Moral Counsel Research Articles

Viewer’s Manual for the Film Red State/Blue State: Lawyers, Politics & Moral Counseling

This Viewer’s Manual provides a lesson plan for classroom or continuing legal education discussion of the film, “Red State/Blue State: Lawyers, Politics & Moral Counseling” (http address in Viewer’s Manual). The Viewers Manual and film use the question of why lawyers are more politically liberal than non-lawyers as a way to explore the foundation in political philosophy for the dominant conception of lawyers as amoral partisans and to consider whether engaging in moral conversation with clients is permitted or preferable. The film attempts to make this inquiry both fun and accessible. It features an entertaining narrative, musical selections from R.E.M., and comments from law students, lawyers, clients, and scholars from diverse political backgrounds, including Doug Ammar, Robin Barnes, Erwin Chemerinsky, Lawrence Fox, Heather MacDonald, John McGinnis, Russell Pearce, Deborah Rhode, William Simon, Ken Starr, and David Wilkins. The Viewer’s Guide and the film build on “The Legal Profession as a Blue State: Reflections on Public Philosophy, Jurisprudence, and Legal Ethics,” available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=988196.

Contemplative Listening in Moral Issues: Moral Counseling Redefined in Principles and Method

We present a listening grid for moral counseling, in which we pay particular attention, alongside the what, to how clients talk about themselves: as if they were spectators; aware what this talking does to them; how they perceive what is good from the past; and what they will strive for in the future. By this moral talk, clients discover a picture of the conviction that will enable them to make a decision.

Group Therapy for Venetian Adolescents? Giannantonio Bernardi’s “Prudence, a didactic prolusion” (Venice, 1709) and Jesuit Moral Counselling in Verse

While Jesuits composed more Latin didactic poetry than any other order or profession in the early modern period, they—perhaps surprisingly—rarely chose moral, political, or spiritual subjects for versification in this genre. One of the few exceptions to the rule is Prudentia, prolusio didascalica (Prudence, a didactic prolusion) by the Paduan-born Jesuit Giannantonio Bernardi (1670–1743), first published in Venice in 1709. Bernardi seems to have spent his whole life as a teacher, preacher, and confessor in northern Italy, apart from a stint accompanying his penitent, the Venetian envoy and future Doge, Carlo Ruzzini, to Constantinople. This paper sets Bernardi’s didactic poem in the context of some other Jesuit didactic poems of moral or spiritual counsel, especially Pierre Mambrun’s Psychourgicon: De cultura animi (La Flèche: ex officina Gervasii Laboe, 1661), as well as a selection of his other moral writings. It finds the Jesuit dimension to Bernardi’s poem more in its literary and institutional contexts and paratexts than in the bare philosophical doctrine it relays.

PENGUATAN SELF ESTEEM ANAK JALANAN MELALUI BIMBINGAN MORAL SPIRITUAL (Pada Program Pendidikan Luar Sekolah)

PENGUATAN SELF ESTEEM ANAKJALANAN MELALUI BIMBINGANMORAL SPIRITUAL(Pada Program Pendidikan LuarSekolah)Nur Afifah Khurin Maknin *)FAI UMMABSTRACTThe burden of street children is much heavy for their age, that they are prone topsychological stress which will affect the children’s emotional, social andintelligence growth, in the sense that the growth will not be maximal. In such acase, the NGO’s main programme to educate and train the children to beindependent by increasing their quality, improving their lives and by enablingthem to interact socially in their as well as in society will not be reached. In orderthat the programme planned by the NGO can be effective and efficient, thechildren should be physically and mentally healthy. To meet this condition, thechildren must be trained to raise their “self-esteem” so that they are mentallyhealthy. When they are mentally healthy, their physical and mental developmentwill hopefully grow optimally, so that they more ready and more able to solvetheir problem constructively. This research will answer the question of whethermoral and spiritual counselling will raise the street children’s self-esteem and willchange their quality of life with attitude especially those who have been educatedand trained by the NGOs.Spiritual and Moral Counselling is one which focuses on theunderstanding and application of moral and ethical values in society; it alsostresses on increasing the children’s self religius motivation so that they will bemotivated to increase their quality and able to be on their own normally. Thiscounselling will hopefully cause the children have high self-esteem and mentalhealth which can be seen from their change of attitude.Keyword:Moral and Spiritual Counselling,Self-Esteem, Quality of life, StreetChildren.

Introduction: War, Conscience, and Counsel in Early Modern Catholic Europe

The introduction identifies the framework of Catholic moral theology, which informs the specific approach of the authors in this special issue, as an important context to deepen the understanding of early modern just war discussions. Some of the most productive contributors to the debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were indeed Catholic moral theologians, who engaged with the question, driven by pastoral concerns over the conscience of subjects and rulers. The delegation of moral questions to theologians was an essential part of post-Tridentine Catholic culture which, however, eroded progressively in the seventeenth century as the tenets of moral theology as well as the external institutions of moral counsel attracted wide criticism.

Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures by Elizabeth Elliot (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures by Elizabeth Elliot Gillian Adler Elizabeth Elliot, Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures (Farnham: Ashgate 2012) 170 pp. Recent scholarly directions in Boethian studies have raised important questions about the influence of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy on late medieval writing. Eleanor Johnson’s Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve explores how Middle English texts received and manipulated inherited Boethian formal structures, such as the prosimetrum, to ethical ends. The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Miller, reveals the use of Boethian models in discourses of desire, loss, and consolation in a variety of medieval European literatures, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Johannes von Tepl’s Ackermann. Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures represents a significant contribution to discussions of the legacy of Boethius in the late Middle Ages. In this critical study, Elizabeth Elliot examines the medieval literary reception of the Consolation of Philosophy through an original selection of texts that range from Jean Froissart’s French Confort d’ami to Thomas Usk’s English Testament of Love to King James I of Scotland’s Kingis Quair. Remembering Boethius focuses on Boethius’s role in the social import of vernacular poetry and prose, the construction of aristocratic identity in literature, and the erotic subjectivities represented in the chosen texts. The works of Guillaume de Machaut, Froissart, Usk, and James I bear a likeness to the Consolation in the conditions of exile or [End Page 241] imprisonment in which the authors depict themselves or others within the text. Without attempting to identify positivistic connections between the historical experiences and life histories of Boethius and those of late medieval authors or literary subjects, Elliot explores how the Boethian model of suffering becomes a springboard for treatments of political issues and how the Consolation serves as “a valuable resource for the aristocratic reader who seeks to apply Boethian philosophy to political practice” (13). The social and political plight of the late antique philosophizing prisoner resonated symbolically for late medieval authors, who assimilated the Consolation to aristocratic tastes and found in Boethius’s work a storehouse of moral counsel and an inspiration for medieval life writing. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 construct a textual tradition that grounds Guillaume de Machaut’s Confort d’ami, Remède de Fortune, and Fonteinne amoureuse in the thematics of the Consolation. Through her focus on the self-conscious politicization of Boethius’s text in Machaut’s writing, Elliot indicates how the philosophical, political, and exilic aspects of the Boethian model become an advisory cornerstone in the mirror-for-princes narrative that Machaut intended for his patron Charles II of Navarre, as the Confort d’Ami adapts from the Consolation the notion that the faculty of memory serves as an ethical compass and a tool for avoiding the vicissitudes of Fortune. Machaut’s Remède de Fortune similarly draws on memory as a tool for control in the face of Fortune and even for transcendence. This chapter represents a broader discussion in Elliot’s work of the association between wisdom and the cultivation of memory that appears in the Consolation and that becomes explored within late medieval texts that draw on the Boethian process of self-education. The third chapter looks at the use of Boethian allegory in the Fonteinne amoureuse to reimagine the situation of Jean de Berry, imprisoned and yet in a situation of inevitable moral edification because of his isolation and opportunity for self-reflection. Chapter 4, “Memory, Desire and Writing in Jean Froissart’s Prison amoureuse,” analyzes Froissart’s treatment of the Boethian themes of constraint, enclosure, and self-discipline and reads his text as “a meditation on the issue of controlling the appetitive will, in which the ability to construct an image of the desired object is imagined as a solution to the problem of frustrated desire” (15). Chapters 5 and 6 examine the Testament of Love and the Kingis Quair...

Moral Counselling: A Method in Development

This article describes a method of moral counselling developed in the Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen (The Netherlands). The authors apply insights of Paul Ricoeur to the non-directive counselling method of Carl Rogers in their work of coaching patients with moral problems in health care. The developed method was shared with other health care professionals in a training course. Experiences in the course and further practice led to further improvement of the method.

Sexual promiscuity among female undergraduates in tertiary institutions in imo state: an issue for healthy living

The study focused on sexual promiscuity among female undergraduates and the attendant health implications. It was carried out in the tertiary institutions in Imo State using 415 final year degree students drawn from four institutions in the State. Three research questions were formulated to guide the study. The design was a descriptive survey. A 12 item questionnaire was structured and validated for the study. Simple percentages were used to answer the research questions. The results indicated the prevalence of sexual promiscuity among female undergraduates, the causes and effects of such unhealthy behaviour on healthy living. Hence, the call for instructional and moral counselling in institutions of higher learning. Recommendations were made based on the findings which, among others was that the counselling Departments in the Universities should organise HIV/AIDS orientation guidance services for greater awareness of the effects of promiscuity. In conclusion, the prevalence and sophistication of sexual promiscuity in the tertiary institutions call for reflections. It is an evil wind that blows no good and should be discouraged in order to maintain healthy female products for productive healthy family living. Key Words: Sexual Promiscuity, healthy living, tertiary institutions

Rank Strangers to Me: Shaffer and Cochran's Friendship Model of Moral Counseling in the Law Office

This is my argument against a model for law office moral counseling based on friendship and moral commonalities. Reading Shaffer and Cochran's Lawyers, Clients, and Moral Responsibility, led me to the conclusion that we would be far better off thinking of our clients as, in the words of the gospel song, rank strangers. And we would be better off relating to these strangers not as if we were in a traditional friendship with them, but as the rhetoricians that I believe our lawyering tradition teaches us to be. Whether I have our tradition's lesson right or not, and I only invite the reader to consider this possibility here, I think any heuristic model for moral counseling in the law office has to start with an interpretation of the story of which we lawyers are a part. For this is where we are likely to find our most justified moral resources for counseling. Shaffer and Cochran, because they accepted a hostile academic critique of the practice, one that separates role morality from personal morality in defense of a false integrity, failed to do this and, in so failing, were not able to provide an adequate heuristic model for moral counseling in the law office.

Michael Drayton, Literary History and Historians in Verse

In or around 1621, Michael Drayton penned his well-known assessment of fellow poet Samuel Daniel, whom he described as ‘too much Historian in verse’. This article investigates that dismissal, arguing that behind it lies a long-standing and consistent literary position. Drayton's vision was of a literature that combined both poetry and history. That vision had been presented first in the Heroicall Epistles of 1597, which opened by responding directly to Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond. The Epistles were innovative in applying the structure of Ovid's Heroides to the vernacular tradition of the Mirror for Magistrates. As a result, Drayton highlighted a newly explicit interaction between literary and historical texts. More dangerously, he also presented individual epistles as moral counsel for his patrons. These qualities made the Epistles an enormous popular success. Yet they are also likely to have caused offence, above all to the dedicatee of the first set of letters: Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Setting wider literary trends alongside Drayton's personal experience of patronage, this article offers a new perspective on the development and decline of history in verse.

The efficacy of moral/religious counselling in checking examination malpractices among secondary school students

Examination malpractices have become one of the most highly pervasive social problems in the educational system of contemporary Nigerian society. This problem is almost destroying the credibility of our educational system. This is because the intensity, level and zeal with which people carry out the act have stimulated great concern in educational, public and government circles. The truth is that all efforts made to curb this problem have proved abortive. This might be so because the problem is a reflection of the general moral decadence in the society and unless the problem is viewed from this angle, it may continue to defy all solutions. Hence, the major purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of moral/religious counselling in checking examination malpractices among secondary school students. A 2x2 factorial design was used on a sample of 80 secondary school students who were drawn from four randomly selected secondary schools in Ogun State. An adapted version of Hassan (1987)'s Scale values of perceived causes of examination malpractices was used to collect data before and after the administration of the treatment programme. The analysis of covariance was used to test the only hypothesis formulated. Results showed that the examination cheating behaviour of the treatment group was significantly lower than that of the control group. Based on these findings, it was recommended that government should encourage the teaching of moral/religious instructions in schools. Also, counsellors should be posted to schools to compliment moral/religious instructions through the provision of moral counselling to students. The Nigerian Journal of Guidance and Counselling Vol. 8 (1) 2002: pp. 47-60

When Patients Choose Faith Over Medicine

Patients at times disagree with medical recommendations for religious reasons. Despite a lively debate about how physicians should respond to patients' religious concerns, little is known about how physicians actually respond. We explored the ways in which physicians interpret and respond to conflict between medical recommendations and patients' religious commitments. One-to-one, in-depth, semistructured interviews with 21 physicians from a range of religious affiliations, specialties, and practice settings. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed for emergent themes through an iterative process of textual analysis informed by the principle of constant comparison. Conflict introduced by religion is common and occurs in 3 types of settings: (1) those in which religious doctrines directly conflict with medical recommendations, (2) those that involve an area in which there is extensive controversy within the broader society, and (3) settings of relative medical uncertainty in which patients "choose faith over medicine." In response to such conflict, physicians first seek to accommodate patients' ideas by remaining open-minded and flexible in their approach. However, if they believe patients' religiously informed decisions will cause them to suffer harm, physicians make efforts to persuade patients to follow medical recommendations. When religiously related conflict arises, physicians appear to intuitively navigate a tension between respecting patients' autonomy by remaining open-minded and flexible and seeking patients' good by persuading them to follow medical recommendations. In such contexts, religion and medicine are intertwined, and moral counsel inheres in physicians' medical recommendations.

Conscientious refusal and a doctors's right to quit.

Patients sometimes request procedures their doctors find morally objectionable. Do doctors have a right of conscientious refusal? I argue that conscientious refusal is justified only if the doctor's refusal does not make the patient worse off than she would have been had she gone to another doctor in the first place. From this approach I derive conclusions about the duty to refer and facilitate transfer, whether doctors may provide 'moral counseling,' whether doctors are obligated to provide objectionable procedures when no other doctor is available, why the moral consensus among doctors seems relevant even though it does not determine whether something is morally acceptable, and whether doctors should stay out of fields whose standard procedures they find morally unacceptable.

The Price of Cold War Partnership: Sir Oliver Franks and the British Military Commitment in the Korean War

In 1949-50 the Cold War spread to Asia. Although at odds in their attitudes to Communist China, Britain and America were in harmony on the need for a tough reaction in Korea. Since 1947 at least the British had sought to be regarded by the American allies as their principal Cold War ally. They felt the Korean War would give them the opportunity of displaying their value as a partner. The British government wished to confine its military involvement to the deployment of Royal Navy. Washington, however, wanted the despatch of British ground troops. Sir Oliver Franks, British Ambassador in Washington, argued that moral support and counsel would not be enough; the presence of British soldiers was the necessary price of being seen as the United States' main partner. The importance to London of preserving such a relationship with United States, rather than combating communism, was the vital ingredient in persuading the British to send forces.

Michalos and the Theory of Ethical Theory

The paper replies to Professor Alex Michalos' keynote address, "Ethics Counsellors as a New Priesthood". Michalos argues that an intractable diversity of opinion about fundamental issues in ethical theory precludes substantive, well-founded ethical counselling. However, Michalos has inappropriately modelled his understanding of an acceptable structure and application for ethical theory on natural scientific theory. For we may countenance a less severe understanding of theory for ethical theory than in the hard sciences. In particular, instructive moral reasoning may tolerate a degree of disagreement across human beings in their conception of moral good. On condition that such variance is not so considerable as to undermine a necessary commonality of language on ethical matters, there will be an adequate basis for warranted theory-construction in ethics and effective moral counselling underwritten by such theory. And, on the available historical evidence, such a condition can be met.

Etica, saúde & sociedade.

The sudden advent of new technological devices and sophisticated methods in both biological research and medical practice alerted different social groups to the development of unprecedented problems for moral counsel and decision-making. The field of study called bioethics grew out of religiously motivated concerns, but nowadays it attracts the attention of politicians, lawyers, religious thinkers, philosophers, scientists and doctors. Bioethics is becoming a sphere of interest to an increasing number of people. Each of these groups bring their own values, which are sometimes not in total agreement with the traditional values of medical ethics, to discussion. Therefore, the Author defends a more active participation of doctors through their representative bodies in the discussion of policies concerning the research and development of new technologies, and also the individual use of them when they are available, so that the practice of medicine may preserve the hippocratic legacy, accepting only the external influences when they are not in conflict with the intrinsic morality of medicine.

Ethical Orientation of Counselors: Its Relationship to Moral Reasoning and Level of Training

This article presents results of a study of the relationship between stage of ethical orientation and stage of moral reasoning for counselors at four levels of training and explores the relationship between ethical orientation and contributions to professional and social action organizations. The findings indicate that ethical orientation is significantly associated with moral reasoning, counseling experience, and number of contributions. Implications of these findings for theory building and counselor education are discussed.

Studies in John Gower by Maria Wickert, and: John Gower’s Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Original Articles and Translations ed. by Peter G. Beidler

SWDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER that seem quite distant from those in which they are found in Langland's poem. Conversely, Psalm 14, which is one of Langland's favorites, receives scant attention-presumably because it was not a favorite of Augustine. It might seem petty to detail such objections if Goldsmith's instincts were better than her methodology,, but unfortunately she remains stead­ fast to her principles far too often. The results are the sort of incoherence I have described and some serious misreadings of tone and content (as with the discussion of Piers and the pardon). It is distasteful to have to register such strong disapproval of a book into which a considerable amount of honest research and thought have gone and to repudiate the efforts of a scholar as diligent and fair-minded as Goldsmith seems to be. Even so, candor requires admitting that the book is one that will only confuse novices and exasperate experts. ROBERT ADAMS Sam Houston State University MARIA WICKERT, Studies injohn Gower. Translated by Robert]. Meindl. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Pp. xiv, 249. $19.75 hardcover, $9.75 paper. PETER G. BEIDLER, ed., John Gower's Literary Transformations in the Confessio Amantis: Ongina!Articles and Translations. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982. Pp. viii, 141. $19.75 hard­ cover, $8.25 paper. Studies in John Gower was the Habilitationsschrift of Maria Wickert (1915-59) at the University of Cologne, and was published by that institu­ tion's press under the title Studien zujohn Gower in 1953. The present volume is a translation into English of this valuable and-in 1953 particu­ larly-ground-breaking book. Wickert's primary subject is the Vox c!amantis, Gower's major work in Latin. That poem contains 10,265 lines of elegiac verse, modeled for the most part on Ovid. There are seven books, each with subdivisions and prose headings, as is Gower's manner; the first three have individual prologues also. As Wickert amply demonstrates, the 146 REVIEWS poem is an extremely intricate one, allusive, tough, and obscure by turns. Tackling it in 1953, roughly a decade before the first translation was published by Eric Stockton (The Major Latin Works ofjohn Gower [Seat­ tle: University of Washington Press, 1962]) and before John H. Fisher's watershed study of Gower's total output Uohn Gower: MoralPhilosopher andFriendofChaucer [New York: New York University Press, 1964]), was no light undertaking. It is hardly insignificant that after thirty years Wickert's study remains the only full-scale attempt to assess Gower's Latin. In every way this scholarly silence seems a pity, since the Vax clamantis is an important poem and one about which we would do well to learn more. Composed, it is thought, in the later 1370s but with subsequent additions and changes reflecting the tumultuous events of 1381 and later, the Vax is in Wickert's view a unique heterogeneity of forms skillfully crafted by Gower to advise the young King Richard II, to provide humankind with moral counsel (as is his obligation as a good Christian), to bring to light religious corruption, and-in what Wickert has termed the "Visio" partic­ ularly-to vilify the instigators of social unrest. Since this "Visio" was written quite likely while the heat of the Peasants' Revolt was still on him by a Kentishman living in London, the first book of the Vax clamantis offers us one of the few accounts by an intimately involved eyewitness. To the chagrin of various historians who have gone to the Vax seeking "facts," however, Gower's version of the revolt is emotive, expressionistic, and heavilyallegorized. Wat Tyler becomes a jaybird, SimonSudbury becomes the Trojan priest Hellenus, and other notables are transformed into as­ sorted animals and Trojans in a tortuous dream sequence whose best literary descendant is perhaps the "Nighttown" chapter in James Joyce's Ulysses. Wickert's analysis of this nightmare is learned and illuminating. She shows painstakingly that Gower's models for the "Visio" were less beast fable than prophetic poetry such as that of John of Bridlington and, of course, contemporary sermon practices. Wickert is also a reader of subtle sensitivity and...