Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes versus Extending Your Concern: Empirical & Ethical Differences

Graduate entry nursing students' development of professional nursing self: A longitudinal case study.

The concept of sustainable development includes three interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars: economic development, social development and environmental protection [1]. Below, we provide arguments that proenvironmentalism and prosociality are components of a broader behavior, named “sustainable behavior”. We thus suggest that traditional emphasis of environmental education on protecting and/or preserving the environment may be reinforced with prosocial education. Such a combined educational approach can promote sustainable behavior, contributing to multi- and inter-disciplinary efforts to create an ecologically, socially and perhaps even economically sustainable society. Proenvironmental behavior is defined as actions which contribute towards environmental preservation and/or conservation [2]. In turn, prosocial behavior is defined as voluntary behavior intended to benefit others or promote harmonious relationship with others [3], [4]. Previous studies demonstrate correlations between proenvironmental and prosocial behavior [5], [7]. For example, Joireman et al. [8] found an association between prosociality and the use of public transport, which has a lower impact on the environment, in comparison to the use of individual motorized transport. Furthermore, [5] and [6] empirically demonstrated that prosociality and proenvironmentalism are components of a broader behavior, which they called “sustainable behavior” since it includes actions aimed at protecting both the natural and the human (social) environments. With regards to the environmental aspects of sustainability, some authors suggest that “environmental problems” are actually problems of human behavior [9]. The first definition of environmental education [10] emphasized the importance of educating the general public about taking action to solve environmental problems. Based on the in-depth analysis of [11], the main emphasis of environmental education is limited to the protection and/or preservation of the environment, while education for sustainable development (or sustainability education) is usually defined as a tool for achieving sustainable development [12]. Prosocial education aims at educating people to share with acquaintances and strangers, to make friends, to work cooperatively, and to develop a sense of self as a moral person [13]. The term “prosocial education” is actually an umbrella concept since it conceptually overlaps with other terms, such as soft-skills development, social-emotional learning, whole child education, service learning, civic education, character education and moral education [2]. Schonert-Reichl & O’Brien [14] reviewed several social-emotional learning programs that have empirical evidence to support their effectiveness, demonstrating that it is possible to promote prosocial behavior through creating a prosocial classroom environment, which emphasizes caring for others, mutual respect and cooperation. Prosocial education could help to gradually bridge this gap of “otherness,” with the aim of helping students overcome alienation, emerging from oneself towards the other by learning to be concerned for the other as we are concerned for ourselves [15].Since on the individual level prosocial and proenvironmental behaviors are parts of the same behavior, prosocial and environmental educational approaches can reinforce each other. Thus, we suggest that the traditional emphasis of environmental education on protecting and/or preserving the environment could be reinforced with prosocial education. Such a combined educational approach would promote sustainable behavior, contributing to multi- and inter-disciplinary efforts to create an ecologically and socially sustainable society. With regard to the economic aspect of sustainable development, some leading economists [16], [17] claim that the current economic system requires the installation of a more social aspect in order to manage today’s interconnected reality. To prevent the enormous damage that is caused to the community as a whole by behavior triggered by fierce economic competition [18], there is a need to react educationally. One possible reaction may be to promote prosocial educational approaches that aim to increase our sense of responsibility towards others. Since the economy is considered a reflection of our relationships [19], the economy might perhaps adjust itself if we change our perception of others and our sensitivity toward others by promoting prosocial educational approaches. One of the biggest paradoxes of contemporary reality is that on the one hand, people, corporations and nations are being increasingly tied together in complex global networks, but on the other, human interactions within these networks are becoming more fragmented, alienated and in many cases motivated by self or local interest [19]. Perhaps the collision between these two opposite tendencies is one of the main reasons for the escalation of the financial crisis worldwide. As the contradiction between our interconnectedness and the nature of human interactions widens – so widens the crisis [20].In summary, prosocial education could not only reinforce environmental education but also contribute significantly to financial and economic sustainability, by cultivating in students a more socially oriented attitude to the world. This in turn can result in sustainable behavior in local and global social networks [21], [22]. Such an approach is aligned with the proposals of UNESCO [23] that promote the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, stressing that education must provide specific skills, such as learning to live together.

We propose that analysis of the life of Jane Lockwood Barney provides insight into the notion of a "generative identity"-an integrated sense of self constructed around caring for others and the world. During her 104 years, the socially prescribed roles for women grew in range; Barney's own roles included minister's wife, mother of four, theological philosopher, social work student and professional, and community activist. We outline her life, focusing on three periods defined by her time at Parishfield, a Christian 'think tank' that focused on community-engaged advocacy for structural change, based in Brighton, Michigan. Using thematic analysis, we identify three main themes from documents written by and about Barney, as well as interviews conducted later in her life. Consistent with Erikson's notion of epigenesis, these themes-belonging, self-reliance/self-expression and generative identity-are evident throughout Barney's adult life to varying degrees. However, we show that the first two themes, belonging and self-reliance/self-expression, act as precursors to the development of her generative identity. Barney's experience at Parishfield in midlife was pivotal to her generative identity, acting as a sort of crucible and turning point; from that time forward the focus of her activities broadened to caring and working tirelessly for the underserved in her community.

This chapter presents research on altruism and health in the context of people living with AIDS. It begins with a review of the literature on AIDS patients who volunteer to help others with the illness. This literature indicates that, as a result of such helping, the volunteers develop a positive sense of self, increase safer sex behaviours, and feel at greater peace with regard to their own future deaths. It then turns to the chapter's own research on a group of seventy-nine long-term survivors of AIDS (people who have survived twice as long as expected), who were compared with a group who had AIDS with a normal course of the illness. The long survivors were significantly more likely to have engaged in AIDS volunteerism and had significantly less depression, anxiety, and perceived stress. In a subsequent study on the psychological predictors of slower disease progression, the chapter again notes that volunteering, giving to charities, and expressing caring for others are related to better prognosis in AIDS and to less emotional distress.

This article explores connections between informal caregiving and identity transformation as experienced by pregnant teens. Based on in‐depth interviews with 51 African American teen mothers, the article examines teens’ pregnancy narratives as an example of narrative repair, illuminating how attending to processes that connect one’s identity to the care of others can work to empower individuals to resist threats to a positive sense of self or a damaged identity. The authors suggest that family caregiving can provide an important context that supports identity transformation not only among pregnant teens as they strive to become good mothers but among those experiencing other types of disruptions to their lives.

BackgroundHumility has recently been conceptualized as a positive, multifaceted attribute in fields outside of medicine, such as psychology and philosophy. In medicine, there has been limited study into the nature of humility and its role in clinical practice. We sought to develop a deeper understanding of humility in medical practice through the lived-experiences of peer-nominated excellent clinicians.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative study with secondary analysis of transcripts from individual open ended, semi-structured interviews of 13 peer nominated physicians [7 (54%) female] at an academic centre. Using constant comparative analysis, the transcripts were analyzed for instances where humility was discussed as it related to clinical practice.ResultsParticipants perceived humility to be an important driver for excellence in clinical practice. This was further explained using two overarching themes: an inward, intellectual perspective and an outward, social perspective. The physician’s inward perspective was their view of their abilities and limits, their self-confidence, and their intellectual openness and adaptability to the limitations and evolving nature of knowledge in medicine. Their outward perspective was an understanding and appreciation for the larger system in which they worked, an openness to others, and valuing patients’ experience. Through these perspectives, humility positively influenced clinical care, learning and curiosity, motivation in the care of others, and relationships with team members and patients.ConclusionsHumility in medicine is a rich, multifaceted construct that was perceived to be a driver for excellence in medical practice by peer-nominated excellent clinicians. Humility was seen as an active force in formulating and calibrating a clinician’s perspective of self and of others, and as such, positively influencing clinical practice. These findings will help inform a discourse in medical education and faculty development about the important role of humility in medical practice.

Liberalism is being called into question both in practice and in principle, from insurgencies at its bloody hinterlands and from the illiberal responses those insurgencies engender within the so-called civilized world, with technological integration creating the conditions for new forms of barbarism. What then are the chances of progress towards a substantial equality of freedoms within this new context of retrograde attitudes framed by the occlusion of others as somehow essentially different? How can we register the significances of cultural distinctions without letting those ‘we's’ and ‘they's’ split an emergent global civil society into parochial retro-nations, where belonging knows itself only by exclusion? What is it that is being called out of the spirit of modernity in our seemingly backward-moving age of essentialized others and self-righteous rage? And to the end of inter-cultural understanding, how can we come to know the other, both through the care of others and in ourselves? This work of political theory reflects on how cultures imagine their barbarians in the form of essentialized others, focusing specifically on the kinds of barbarism associated with a civilization devoted to technological progress. In response to the excesses of modernity, the author looks to advances an ethic of difference, inverting the golden rule so as to do unto others as those others would do unto themselves.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life . By Nancy Tatom Ammerman . New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. xvi + 37 6pp. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesSociologist Nancy Ammerman is an accomplished scholar of American religion. Her previous research on prompted her to interview ninety-five Americans about the spiritual aspects of their daily lives. These interviews provide candid glimpses into the many ways people identify experiences as sacred, negotiate tensions between religious and secular understandings of their lives, and selectively appropriate intellectual or ritual themes from religious institutions. Ammerman found that only a few of her research subjects were loyal, orthodox believers across all domains of their lives. Many were infrequent in their religious attendance. Some had no religious affiliation at all. But most told stories about everyday activities that signaled intense interest in viewing the world in ways that go beyond wholly secular understandings. Ammerman draws heavily on Charles Taylor's work as she identifies a in the stories that Americans use to narrate their lives. This sacred consciousness consists of an overriding sense that life cannot be reduced to what Taylor terms the immanent frame of objective science. This book seeks to understand the everyday religion guiding these individuals' efforts to identify--and live up to--such distinctively religious conceptions of everyday realities.Ammerman designed these interviews to explore how informs the meaning of a broad spectrum of human activities: everyday life at home, the workplace, neighborhoods and local communities, engagement with national and even international policies, and attempts to manage illness or death. Especially insightful were her interviewee's reflections about the nature and meaning of their jobs. Some jobs lend themselves both to a sense of vocation and to the possibility for everyday encounters with larger meanings and mysteries. More often, however, religion surfaces in people's efforts to cope with the frustrations and disappointments inherent in their work lives. Very few of her interviewees called on religious principles to critique the nature of the wider economic system. Ammerman found that a few engaged in (or were annoyed by) workplace prosletyizing and that two-thirds of workplace friendships are religiously homogenous. For the most part, however, everyday religion manifests itself in the workplace as yet another variation of what Ammerman calls Golden Rule Christianity. It seems that at work--as with most other spheres in our lives--religion is not primarily about beliefs or institutional affiliation. Everyday religion thus often comes down to caring for others, being compassionate, and setting aside selfishness.Ammerman teases a number of interesting points from her interviewee's lengthy stories. …

What Is Democracy? Reflections on Sen's Idea of Justice

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property , John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. Portable Property examines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda , Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds , and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone . He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.

The article examines the influence of ancient Chinese philosophical concepts on the formation of modern piano art in China. Ancient Chinese materialistic philosophy is based on such teachings as Wu-xing and Yin-Yang, the Great Limit (Tai Chi), the eight trigrams and others. With the passage of time and the rapid development of science, these philosophical concepts not only did not lose their significance, but also had a powerful influence on the formation of modern Chinese piano creativity, deeply influenced the form and cultural connotation of Chinese music, and also became the theoretical basis for the works of many modern composers. The philosophical and aesthetic Taiji system presented by composer Zhao Xiaosheng, integrated into the modern piano composition system, marked the beginning of a revolution in the field of piano art, combining the theoretical foundations of traditional Chinese philosophy and the principles of modern composition methods. The research methodology is based on philosophical and cultural analysis, musicological analysis, and semantic analysis. Of particular interest is the comparative analysis of the musical and philosophical "Tai chi composition system" by Zhao Xiaoshen, the dodecaphony of A. Schoenberg and the set theory of M. Babbitt and A. Fort, which the Chinese composer considers the sources of his creativity. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that a correlation is proposed between the key categories of ancient Chinese philosophy and modern experiments in the field of musical expression. The authors managed to demonstrate the high degree of influence of Chinese philosophy on music, to clearly show that the basic postulates of ancient Chinese philosophy have been encoded in the basis of traditional Chinese music since ancient times, and in the twentieth century they were the basis of modern Chinese theory of composition, while playing a colossal role in identifying the common foundations of modern composition of the West and East, while preservation of local features of the diverse sphere of these cultures. The emergence and formation of a philosophical and theoretical system of musical composition, based on the concepts of classical Chinese philosophy, organically refracted in the latest achievements of Western music composition, emphasizes the ontological significance of these concepts for both Eastern and Western culture. And the creation of appropriate musical works undoubtedly leads to positive trends in the development of modern Chinese music and classical Chinese philosophy.

Reviewed by: The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights by Robert Elliott Allinson Robert Cummings Neville (bio) The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights. By Robert Elliott Allinson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xxiv + 256. Paperback $30.95, ISBN 978-1-350-05986-3. This is a most unusual book. Mao Zedong was one of the most powerful people in the twentieth century. With Chiang Kai-shek he drove out the Japanese from China and then defeated Chiang in turn and carried out a major revolution over which he presided for many years. Everyone knows he was a poet and, like every Marxist leader, he was a philosopher of sorts. His Marxist philosophy evolved from his youth to old age, and he developed differences from the Soviet model of Marxism that were quite significant. He "converted" to Marxism in his twenties and identified himself with that movement until he died in his eighties. But what was his education in philosophy like before he encountered Marxism? Whereas Marx, Lenin, and Stalin had educations in Western philosophy before and as undergirding their Marxism, did Mao have an education in Chinese philosophy, or Western philosophy, before and undergirding his Marxism? This book sets out to answer these questions. Robert Elliott Allinson is a professional philosopher who went to teach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1977, just after Mao's death. (I lectured in that university that year and met Allinson with whom I had several congenial talks, and a walk around the top of a Hong Kong mountain). Allinson served on many committees and held visiting professorships in a number of Chinese universities before moving, in the present century, to Soka University in California where he now teaches. He is ideally placed to answer these questions, especially to an English-reading audience. Mao himself did not have a splendid early education. In 1909, at the age of fifteen, he attended the Dongshan Higher Primary School, a middle school that taught the Western as well as Chinese classics. He was devoted enough to Confucius that in 1919 he visited Confucius's birthplace in Shandong Province. Mao's college was the First Teachers Training School in Changsha where his major professor was a philosopher, Yang Changji. Professor Yang's daughter became Mao's first wife. Yang first introduced Mao to the German idealist philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen, whose large book on the history of Western philosophy Mao annotated copiously in 1917 and 1918. Mao followed Yang to Beijing and sat in [End Page 1] on his classes at Peking University. He was much involved in the revolutionary events around the time of the May 4th movement in 1919 and worked on making arrangements for the lectures of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. So it was very clear, before Mao converted to Marxism, that he was reasonably well read, at least according to the standards of his time, in both the Chinese and Western classical ideas. Except for brief mentions of other philosophers, Chinese and Western, Allinson found Mao's complex annotation of Paulsen's text to be the best source of his early philosophy. Sometimes the annotations were just agreements or disagreements. But most of the time they developed Mao's own philosophy that was a combination of Eastern and Western sources. First of all, the young Mao was an egoist, meaning that he thought philosophy takes its start from an individual's conception of the self. Whereas Confucius had thought that the ego by itself was just a path toward selfishness, Mao's conception was more materialistic. Mao thought that the self can be expanded to include others, not on their own terms necessarily, but on terms that expanded the individual's own sense of self. Mao never became clear about how this purification of the self so as to include others took place. He rejected altruism as the alternative to his egoism. Second, Mao took Paulsen to demonstrate the history of ideas, Western ideas to be sure, but still ideas in a history. Paulsen's history led up through German idealism. Mao took over Marx's conception of material history, upsetting the Paulsen ideal...

Reviewed by: Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China by Gordon H. Chang Brian Su-Jen Chung (bio) Gordon H. Chang. Fateful Ties: A History of America’s Preoccupation with China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. xi, 314 pp. Hardcover $32.95, isbn 978-0-674-05039-6. Gordon H. Chang explores how “China has been a central ingredient in America’s self-identity from its very beginning and in the American preoccupation with national fate” (p. 8). Beginning with the late eighteenth-century aspirations for independence from Britain to the Barack Obama administration when then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton claimed the United States and China’s futures were inevitably interdependent upon one another, Chang traces American “destinarian attitudes” toward China and Chinese people to show how everyday Americans envisioned American national identity and future growth as a nation-state—culturally, economically, and politically—through their real and imaginary relationships with China. Recent travelogues about China’s capitalist modernization, and even Tom Clancy novels and video games centered on fictional stories of US wars with China, which Chang cites, are just a few of the American cultural representations from the twenty-first century that relays how “China simultaneously fascinates and repels” and “intrigues and infuriates” in the American imaginary (p. 7). Although media and political discourse on China focuses on “yellow peril” anxieties of China’s alleged threat to America’s sense of self as the world’s preeminent superpower, Chang argues that this logic captures just a sliver of what Americans think and have thought about China in their assertions of their national identities within the contexts of US imperialism, industrialization, and globalization. For more than four centuries, Chang argues, Americans have also simultaneously looked toward China as a model of state building, cultural values, and even revolutionary and leftist politics. Chang writes, “Unlike formal documents and diplomatic archives, the creative imaginings of China by entrepreneurs, political commentators, missionaries, academics, artists, and political activists (right and left) reveal far more of the rich texture and mental underpinnings of relations” (p. 6). The focus of Fateful Ties is what Chang calls the “mentalities,” which reflect the “images and perceptions that Americans hold in their minds” that shape public discourse of American national identity and their place in the world (p. 5). In tracing the “mentalities” of Americans across a broad spectrum of professions, institutions, and political ideologies, Chang suggests that America’s relationship with China inspires references to America’s destiny. Whereas other European, Latin American, and Asian countries have represented friends and/or foes to Americans at home and abroad depending on foreign policy, none, according to Chang, has continuously across epochs remained in the American public imaginary the way China has. For Chang, this makes the rhetoric of destiny a distinctly American story worth sharing. [End Page 126] This book is divided into seven chapters, including an introduction and an afterword, organized chronologically with the aim of grounding cultural history within specific political contexts. The breadth of voices that Chang draws from convincingly demonstrates the depth to which China seeped into the cultural lexicon of what it meant to be an American. Each chapter aims to show the shifting discourses and policies of US–China diplomacy and its connection to the “mentalities” that took shape in the United States. For example, the chapter “Physical and Spiritual Connections” focuses on the role of Christian missionaries in China and the ways they envisioned themselves within a broader project of manifest destiny. In “Grand Politics and High Culture,” Chang explores how American writers, scholars, and art collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embraced Chinese art, fashion, and philosophies for diverse reasons with a broader intent of forging new American cultural and intellectual traditions. Chang tackles a different set of people, institutions, ideologies, and cultural representations in the chapter “Allies and Enemies,” which chronicles the changing racialization of Chinese and Chinese Americans when China became an ally of the United States during World War II and, then later, an enemy when China established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The chapter “Transformations” explores how Americans, such as academics, black intellectuals, and revolutionaries...

This research has innovated an emerging technology: Viable Computer Systems, aimed at surpassing the autonomic computing genre through analysis of cybernetic and mathematical bases of enquiry. The agentbased framework aspires software system self-governance by incorporating the environment as part of the system, illustrated via a set theory analogue. Relevant properties of Beer’s human-oriented Viable System Model are represented, towards reducing software redundancy within the industry. Pertinent attributes include open-bounded communication and control, allowing portability to differing computing scenarios the recursive architecture is underscored by feedback control and variety engineering, thereby enabling homeostatic and temporal modelling of both the internal systemic capabilities and the environment of that system in focus, so promoting a sense of self and thus viability through autopoietic emergence. The systemenvironment ecology is further engendered by application of Ashby’s goal directedness in conjunction with Sommerhoff's coenetic variable and directive correlation principals respectively. Case studies demonstrate proof of concept.