Democratic Ethics Research Articles

Deep, Cheap, and Improvable

A democratic ethics of biological technology must engage the public. This is not easy to do in a way that satisfies the demands of democratic ethics, or meets the pace of rapidly changing, complex technology. This paper describes a solution proposed by the University of British Columbia’s Norms Evolving in Response to Dilemmas interdisciplinary research group. The solution, the NERD web survey, has three distinct advantages over other methods: it is Deep—the survey provides deep data, particularly when compared to alternatives such as polls and focus groups; Cheap—our survey is cost effective, which is important for a truly democratic tool; and Improvable—the NERD survey is a work in progress, improvable by design.

BEAUTY OR BEAST, OR MONSTROUS REGIMENTS? ROBERTSON AND BURKE ON WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC SCENE

The Enlightenment can usefully be conceived as a confrontation with eroding Christian and classical republican ethics. It was permeated with assumptions about women and the gendered dichotomy between public and private spheres. While William Robertson and Edmund Burke, along with many of their contemporaries, remained committed to Christian- and republican-based conceptions of virtue, they were working within a new Enlightenment paradigm. Its political agenda has to be understood by way of its configurations of beauty, taste, and morality as these relate to the imperatives and needs of modern societies of a high level of sophistication and differentiation. An examination of two themes in the work of Robertson and Burke—the nature of women in “savage” and “civilized” societies, and “beauty in distress”—reveals how long-held convictions about the character of women, especially with regard to their capacity and right to appear in the public domain, were modified and adjusted to the idea of progress, and became central to an enlightened affirmation of modern European civilization. The result had its ironies. On the one hand, a positive public and indeed political role was invented for women that is central to understanding the overall thrust of a political discourse based on politeness, civility, refinement and similar values specifically associated with modern commercial societies. On the other hand, though the complexity of this model of society gave ample scope to informal and spontaneous vehicles of social disciplining, whatever room was left for the more traditional ways of governing polities through the direct exertion of political power remained closed to women: the very features that opened for them the opportunity to play political roles through sociability in the public sphere also circumscribed them.

Character as Ethical Democracy: Definitions and Measures

In the wake of crises caused by teen and child violence and by financial and sexual scandals in business, government, and religion, educators are turning more and more attention to the development of character in our nation’s students. With this increased attention come important questions of the extent to which these efforts may be effective. Is character something that can be developed in students? If so, which are the most effective methods for doing so? What are the outcomes that might reasonably be expected from such methods? Are there ways of testing students to chart their progress in character development?

Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics

Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics

Towards a Democratic Liberatory Ethics

The object of this article is threefold. First, to critically assess the approaches to liberatory ethics particularly those developed in early modernity which aimed at deriving an 'objectively' grounded liberatory ethics. Second, to explore the reasons why today's liberatory ethics should avoid both the Scylla of 'objective' ethics as well as the Charybdis of irrationalist ethics or unbounded moral relativism. Third, to show that a democratic liberatory ethics, which could only be derived through a process of democratic rationalism, should necessarily express those moral values which are intrinsically compatible to the democratic institutions themselves.

A Deweyan Perspective on Democracy and Inquiry in the Field of Special Education

On what basis do special educators working in the area of severe disabilities make decisions? This article provides an exploration of the practice of social inquiry in professional work that draws from the democratic ethics of John Dewey. Dewey emphasizes the need for knowledge to contribute to the daily challenge of fostering equality in human interactions and relationships. His philosophy supports the free development of many forms of social inquiry and the cultivation of a pluralistic dialogue valuing diverse perspectives. This article concludes with a description of advisory work within the self-advocacy movement as an example of Deweyan democracy in action.

Democratic Ethics and Ecological Modernization: The Formulation of California’s Automobile Emission Standards

The state of California is the force leading the nation’s automobile emission standards. Environmental groups working on clean air policies, however, have been co-opted by the state agency responsible for setting the state’s automobile emission standards, the California Air Resources Board, and the automobile and oil industries. This has been done primarily by controlling the nature of the discourse surrounding the public debate on how to improve air quality. This debate is centered not on health and the environment but on “ecological modernization,” or the technology of controlling air pollution. Thus land use planning is ignored or is not considered as a viable policy option. Given the bounded nature of this debate, I hold that the most ethical and efficacious approach for environmental groups is to withdraw from the state’s policymaking process and redeploy their time and resources toward civil society. I draw this conclusion by employing an ethics rooted in democracy and by offering a description of the forces that are driving the ecological modernization of the automobile in California.

The Ethics of Democracy: Individuality and Educational Policy

The author revisits earlier discussions of the importance of the development of the individual for a democratic society, looking in particular at the "pragmatic utopianism" of John Dewey. The article proceeds from a view of personal growth, subjectivity, and communal relations that challenges the class stratification brought about by capitalist forces that serve to undermine an individual's democratic agency. The author explores the role and function of the individual in educational policy in the hope that such an examination will broaden theories and analyses of the role of class in educational policy.

God and Kant’s Ethical Commonwealth

The Thomist 65 (2001): 67-92 GOD AND KANT'S ETHICAL COMMONWEALTH GORDON E. MICHALSON, JR. New College ofthe University ofSouth Florida Sarasota, Florida At one point in his recent history of modern moral philosophy, J.B. Schneewind refers to Immanuel Kant's "astonishing claim" that "God and we can share membership in a single moral community only if we all equally legislate the law we are to obey."1 Schneewind's remark is intended to illuminate his wider story about what he calls the Kantian "invention" of autonomy. In Schneewind's telling of this story, Kant's claim is "astonishing" because of the clear suggestion that autonomy has replaced obedience as the basis of the moral life, a transition that marks a decisive moment in the secularization of ethics in the modern period. Considered theologically, however, Schneewind's remark is simultaneously suggestive of a fundamental alteration of the traditional view of divine transcendence, an alteration implicit in the modern effort to ground morality in something other than the will of God. The vision of a moral community in which God and finite moral agents equally legislate the law probably implies that God is subject to a moral principle that can be understood apart from reference to the divine will alone. The leveling process at work in the notion of a "shared membership" in the moral community is at the same time an erosion of the distance separating heaven and earth, the transcendent and the immanent. This subterranean linkage between Kant's ideal moral community and an implicit 1 J.B. Schneewind, The Invention ofAutonomy: A History ofModem Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 512. 67 68 GORDON E. MICHALSON, JR. loss of divine transcendence is in fact one of the most powerful and least understood aspects of Kant's philosophy. The moral community in question is what Kant will ultimately refer to as the "ethical commonwealth," which is the refined version of what he had earlier referred to in the Founda.tions of the Metaphysics ofMorals as the "kingdom ofends."2 Kant defines the ethical commonwealth as a union of rational agents living under moral laws, which is to say, "laws of virtue."3 As the contrast case to a political or what Kant calls a "juridico-civil state," the ethical commonwealth depends upon self-legislation rather than on external coercion for its maintenance and regulation. The point of the distinction is amply conveyed by Kant's admonition to all who would attempt to legislate morality: "But woe to the legislator who wishes to establish through force a polity directed to ethical ends," as it "would be a contradiction ," Kant warns, "for the political commonwealth to compel its citizens to enter into an ethical commonwealth, since the very concept ofthe latter involves freedom from coercion."4 The main reason Kant's position holds such theological interest is that his notion of "freedom from coercion" includes freedom from any conception of a divine will that is not itself subject to the same legislative principle that governs all members of the ethical commonwealth. What Schneewind refers to as Kant's "astonishing claim" is in fact Kant's effort to envision a kind of moral partnership between God and humanity, a project that leaves traditional conceptions of divine transcendence in a complex transitional zone. My aim in what follows is to examine further the nature of the divine-human partnership involved in Kant's conception of the ethical commonwealth, with a view to clarifying the status of divine transcendence within his position. A primary textual clue for this clarification will be a series of important shifts in Kant's 2 Immanuel Kant, Foundations ofthe Metaphysics ofMorals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 55. Hereafter Foundations. 3 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits ofReason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Green and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 87. Hereafter Religion. 4 Ibid. GOD AND KANT'S ETHICAL COMMONWEALTH 69 thinking occurring between the Critique ofPractical Reason and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, works separated by five years. These shifts reveal the connection between the increasing importance ofthe moral community and the decreasing importance of...

Resistance Theories: Exploring the Politics of Oppositional Behavior.

Special educators have historically used psychological theories to explain students? disruptive and oppositional behavior. Sociological research and theories have played a secondary or even nonexistent role. The sociology of education tradition within general education has developed an extensive literature examining student misbehavior. This article presents the resistance theories, one strain of the critical sociology of education. Given the preponderance of students of lower social class and minority group status within special education, these theories offer insightful and useful ways for special educators to understand the political nature of oppositional behavior. These theories provide suitable ways of interpreting the underlying political tensions that reside behind behavior and guidance for teachers who want to develop the school as a community enacting the social ethics of democracy.

In Service of the Leviathan: Democracy, Ethics and the Potential for Administrative Evil in the New Public Management

In this paper, we argue that the practice of New Public Management (NPM) subverts democracy by undermining the social contract and substituting a market mentality with very different normative expectations. Like late modern Hobbesians, those who advocate NPM offer a vision of public service in which democratic politics and ethics become increasingly irrelevant. In this scenario, the market becomes the new leviathan, which we have no choice but to obey. The values of this sovereign-competition, exchange values, transaction costs, and survival of the fittest-have driven most remaining vestiges of democracy from the public square. Such an atmosphere leaves us disturbingly vulnerable to the practice of administrative evil.

Théologie et bioéthique : une perspective protestante

The contribution of the protestant ethics in the bioethical debate depends strongly on the religious situation of the considered countries. In Switzerland, the relative equilibrium between laicity, protestantism and Catholicism offers a good opportunity to take into account the pluralist condition of a democratic ethics. The protestant convictions find here an appropriate setting for an open ethical theory, which integrates the symbolical and religious representations of transcendence.

Culture and Democratic Theory: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Democracy

Since the late 1970s, a highly productive strand of critical theory has emerged which has largely abandoned the Frankfurt School’s critique of cultural domination. Influenced by the work of Habermas, which replaces the problem of individual happiness with “a concentration on the problem of political democracy and on the analysis of institutions permitting individual autonomy and democratic interaction,” 1 this strand has turned to democratic theory and discourse ethics as a means to resuscitate the transformative potential of existing political institutions. Civil society, the public sphere, and the domain of law (as opposed to the culture industry and the critique of instrumental reason) figure centrally in reconstructive projects aimed at the articulation of institutional remedies for chronic forms of economic and political injustice. It is noteworthy, however, that in the search for post-Marxist foundations for the critique of “really existing democracy,” critical democratic theory has not adequately taken stock of the fact that the symbolic order of society, which shapes the meaning and status of social identities, is implicated in these forms of injustice. While this emergent strand of critical theory has remained distant from a critique of cultural domination, it does not stand alone in this failure to conceptualize all the significant features of modern relations of power. The constitutive force of the symbolic order of society, enacted at the macro-level through the institutions of the public sphere and at the micro-level in face-to-face interactions, is difficult to capture in the terms of existing political and social theory. Such theory, as Foucault emphasized, is capable of recognizing social injustice in only two registers: economic domination and the illegitimate exercise of sovereign authority. Consequently, the symbolic force that structures the formation and hierarchization of social identities fails to be understood as a type of political power. Because it is unequally distributed across the social order,this symbolic force is an undemocratic structural constraint on the social identity, social valuation, and symbolic practices of individuals and groups, a constraint which always already impacts the quantity and quality of individual and group participation in the political, economic, and cultural life of society. Moreover, the one-solution-fits-all approach to instances of social injustice that is favored by liberal and social democratic reform projects (legal equality and economic egalitarianism) inhibits the development of a theory which can articulate

Drama and politics in the English Civil War

List of illustrations A note on texts and list of abbreviations Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: how the drama disappeared Part I. 1642-1649: Cases in Politics and Drama: 1. New news for a new world? Genre, politics and the news dialogues of the 1640s 2. 'With the agreement of the people in their hands': transformations of 'radical' drama in the 1640s 3. Royalist versus republican ethics and aesthetics: The Famous Tragedie of Charles I and The Tragedy of the Famous Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero Interchapter: 'The Life of Action': playing, action and discourse on performance in the 1640s Part II. The 1650s: Protectorate, Politics and Performance: 4. Gender and status in dramatic discourse: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 5. Royal or reformed? The politics of court entertainment in translation and performance 6. National identity, topic and genre in Davenant's Protectorate opera 7. Genre, politics and place: the social body in the dramatic career of John Tatham 8. True and loyal? Politics and genre in Civil War and Protectorate tragicomedy Coda Notes Select bibliography Index.

Putnam and Cavell on the Ethics of Democracy

L'A. souligne la necessite d'une revision et d'une amplification des theories politiques d'H. Putnam et S. Cavell, fondees sur la defense de la democratie et la revendication de l'auto-perfection de l'individu, en vue du projet d'un meliorisme pragmatique reconstructif inspire par Dewey. Se referant au perfectionnisme d'Emerson et Thoreau, l'A. montre que l'ethique de la democratie et de la realisation de soi defendue par Putnam et Cavell releve de la dimension pratique de la vie philosophique

East Asia in Transition: Toward a New Regional Order

This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics. The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In their framework, ideographic collisions and everyday impasses bring about political events that challenge the status quo, creating possibilities for social change. "Postmodern Public Administration" is an outstanding intellectual achievement that has rewritten the political theory of public administration. This new edition will encourage everyone who reads it to think quite differently about democratic governance.

In the service of democracy

The notion of service can encompass much more than the basic duties of obedience, loyalty, trust, and courage directed solely to some higher secular authority. It can also encompass a duty to a “common good,” a “good society,” a “public,” or a people. If public service is to be viewed as an integral component of our democratic political system, the ethical-moral values of faith, hope, and love must be recognized as the critical impulses which energize a life dedicated to the service of democracy. But such an approach is very different from the current focus of democratic ethics. In particular the love ethic inevitably moves on a collision course with many of our basic canons of public sector management such as the concept of formal, institutionalized, bureaucratic authority, the notion of detached, dispassionate, objective neutrality, and the almost absolute emphasis placed on rational, routinized, programmed behavior. To labor in the service of democracy is to recognize that all of us are called, in one ...

Henry George and George Bernard Shaw: Comparison and Contrast

Abstract. Henry George, the American economist and social philosopher, and George Bernard Shaw, the British playwright and social reformer, were two famous personalities of the last quarter of the 19th century, each a prophet in his own way. The two men probably never met, though Shaw credited George's oratory as well as his classic. Progress and Poverty, with awakening his interest in economic issues, and to his last days acknowledged his debt to George. Both were deeply committed to ending poverty. But there the similarity ended—George was devoted to ethical democracy, Shaw to socialist dictatorship. George saw cooperative individualism as the goal of social reconstruction; Shaw dreamed of a Superman, and fancied himself a supporter of the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, and of Soviet Russian‘communism.’Shaw saw the purpose of life as “being used for a (mighty) purpose;” George saw it as blazing a trail for‘progressive humanity,’cooperating with the Creator in creating a moral world.

Democratic Autonomy, Political Ethics, and Moral Luck

Democratic Autonomy, Political Ethics, and Moral Luck

Die gute Regel als Weg des guten Lebens

Abstract Present discussions regarding »prominent« ethical issues time and again focus on the question whether firm ethical and religious beliefs should be privileged vis a vis the democratic rules of the distribution of power and the formation of majorities. The »ethics of the structure of power« teach us to consider the seemingly only formal rules to be »good«, for they allow to have open discussions between different views of»the good life«. The distinction between these two realms of»good« pose a problern to religious ethics and need to be considered in the ethics of democracy.