Ethical Convictions Research Articles

La ética política en Max Weber: contexto, análisis e interpretación

En este artículo se elabora una reflexión sobre la ética política propuesta por MaxWeber en sus escritos políticos. Esta reflexión se llevará a cabo en tres etapasrelacionadas. Primero se presenta una breve contextualización del pensamientopolítico del citado pensador. Luego, se analiza en profundidad la ética políticapropuesta por Weber, analizando los rasgos y diferencias de las dos éticas quepueden afectar al campo de la política: ética de las convicciones y ética de laresponsabilidad. En tercer lugar, se hace una interpretación crítica de la éticade la responsabilidad, que Weber concibe como la ética propia de la política,aludiendo a los diversos problemas que puede presentar la aplicación prácticade dicha ética. Por último, se cierra el artículo con unas consideraciones finales.

Модуси ідеї відповідальності в соціокультурних обставинах середини ХХ – початку ХХІ століть. Частина 1

The paper deals with socio-cultural factors, terminological collisions and modi of the idea of responsibility in the West European socio-cultural space. Main attention is paid to shaping of the idea of responsibility in socio-cultural circumstances of the mid of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st centuries. The first part of the paper outlines the preliminary history of the modern concept of responsibility, peculiarities of the problem in Aristotle’s "The Nicomachean Ethics" are observed as well as the idea of accountability (imputatio) in ethics of P. Abelard in modi of moral guilt and offense. It is mentioned that in Pre-modern culture idea of responsibility is developed in the context of the freedom of human action, one’s capability to keep an answer for one’s actions and to admit guilt. It is specified that in philosophy of Modernity the notion imputatio is represented in I. Kant’s philosophy. Although Kant did not put the problem of accountability as the cornstone of his philosophy, he had defined conditions for possibility of agent’s accountability in such a way that his ideas are at the background of the main conceptions of responsibility of the 20th century. Further in the paper development of the problem around the term Verantwortung (responsibility) is observed. In particular, M. Weber’s ethics of responsibility (in comparison to ethics of conviction) is analyzed. The paper pays attention to the of H. Arendt’s conception of lost generations, and grounds of the problem of responsibility actualization in the sense of life search of these generations are analyzed. The first part of the paper is finished by the analysis of the conception of guilt and responsibility by K. Jaspers who applied to the problem in the context of comprehension of the axiological space of postwar Germany.

Dewey's and Freire's popular philosophies of education in a capitalist context

This article looks at Dewey’s and Freire’s popular philosophies of education in light of their views of the relation between common sense and scientific inquiry. Dewey’s view, unlike that of Freire, requires the data to be radically reorganized so that the inductive data cannot really be considered merely a reorganizing of common-sense experience. Dewey, though, does not apply his own characterization of scientific inquiry to his critique of capitalist relations; his criticism constitutes an external critique of capitalism via his concept of a cultural lag. Freire, too, criticizes capitalist relations not on its own terms but externally, via his humanist ethical condemnation of treating human subjects as objects. Marx, on the other hand, proposes an internal critique of capitalist relations, starting with the contradictory inductive unit of the commodity that parallels Dewey’s concept of scientific induction. Freire, despite his different conception of scientific inquiry, shares Marx’s interest in the working class and provides a complementary educational approach by addressing the working class’ experience of fear, by counteracting the denigration of working-class experience and by arguing against the claim of neutrality in inquiry in a capitalist context. A synthesis of the three philosophies would therefore serve better the educational needs of the working class.

한국의 정치적 전통과 이념: 가산제와 신념윤리를 중심으로

한국의 정치적 전통과 이념: 가산제와 신념윤리를 중심으로

Bertrand Russell: Cognitivism, Non-Cognitivism and Ethical Critical Thinking

Bertrand Russell converted from ethical cognitivism to ethical non-cognitivism and this was historically important, as it gave rise in part, to meta-ethics. It also clarified the central problem between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Russell’s view was that defining “good” is the basic problem of ethics. If “good” is not amorphous, the rest of ethics will follow. He did not believe in ethical knowledge per se and asserted that reason is, and must only be, the servant of desire. A factual statement is thus true if there is an equivalent fact, but as ethical statements do not state facts, there is no issue of a corresponding fact or the statement being true or false in the sense in which factual statements are. Ethics has no statement whether true or false, but consists only of desires of a general kind and people know intuitively what is “right” or “wrong”. To Russell critical thinking is entrenched in the structure of philosophy. His epistemological conviction was that knowledge is difficult to attain, while his ethical conviction showed that people should be expected to exercise freedom of inquiry when arriving at conclusions of something being either “good” or “bad”.

Dignity in Context, and Out: Discussion of Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity, a Sense of Dignity, and Inspirational Shame”

ABSTRACTDr. Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity, a Sense of Dignity, and Inspirational Shame” is an interdisciplinary integration of a priori ethics and a phenomenology of dignity. She contends that the human person’s engagement with other people—writ large in the therapeutic encounter—is inherently ethically situated. Moreover, she avers an inherent content to this ethics, namely, mutual respect for distinctively human value—dignity—between and among people. Her ethics of dignity informs her psychoanalytic exploration of experiences of dignity, indignity, and her notion of inspirational shame, among others. I join in Jacobs’ advocacy for therapeutic facilitation of a person’s sense of inherent worth, as well as her opposition to relational contexts of devaluation and degradation. However, the primordiality Jacobs grants to her ethics of dignity often obscures the constitutively cultural, familial, and personal contextuality of, first, her—and in my view, any—ethical conviction; second, what she describes as the experience of being human; third, the alleged indignity of human vulnerability; and finally, the claim that shame is the natural reaction to one’s failure to live up to personal ideals. In the end, and subject to certain clinical concerns, Jacobs’ article integrates into psychoanalysis primordial ethical duties that she and others claim inhere in us as human beings.

T. G. Masaryk, Václav Havel a heslo „pravda vítězí“ z československé prezidentské standarty

The paper deals with the motto written on the flag of the president of Czechoslovakia, “Truth Prevails”. It is usually associated with T. G. Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, and Vaclav Havel, its last president and the first president of Czech Republic. For Masaryk the truth was an ethical ideal and an imperative which obliged him to fight for what he believed to be true. In his writings on the meaning of Czech history he gave it religious connotation, presenting it as a fulfillment of the humanitarian ideal, a heritage of the Czech reformation started by Jan Hus and the Hussites (who used the slogan “God’s truth prevails”). However, the meaning of the motto was in fact polyphonic, as most of the Czech public treated it as a generalized nationalist, perhaps anti-German symbol. For the Communists it symbolized a highly prized, domestic revolutionary tradition. Another meaning the motto received under Vaclav Havel, a former dissident whose truth aimed against “deceitful” Communism, losing its meaning after the fall of the Communist regime when it turned into an obstacle for critical self-reflection. The history of the motto gives the impression that the idea of truth may be a viable basis for the political ethics of conviction, but it hardly forms a basis for the ethics of responsibility.

A Theoretical Framework for Demystifying the Causes of Dysfunction and Disorder in the Chinese Market Economy: A Weberian Perspective

This paper explores a theoretical framework for demystifying the causes of the dysfunction and disorder of the present Chinese market economy. It is posited that Max Weber’s classification of the two potentially conflicting ethics he associates with the behaviour of politicians, the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility offers the basis for a more thorough and accurate account of the dysfunction and disorder within China’s current markets and political economy. Indeed, this paper contends that cultural determinism and neo-institutional economics fail to capture the contextual factors influencing the transition from the Maoist era of state control to contemporary China’s market led economy (following the opening-up of the country since 1978) than a wider reaching Weberian analysis of the contextual factors involved might achieve. This paper proposes that the distinct ethical foundation for the Chinese market economy is based upon the ethic of conviction, which is the continuity of the philosophical underpinnings of the national ideology during the Maoist era. In turn, this has led to the distortion of the incentives for firms in China to provide high-quality goods and services. This paper also conducts a study of the ethical foundations of the present Chinese economy from the comparative perspectives of Smith’s concept of the market economy and from a Confucian perspective. Through this comparative examination, it will be demonstrated that the ethical feature of the modern market economy, stemming from Smith and Confucianism, is based on the ethic of responsibility, which is a mutually opposed concept to the ethic of conviction; therefore, firms whose business ethics are founded upon the ethic of “responsibility” are less prone to deceive consumers as they adhere to a contractual “responsibility” towards the consumer that many Chinese firms still see as of secondary importance as the ethic of “conviction” still dominating the policies, society and culture of the centralist economic post-Maoist state. This paper further reveals that larger firms tend to have more corporate social responsibility due to their established branding effect, thus reflecting a more pervasive sense of the ethic of responsibility and vice versa for firms of a smaller size. This paper concludes with an economic model acting as a quantitative framework which further supports the theories proposed.

When Do Ethical Leaders Become Less Effective? The Moderating Role of Perceived Leader Ethical Conviction on Employee Discretionary Reactions to Ethical Leadership

Drawing from the group engagement model and the moral conviction literature, we propose that perceived leader ethical conviction moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee OCB as well as deviance. In a field study of employees from various industries and a scenario-based experiment, we revealed that both the positive relation between ethical leadership and employee OCB and the negative relation between ethical leadership and employee deviance are more pronounced when leaders are perceived to have weak rather than strong ethical convictions. Further, we argued and showed that employees’ feelings of personal control and perceived voice opportunity mediated the interactive effect of ethical leadership and perceived leader ethical conviction on OCB and deviance. Implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.

La sociologie de la littérature par Gisèle Sapiro

of a reader’s complicity in a perpetrator narrative.Yet Sanyal is also willing to recognize where literary figuration falls short: while Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand productively uses irony to underscore the French Republic’s problematic uses of Holocaust memory (à la Sarkozy), the novel’s unwillingness to interrogate France’s colonial legacy undermines its engagement with comparative histories.While offering fresh insight on a number of canonical texts, Memory and Complicity is timely, provocative , and relevant well beyond the French example: the plasticity of Sanyal’s framework, like the rhetorical figures she assesses, suggests the possibility of new crosspollinations across a range of linguistic and historical contexts. Trinity College (CT) Sara Kippur Sapiro, Gisèle. La sociologie de la littérature. Paris: Découverte, 2014. ISBN 978-27071 -6574-9. Pp. 125. 10 a. As Sapiro explains in her detailed and judiciously conceived survey, the field of studies and research known as the sociology of literature was constituted in the second half of the twentieth century. This new approach to literature originated at a time when literary theory, under the influence of new criticism and structuralism, was increasingly focused on the internal analysis of literary works. In contrast, a sociological perspective developed in the context of Marxist theory and of work done in the field of cultural studies. The fundamental assumption governing a sociological approach is that the meaning of a literary work vastly overflows the boundaries of an authorial intention—not only taking on a significance provided by the context in which the work is created—but also having the potential of acquiring inflections and emphases according to subsequent configurations of social or cultural developments. In this sense, literature appears as“une institution, un champ, un monde ou un réseau de relations, elle est médiatisée par l’univers social dont elle est le produit” (34). Accordingly, Sapiro proceeds to outline three particular levels on which these processes of mediation take place, namely, the conditions surrounding the production of works of literature, the sociology of these works, and the sociology of their reception. Thus the production of literary works is subject to external factors such as economic, political, and religious pressures as well as to internalized ethical and aesthetic conventions or convictions. The theory of Pierre Bourdieu, as it locates the production of literay works at the intersection of a habitus and a champ or field, has been particularly useful in this regard. Such an approach helps avoid what Bourdieu has termed “l’illusion biographique” informing traditional studies that typically conflate an author’s life and work. The author’s role is to be understood instead in terms of “un travail de mise en forme,” a process defined as a “transubstantiation de la matière vécue, imaginée ou empruntée à des sources extérieures et leur amalgame, dont le 268 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 269 principe échappe le plus souvent à l’auteur lui-même” (65). This endeavor inevitably bears the mark of an author’s point of view and, according to Bourdieu, encompasses the entire history of the field of literature (67). As for the reception of literary works, a sociological approach seeks to go beyond a quantitative approach by providing an appreciation of the various modes of appropriation and interpretation to which works are subjected over time. Needless to say, a “sociologie de la lecture” proves eminently daunting in its realization. Moreover, it is a task whose complexity has only grown as a result of the international circulation of literature and literary theory. New fields, such as the sociology of translation and the sociology of transnational modes of appropriation are emerging. In concluding her concise, dense, and most valuable survey Sapiro notes that“si de nombreuses pistes de recherche ont été ouvertes, il reste beaucoup à faire” (108), thus stating what has become both obvious and challenging in the area of her investigations. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Spandri, Francesco, éd. La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2981-1. Pp. 400. 49 a. This important collection, comprised of an introduction and...

Bertrand Russell: cognitivism, non-cognitivism and ethical critical thinking

Bertrand Russell converted from ethical cognitivism to ethical non-cognitivism and this was historically important, as it gave rise in part, to meta-ethics. It also clarified the central problem between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Russell’s view was that defining “good” is the basic problem of ethics. If “good” is not amorphous, the rest of ethics will follow. He did not believe in ethical knowledge per se and asserted that reason is, and must only be, the servant of desire. A factual statement is thus true if there is an equivalent fact, but as ethical statements do not state facts, there is no issue of a corresponding fact or the statement being true or false in the sense in which factual statements are. Ethics has no statement whether true or false, but consists only of desires of a general kind and people know intuitively what is “right” or “wrong”. To Russell critical thinking is entrenched in the structure of philosophy. His epistemological conviction was that knowledge is difficult to attain, while his ethical conviction showed that people should be expected to exercise freedom of inquiry when arriving at conclusions of something being either “good” or “bad”.

‘Responsible Interim’: Revising Hermeneutics and Ethics in the Era of Globalization and Religious Plurality. Philosophical and Sociological Reflections on the Modern State of Religion

AbstractComing from a more comparative point of view as far as Theology of Religions and Interreligious Studies are concerned – though to a certain extent as well as a pluralist in the sense of hope for universal understanding and well-being – I want to ask how Interreligious and Intercultural Hermeneutics are a necessary tool when we try to set up minimal standards for a Global Ethics in the reality of nowadays multicultural societies. I introduce for Ethics as well as for Hermeneutics the concept of ‘Responsible Interim’ – the latter reflecting the fact that human beings do have universals only under the ‘eschatological reserve’ (in Christian terminology), as ‘Suchness in Emptiness’ (in Buddhist terminology). I will proceed from universal truth questions and more general questions of philosophy of religion towards questions of cultural i.e. religious contexts shaping ethical and religious view(s) and convictions. Can smallest common denominators be found? How does legal rule help to establish and keep them? How does society, how do individuals change by starting from a spiritual, creative and holistic and maybe even transpersonal point of view – a view of co-creation and incarnatio continua in religious, i.e. in Christian terminology again?

Justicia después de la guerra

Concluidas las hostilidades, ya sean o no conflictos armados formales, las partes deben rendir cuentas por su proceder. Este sentimiento es casi universalmente compartido, independientemente de la propia estructura moral o ética que tengan, aunque los detalles de esta responsabilidad son profundamente controversiales y discutidas. En la Sección 2 de este breve artículo ofrece una base normativa para la justicia después de la guerra que apela a la norma contra la impunidad. Se concluye que los procesos penales, en oposición a los mecanismos no penales, mejor reivindican la norma contra la impunidad. A la luz de esta conclusión la Sección 3 se hace la pregunta ¿cómo debemos alcanzar la justicia después de la guerra? ¿Quién debe ser llevado a juicio? (líderes o soldados de infantería), que instancias deben juzgarlos (los tribunales nacionales o internacionales), que los delitos que se deben imputar (delitos de tipo nacional o crímenes internacionales), los procedimientos que deben seguirse en los juicios, y, ¿cómo? (y por qué) deben ser castigados.

Ethics of Clinical Research Involving Adults with Impaired Decision-Making Capacity

Background: Proper decision making capacity, adequate disclosure and voluntary decisions are basic constituents of informed consent which is required in surgical procedures, any interventions, any tissue collection, or any research involving the human participants. But, it becomes more hectic if the participants or patients are physically or mentally impaired for proper understanding or rational decision making. Time has gone by assembling or regulating effective laws for research involving persons with impaired decision making capacity. Still, question arises, is it ethical to enroll an incompetent person who is not physically or mentally fit to make a decision in risky research or interventional trials? If it is, how the informed consent and ethical measures can be taken? Method: Extensive literature review was done in Google scholar, PubMed and national or institutional websites with the corresponding keywords to summarize the cases of impaired decision making and regulation of informed consent and ethical measures in those cases. Results: Decision making capacity requires three level of capacities and four levels of abilities. If a person has factual understanding, implies a certain level of rational belief, knows to manipulate information to arrive at a choice and remains stable on the choice, is known to be capacitated in decision making. Impaired decision making capacity is more common in Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia research. Although a definite line between decisional capacity and incapacity is still in question, many assessment tools are available to conclude it. Moreover, decisional incapacity has been found as a significant ratio in general or psychiatric hospitals and nursing homes regarding psychological disorders or critically ill conditions. But, these conditions should not prevent anyone from understanding, choosing, or accepting any intervention as sometimes they may have some preserved abilities too. As per accepted ethics, respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions. First, the individual should be treated as an autonomous agent and second, the person with diminished autonomy is entitled to protection. That’s why, in case of severe psychiatric diseases and Alzheimer’s diseases, surrogate consent is recommended. But surrogacy should be reviewed by the institutional review board (IRB). Multimedia consent process, advanced consent directives, rational consent waiver and many other processes are practiced in case of ethical research involving decisional incapacitate persons which are discussed in the paper. Conclusion: It should be clarified by the IRB whether involvement of impaired subjects has beneficial scientific aim or not. Capacity assessment system should be in an organized and systemic way. Threshold for capacity and recognition of persons able to conduct this process should be fixed. Role of surrogacy and involvement of IRB to align it in a proper manner is always a matter of concern. Consideration of risk management, subjects’ autonomy and assent-dissent issues should be clarified in research.

Dynamic multilevel governance for sustainable transformation as postnational configuration

Modern societies are increasingly having to cope with profound socio-political transformations, such as the transition from fossil energy production and consumption to more sustainable energy systems. Transformations ignite dynamics, processes, and forces, which induce new challenges for traditional structures and orders because major changes in society and politics are shifting from established manners, customs, and modes of behavior to new norms and values. Transformations cause epistemological uncertainty and complexity and challenge ontological fundaments and ethical convictions. National structures alone are not adequate to the task of handling the corresponding challenges because the capacity of domestic politics and regulations is too weak to achieve eligible political outcomes that can guide and structure transformations. In this light, I argue for a form of dynamic multilevel governance as a postnational configuration that has the capability and power to reform and transfigure institutions, structure and agency, hierarchies, cultural fabrics, socio-technical systems, and infrastructures toward new social and political orders. I theoretically and normatively conceptualize and justify three major governance framework conditions as hallmarks of dynamic multilevel governance, namely inclusiveness, adaptiveness, and distributed and differentiated deliberation. These capabilities produce reflexive authority with transformative and structuring power to tackle transformation issues. My notion of dynamic multilevel governance relies on thoughts in new institutionalism, network theory, deliberative democracy theory, discourse ethics, and different concepts of governance. I combine theory, normative justification, and institutional feasibility.

On Thinking the Tragic with Adorno

This article seeks to provide a template for understanding the tragic dimension of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy through a reading of his early collaborative work with Max Horkheimer, the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). While Adorno’s view has often been considered to be tragic, little has been done to reconstruct the tragic dimension of his thought. I argue that the view of the human condition, presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is founded on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical convictions that have structural similarities with the positions held by theorists and philosophers of tragedy and the tragic. Since traces of these tragic elements can be found throughout Adorno’s mature philosophy, the approach presented in this article may serve as a model for a more detailed mapping and examination of the tragic dimension of his thought in future research.

The Theological Context for Weber’s Two Types of Ethics

In the final pages of Politik als Beruf Max Weber introduces his now famous distinction between two types of ethics: the “ethics of conviction” ( “Gesinnungsethik”) and the “ethics of responsibility” ( “Verantwortungsethik”). Neither of these is simple to translate and neither of these is easy to understand. What makes it even more difficult to comprehend Weber’s two types of ethics is the absence of a sufficient context. In the following piece I will try to address this problem. In the first part I set out the nineteenth century notion of “conscience”, in the second I address the Protestant Ethic with the particular emphasis on Calvin’s theology, and in the third I lay out the political and ethical demands of some of the Old Testament Prophets. The people’s appeals to conscience, Calvin’s convictions, and the beliefs of Old Testament prophets were all predicated on a sense of devotion to God. Weber’s “modern politician” shared many of their ethical convictions but was no longer able to appeal to the authority of God. Instead, the modern political actor has to have a sense of responsibility and a belief in the accountability for the future. By providing this theological context one will have a fuller background for understanding of Weber’s two types of ethics.

Il vero, il bello e il giusto. Tre criteri relazionali per valutare la validità del discorso scientifico nelle scienze sociali

The relationship between scientific discourse and is at the heart of sociological thought since its founding as an autonomous scientific discipline. The starting point is certainly to be found in the distinction between ethics of conviction and ethics of advanced by Max Weber. The theme runs through the entire theoretical elaboration of the ‘900 and is one of the central themes of the branch of sociology that specializes in the analysis of scientific activity, otherwise called Sociology of Science (and later Sociology of Sociology). On the basis of this tradition, so to speak hidden within the sociological knowledge, in this paper the Author propose to analyze the validity of the scientific discourse in the social sciences through the use of three semantic criteria: the true, the good and the right. Which in turn refer to three dimensions of scientific activity: the truth, consistency and accountability; belonging respectively to three different sets of values and ethical (codes): ethics, aesthetics and public ethics. These criteria - truth, consistency and responsibility - will be re-specified, following the categories of analysis of the relational paradigm, into the different dimensions of scientific knowledge: ontology, epistemology, methodology and pragmatic.

A Justificação Ética da Tese da Separação entre o Direito e a Moral em John Austin

O jurista britânico John Austin está inserido no limiar do desenvolvimento da tradição juspositivista. Sua obra, que data da primeira metade do século XIX, foi especialmente importante para a fixação dos elementos básicos dessa vertente do pensamento jurídico. Entre suas contribuições para a doutrina juspositivista está a sua formulação da tese da separação entre o direito e a moral. No âmbito ético, por seu turno, John Austin foi um fervoroso utilitarista e defendeu a utilização do princípio da utilidade como o único critério racional para o desvelamento das normas morais superiores (as leis divinas). Considerando essas duas dimensões do seu pensamento, há muito se questiona se a sua ética utilitarista teria influenciado, de algum modo, a sua teoria jurídica, especialmente no que tange à tese da separação. Esta última, que está no centro da tradição juspositivista, tem sido interpretada de diferentes modos no debate jurídico contemporâneo. Uma vertente em especial, o chamado positivismo ético, abriu novas perspectivas para o estudo dessa tradição, ao defender a teoria juspositivista como um modelo teórico moralmente satisfatório para os sistemas jurídicos contemporâneos. Desse modo, utilizando a premissa central do positivismo ético (de que existem razões morais para a defesa da tese da separação) como instrumento metodológico- interpretativo, pretende-se retomar a questão da relação entre as convicções éticas e jurídicas de John Austin, a fim de compreender quais foram as razões morais que o levaram a defender a separação entre o que é o direito e aquilo que ele deveria ser.

Ought I Make Political Dance?

This essay draws on personal experience as it investigates the intersection of ethics, political activism, and dance performance. It considers the manner in which artistic and ethical convictions can shape the critical reception of dance that intentionally engages social justice issues, and it draws on ethical theory in order to investigate the manner in which personal ethical beliefs can determine a dance artist's approach to such work.