A Response to Thorian Harris’s “Moral Perfection as the Counterfeit of Virtue”

Aim of the study: Present research aimed to find out the relationship between moral perfectionism (self-oriented moral perfectionism & socially prescribed moral perfectionism), moral judgment, altruism and forgiveness in young adults. It was hypothesized that socially prescribed and self-oriented moral perfectionism would positively predict moral judgment, altruism and forgiveness. Mediating role of moral judgment between moral perfectionism, altruism and forgiveness was also hypothesized. Methodology: Cross sectional research design was used in this research. Probability random sampling strategy was used to approach a sample of 200 (Men=100, Women=100) young adults with the age range of 20-25 years old (M=21.53, SD=1.31). To measure moral perfectionism, moral perfectionism scale, and adapted version of parental expectation scale of Frost multidimensional perfectionism scale were used. Further, moralization of everyday life scale, Forgiveness scale and adapted self-report altruism scale were used to measure moral judgment, forgiveness and altruism. Findings: Structural equation modeling through AMOS indicated SOMP as a negative predictor of forgiveness and SPMP a positive predictor of altruism and forgiveness whereas no prediction was found for moral judgment. Further, Moral judgment didn’t predict altruism and forgiveness. Conclusion: overall the study highlights the significance of both self-oriented and socially prescribed moral perfectionism in shaping moral behaviors. It suggests that personal and social standards together provide a deeper understanding of moral actions, particularly in terms of altruism and forgiveness. The implications of the study are discussed with its application in counseling, educational, social and moral psychology.

Academic resilience, moral perfectionism, and self-compassion among undergraduate nursing students: A cross-sectional, multi-center study.

Moral perfectionism and online prosocial behavior: The mediating role of moral identity and the moderating role of online interpersonal trust

Reviewed by: Reading Cavell Emily Budick Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh , eds. Reading Cavell. London: Routledge. 2006. x + 262 pp. In their introduction to Reading Cavell, Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh claim as the volume's "principle of unity" "the role within Cavell's thought of the view or, in Cavell's terms, the 'vision' of language" (which he derives from Wittgenstein) according to which the "language and concepts we use are invariably 'ours' in the sense that they reflect human interests." "Our modes of thought and speech," they go on to explain, "express our shared humanity" or what Cavell calls our "attunement in our criteria" (1). Although each of the eleven essays in the volume expresses the unique, individual, and often brilliant vision of each of their authors, they do tend to coalesce around this distinctive feature of Cavell's thought: what we might designate, not so much ordinary language philosophy as a philosophy of the ordinarily (and extraordinarily) human. The first three essays deal with the ordinary language philosophy out of which Cavell's other interests can be understood to evolve. Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein entitled "The Wittgensteinian Event" already exhibits Cavell's language-oriented, readerly approach to philosophy: his "reading" of Wittgenstein's text, he tells us, "is guided by the idea of taking it not alone as an object of interpretation but at the same time as a means of interpretation" (10). "Reading" the text (to invoke the title of this volume) is for Cavell the activity of philosophy, cultural criticism, and ordinary human exchange. The eventfulness of language, its performativity — how we do things with words — also governs the thinking of Stephen Mulhall and Alice Crary in their two essays. Mulhall's "Suffering a sea-change" is itself a Cavellian reading of Austin, not only in that it evokes those dimensions of Austin's thought important to Cavell, which Cavell then supplements or transforms, but also in the sense that it takes seriously the hesitations and recursions expressed in Austin's text, which constitute moments of its own self-transformation. Self-transformation, albeit as moral growth, is also the focus of Crary's essay on Austin. Crary takes up "Cavell's claim that Austin provides support for a species of 'moral perfectionism'" (42) in order to draw out the "implications" of Austin for "ethics — implications connected to the fact that the conception of language-world correspondence that it brings into question determines the problem-space within which theories of moral judgment are for the most part developed and debated" (43). "Part of what is disappointing about existing discussions of Austin's view of language in relation to ethics," writes Crary, "is . . . that they overlook the sense in which his view equips us to acknowledge the possibility of simultaneously [End Page 309] emotional and cognitive forms of moral growth" (59–60). Like the idea of self-transformation in Mulhall's essay, the idea of "perfectionism" (not perfectibility) and "growth" here constitute Cavellian markers of the dynamics of interrogation, interaction, and self-implication, which for him define "reading" (or thinking) as the project of philosophy. To quote Nancy Bauer concerning the figure that concerns all of these first four essays: "Austin's goal is not to . . . propound some counter-theory [of language]." Rather, he is "suggesting that doing philosophy . . . does not require that we be able to pin down the semantics of natural language in advance of what Wittgenstein . . . calls 'looking and seeing'" (69). For Bauer the misapplication of Austin to the discussion concerning pornography results in the evasion of "an honest accounting of our investments, both positive and negative, in the phenomenon of pornography." And she concludes: "the example Austin sets gives us reason to imagine that we will feel at least as much exhilaration as despair or shame when we recognize the depth of our own implication in what our words — and, I am suggesting, our pictures — see and do" (91–92). It is from this same position of self-investment and self-implication that Cora Diamond situates her reading of J. M. Coetzee's Lives of Animals, which turns out to be nothing less than an investigation of the "vulnerability" of that...

One will be hard-pressed to find a morally perfect agent in this world. It’s not that there aren’t any morally good people. It just takes a lot to be morally perfect. However, theists claim that God is morally perfect. (Atheists claim that if God exists, God is morally perfect.) Perhaps they are mistaken. This chapter presents an argument for the conclusion that God is not morally perfect. The argument depends upon two things: (1) the nature of the concept of moral perfection, and (2) the modest theistic claim that God is involved in the affairs of the world.

Moral perfection is among the perfections typically ascribed to God. For four features, the credentials of which as divine perfections are at least as well established as those of moral perfection—omnipotence, omniscience, perfect rationality, and perfect freedom—together entail that moral perfection is not among the absolutely perfect being’s perfections. Crucial to a being’s exhibiting moral perfection is that somehow that being realizes moral excellence, and to an unsurpassable degree. A defender of the argument from evil might reject this argumentative burden, pointing out that as real-life theists on the ground generally believe that God is actually morally perfect, he or she can feel free to rely on that actual moral perfection ascribed to God in making the argument from evil. When one takes a somewhat longer historical view of what it would take for there to be a consensus on God’s moral perfection within theistic philosophy, it is pretty clear that there is no such consensus.

This essay considers two themes which have not, to my knowledge, previously been connected: the role of laughter in Nietzsche’s thought (with particular reference to Thus Spoke Zarathustra); and what several commentators have recently taken to calling Nietzsche’s ‘moral perfectionism’. Though some writers have discussed laughter in Nietzsche, the attention it has been given remains relatively minimal. When laughter is discussed, it is more likely to be construed on a metaphorical level, and connected with such themes as ‘lightness’ and ‘dance’ (for Zarathustra does indeed make these associations);1 or the focus put upon Part IV as some kind of literary comedy.2 The former is keen to link laughter with joy; the latter tends to focus upon the more obviously parodic elements of Part IV, such as the ‘Ass Festival’. I have myself commented elsewhere upon a Nietzschean laughter which is essentially joyous, contrasting a Zarathustran ‘laughter of the height’ with a ‘laughter of the herd’; a Bergsonian laughter of social correction.3 But in this essay, I want to consider another kind — or use — of laughter, of which there are also traces in Zarathustra. This laughter, I shall suggest, can play an important role in a project of ‘moral perfectionism’. So the essay is not primarily a piece of ‘Nietzsche scholarship’.

Background: pro social behaviors are the behavioral characteristics that are affected by several components. The main purpose of this study was to develop the modelling of relationship between moral perfectionism and pro social behavior with the mediating role of moral identity. Methods: In this study, 341 residents of West Azerbaijan province in 2022 were selected by available methods and completed moral perfectionism, pro social behavior and moral identity questionnaires in person or online. Results: The results of Pearson coefficient and path analysis with SPSS and Amos revealed that there was significant relationship between moral perfectionism, pro social behavior and moral identity and the model of the relationship between moral perfectionism and pro social behavior with the mediating role of moral identity was significant too (p<0/001). Conclusion: According to the result of research pro social behavior is influenced by personality and cognitive components, and in cultivating this behavioral characteristic, moral perfectionism and moral identity should also be considered

In what follows I will sketch an approach to understanding improvised music-one that discovers in certain outstanding jazz improvisations an emblem of what Emerson typically calls self-trust and Stanley Cavell, in recent years, has called moral perfectionism. Thus perhaps the greatest burden of these pages is to show how a way of attending to improvised music might reveal a form of knowledge that is essentially moral. By extending this general claim to moral perfectionism, I will be joining my discussion to a broader philosophical project-as well as to a tradition of thinking-to which the present occasion permits only the briefest of introductions. Moral perfectionism is best characterized not as a set of moral axioms or principles, as though it stood in competition with the dominant theories of morality (Utilitarianism and Kantianism), but as a kind of thinking that begins after or beyond such theories. It is a thinking whose distinctive features are a commitment to speaking and acting true to oneself, combined with a thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with oneself as one now stands. One might summarize these features by saying that they identify a way of living set against a life of conformity and a lifeless consistency. It is in his essay Self-Reliance that Emerson famously describes our human tendency to nullify ourselves in the face of our craving for conformity and consistency. The way out of this danger to the self is what Emerson means by selftrust or self-reliance; he speaks in similar contexts of heeding one's genius. There are of course trivial as well as arrogant ways to take up Emerson's call, exactly as many as there are trivial and arrogant ways of reading. ' But that it can be read as belonging to a tradition of thinking inherited from such figures as Plato and Pascal, and continued in such figures as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, was perhaps the most fertile conclusion of Stanley Cavell's 1988 Carus Lectures published as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome.2 The central concern of those lectures, beyond that they identify this tradition of thinking, was to argue that the necessarily unending commitment to perfecting the self is not only in harmony with the equally unending or ongoing political commitment to democracy, but it is, in fact, democracy's precondition, even its fullest meaning. The feature of interest to me here, however, as I set out to suggest some connections between moral perfectionism and the work of some exemplary jazz improvisers, is the understanding that emerges from this tradition of how we manage to do anything new or different or original at all: to check our habitual responses to the world-for example, our reliance, when improvising a jazz solo, on familiar solutions to a pattern of chord changes-in favor of newly discovered or newly charted desires. This essay is divided into four sections. In the first section, I offer a critique of standard efforts to interpret improvised solos as though they were composed or preconceived, contrasting that approach to one that treats the procedures of improvisation as derived from and importantly at play in our everyday actions. The second section turns to a pair of discussions of artistic genius and originality: Kant's account of artistic genius in Critique of Judgment ??46-503 and especially Emerson's concluding essay in Essays: First Series-the one he calls Art.4 My intent in this section is twofold: to show the extent to which Emerson's essay is written in response to

This article aims to rewrite Emerson’s moral perfectionism – his anti-foundationalist pursuit of an always more perfect state of self and society – onto his moral and intellectual participation in the abolitionist movement. I argue that Cavell artificially separated Emerson’s moral perfectionism from his extensive, decades-long abolitionism. The source of Cavell’s oversight is his participation in the long-standing norm of dichotomizing Emerson’s work into the theoretical ‘essays’ and the ‘anti-slavery writings’ or the philosophical and the polemical. Recent scholars of Emerson have questioned and even dismissed this dichotomy, however, while recentring Emerson’s politics in his oeuvre as a whole. They find much to praise, and also plenty to criticize, in Emerson’s abolitionist writings. I follow and extend that scholarly trend here and introduce what I call Emerson’s abolitionist perfectionism as an expansion of Cavell’s influential work on moral perfectionism.

In what follows I will sketch an approach to understanding improvised music-one that discovers in certain outstanding jazz improvisations an emblem of what Emerson typically calls self-trust and Stanley Cavell, in recent years, has called moral perfectionism. Thus perhaps the greatest burden of these pages is to show how a way of attending to improvised music might reveal a form of knowledge that is essentially moral. By extending this general claim to moral perfectionism, I will be joining my discussion to a broader philosophical project-as well as to a tradition of thinking-to which the present occasion permits only the briefest of introductions. Moral perfectionism is best characterized not as a set of moral axioms or principles, as though it stood in competition with the dominant theories of morality (Utilitarianism and Kantianism), but as a kind of thinking that begins after or beyond such theories. It is a thinking whose distinctive features are a commitment to speaking and acting true to oneself, combined with a thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with oneself as one now stands. One might summarize these features by saying that they identify a way of living set against a life of conformity and a lifeless consistency. It is in his essay "Self-Reliance" that Emerson famously describes our human tendency to nullify ourselves in the face of our craving for conformity and consistency. The way out of this danger to the self is what Emerson means by selftrust or self-reliance; he speaks in similar contexts of heeding one's genius. There are of course trivial as well as arrogant ways to take up Emerson's call, exactly as many as there are trivial and arrogant ways of reading. ' But that it can be read as belonging to a tradition of thinking inherited from such figures as Plato and Pascal, and continued in such figures as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, was perhaps the most fertile conclusion of Stanley Cavell's 1988 Carus Lectures published as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome.2 The central concern of those lectures, beyond that they identify this tradition of thinking, was to argue that the necessarily unending commitment to perfecting the self is not only in harmony with the equally unending or ongoing political commitment to democracy, but it is, in fact, democracy's precondition, even its fullest meaning. The feature of interest to me here, however, as I set out to suggest some connections between moral perfectionism and the work of some exemplary jazz improvisers, is the understanding that emerges from this tradition of how we manage to do anything new or different or original at all: to check our habitual responses to the world-for example, our reliance, when improvising a jazz solo, on familiar solutions to a pattern of chord changes-in favor of newly discovered or newly charted desires. This essay is divided into four sections. In the first section, I offer a critique of standard efforts to interpret improvised solos as though they were composed or preconceived, contrasting that approach to one that treats the procedures of improvisation as derived from and importantly at play in our everyday actions. The second section turns to a pair of discussions of artistic genius and originality: Kant's account of artistic genius in Critique of Judgment ??46-503 and especially Emerson's concluding essay in Essays: First Series-the one he calls "Art."4 My intent in this section is twofold: to show the extent to which Emerson's essay is written in response to

I consider the revision of pragmatism by three leading neopragmatists: Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and Cornel West. I argue that their vision of pragmatism lacks a teleology, though a teleology is suggested by Bernstein's description of a pragmatic ethos. I appeal to Stanley Cavell's notion of 'moral perfectionism' to suggest a kind of teleology that is available to pragmatism. Finally, I find the weakness of pragmatism done without teleology well exemplified in the exchange between Rorty and Nancy Frazer at Rorty's 1990 Tanner Lecture. Rorty's paper, "Pragmatism and Feminism," was meant to offer feminists some pragmatic strategies for improving their position. Frazer's strong response finds Rorty's suggestions only marginally helpful. I interpret her criticism of Rorty's suggestions to be that they lack something like a teleology. To me, this suggests that pragmatism can learn from feminism.

This article argues that Stanley Cavell's notion of moral perfectionism must be understood, within the American cultural context, as deeply intertwined with myths of heroic American masculinity. It traces connections between Cavell's descriptions of moral perfectionism, the transcendentalist authors (primarily Emerson and Thoreau) on whom he relies, and writings about the myth of the American frontier hero. When understood as a tradition of masculinity, it becomes possible to trace moral perfectionism across much wider areas of American cinematic culture than Cavell's reading suggests; Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997) is used as an example which further illuminates the relationship between moral perfectionism and American masculinities. Psychoanalysis, a major feature of Good Will Hunting as well as an important aspect of Cavellian moral perfectionism, must also be revisited in terms of the differences in its popular mythologisation for men versus for women.

This paper focuses on the relationship between pop culture, i.e. pop music, and ideology. The main thesis of the text is that the works of pop culture are the product of the social-historical context in which they emerge, but that the same works can also function as a criticism of that very context. As an example, we took Bob Dylan's media phenomenon and the elements of utopia as a narrative genre in his work. As a theoretical-interpretative context we relied on the propositions of American analytic philosopher Stanley Cavell: through his ethical theory on 'moral perfectionism' an analysis was made of the way in which pop culture functioned as the necessary internal corrective of a democratic community. It is assumed that texts on pop culture cannot be truly revolutionary, but they can certainly be critical.

Self-compassion plays a vital role in maintaining mental health. Evidence suggests that enhancing morality-related constructs can improve self-compassion among nursing students. This study examines the predictors of self-compassion in nursing students and explores its relationship with moral intelligence and moral perfectionism. This cross-sectional, multicenter study was conducted between January and March 2022. Undergraduate nursing students from three Iranian universities-Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, and Semnan University of Medical Sciences-were surveyed using the Self-Compassion Scale, Moral Intelligence Questionnaire, and Moral Perfectionism Scale. Correlation analyses and stepwise linear regression were employed to assess the relationships between variables. A total of 250 nursing students participated, reporting moderate self-compassion levels (M = 37.19, SD = 5.02). Self-compassion was positively correlated with moral intelligence (r = .33, p < .001) and moral perfectionism (r = .23, p < .001). Forgiveness emerged as a significant predictor of self-compassion (β = 0.33, p < .001). This study underscores the significance of moral intelligence and moral perfectionism in fostering self-compassion among nursing students. Integrating forgiveness and ethical development into nursing education could enhance professional competence and compassionate care delivery.