Variability and moral phenomenology

Many moral philosophers in the Western tradition have used phenomenological claims as starting points for philosophical inquiry; aspects of moral phenomenology have often been taken to be anchors to which any adequate account of morality must remain attached. This paper raises doubts about whether moral phenomena are universal and robust enough to serve the purposes to which moral philosophers have traditionally tried to put them. Persons’ experiences of morality may vary in a way that greatly limits the extent to which moral phenomenology can constitute a reason to favor one moral theory over another. Phenomenology may not be able to serve as a pre-theoretic starting point or anchor in the consideration of rival moral theories because moral phenomenology may itself be theory-laden. These doubts are illustrated through an examination of how moral phenomenology is used in the thought of Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Butler, Francis Hutcheson, and Søren Kierkegaard.     

明代道德生活与核心价值观

明代独特的道德生活是有其偏执的政治导向、失序的商品经济发展以及无根社会文化综合作用的结果.究其实质乃是在商品经济发展的过程中,传统儒家的价值观念无力为新的社会经济生产方式提供价值支撑,道德生活中的种种失范现象最终都导源于核心价值观的缺失.     

Job-seeking and job-acquisition in high school students

We surveyed 225 Year 9 and 10 students at T1 regarding their attitude, social norms, control, experience, plans and intentions to find a part-time job while at school. Of these, 149 did not have a job and were surveyed again four months later about their job-seeking and job outcomes (104 responded at T2). Job-seeking intentions at T1 were associated with past experience, plans and beliefs that getting a job was the right thing to do. Job-seeking at T2 was associated with beliefs about the value of job-seeking. Job interviews attended were related to job-seeking, and job offers were related to interviews attended. Students with higher job-seeking intentions and behaviours differed on most variables from students with lower intentions and behaviours. Students need to be aware of the relationship between job-seeking, interviews and offers, and be provided with strategies that increase their interviews and assist to manage unsuccessful job attempts.     

Emotional expressions of moral value

In “Moral Luck” Bernard Williams describes a lorry driver who, through no fault of his own, runs over a child, and feels “agent-regret.” I believe that the driver’s feeling is moral since the thought associated with this feeling is a negative moral evaluation of his action. I demonstrate that his action is not morally inadequate with respect his moral obligations. However, I show that his negative evaluation is nevertheless justified since he acted in way that does not live up to his moral values. I then use this distinctive negative moral evaluation to distinguish agent-regret from guilt and mere regret.

Educating moral emotions: a praxiological analysis

This paper presents a praxiological analysis of three everyday educational practices or strategies that can be considered as being directed at the moral formation of the emotions. The first consists in requests to imagine other's emotional reactions. The second comprises requests to imitate normative emotional reactions and the third to re-appraise the features of a situation that are relevant to an emotional response. The interest of these categories is not just that they help to organize and recognize the significance of what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of ordinary moral-educational interactions between children and educators. We suggest, further, that this analysis provides some new insight into what distinguishes the broad and recurrent conceptions of moral education from one another. Rather than being straightforwardly reducible to intractable differences over core normative or meta-ethical questions they can also be seen as correlating with different suppositions about the central role of the emotions in moral life and, correspondingly, different but to a large degree compatible interpretations of what the "education of the moral emotions" primarily means.

Externalism and the Content of Moral Motivation

In his fetishist argument, Michael Smith raises an important question: What is the content of the motivational states that constitute moral motivation? Although the argument has been widely discussed, this question has not received the attention it deserves. In the present paper, I use Smith’s argument as a point of departure for a discussion of how advocates of externalism as regards moral judgements can account for moral motivation. More precisely, I explore various explanations of moral motivation that externalists can employ to answer the question Smith poses.     

Post-conventional moral reasoning and reputation

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development conceives conventional and post-conventional moral reasoning as consecutive levels in a developmental sequence. This claim was examined in terms of the relationship between preference for these two styles of reasoning on the one hand and moral identity as perceived by others (reputation) and as self-perceived and on the other. Participants (n = 172), in groups of four mutual acquaintances, provided ratings of one another’s standing, and estimates of their own standing and reputation, on four trait dimensions (moral responsibility, consideration for others, respect for authority, and political orientation). Post-conventional moral reasoning, assessed using the Defining Issues Test, was not significantly related either to reputation or to self-rating on any dimension except political orientation. Conventional reasoning was related to politics though in the opposite direction, but additionally to both self- and other-ratings of moral responsibility and to the corresponding ratings of respect for authority. Findings do not support the view that the conventional/post-conventional distinction in moral reasoning is a developmental difference. An alternative proposed is that these are independent domains of moral thought, related to quite different aspects of social behaviour and political attitudes.     

A path to the Oasis: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Sharī‘ah</Emphasis> and reason in Islamic moral epistemology

I propose a framework for comparative Islamic—Western ethics in which the Islamic categories Islam, Iman, and Ihsan are juxtaposed with the concepts of obligation, value, and virtue, respectively. I argue that shari’a refers to both the obligation component and the entire structure of the Islamic ethic; suggesting a suspension of the understanding of shari’a as simply Islamic “law,” and an alternative understanding of usul al-fiqh as a moral epistemology of obligation. I will test this approach by addressing the question of reason in Islamic moral epistemology via an examination of an argument advanced by a founding usul scholar Muhammad bin Idrīs al-Shāfi‘ī (150 A.H./767 C.E.).     

Enrolling the Citizen in Sustainability: Membership Categorization,Morality and Civic Participation

This article examines the common-sense and methodical ways in which “the citizen” is produced and enrolled as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning. Using Membership Categorization Analysis, we explicate how the categorization procedures in the Foreword of a draft regional planning policy interactionally produce the identity of “the citizen” and “civic values and obligations” in relation to geographic place and institutional categories. Furthermore, we show how positioning practices establish a relationship between authors (government) and readers (citizens) where both are ascribed with the same moral values and obligations toward the region. Hence, “the citizen” as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning is viewed as a practical accomplishment that is underpinned by a normative morality associated with the task of producing orderliness in “text-in-interaction.”

Imagining human enhancement: whose future,which rationality?

This article critically evaluates bettering human life. Because this involves lives that do not exist yet, the article investigates human eugenics and enhancement through the social prism of ‘the imaginary’ (defined ‘as a set of assumptions and concepts for thinking and speaking about human enhancement and its future direction’) [1]. “Exploring basic assumptions underlying the idea of human enhancement” investigates underlying assumptions and claims for human enhancement. Firstly, human eugenics and enhancement entangles a factual as well as a normative claim about what improvement/betterment maybe constitutive of. Secondly, claims about what a better life is, is often a future orientated claim about whether certain kinds of life that do not exist yet should ever exist. Moral images of thought are introduced and how they work to make normative judgments about lives that do not exist. This implicates the moral problem of difference, where an image of a ‘better’ life—classically expressed in eugenics as a ‘superior’ and/or ‘normal’ life—necessarily entails inferiority and/or deviance from a norm. “Moral imagination in contemporary fiction and the history of old eugenics”, introduces moral images in history of eugenics and demonstrates how examples fall foul of the problem. “The new (liberal) eugenics and the moral image of therapy” examines progress in contemporary debates, the move from authoritarian to non-authoritarian eugenics (human enhancement), and how, to some extent, this has solved the problem of difference, through liberal defence of personal choice. “The heart of the eugenic issue” suggests that personal choice in liberal non-authoritarian eugenics is not immune to basic drive behind all eugenic arguments; desire as lack which is expressed as the continual dissatisfaction of not having our future expectations met.