idea that we are beings who live with and through bodies.     

On Becoming Better Human Beings: Six Stories to Live By

What are the conditions required for becoming better human beings? What are our limitations and possibilities? I understand ??becoming better?? as a combined improvement process bringing persons ??up from?? a negative condition and ??up to?? a positive one. Today there is a tendency to understand improvement in a one-sided way as a movement up to the mastery of cognitive skills, neglecting the negative conditions that can make these skills mis-educative. I therefore tell six stories in the Western tradition about conditions for a combined improvement process. The first three stories belong to our cultural ABC: an Aristotelian story about moral wisdom which brings people up from being enslaved by passions and up to a good life of virtues; a Biblical story about God??s word bringing listeners up from a self-centred life and up into creative work as God??s fellow workers, and a short Cave story by Plato about liberation??up from living by common illusions and up to enlightenment from what is perfectly good. The subsequent three stories interpret and actualise these basic stories in different ways: a story about moral wisdom and divine love (Thomas Aquinas), a story about individual freedom and rationality (Immanuel Kant), and a story about the love that builds us up as equal human beings (S?ren Kierkegaard). These stories may directly guide us adults??and indirectly the children and youth who learn from our examples??when we struggle to become better human beings.     

Political Animals: Luck, Love and Dignity

Human beings are both needy and dignified. How should we think about the relationship between our neediness and our worth? Card argues well that our vulnerability to luck is intertwined in the very conditions of moral agency. We can see the merit of her approach even more clearly by turning to some difficulties the Stoics have in preserving dignity while removing vulnerability. Stoicism does, however, help us to sort through the difficulties involved as we try to combine love of particular people with respect for all human life. Richardson is correct to suggest that love itself can animate the concern for all humanity; I also agree with him that institutions must play a major role in any solution to problems of inequality between nations. Although the “capabilities approach” offers an attractive account of one part of the goal of just political institutions, combining, as Moody-Adams suggests, respect for difference with a commitment to universal norms, I now believe that the capabilities account should be combined with a form of Rawlsian political liberalism that protects spaces within which citizens may pursue the good as they understand it.     

Persons as dialogical-hermeneutical-relational beings – New circumstances ‘call out’ new responses from us

Shifting from a world of already-made-things to a world of things-continually-in-the-making changes everything. Psychology, like all other sciences, tries to proceed by analysis, by breaking down a living, unique, always developing organic whole into a set of general, already-existing, nameable elements. But as Bakhtin makes clear, in discussing how Dostoevsky portrays the inner dynamics of people worrying over how to act for the best in living their lives, such an itemization of merely observed behavioural characteristics leads to a degrading reification of a person's unfinalizability, of their still-developing nature. Below, I first examine the Cartesianism that still seems present in much of our thinking in social inquiry today. I then turn attention to the primacy of our living movements out in the world and their responsiveness to events occurring around us. While finally turning to the fact that, as living beings, what ‘goes on inside us’, is not so important as ‘what we go on inside of’. Although Dostoevsky portrays this indivisible, flowing reality, in terms of a set of discontinuous fragments —because that is the nature of our experience in everyday life — as hermeneutical-dialogical-relational beings, we have a basic capability of organizing them into unitary wholes which sit in the background to everything we think and do.     

Growth,Experience and Nature in Dewey's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy

Growth is an important concept in Dewey's philosophy,and,indeed,its ultimate focus.It is not,however,an easy task to posit growth as an ethical ideal,for here Dewey immediately faces a metaphysical dilemma:whether to offer us an objective standard of growth,which becomes a type of absolutism,or to inevitably fall into relativism.This paper explores how Dewey avoids this dilemma with his concept of experience,which is interrogated through the relationship between human beings and nature.Still,human growth in nature involves the cultivation of virtuosities (de德) in accordance with the rhythm of nature,and requires a completely different way of life other than our technological one.For this reason,I use Chinese philosophy,specifically ideas from the Yijing,to show how growth can be illustrated through the interaction between humans and the natural world.     

(Dis)agreement with the Implementation of Humanitarian Policy Measures Towards Asylum Seekers in Israel: Does the Frame Matter?

This study investigates emerging public attitudes about the implementation of humanitarian policy measures towards asylum seekers among the Jewish population in Israel. It specifically asks whether the way asylum seekers in Israel are framed informs the process of attitude formation in the Jewish Israeli public. To answer this question, we measure the extent to which the frame “infiltrators” as opposed to the frame “asylum seekers” positively predicts the rejection of humanitarian policy measures toward asylum seekers. Following framing theory, we also propose that the framing effect depends on the respondents’ perceived levels of threat by asylum seekers, and on their political identification. In line with our hypothesis, the findings indicate that the effect of the framing on the rejection of humanitarian policy measures decreases with increasing levels of threat. Although the framing effect on the rejection of humanitarian policy measures towards asylum seekers is somewhat weaker among respondents with a right-wing political identification, the differences between these and other respondents are not significant.     

Papineau’s Theoretical Rationality and the Anthropological Difference

A common view in philosophy is that the way human beings reason is not only gradually better, but that our way of reasoning is fundamentally distinctive. Findings in the psychology of reasoning challenge the traditional view according to which human beings reason in accordance with the laws of logic and probability theory, but rather suggest that human reasoning consists in the application of domain specific rules of thumb similar to those that we ascribe to some intelligent non-human animals as well. However, this view on human reasoning is unable to explain human accomplishments like technological innovations or scientific progress. David Papineau offers a theory of human theoretical rationality that is consistent with the psychological view on human reasoning but that can also explain how humans sometimes are able to transcend the limitations of their biologically quick and dirty modes of thought and thereby reach a high level of accuracy. Papineau claims that the abilities that constitute theoretical rationality are unique to the human species and thus, that human reasoning is fundamentally distinctive after all. In this paper I am going to discuss to what extent these abilities in fact are unique to our species and whether this theoretical rationality can be called an anthropological difference.     

What is Philosophical about Kant’s Anthropology?

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is fundamentally about the sphere of civilization, and, with this, a particular kind of philosophical self-understanding. By civilization, Kant means to indicate the process by which human beings transform their inner natures based on pragmatic or prudential considerations born of our living together. Civilization is what we do to ourselves in order to get along with others with whom we share the earth. In the Anthropology, what we come to understand about ourselves is the possibility of transforming our inner natures based on our will.     

Minding Animals, Minding Earth: Old Brains, New Bottlenecks

Abstract. I emphasize the importance of broadening behavioral, ecological, and conservation science into a more integrative, interdisciplinary, socially responsible, compassionate, spiritual, and holistic endeavor. I stress the significance of studies of animal behavior, especially ethological research concerned with animal emotions in which individuals are named and recognized for their own personalities, for helping us to learn not only about the nonhuman animal beings with whom we share Earth but also about who we are and our place in nature. We are best understood in relationship with others. To this end I develop the notions of “minding animals” and “deep ethology.” Animals are sources of wisdom, a way of knowing. We are all citizens of Earth, members of a global community in which intimate reciprocal and beneficent peaceful relationships are mandatory. A world without cruelty and with boundless compassion, respect, grace, humility, spirituality, and love would be a better world in which to live. We have compelling responsibilities for making Earth a better and more peaceful habitat for all beings. It is essential that we do better than our ancestors. We must reflect and step lightly as we “redecorate” nature. Time is not on our side. I plead for the development of heartfelt and holistic science that allows for joy and play. Science need not be suspicious of things it cannot fully understand. We must not avert our eyes or other senses from the eyes and voices of other beings who urgently need our uncompromising and unconditional aid and love. We can do much more than we have done for animals and the Earth.     

Expressions of Preference and Other Morally Problematic Instances of Prayer

When considering the role of prayer in the lives of believers, most theists agree that one important effect is the psychological impact on the person who is praying. Nevertheless, the way many of us pray, by primarily or solely focusing on our welfare and the welfare of our loved ones, agitates the human tendency towards exclusion. If we take seriously God’s commandment to love the neighbor as the self, we should use prayer, instead, as a prime opportunity to help cultivate a moral character that embraces more inclusion. In this paper, I use Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as a framework for working towards this more inclusive view of prayer—one that widens our moral circle and awareness to include all human beings, and not just the select ones we have chosen to prefer above all others. It does not follow that we are prohibited from praying for our own welfare or the welfare of our loved ones, but it does mean that using prayer in a way that only (or primarily) shows concern for those whom we prefer is morally problematic.     

Global Justice for Humans or for all Living beings and what Difference it Makes

I begin with an account of what is deserved in human ethics, an ethics that assumes without argument that only humans, or rational agents, count morally. I then take up the question of whether nonhuman living beings are also deserving and answer it in the affirmative. Having established that all individual living beings, as well as ecosystems, are deserving, I go on to establish what it is that they deserve and then compare the requirements of global justice when only humans are taken into account with the requirements of global justice when all living beings are taken into account.     

On euthanasia: blindspots in the argument from mercy

In the euthanasia debate, the argument from mercy holds that if someone is in unbearable pain and is hopelessly ill or injured, then mercy dictates that inflicting death may be morally justified. One common way of setting the stage for the argument from mercy is to draw parallels between human and animal suffering, and to suggest that insofar as we are prepared to relieve an animal's suffering by putting it out of its misery we should likewise be prepared to offer the same relief to human beings.
In this paper, I will argue that the use of parallels between human and animal suffering in the argument from mercy relies upon truncated views of how the concept of a human being enters our moral thought and responsiveness. In particular, the focus on the nature and extent of the empirical similarities between human beings and animals obscures the significance for our moral lives of the kind of human fellowship which is not reducible to the shared possession of empirical capacities.
I will suggest that although a critical examination of the blindspots in these arguments does not license the conclusion that euthanasia for mercy's sake is never morally permissible, it does limit the power of arguments such as those provided by Rachels and Singer to justify it. I will further suggest that examination of these blindspots helps to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in the question of euthanasia in ways that tend otherwise to remain obscured.     

AN EVOLUTIONARY CRITIQUE OF THE CREATED CO-CREATOR CONCEPT

Abstract The created co‐creator theology states that human beings have the purpose of creating the most wholesome future possible for our species and the global ecosystem. I evaluate the human aspect of this theology by asking whether it is possible for human beings to do this. Do we have sufficient knowledge? Can we be motivated to do what is necessary to create a wholesome future for ourselves and our planet? We do not at present have sufficient knowledge, but there is reason to believe that with further scientific research we will be able to acquire it. The more difficult question is whether we can be motivated to cooperate on the scale necessary to fulfill this purpose. Evolutionary theories of human sociality, altruism, and cooperation are reviewed. I conclude that it is possible for human beings to fulfill the purpose defined for us by the created cocreator concept, but doing this will not be easy.     

What Nature Makes of Her: Kant's Gendered Metaphysics

Women's exclusion from political enfranchisement in Kant's political writings has frequently been noted in the literature, and yet has not been closely scrutinized. More often than not, commentators suggest that this reflects little more than Kant's sharing in the prejudices of his era. This paper argues that, for Kant, women's civil incapacities stem from defects relating to their capacities as moral agents, and more specifically, to his teleological account of the conditions within which we, as imperfect beings, develop our moral capacities. Women are not incidentally or tangentially excluded from the boundaries of political and moral agency, but rather must adopt an explicitly nonmoral character if we are to understand humanity as moving toward its naturally given, moral ends. I argue (1) that Kant's teleological view of human development requires women to develop an explicitly nonmoral character; (2) that this teleology is inextricable from his view of the moral agency that human—and not merely rational—beings are capable of; and (3) that taken together, these suggest that women's subordinate status is internally connected to Kant's view of moral personhood.