Moral Endeavor Research Articles

Leibniz as a virtue ethicist

AbstractIn this paper I argue that Leibniz's ethics is a kind of virtue ethics where virtues of the agent are explanatorily primary. I first examine how Leibniz obtained his conception of justice as a kind of love in an early text, Elements of Natural Law. I show that in this text Leibniz's goal was to find a satisfactory definition of justice that could reconcile egoism with altruism, and that this was achieved through the Aristotelian virtue of friendship where friends treat each other as “other selves.” Following this decisive moment, Leibniz adopted an Aristotle‐inspired ethical framework where the virtuous agent is central for moral evaluations. I then show that, despite certain developments, Leibniz's ethics retained this essential feature throughout his career. In Leibniz's later writings, God constitutes the foundation of the moral realm, and the fundamental moral endeavor of human beings consists in the imitation of God.

An overview of conflicts against coal in eastern India using critical environmental justice framework

Coal in India is considered more than a commodity with diverse social, cultural and political implications. It symbolizes a moral endeavor linked with economic development and nation-building in the popular imaginary. Despite this, extraction and use of coal to produce electricity leads to conflicts, involving marginalized, often indigenous communities. The state of Jharkhand in the eastern part of the country contains the highest coal reserves and has many conflictive mines and thermal power plants. In this article, using the lens of critical environmental justice, I analyze ten cases of coal conflicts in Jharkhand to provide an overview about the people mobilizing, the types of mobilizations and the outcomes. Looking at the four pillars of critical environmental justice scholarship, I analyze in depth one case study to show the need for critical research to study conflicts involving marginalized communities and for expanding the boundaries of the field.

Social science as an inherently moral endeavor

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to argue that social science is an inherently moral enterprise. There are four reasons to see science as a moral endeavor based on the neo-Aristotelian recognition that morality is centered on human goods (e.g., justice and knowledge), not just right action. First, science is guided by epistemic values (e.g., accuracy, transparency) and underwritten by pro-science traits (e.g., honesty, patience). Second, the outcomes of applied science (e.g., disease cures, pedagogy improvements) are valued by scientists and others. Third, attempting to eliminate values from science is counterproductive because it leads to smuggling in moral commitments that are very difficult to critically evaluate, particularly in the social sciences. Finally, the goal of science is knowledge, which is a vital human good. Therefore, science is a thoroughly moral enterprise because human goods are moral aims. I conclude with three implications of this argument for science education.

Öğretmenlik Meslek Etiği

Felsefi bir disiplin olarak etik uzun bir geçmişe sahiptir. Meslek etiği ve etik kodların oluşturulması ile ilgili de hatırı sayılır bir birikim vardır. Ancak okula ve öğretmene yüklenen yeni anlamlar etik tartışmaların yeniden ele alınmasına ve özellikle öğretmenlik meslek etiğinin bugünkü durumunu tartışma ihtiyacını doğurmuştur. Bu çalışmada bu ihtiyaca cevap vermek amaçlanmıştır. Özel olarak, etik ve meslek etiği kavramı üzerine tartışmaları sunmak, çeşitli ülkelerdeki öğretmenlik meslek etiği kodlarını değerlendirmek, meslek etiği eğitiminde gelinen noktayı ortaya koymayı amaçlayan bu çalışmada derleme yöntemi kullanılmıştır. Derlemden elde edilen bulgulara göre, öğretmenliğin hem mesleğin profesyonel statüsü için hem de mesleğin ‘ahlak uğraşı’ olması ve kültür taşıyıcı rolü gereği meslek etiği kodlarının oluşturulması oldukça önemlidir. Etik kodlarla ilgili belgeler meslek birlikleri, devlet organları veya kurumlar tarafından oluşturulabilir. Öğretmenlik meslek etiği kodlarının dayandığı değerlerin tartışılması ve kodların güncellenmesi gerekmektedir. Sadece kodların oluşturulması etik davranan öğretmenler yetiştirmek için yeterli değildir, etik tutum, davranış ve kararlar için etik eğitiminin gerekli olduğu kabul görmektedir. Ancak tüm dünyada olduğu gibi Türkiye’de eğitim fakültelerinde etik konusunda ders koymak konusunda genel olarak bir isteksizlik veya uygulamalarda tutarsızlık görülmektedir. Post modern dünyanın değerler karmaşası içinde etik eğitimin gerektiği platformlarda tartışılması ve bu tartışmaların öğretmen yetiştirme uygulamalarına yön vermesi önerilmektedir.

The Triumph of the Will: Evolutionary Psychology and the Conceptual Incoherence of Enhancement

Recent decades have witnessed a profound increase in scholarly work and scientific research conducted under the banner of evolutionary psychology. Although evolutionary psychologists typically disavow any historical or conceptual link to the political or scientific project of eugenics, or at the very least downplay the current relevance of such linkages, a growing number of evolutionary thinkers have begun to embrace a biological science of cognitive and moral enhancement. This article examines some of the ways in which advocates of enhancement assume human agency as central to their project even as their naturalistic explanations of human behavior deny that agency. The article also argues that the utopian moral project that animates the evolutionary enhancement movement is undercut by the materialist metaphysics that undergirds the neo-Darwinian worldview employed to ground the project in the first place, a metaphysics that relativizes and ultimately rejects any meaningful morality or moral endeavor whatsoever.

Compassion and responsibility for disease: Trump, tragedy and mercy.

Thinking about compassion helps to illumine what is pernicious and beneficial about emphasising personal responsibility for health. This article considers whether it is 'compassionate' to see someone's disease as an embodiment of past faults. Two traditions, one Aristotelian-tragedic and the other Thomist and merciful, yield two ideas of compassion. The argument is that disease should not be conceived as something for which one is responsible in a way which risks the possibility of receiving treatment. But preventive medicine is conceived as a moral endeavor intertwined with the pastoral care of the sick, with discretion as to the manner and timing of any focus on responsibility.

Concept frame for curricular innovation in health care schools

We herein describe the conceptual dimension of the curricular innovation process carried out in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile. We describe the context of innovation. The theoretical pertinence and relevance of a competence driven curriculum for health care professionals is discussed. The epistemological, ontological and didactic dimensions of the curricular innovation are examined. A main issue is the notion of competence and its significance in professional training. The curriculum is essentially considered as a moral endeavor, especially for health care professionals and their quest to improve the quality of life of the population.

Intelligence, Practice and Virtue: A Critical Review of the Educational Benefits of Expertise in Physical Education and Sport

The paper calls for a re-evaluation of physical education’s cognitive value claims, as this issue is fundamental to many of the conceptual difficulties the subject faces. Current epistemological challenges are reviewed before analysing the structural connections between intelligent practice and intelligent virtues, and the possibilities for physical education to better articulate its’ intrinsic and instrumental values claims. The paper evaluates arguments made on this basis and reviews revised curriculum planning and pedagogical practices, which could support an enhanced focus on learners’ wider aspirations and achievements; factors crucial for a virtuous life. While applauding enquiry into the possibilities for considering physical education as a moral endeavor, the paper raises concerns about conceptual clarity in intellectual and empirical accounts of virtue. The paper concludes by advocating further research on the interrelationship between intellectual and empirical accounts of skill, evaluation of learners’ decision-making and the aims of physical education and school sport programmes.

Herbert Hoover and the construction of modernity

Herbert Hoover occupied two important roles prior to his presidency. At the Food Administration during World War I, Hoover learned the importance of eliminating waste, and establishing efficient delivery systems across firms and industries. As Secretary of Commerce he applied those principles in an attempt to improve living standards through the standardization of living. He charged the Bureau of Standards with creating (1) uniform specifications for purchases, (2) simplification to eliminate ‘unnecessary’ variation and (3) standards of quality for thousands of industrial products. He saw this as a moral endeavor in which engineers would create a third way between capital and labor. What Hoover failed to notice was that newly created standards promoted dominance by large corporations. Indeed, it helped to pave the way for the audit society in which we currently live and – despite its innovativeness as an approach – limited innovations to those proposed by management.JEL Codes: N00, N12

Imparting Research Ethics in Emergency Medicine-A Perspective from the Developing World

Given that the ED deals with a vulnerable population, researchers must carefully conduct research with the voluntary participation of subjects. When faced with such consent problems, researchers may violate ethical standards. Institutional review boards need to be aware of EM-related research proposals; in particular, the protocols must safeguard the rights of clinical research subjects. Formal research ethics training must be provided to data collectors prior to allowing them to initiate clinical research studies in the ED. EM research has immense opportunities in a developing country such as Pakistan. The area can identify possible areas of improvement in research and healthcare. Incorporating public health into EM can create new horizons focusing on basic health issues of the country. Emergency research can identify gaps that occur while managing events such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters. EM services are in infancy with scope for improvement and pre-hospital care. Moreover, EM research has numerous risks. As Pakistan has a low literacy rate with a low understanding about research, participants may be enrolled in studies without properly understanding the rationale of the study and their role in it. As EM research is an area prone to ethical disparities, investigators enrolling patients without paying due attention to the patient autonomy and beneficence; this may create serious issues in violation of patient healthcare rights. Consent importance in EM research must be communicated to the masses of the country through print and electronic media, which are easily accessible. In conclusion, EM research is a moral endeavor. The moral lapse that has been observed in Pakistan is due to the lack of patient autonomy in EM research principles. EM research, which possesses the potential ground for novel research, could be improved if the focus is toward better training of emergency physicians.

Empathy and a Life of Moral Endeavor

Over the course of her career, Jean Harvey contributed many invaluable insights that help to make sense of both injustice and resistance. Specifically, she developed an account of what she called “civilized oppression,” which is pernicious in part because it can be difficult to perceive. One way that we ought to pursue what she calls a “life of moral endeavor” is by increasing our perceptual awareness of civilized oppression and ourselves as its agents. In this article I argue that one noxious form of civilized oppression is what Miranda Fricker calls “testimonial injustice.” I then follow Harvey in arguing that one of the methods by which we should work to avoid perpetrating testimonial injustice is by empathizing with others. This is true for two reasons. The first is that in order to manifest what Fricker calls the virtue of testimonial justice, we must have a method by which we “correct” our prejudices or implicit biases, and empathy serves as such a corrective. The second is that there are cases where the virtue of testimonial justice wouldn't in fact correct for testimonial injustice in the way that Fricker suggests, but that actively working to empathize would.

Perceptual Failure and a Life of Moral Endeavor

Perceptual Failure and a Life of Moral Endeavor

Without Having Seen: Faith, the Future, and the Final American Frontier

The popularization of the science of space exploration in America after World War II has its roots in the nineteenth century. Mid-twentieth-century calls to “conquer” space were reanimations of nineteenth-century exhortations to “conquer” the American West in the name of God and to fulfill America’s manifest destiny. Magazine articles, television specials, and films such as Destination Moon (1950) explicitly connected the ephemeral space frontier to the historical Western frontier. In each medium, “space proselytizers,” like artist Chesley Bonestell, engineer Wernher von Braun, and writer Willy Ley, made clear connections between the American frontiersman of the previous century and the twentieth century’s space pioneer. This link is especially apparent in a series of articles on the emerging science of space exploration that ran in Collier’s magazine from 1952 until 1954. Space is viewed as “our new frontier,” and is championed through Bonestell’s paintings and von Braun’s invocation of the material frontier. Von Braun even closes his article by explaining that Americans are ready for a journey to “man’s oldest and last frontier: the heavens themselves.” Thus, the science of space exploration—in the Collier’s articles and elsewhere—was carefully framed as an endeavor analogous to the conquering of the American West. By situating space as humankind’s “last frontier,” the effort required to build a space program could become a moral endeavor and the fulfillment of America’s new manifest destiny.

The Scaffold in the Marketplace

Samuel Johnson haunted the nineteenth-century American literary imagination, and there is no more compelling example of this than Nathaniel Hawthorne, who modeled his uniquely reticent form of authorial exemplarity in Johnson’s sociable shadow. This essay looks at a neglected dimension of Hawthorne’s historical and moral endeavor in his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), by considering his fascination with both the great Augustan moralist and the elusive, mobile, and seminal historical genre that shaped that fascination, the anecdote. The genre of exemplarity par excellence, the anecdote is also, in Joel Fineman’s words, “the literary form that uniquely lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end.” The anecdote is thus the “hole within the whole” from which alternative histories, including the true histories known as romances, can emerge. Hawthorne’s lifelong preoccupation with James Boswell’s anecdote of Johnson’s penance in Uttoxeter Market roots a uniquely American fictional hero (aka Arthur Dimmesdale) and Hawthorne’s distinctively melancholic mode of American authorship, in Johnson’s English singularity.

The Moral Vacuum in Teacher Education Research and Practice

This chapter examines the gap between the widespread acknowledgment that teaching is a moral endeavor, on the one hand, and the lack of explicit, systematic teacher education research and practice to support preparing teachers for the moral aspects of teaching. After providing an initial description of the aforementioned gap, the chapter surveys the evidence that such a gap exists, then takes up a number of themes found in the literature bordering the gap. It concludes with a discussion of possible paths for teacher education research and practice to move forward. Teachers do not lack moral sophistication because they are not moral people. Just the opposite, most teachers are drawn to teaching because of their moral commitments. Moral language is missing in classrooms, but it is also missing in the seminar rooms and lecture halls of teacher education. (Sockett & LePage, 2002, p. 171)

Rethinking Interventions to Improve Surrogate Decision Making in Intensive Care Units

Many aspects of care for critically ill patients that were once managed exclusively by physicians are now collaboratively managed by clinicians from several disciplines.1-3 However, most of the responsibility remains with physicians to help surrogate decision makers deliberate about goals of care for patients with advanced critical illness. This is rational if decision making is conceptualized as a purely cognitive process requiring only physicians’ technical biomedical knowledge. However, this narrow conceptualization is at odds with the reality that surrogate decision making is also an emotional and moral endeavor. Moreover, the simple goal of ensuring timely, consistent communication in intensive care units (ICUs) is an organizational challenge. When conceptualized in this way, the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration is clear—no single individual has sufficient skills and time to attend to the diverse challenges that surrogates face in ICUs. In this article, I present a multidimensional framework of the barriers to high quality surrogate decision making in ICUs and present 5 ways that clinical nurses could be more explicitly incorporated into interventions to improve surrogate decision making in ICUs.

Legislation vs. morality – a police officer’s ethical dilemma

Policing is a moral endeavor. This paper discusses policing as a complex mission linked to its moral dimension and how individual values may impact how daily work is accomplished. It highlights the ethical dimension of decision-making from different ethical perspectives and the importance of developing practical ethical awareness in routine tasks and everyday activities. A routine episode, as depicted by a female police officer in an in-service program, illustrates how a number of ethical dimensions may arise in an unexpected situation with a discrepancy between the national ethical values for policing and its realization in practice. This paper draws attention to the importance of a forum in which shared dilemmas drawn from everyday activities are discussed, focusing on legislation as well as different ethical perspectives, to identify alternative actions.

Images of a ‘good nurse’ presented by teaching staff

Nursing is at the same time a vocation, a profession and a job. By nature, nursing is a moral endeavor, and being a 'good nurse' is an issue and an aspiration for professionals. The aim of our qualitative research project carried out with 18 nurse teachers at a university nursing school in Brazil was to identify the ethical image of nursing. In semistructured interviews the participants were asked to choose one of several pictures, to justify their choice and explain what they meant by an ethical nurse. Five different perspectives were revealed: good nurses fulfill their duties correctly; they are proactive patient advocates; they are prepared and available to welcome others as persons; they are talented, competent, and carry out professional duties excellently; and they combine authority with power sharing in patient care. The results point to a transition phase from a historical introjection of religious values of obedience and service to a new sense of a secular, proactive, scientific and professional identity.

Moral Uses, Narrative Effects: Natural History in Victorian Periodicals and Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters

This article situates Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, serialized in Cornhill Magazine between 1864 and 1866, in the context of contemporary periodical articles that represent natural history as a moral endeavor and that depict men of science as moral exemplars. Gaskell thematizes scientific morality through her naturalist-hero Roger Hamley, linking his personal excellence to his scientific gifts and thus presenting scientific ways of thinking as relevant to the "every-day" world the novel chronicles and as integral to the development of the novel's courtship plot. The article ends by briefly considering the changing place of natural history in George Eliot's oeuvre.

Why ethics should be part of health technology assessment

From the heydays of HTA in the 1970s, it has been argued that ethics should be a part of HTA. Despite more than 30 years with repeated intentions, only few HTA reports include ethical analysis, and there is little agreement on methods for integrating ethics. This poses the question of why it is so important to integrate ethics in HTA? The article analyzes ten arguments for making ethics part of HTA. The validity of the arguments depend on what we mean by "integrating," "ethics," and "HTA." Some of the counterarguments explain why it has taken so long to integrate ethics in HTA and why there are so many ethical approaches. Nevertheless, some of the arguments for making ethics part of HTA appear to be compelling. Health care is a moral endeavor, and the vast potential of technology poses complex moral challenges. A thorough assessment of technology would include reflection on these moral aspects. Ethics provides such a moral reflection. Health technology is a way to improve the life of human individuals. This involves questions of what "the good life" is, and hence ethical issues. Trying to ignore such questions may inflict with the moral foundation of health care: to help people. Additionally, HTA is an evaluation, and as such also a reflection on values. Hence, there is a profound affinity between HTA and ethics. Accordingly, ethics cannot be "integrated" in HTA as ethics is already a constitutive part of HTA. However, ethics can be acknowledged and emphasized.