Moral Certitude Research Articles

What Makes Conflict Resolution Possible?

Much of the negotiation literature emphasizes dispute resolution process, seemingly based on the assumption that resolution is indeed possible in a rational environment. The author outlines the history of transformations in social and political thought that have led to this shared assumption. However, the rationality assumption is seriously challenged in the contemporary era by terrorists and others who predicate their actions on a moral certitude that justifies their actions, no matter what the costs. Interveners perhaps should place more emphasis on changing the environment in which disputes occur, so that resolution is at least a possibility.

The descent of the doves

This essay is a critique of Derrida’s ethical works, using Camus’s last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida’s: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting passer-by as a young woman suicides one night on the Seine. After this time, he comes to consider all his former virtues as concealed vices. He also becomes acutely aware of what he terms the ‘duplicity’ of human beings as such. In Part I, I consider how Clamence’s fall from innocence can be read ‘with’ Derrida’s deconstructive registration of a ‘double bind’ pertaining to our standing vis-à-vis what he terms ‘logocentrism’. I argue that Derrida’s is a post-lapsarian philosophy, which challenges all attempts to construct closed conceptual systems that would confer an epistemic and/or moral certitude upon their expositors. In Part II, I then enter into a more detailed exposition of Derrida’s ‘later’ works broaching friendship, the invitation, the gift, and other ‘matters moral’. I read these texts in the light of an examination of what is involved, for Camus, in being a ‘judge-penitent’ (what Clamence in The Fall calls his profession). I suggest that Derrida runs the risk of a certain ‘puritanism of difference’ in his moral reflections, which defend the aporetic formulation: ‘ tout autre est tout autre’ [every other is every bit other] ( The Gift of Death). The problem is that, while Derrida’s position allows one (everywhere) to say what one is against, it problematizes any affirmative moral stance. Like Clamence, who assumes the right to judge everyone else because he has subjected himself to a severe penitence, I suggest that we have a right to wonder whether Derrida’s deconstructive critique of metaphysics can validate only endless repetitions of itself.

Making Reform Happen: The Passage of Canada's Collective-Bargaining Policy, 1943–1944

Patrick Conroy, the secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) from 1941 to 1951, was not someone who gave up easily. As a friend observed, the Scottish-born coal miner was a committed trade unionist whose “moral certitude was admirable and… one of his great strengths.” In late 1942, however, Conroy seemed ready to call it quits on the CCL's campaign to win a national collective-bargaining policy in Canada. Since its inception in September 1940, the Congress, which represented most of the industrial unions in the country, had pushed hard for a comprehensive labor policy like the National Labor Relations or Wagner Act in the United States, which protected and advanced the rights of workers. But the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King repeatedly refused to move beyond a turn-of-the-century conciliatory framework that emphasized moral suasion and compromise. In late 1942, when a regional organizer asked Conroy whether a collective-bargaining policy appeared likely in the future, the CCL leader replied: “We do not feel it worthwhile to raise people's hopes when the record of the federal government is as it has been.”

Milton's imperial epic: Paradise lost and the discourse of colonialism

Written during the crucial first phase of English empire-building in the New World, Paradise Lost registers the radically divided attitudes toward the settlement of America that existed in seventeenth-century Protestant England. Evans looks at the relationship between Milton's epic and the pervasive colonial discourse of Milton's time. Evans bases his analysis on the literature of exploration and colonialism. The primary sources on which he draws range from sermons about the New World justifying colonization and exhorting virtue among colonists to promotional pamphlets designed to lure people and investment into the colonies. Evans's research allows him to create a richly textured picture of anxiety and optimism, guilt and moral certitude. The central question is whether Milton supported England's colonization or covertly attempted to subvert it. In contrast to those who attribute to Paradise Lost a specific political agenda for the American colonies, Evans maintains that Milton reflects the complexity and ambivalence of attitudes held by English society. Analyzing Paradise Lost against this background, Evans offers a new perspective on such fundamental issues as the narrator's shifting stance in the poem, the unique character of Milton's prelapsarian paradise, and the moral and intellectual status of Adam and Eve before and after the fall. From Satan's arrival in Hell to the expulsion from the garden of Eden, Milton's version of the Genesis myth resonates with the complex thematics of Renaissance colonialism.

Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection

"Will women become obsolete?" The theme of this book is the need for and utility of reliable methods of sex selection. It is written "from a feminist perspective." Warren defines<i>gendercide</i>as "the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex." While this neologism is indeed "sex-neutral," it hints at the book's moral certitude in addressing the questions surrounding preconceptive and postconceptive sex selection. The author seeks to protect and defend women's choices, whether to abort an unwanted, "wrong sex" fetus or to participate in affirmative action programs to reverse son-preference and sexism in our society. Specific counterstrategies to male domination are encouraged. The book has eight chapters, which, despite their brevity, are surprisingly comprehensive. Objections to sex selection are divided into consequentialist (social) and nonconsequentialist (moral) camps. Unattractive precedents to sex selection, including witch hunts and widow sacrifices, are examined, and the question whether more males would mean more

The correspondence of two corners

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard produced, on an unprecedented scale, a reaction that one might term heartfelt confusion. The immediate response of the record-breaking assemblage, most of whom remained through a persistent drizzle, must be judged enthusiastic they interrupted him with applause no fewer than twenty-five times, by one count. Those present, however, could not fail to notice that the interruptions came, literally and figuratively, from different parts of the crowd, now from the left, now from the right, now from the center. The applause itself seemed tentative. At the conclusion of his remarks, however, Solzhenitsyn was ac corded a warm standing ovation. The subsequent reaction in the public print was similarly massive and disjunctive. American conservative editors, apparently surprised to have such good copy about the 'Communist menace' from an 'intellectual' of world wide reputation, gave a vigorous play to two or three paragraphs. Liberals were perplexed: how could an author with the proven humanistic insight and intellectual force of Solzhenitsyn speak as he had of humanism, of the En lightenment, of the American withdrawal from Viet Nam and of the precious freedom of the media? One even heard from the left echoes of the right wing taunt, 'Love it or leave it'. It is not the purpose of the remarks that follow to elucidate or comment upon Solzhenitsyn's speech, or to deal specifically with the response it elic ited. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn speaks with a moral certitude that is unique among the great story-tellers of our time, and one could not, in a few pages, do justice either to his message or to the curiously diverse reception it has met. It does appear possible, however, to make some very general comments upon a more general phenomenon, one of which Solzhenitsyn is a major and, for all his individuality, not entirely atypical part, namely, the recent en counter of the American intellectual and the Russian ?migr? intelligent. For nearly a decade now, a growing tide of emigrations, deportations, and defections has been providing American intellectuals with an opportunity for which many of them longed during the long years of Cold War the chance

Children's Television Advertising: An Ethical Morass for Business and Government

Abstract The confrontation between marketers and broadcasters and the FTC over regulation of children's television advertising illustrates the effect of ethic conflict on public policy. Ethic theory describes circumstances where instinctive and personal values of “right” are contested with situational consequences. Such ethic dilemmas are apparent in both corporate and government positions on the issue. Business publicly professes concern for child welfare but appears captive of market exigency. The FTC staff is similarly caught between a moral certitude akin to a crusade and the situational reality that its proposals are too severe for acceptance. The paper suggests the product of such conflicts is the abrasive and contentious atmosphere we find in the current debate.

British Foreign Policy Since the War (II)

If criticism, like charity, begins at home, both virtues are probably served best by examining not the manifest faults, but the hidden ones. If Britain’s official position to-day is that a lead was given to the world and not followed, and that rearmament is a justified and overdue result, it is important to be sure whether or not such is the historical truth. If it is, then the new British policy of 1939 can command the resolute and unreserved support of everyone except a complete pacifist. But if it is not, then the new policy is unsound for lack of a moral certitude, and has none of the easy convenience of unavoidability. And the matter can only be clarified by examining British policy in two ways—our record at key-points, and our greatest post-war achievements as judged by ourselves.The first key-point occurred very early: in 1919. During the Peace Conference, Britain and the United States had agreed jointly (on June 28th) to strengthen the League system by guaranteeing the territorial integrity of France, backed by force. When the United States Government rejected the Covenant and withdrew from the guarantee, the British Government withdrew also, feeling unable to guarantee the frontiers of France single-handed. But, six years later, we did give precisely such a guarantee, in the Treaty of Locarno. And there is real tragedy in the sequence of events. For, in virtue of the principle that a guarantor can influence the party guaranteed, we have been able since Locarno to influence and to moderate French policy. Had we given the guarantee in 1919 we should have had that power from the start.

Religion, Revelation, and Moral Certitude

Previous articleNext article FreeReligion, Revelation, and Moral CertitudeHenry S. NashHenry S. Nash Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 31, Number 5May, 1908 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/474049 Views: 59 Journal History This article was published in The Biblical World (1893-1920), which is continued by The American Journal of Theology (1897-1920). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

III. A calculation of the credibility of human testimony.

Moral certitude absolute, is that in which the mind of man entirely acquiesces, requiring no further assurance