Moral Coherence Research Articles

Innovative educators, cutting-edge technologies, and moral coherence

Innovative educators, cutting-edge technologies, and moral coherence

Transformative Leadership Journeys: Learning and Identity of University Leaders of Engaged Scholarship

University-community engagement (UCE) researchers have developed taxonomies, frameworks and practices for the field, but have not deeply considered issues of social, cultural, political, geographical and economic dimensions of theory and practice in institutions and their communities, including faculty, staff, and senior leadership. These dimensions may include institutional and personal history, such as religious affiliations; epistemology; forms of leadership; power structures; and social locations, among others. These cultural forms are reflected in institutional discourse, for example the narratives of engagement actors, and can be expressed in a variety of cultural artifacts including personal stories of praxis. Leading community engagement efforts is a transformative values-driven activity; we believe that transformative leadership is a process of continual, transformative learning, which is fundamentally a process of identity transformation. The narratives of six institutional leaders of community-engaged scholarship (CES) in higher education are examined for how their various scholarly and professional identities have developed through transformative learning processes), revealing themes of serendipity, moral coherence, values congruence, agentic change, moral courage, authenticity, relational practice and generativity that integrate these stories.

Agency, identity, power: An agentive triad model for teacher action

Teacher action and change is a complex and nuanced phenomenon that has been theorized across diverse literature in terms of identity, agency, and power. Drawing on this literature, this article offers specific articulations of teacher identity as interpretive framework, power as legitimate action, and agency as moral coherence. We posit a model of teacher agency understood in the interplay of individual beliefs, values, and ideals with institutional roles, authority, and institutional action, producing (or not producing) authentic action. This model draws a distinction between agency and power, and highlights dynamics of equilibrium and discord that may emerge between who teachers are and what they do. The agentive triad model serves as a theoretical tool for guiding or supporting teacher growth and agentive action, and for understanding the dynamics between institutionally legitimized roles and teacher identities.

Introduction: What Does David McCullough Have That We Don't?

Why do books like David McCullough's The Pioneers sell so much better than academic monographs? This question is more complicated than it may appear, given that academic historians strive for many of the qualities for which McCullough is rightly known. The difference between this work of popular history and most academic histories centers on the moral coherence of McCullough's story, which makes it easier to read and digest. This coherence derives from key authorial decisions about characters and outcomes. Yet academic historians should not fear or envy these kinds of histories, for there is a great and growing demand for the kinds of contextual knowledge and precision that they can provide.

من بلاغة التناسب فی الفاصلة القرآنیة فاصلة نفی الظلم بــ ( لا ) عن الله تعالى نموذجًا

من بلاغة التناسب فی الفاصلة القرآنیة فاصلة نفی الظلم بــ ( لا ) عن الله تعالى نموذجًا

Towards moral teleology — a comparative study of Kant and Zhu Xi

Kant’s coining of «reflective judgment» in the third Critique by a conceptual clarification of the third higher cognitive faculty has long been criticized as redundant for his philosophical system and deemed a typical Kantian architectonic failure. Zhu Xi’s vital development of the doctrine «gewu» in his commentary on The Great Learning has been attacked for centuries for committing a hermeneutic fallacy. I argue that a comparative study shows that both conceptions steered a metaphysical transition towards «the supersensible» in each philosophy, leading to a similar construction of moral teleology. Zhu Xi’s «li» is comparable to Kant’s «purpose» as a moral teleological property. The Neo-Confucian li-qi dichotomy provides a counterpart of the Kantian double causality. Nevertheless, Neo-Confucian moral teleology does not rely on a Kantian-type rationalistic deduction concerning the idea of highest good (as final purpose) nor on the so-called intellectual intuition. Gewu looks outwards for the moral coherence between humans and things, while Kant ultimately rejects the natural world for the sake of moral certainty in terms of freedom and identifies what is unique within us.

Value Realism and Moral Psychology: A Comparative Analysis of Iris Murdoch and Fyodor Dostoevsky

How can metaphysics be a guide to morals? For twentieth-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, this was the central question of philosophy, and I argue that her answers to it converge with those of nineteenth-century writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. For both thinkers, a transcendent evaluative reality places moral demands on their characters, defines the general terms of their moral consciousness, and influences their experience of the presence or absence of moral coherence in a way that shatters self-consoling myths and opens their imaginations toward the possibility of goodness. Ultimately, both connect transcendent value realism to immanent evaluative consciousness in surprisingly congruent ways.

'Other Spaces' for the Dangerous Dead of Provincial England, c.1752-1832.

The Murder Act (1752) decreed that homicide perpetrators should be hanged and sent for post‐execution punishment. This article explores the event management of criminal dissections by penal surgeons in situ. It reveals that the punishment parade of the condemned did not stop at the scaffold, contrary to the impression in many standard historical accounts. Instead, ordinary people accompanied criminal corpses to many different types of dissection venues. Penal surgeons hand‐picked these performance spaces that were socially produced for legal and practical reasons. They had to be able to process large numbers of people who wanted to be part of the consumption of post‐mortem ‘harm’ in English communities. Event management on location had to have emotional and visual appeal, moral coherence, be timed appropriately, and, if successful, would enhance the deterrence value of the capital code. Yet, managing the ‘dangerous dead’ involved a great deal of discretionary justice with unpredictable outcomes. It often happened in ‘counter‐sites’ of punishment in the community and involved a great deal of immersive theatre. Some events worked well, others threatened the social order. In ‘Other Spaces’ the ‘Dangerous Dead’ was hence a fascinating feature of the Murder Act outside the Metropolis from 1752 to 1832.

Titus Andronicus, hell and the elements

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the co-authored revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (pub. 1594) as a subtly constructed space (as we read it on the page) that emphasizes its hellish torments and moral message through an oblique use of a graduated elemental scheme within it. The four elements are loosely clustered according to the act divisions of the play established in the First Folio. The play incorporates the elements according to a Virgilian–Aristotelian scheme, progressing naturally from earth to fire, and so demonstrates an intertwined dual framework of renaissance natural philosophy and religion reminiscent of classical and medieval purgatorial and hellish concepts. The elements thereby form a running and varying structural conceit that reinforces the “hellish” experience that an audience (or reader) might expect from a revenge tragedy, including George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar. When understood in this way, we see how the elemental scheme undergirding the play provides a structural moral and intellectual coherence relevant to all of us. The individual characters undergo horrendous torments and remarkable changes; they are, in a sense, writhing souls in communal suffering bound by the cosmic borders of the stage, which was commonly understood conceptually as a microcosm. The underlying elemental scheme reinforces the concept of the play as a virtual or parodic hell and/or purgatory: a play that begins amid earthly desires and burials ends with the destructive bonfires of the living hell that the characters thrust (and bake) themselves into.

Individual Responsibility for Environmental Degradation

In environmental ethics a debate has arisen over the extent to which the individual should make changes in personal lifestyle in a long-term program of ameliorating environmental degradation, as opposed to directing energies toward public-policy change. In opposition are the facts that an individual's contribution to environmental degradation can only have a negligible effect. Public policy offers the only real hope for such massive coordinated effort, and environmental degradation is only one of many global problems to which ethically oriented people must focus their attentions and energies. So far, the pro-personal responsibility side has urged that personal lifestyle changes are necessary for moral coherence, thus in turn for integrity of character, and lifestyle changes can affect others in a kind of chain reaction because humans are socially submerged beings. The stalemate here can only stymies the needed coordinated effort toward ameliorating environmental degradation. Further, moral concerns need to be brought into this issue; namely, the ramifications of pursuing a policy-only approach, emphasizing policy as the sole (or even primary) means of ameliorating environmental degradation, implicitly undercuts the role of individual agents in morality in general, in terms of (1) individual responsibility, (2) autonomy, and (3) creativity in solving problems. All these problems not only bear on the program to reverse environmental degradation, but undermine other widely held moral values. Emphasizing personal lifestyle responsibility is not only the most moral alternative but is also the most assured way to affect long-term changes and the better way to make policy changes credible and sufficiently substantive for change.

Assessing the Moral Coherence and Moral Robustness of Social Systems: Proof of Concept for a Graphical Models Approach.

This paper presents a proof of concept for a graphical models approach to assessing the moral coherence and moral robustness of systems of social interactions. "Moral coherence" refers to the degree to which the rights and duties of agents within a system are effectively respected when agents in the system comply with the rights and duties that are recognized as in force for the relevant context of interaction. "Moral robustness" refers to the degree to which a system of social interaction is configured to ensure that the interests of agents are effectively respected even in the face of noncompliance. Using the case of conscientious objection of pharmacists to filling prescriptions for emergency contraception as an example, we illustrate how a graphical models approach can help stakeholders identify structural weaknesses in systems of social interaction and evaluate the relative merits of alternate organizational structures. By illustrating the merits of a graphical models approach we hope to spur further developments in this area.

Structure of Moral Personality producing Individual Differences in Moral behavior

Considerable part of moral behavior is based on psychological traits which exist in an individual. This study raises possibility of existence of moral personality as a psychological construct of personality which produces individual difference in moral behavior. As it is necessary to consider personality of an individual, that is, their temperament, character and narrative, in order to understand thoroughly the individual`s behaviors, so it is necessary to consider their moral personality in order to understand completely the behaviors of moral self. There are individual differences in types, strengths and maturity of moral behavior. It is because moral traits which produces types of moral behavior exist in an individual`s biological and genetic temperament. In addition, it is because moral adaptation which produces strength of moral behavior exists in an individual`s environmental and experiential character. Moreover, it is because moral reflection which maturates moral behavior exists in reflective and self-defining narrative. Moral personality can be conceptualized as ‘an individual`s complex organization of moral traits, moral adaptation and moral reflection which grants their life a moral orientation and coherence’ and individual difference in moral behavior originates from individual difference in moral personality. This study verifies through a series of basic empirical researches that moral personality can be structuralized in three dimensions which are moral traits, moral adaption and moral reflection. Moral reflection on one`s moral traits and moral adaptation can maturate moral behavior. Moral maturity means moral behavior becoming more familiar, versed and complete by reflecting one`s root and competency of moral behavior.

Advancing Community Building for ASEAN

This is a policy paper supporting the vision of ASEAN leaders in the project of ASEAN Community building. However, it goes beyond their declarations to argue for a more thorough going adoption of the norms of the United Nations and to promote more people-to-people activities and ASEAN consciousness among the people. ASEAN was established in 1967 with the aim to strengthen regional cooperation to deal with the geopolitical challenges of the Cold War. It has scored successes in the realm of economy. Driven by the dynamics of globalization, ASEAN has aspired to become a full-fledged community of nations. It aims to widen its scope to include social and cultural dimensions, social justice, and human rights. The most progressive manifestation of this is the ASEAN Charter. To advance the project of the ASEAN Community, this paper makes suggestions at two levels, namely the level of ideas and the level of activities, with some reflections on nation building. A nation at peace with itself based on social justice and human rights contributes to regional community building. If and when it does come about, the ASEAN Community will represent a new ASEAN identity, with a new moral and political order, and it will be able to articulate global issues in international forums with moral authority and moral coherence.

Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical AnthropologyMaurizioValsaniaCharlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.

Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology Maurizio Valsania Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.Maurizio Valsania describes central core of Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology presenting Jefferson's philosophical anthropology concretely, (Chapter Two) forming body (Jefferson's Communitarianism) cannot be split, and which two limbs are attached: theoretical (Chapter One) and (Chapter Three) consequences of communitarianism (10). Drawing on Carl Degler's image of past a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces yet be added, Valsania views the past a series of layers and possibilities allowing multiple interpretations (11). To understand Jefferson's moral coherence, important words, capable of being defined in many ways, must be perfectly calibrated (8). book treats operative conceptual terms metaphors and descriptors that do not refer an absolute but should be treated as containers where content and meaning have be drawn each time from context (9). While preliminary chapter examines Jefferson's modernity, individualism, and degree of his break with tradition, Chapter Two presents Jefferson's complex communitarianism, and Chapter Three complicates modern readers' negative understanding of Jefferson's brutal system of exclusion (151).Jefferson inherited an extended cultural environment that included seventeenth century and intellectual hegemony (8) of eighteenth century. For his definition of modernity, and his understanding of communitarianism, he was indebted (47) many for his ideas, including Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, earning epitaph of trinity of immortals by Jefferson (22), pessimist Thomas Hobbes (21), moralists Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Lord Karnes, and Richard Price (47), and much farther back, Jesus of first century C.E., epistemological sens ism from many, including Greek Epicurus, eighteenth century Condillac, La Mettrie, Helvetius, Diderot, and d' Holbach. Valsania says culture has marched consistently toward individualism (30), and Jefferson, framed within a society that was typically in-between [old and new (40)] evidences a paradox of and traditionalism (6). Traditionalism held a strong link between God and humans (13); modernity, on other hand, rebutted traditional hierarchy [humans higher than animals, man superior women, whites over blacks, pope over king, and kings and nobles over common sort (14)], and drove in direction of science and naturalism, and imbricated [human beings] in animality (5). Jefferson, nonetheless, like other eighteenth century figures, tried to turn tide of Enlightenment in direction of a modernized, minimalized Christianity (39). Thus, he viewed human beings naturalized and materialized (39), but, at same time, humans have implanted in their breasts... a moral sense (21) that becomes a foundation for morality. The postulate of a physical-moral parallelism [a moral sense] provided starting point Jefferson's moral reasoning and, more generally, one basis of his modernity (23). …

The Protestant Dimension of the Ethical Critique of Carbon Commodification

Some influential philosophers have argued that carbon commodification is a morally bad means of combating global climate change. This article argues that the ethical critique of carbon commodification derives moral coherence and strength from its implicit religious foundation, that is, the “Protestant” understanding of social ethics on which it relies. The argument is threefold. First, the ethical critique of carbon commodification is not a strictly ethical position, as it typically depends on prophetic indictment as well as moral-philosophical concerns. Second, the ethical critique of carbon commodification involves a secularized continuation of the “Protestant” tradition within Christian thought. Third, its “Protestant-ness” gives the ethical critique of carbon commodification critical power, as the very occurrence of climate change implies coherency problems for the opposing dominant “Roman” tradition.

Maturity is coherent: Structural and content-specific coherence in adolescent moral identity

Identity narrative may involve considerable variations in structural and content-specific coherence. These variations are potentially relevant to the development of moral commitment in adolescence. The present study analyzed coherence in moral identity narratives for a matched comparison sample of urban adolescents. Thirty nominated adolescent moral exemplars and 30 everyday comparators were given interview prompts designed to tap identity narrative. Structural and content-specific coherence dimensions were assessed with a palette of computational techniques known as coh-metrix. Consistent with study hypotheses, exemplar adolescent moral identity narratives generally evinced greater structural and content-specific coherence than everyday comparators, particularly on causality and agentic intentionality dimensions. Findings suggest that moral identity coherence is a kind of expertise fixed in developmental processes and associated with real-world action.

The Global Model of Constitutional Rights: A Response to Afonso da Silva, Harel, and Porat

The issues and criticisms that Virgílio Afonso da Silva, Alon Harel, and Iddo Porat raise about The Global Model of Constitutional Rights1 relate, first, to its methodology (in particular the nature of my theory as morally reconstructive, and its global character), secondly, to the role of autonomy (in particular its relation to equality, and my defence of a general right to autonomy), and thirdly, to the problem of justification (outcome-based versus excluded reasons-based ways of reasoning about questions of rights). Correspondingly, I divide this response into three sections, dealing with the methodological questions in the first, with the autonomy-related issues in the second, and with the problem of justification in the final section. Any morally reconstructive theory is Janus-headed: it looks both to fit with the practice and to moral value. Thus, a morally reconstructive theory of the global model of constitutional rights must meet two criteria: first, it must “fit” the global model sufficiently well to be rightly considered a theory “of” that practice, and second, it must be morally coherent. If, on the one hand, my theory did not have sufficient fit, then it would simply be a free-standing theory of rights—indeed it might be excellent in this regard, but it could not claim to be a theory of the global model. If, on the other hand, my theory were morally incoherent, it could not claim to be a moral reconstruction. The goal of the book is to show that the global model, which departs in so many ways from how almost all moral and political philosophers think about rights, is morally defensible. A morally incoherent theory obviously could not be used to demonstrate this claim. It is of course a possibility that a practice is morally indefensible: that it cannot be reconstructed in a way which fits the practice and shows it as morally appealing (think of Nazi law as an extreme example). Where that is the case, it must be concluded that the practice ought to be abandoned or radically changed, precisely because no theory that fits that practice sufficiently well displays moral coherence.

Moral Coherence and Principle Pluralism

This paper develops and defends a conception of moral coherence that is suitable for use in contexts of principle pluralism. I argue that, as they are traditionally understood, coherence methods stack the deck against pluralist theories, by incorporating norms such as systematicity—that the principles of a theory should be as few and as simple as possible. I develop and defend an alternative, minimal, conception of coherence that focuses instead on consistency. It has been suggested that consistency in this context should aim at the avoidance of conflict, but I argue against this: what matters is “case consistency,” or judging consistently from one case to another. This means judging in accordance with morally relevant similarities and differences. I defend my proposal of minimal coherence from objections having to do with complexity and arbitrariness.

Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups Naoko Saito and Paul Standish (eds)

Reviewed by: Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups edited by Naoko Saito and Paul Standish Thomas Wallgren Naoko Saito and Paul Standish. (eds) Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. Fordham University Press, New York, 2012. 262 pp. including index. The main strength of this volume is its clarity of focus. The focus is on what Hilary Putnam tells us is his “favorite definition of philosophy”, “Stanley Cavell’s ‘education for grownups’” (p. 37). I take it that the quote is Putnam’s favorite not only because of the truth of the definition but also because it may strike many professional philosophers as surprising. It serves to awaken us to the importance of something we know but have forgotten that we know, and that we have therefore lost hold of. In this volume it is probably Cavell himself who provides the most memorable clue to how we may begin to unravel the truth of his definition. There are two claims. One is that “the learning of speech, the ordering and reordering of words” is “the most fundamental of the matters we can be said to learn”; the other is that such learning has an internal connection to the “practice of philosophizing” (p. 23). If mainstream, analytical, representationalist theories of meaning are basically true the only internal connections between philosophizing and the learning of speech are that philosophy tells us what we have learnt when we have learnt to speak and how, thanks perhaps to compositionality, “ordering” of words has countless possibilities. In this volume there is no criticism of such philosophy. Instead it provides a set of elaborations of the notion that the language we have learnt when we have learnt to speak remains enigmatic to us in ways that representationalist theories fail to capture and that we need to understand if we are to understand ourselves. The basic idea is most easily recognizable when we think of ethics. If we say that “it is always possible to improve one’s understanding of a concept like ‘bravery’ or ‘justice’“ (p. 45) many will agree. The element of surprise comes in when the claim is generalized. Not only the “grammar” of bravery and the grammar of key words in theoretical philosophy, such as knowledge and meaning have the said character. Also ordinary words, words like “chair”, “have a grammar” (p. 24) that implicates us as carrying responsibility for how we place them in our lives The explication of this idea is an important theme in Wittgenstein’s later work. Cavell has probably done more than any other philosopher [End Page 257] in bringing attention to it. It is particularly helpful that Cavell has shown that the topic of skepticism in Wittgenstein’s later work is inseparable from his notion of philosophy as an activity in which we seek friendship, community, recognition and acknowledgement in the face of the threats of denial, exile, and isolation. It is this positive vision of how a philosophy that does not work with arguments and theories that are supposed to serve the discovery and establishment of truths can be important for us that is central to Cavell’s definition of philosophy. The contributions by Goodman, Standish, Bearn, Colapietro, Arcilla, and Saito in the present volume all provide useful discussions of how nothing less than the “moral coherence” (p. 152) of how we live is at stake in such philosophy. It is an additional strength that many of the contributors also stress that because our struggle for clarity about grammar is a struggle for clarity about how we can share life with others, their educational philosophy is a political philosophy, a philosophy that creates “the appetite for democracy” (Putnam, p. 168). The back-cover and the editorial introduction to the volume indicate a desire to make Cavell’s philosophy relevant in particular for educators. The contributions by Standish, Bearn, and Arcilla address the issue head-on (with Bearn using Whitehead to surpass limitations he claims to see in Cavell’s and Wittgenstein’s “flight from the sensual”, p. 108). When education is seen as involving “inculcation into the practices of community” and hence, achievement of membership in a polis (p. 84), this notion can be used...

History and Commitment: E.P. Thompson's Legacy

Fifty years after the publication of his groundbreaking study, The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson's legacy remains controversial. While the dominant liberal historical establishment has assimilated certain aspects of his approach, there has been a tendency to overlook or else dismiss the methodological and moral coherence of his work. Providing a synoptic reading of Thompson's oeuvre, this article argues against such disaggregating views, in the belief that it is important to grasp the internal connections from which Thompson's imaginative recreation of the past derives its enduring power. The question of what ‘commitment’ meant to Thompson, his complex and nuanced understanding of the difficulties inherent in writing a distinctively socialist ‘history from below’, furnishes the major focus. The formative influences of communist culture, the war against European fascism, followed by the experience of teaching workers in the adult education movement in West Yorkshire and his involvement...