Should We Teach Patriotism?

This article examines a particular debate between Eamonn Callan and William Galston concerning the need for a civic education which counters the divisive pull of pluralism by uniting the citizenry in patriotic allegiance to a single national identity.The article offers a preliminary understanding of nationalism and patriotism before setting out the terms of the debate. It then critically evaluates the central idea of Callan that one might be under an obligation morally to improve one's own patriotic inheritance, pointing to the ineliminable tension between the valuation of one's own patria by its own terms and a detached critical reason.It concludes by suggesting that we are, in advance of our education, members of a particular patria and that any education must be particularistic. Finally, the danger is noted of presuming that, in each case, there is a single, determinate national tradition.     

FILIAL MORALITY

Filial regard is the special consideration that children, even as adults, show their parents and filial morality the demonstration that such a regard is demanded of them. The three main accounts of filial morality, based upon ideas of gratitude, role obligations, and friendship, are shown to be unsatisfactory. The article explores the idea, found in traditional Chinese thinking, that filial regard is the ‘root’ of goodness, and suggests that the Chinese model has been viewed unsympathetically due to an understanding both of the family's role in moral education and of the nature of modern morality.     

Selling Yourself: Titmuss's Argument Against a Market in Blood

This article defends Richard Titmuss's argument, and PeterSinger's sympathetic support for it, against orthodoxphilosophical criticism. The article specifies thesense in which a market in blood is ``dehumanising' ashaving to do with a loss of ``imagined community' orsocial ``integration', and not with a loss of valued or``deeper' liberty. It separates two ``domino arguments'– the ``contamination of meaning' argument and the``erosion of motivation' argument which support, indifferent but interrelated ways, the claim that amarket in blood is ``imperialistic.' Concentrating onthe first domino argument the article considers theview that monetary and non-monetary meanings of thesame good can co-exist given the robustness of certainkinds of relationship and joint undertakings withinwhich gifts can figure. It argues that societalrelationships are vulnerable or permeable to theeffects of the market in a way that those constitutiveof the personal sphere are not.General, more broadly political questions remainunanswered but the core of Titmuss's original andchallenging argument remains and can be presented ina defensible form.