Moral Purpose Research Articles

Darnaus vystymosi poveikis gyvenimo kokybei

The article discusses impact of sustainable development on quality of life. According to the collected theoretical and practical material, it analyzes conceptions of quality of life and sustainable development and aspects, which connect them. Was formatted the theoretical model of assessment of impact of sustainable development on quality of life. The research supports the hypothesis, that sustainable development has positive impact on quality of life. In assessing the quality of life it is important to pay attention not only to the social, environmental, economic development but also to the system of human’s value, beliefs, ethics, his sense of moral purpose and responsibilities. Quality of life can be achieved by resolving the conflict between nature and society by reducing the use of natural resources, waste disposal and so on. The main problem of the paper is stated as follows: because we don’t have unique system for assessment of sustainable development and quality of life, it is difficult to assess impact of sustainable development on quality of life. Research object – sustainable development and quality of life. Research objective is to assess impact of sustainable development on quality of life. Research tasks: a) to analyze the concepts of quality of life and sustainable development; b) to discuss the aspects bringing together quality of life and sustainable development; c) to explore the empirical research on quality of life and sustainable development; d) to form the model of the assessment of impact of sustainable development on quality of life; e) to measure the impact of sustainable development on quality of life. Research methods. Research methods contributing to this paper are: systematic scientific literature analysis, statistical data and comparative analysis, regression analysis, use of SPSS 17 (Statistical Package for Social Science) and Package Microsoft Excel. Analyzing the impact of sustainable development on quality of life it became clear that each country’s cases are different. Strong correlations and dependence between sustainable development and quality of life were founded only in three countries – France, Latvia and Lithuania. Analysis showed that external quality of life significantly correlates with environment and social development. In Lithuania case where was added institutional aspect to the sustainable development index there were founded statistically significant model to evaluate the impact of sustainable development on quality of life. Economic and institutional development of the country affects external quality of life and positive chantes of social development improve the inner quality of life in Lithuania. The results showed the importance of the institutional dimension in evaluation of the impact of sustainable development on quality of life. These results may demonstrate the most important things in the country what influence quality of life.

Advice for Improving Memory: Exercising, Strengthening, and Cultivating Natural Memory, 1860–1910

The idea that human memory can be improved appears to be as ancient as the concept of memory itself. For centuries, authors have promised that using artificial mnemonical systems can improve remembering. However, in the late nineteenth century many authors of memory improvement texts emphasized the importance of enhancing natural memory as opposed to developing artificial memory systems. In doing so, they portrayed natural memory as something analogous to other body functions and parts, such as muscles, and promoted a metaphorical view of memory that did not rely wholly on the more familiar root metaphors of storage and inscription. At the same time, they stressed that natural memory could be reconciled with moral purposes, especially through notions of exercise, training, and discipline. This article explores these ideas and how they chimed with Victorian concerns about free will, the education of the young, moral imperatives around self-improvement, and the increasing interest in science and especially a science of the mind.

David Hopkins, Exploding the myths of school reform

David Hopkins, Exploding the myths of school reform. Australian Council for Educational Research: Camberwell, 2013; 232 pp. ISBN: 978-1-742-86098-5 (paperback) David Hopkins is at the stage of his career when he has a vast amount of experience and expertise to call upon and in this book he turns his attention to the vexed issue of school reform. In a clear, logical and compelling fashion Hopkins examines 10 powerful prevailing myths extant in education today. These myths are in effect powerful mindsets developed over time which have reached the status of mental barriers too high to be easily seen over or climbed over. The first of these is the myth that achievement cannot be realised at scale for all students. In this chapter, Hopkins provides sufficient examples of outstanding educational achievement occurring through a combination of strategy and moral purpose in a variety of disadvantaged and difficult settings that one can only conclude that, despite the difficulty (and sometimes the impossibility) of every child achieving at a high standard, we must not abandon this aim. We have known for more than 30 years what the characteristics of effective schools are; our big challenge is to develop more of them. Standardised testing has revealed that the further we go down the socioeconomic scale the greater the variation we see in school achievement. Clearly, some schools have met the challenge while others have not even engaged with it. If some schools can be so successful the key question then is why others can't or won't raise their expectations. The real issue then is not so much what effective schools do, but how they have managed the school improvement process. This chapter highlights some of the imperatives if such improvement is to occur. The second myth exploded by Hopkins concerns that of school autonomy. It has become something of a mantra that increased school autonomy is required for and necessarily leads to greater student and school performance. Recent key papers issued by governments and education systems accept this as fact. The combination of autonomy and greater competition, no doubt borrowed from the corporate sector, is thus strongly advocated. Hopkins, however, provides convincing evidence that there is in fact no correlation between school decentralisation and achievement. In any case, no schools, not even those in the independent 'sector', are truly autonomous and independent. All schools are linked in various ways and through various systems. As we move to greater centralisation of matters such as testing, curriculum and teacher standards, all schools are drawn more tightly into various circles of influence and accountability. …

Deepening system leadership

The increasing importance of educational collaborations and networks that blur organizational boundaries requires conceptual developments in leadership theory. One approach to both theorizing and promoting such phenomena is through the idea of system leadership. Three different meanings of the term are identified: interschool leadership; a systemic leadership orientation and identity; and leadership of the school system as a whole. Previous descriptions of system leadership, and policy initiatives related to it, have focused on headteachers and senior leaders. However, teacher leaders may also exercise system leadership in relation to all three meanings. Professional development networks and school collaborations provide a range of distinct contexts for interschool leadership by teacher leaders and these are identified. This extends existing theories of teacher and distributed leadership. Further, it is proposed that teacher leaders can, like headteachers, have a systemic leadership practice orientation that is informed by moral purposes. The model of teacher activist professional identity provides a starting point for analysing teacher system leadership identity. Teacher leaders can and do influence system-wide change and, to conceptualize this, the concept of system leadership from below is introduced. In making this argument a number of issues and methodological tools are identified that are important in researching both headteacher and teacher system leadership in relation to the three meanings of system leadership.

Teacher Identity and the Neoliberal Condition: Asserting a Participative-Professional, Socially Democratic Teacher Imaginary in Technical-Managerial Times

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in disadvantaged communities, the paper describes the effects of 30 years of neoliberal education policy on the teaching profession. I describe the type of teacher identity that is promoted by neoliberal discourse, and which is doing damage to countless young people, as ‘technical-managerial’. Teachers are expected to be effective instructors but educational ideas and democratic values are largely missing from this view of teaching, which is strongly aligned with individual, institutional and national economic competition. I distinguish this restricted perspective from a more engaged, relational type that I describe as ‘participative-professional’. Within this latter perspective, teachers would be engaged, critically reflective practitioners - active participants in educational and organizational politics and policy and well as pedagogy. I conclude that teachers must strive to assert participative-professional teacher identities in order to restore notions of social justice to the moral purpose of education. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p170

The Epistemic Status of the Human Sciences: Critical Reflections on Foucault

Any reader of Foucault's corpus recognizes fairly quickly that it is animated by an ethical impulse, namely, to liberate individuals from a kind of oppression from which they suffer. This oppression, however, does not involve the familiar tyranny of the Leviathan or the totalitarian state; it exploits instead values that the victim of oppression herself accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be complicit in her subjugation. It also depends, crucially, on a skeptical thesis about the epistemology of the social sciences. It is this conjunction of claims - that individuals oppress themselves in virtue of certain moral and epistemic norms they accept - that marks Foucault's uniquely disturbing contribution to the literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Max Weber, to understand the oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School, human liberation and human flourishing. I offer here both a reconstruction of Foucault's project - focusing on the role that ethical and epistemic norms play in how agents subjugate themselves - and some modestly critical reflections on his project, especially the weaknesses in his critique of the epistemic standing of the human sciences.

‘It’s so wrong yet so funny’: celebrity violence, values and the Janus-faced cultural public sphere online

The aim of this study is to explore the values that characterise participation in the cultural public sphere of local (Finnish) and (potentially) more global or multinational (English-language) celebrity-gossip sites. By utilising the analysis of evaluative language, the values expressed in 900 English-language and 900 Finnish comments from different websites (such as Just Jared, YouTube, Oh No They Didn’t and online newspaper sites) were explored. The results indicate that the cultural public sphere of both global and local celebrity-gossip sites has three basic functions, which I will characterise here as morality (purpose), competition of power (game) and entertainment (play).First, and especially if celebrities undergo serious miseries such as domestic violence, the cultural public sphere involves negotiation of and reflection on the normative meanings of being a citizen. Such moral seriousness is particularly prominent on Finnish sites of celebrity gossip, which may indicate that when celebrity gossip is limited to one culture and nation, the public-spirited focus seems stronger than in potentially global gossip discussions. Second, and perhaps most prominently, the cultural public sphere is a terrain of contest characterised by mockery, pity and hostility towards celebrities, particularly women. Third, the cultural public sphere focuses on shared entertainment, and especially voyeuristic pleasures. Moreover, comments posted to both Finnish and English-language online environments of celebrity gossip are characterised by the overlap of game with both purpose and play. Serious moral purpose stressing obedience to communal rules and playful mockery as a humorous self-expression have a common goal in contributing to self-interested, and often sexist, discourses of power.

Reframing leadership as a participative pedagogy: the working theories of early years professionals

Traditional notions of leadership are at odds with the pedagogy and ethos of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), prompting increasing international concern to develop new understandings which are better suited and create greater leadership capacity. The introduction of the Early Years Professional (EYP) in England, as a leader of practice without association with an organisational position, gave impetus to the idea of pedagogic leadership. This paper draws on two qualitative studies to examine the working theories of EYPs in leading practice to discover how they interpret and apply their professional purpose. An interpretive approach was adopted to develop patterns of meaning from practitioner stories which show an emerging notion of leadership founded on ‘passionate care’ to improve the education and well-being of young children. Such leadership can be exercised regardless of positional role as it does not operate through authority but from moral purpose and it seeks to release agency for change with others by building trusting relationships. This provides scope to reconceptualise leadership in ECEC as a participative pedagogy which could generate greater leadership capital if embedded into professional development.

Religious experience as an aim of religious education

This article presents a model for religious education based on three central elements. First, it is argued that religious experience, or direct experience of the Divine, is an essential part of a full religious life, that religious experience is based in, enabled by and examined against, the body of knowledge in a given religion, and that religious experience is itself a form of knowing. Second, it is suggested that there be three sets of aims in religious education curriculum: knowledge aims, moral value aims and spiritual aims, the last of which encompasses religious experience, which religious education should aim to encourage and facilitate among students. Third, the teacher is presented as the central factor in such facilitation, and the pedagogical and personal characteristics of this ideal teacher are described.

Sitting on the Balcony: American Responses, Strategic Dilemmas, and Swedish Criticism of the Vietnam War

Small states often seek power by exercising authority beyond their borders. Sweden, a prominent protagonist of the global projection of moral values, established itself as a champion of humanitarian internationalism in the post-Second World War period, especially during the Vietnam War. By voicing criticism of the American war effort and putting moral purposes beyond itself, Sweden tried to change American policy. Years of vehement criticism provoked strong reactions in the United States, leading to bilateral diplomatic crises and long-lasting political conflicts. Even though part of a wave of international criticism and based on the power of the better argument and conveyed through open advocacy, Sweden's public diplomacy had little bearing. Its confrontational style was counter-productive; its content badly synchronised with the domestic American debate and lacking originality and centrality; and the criticism generally considered irrelevant. Attention fell on Swedish verbal activism when more conspicuous elements of Swedish Vietnam policy were in focus.

Ethical blind spots in leading for learning: an Australian study

PurposeThis study aims to explore the dynamics by which exposure to a moral rationale is given expression in schools, and how this is perceived as impacting on teaching, leadership practice and student outcomes.Design/methodology/approachA total of 11 Australian schools were part of a project in which they were supported in applying a conceptual framework involving moral purpose, learning and leadership to self‐selected improvement initiatives. Extensive focus group interviews with the school project teams were analysed to identify recurrent themes, and to illustrate the dynamics of engagement with moral purpose.FindingsA significant insight that emerges from this study is that the movement towards increased moral sensitivity enhanced commitment to shared purpose. This movement provided a driver for ethically driven behavior. Part of the contribution of the intervention was to draw attention to these elements of moral purpose, which, in turn, increased teacher and leader sensitivity to their operation, and resulted in changed teacher practice and enhanced learning outcomes for students.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study highlight the potential of explicit attention to moral purpose in school communities, and suggest some points of emphasis for school leaders who are committed to improvement built on staff commitment.Originality/valueWhile many authors signal as a matter of principle the importance of moral purpose in schooling, and in the leadership of change, it is a comparatively under‐researched area in terms of its practical application. This study makes a contribution to addressing that gap.

Straight Thinking About Sovereignty

Captives of Sovereignty. By Havercroft Jonathan . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 276 pp., $89.10 hardcover (ISBN13-978-1-107-01287-5). Rather than relying on a sovereign, ultimate authority is better vested in a political community that rests on a set of common linguistic norms and the everyday mutual self-regard and communality among persons that such norms engender. This is the central thesis of Captives of Sovereignty , an erudite, carefully argued, and well-written survey of how a certain “picture” of sovereignty has come to entrance political theory in general and international relations theory in particular since the sixteenth century but should be challenged because of its fatal embrace of a centralized “truth” decider whose despotic power is based in an unexamined acceptance of epistemological skepticism. In fact, the book is part of a long tradition of works engaged in the critique of domination. Its novelty lies in identifying the origins of our collective captivity in the epistemological skepticism about the possibility of mutual agreement about moral and political purposes without a central fount of authority found in such early modern philosophers as Hobbes and Spinoza. The first part of the book is taken up with showing how much today's doctrine of state sovereignty is traceable to imputing the sovereign as the decider of truth “in such diverse areas as epistemology, ethics, and religion by determining what the truth is and using its coercive power to compel subjects to …

Understanding Libya's ‘Revolution’ through Transformation of the Jamahiriyya into a State of Exception

This article aims to provide a historical and structural context to the outbreak of the Libyan Revolution, which began in February 2011. It does so through an analysis of the polity Mu'ammar Qadhdhafi termed a Jamahiriyya. By identifying a crucial transformation within the long development of the Jamahiriyya through what Giorgio Agamben defines the state of exception, the article demonstrates how the official discourse entered in sharp contradiction with the very principles around which the regime had framed its moral purpose since the coup d'état in 1969. This metamorphosis resulted both in the slow, yet constant, erosion of the legitimacy of the regime and in the emergence of different forms of resistance. It is in such conditions, where emerging offstage resistances, what James Scott has called hidden transcripts of power, and counter-discourses began to come out, that the paper tries to assess the significance of the popular revolt and NATO's subsequent international intervention for the future of the country.

Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964

Montaigne y la inmensidad del mundo: «una perpetua multiplicación y vicisitud de formas»

Podría pensarse que la idea de la inmensidad del mundo aparece en Montaigne sólo como un recurso retórico empleado con una finalidad pedagógicomoral. Pero el examen de las distintas páginas de los Ensayos que se ocupan del tema muestra hasta qué punto tiene también una dimensión filosófica. En particular, en el capítulo «Des coches» Montaigne toma partido con notable rotundidad por un universo sin límites ni espaciales ni temporales poblado por una infinidad de formas en perpetua vicisitud. La lista de imágenes del mundo alternativas presentada en una importante página de la «Apologie de Raymond Sebond» certifica el interés del autor por este planteamiento.

Irrational amusements, theatre law, and moral reformers in nineteenth-century America: implications for later popular music study

This paper considers several case studies of conflicts between moral reformers active in US cities and venues catering to working-class audiences from the 1860s to 1880s. For moral reformers, theatrical entertainments, particularly forms with no educational or moral purpose, were deeply corrupting and threatened not only the well-being of the individual, but also that of the nation. These case studies show that tensions emerged when popular styles sought to expand their audience beyond their traditional patrons or to move into respectable areas of the city – in other words, when they did not stay in their traditional place. This is also true of the many hybrid musical forms that combined European-based folk or religious styles with African-American music. Forms such as jazz and rock ‘n’ roll did not elicit significant protest until they began to find an audience in northern cities among middle- and lower-middle-class youth. Exploring how laws were changed in response to earlier conflicts adds a crucial historical perspective to popular music studies, which tends to remain firmly focused on music from the mid-twentieth century onwards.

Basic desert of reactive emotions

In this paper, I explore the idea that someone can deserve resentment or other reactive emotions for what she does by attention to three psychological functions of such emotions – appraisal, communication, and sanction – that I argue ground claims of their desert. I argue that attention to these functions helps to elucidate the moral aims of reactive emotions and to distinguish the distinct claims of desert, as opposed to other moral considerations.

Love for the divine or divine love

There is no doubt that likes and dislikes develop under the influence of love and hatred. As a person loves, he has a feeling of pleasure and happiness and when he hates, he feels pain, suffocation and anguish. May be, because of this, some great thinkers and Philosophers thought that the aim of good morality was happiness, means a happy life and achievements of this was possible only in love and affectionate life. The highest point of this life was life of love. The secret of attachment of value to this term "Love" should be searched in this fact. But what is more important than the origin of love is the position of beloved. The degree of happy8ness of a person is related to the degree of his love. The status of his love should be assessed by the glory and rank of his beloved. The durability and longevity of the love is connected with the rise and fall of glory of the beloved. The main question is with whose glory and greatness one should put his soul and head at stake so that eternal and durable love is achieved resulting into eternal pleasure and happiness.

Legal Positivism and the Moral Aim Thesis

According to Scott Shapiro’s Moral Aim Thesis, it is an essential feature of the law that it has a moral aim. In short, for Shapiro, this means that the law has the constitutive aim of providing morally good solutions to morally significant social problems in cases where other, less formal ways of guiding the activity of agents won’t work. In this article, I argue that legal positivists should reject the Moral Aim Thesis. In short, I argue that although there are versions of the Moral Aim Thesis that are arguably compatible with legal positivism, all of the different ways of making it compatible face serious philosophical difficulties. Following a discussion of what these difficulties are, I provide an alternative to the Moral Aim Thesis, a thesis that I call the ‘Represented-as-Moral Thesis’. This thesis avoids the problems that I raise for the Moral Aim Thesis and better resonates with some of the core intuitions behind legal positivism. Furthermore, a version of Shapiro’s Planning Theory of Law that is developed with the Represented-as-Moral Thesis (as opposed to the Moral Aim Thesis) can explain all of the things that Shapiro uses the Moral Aim Thesis to explain.

Alon Goshen-Gottstein and Eugene Korn (eds.), Jewish Theology and World Religions

A coherent Jewish theology of world religions has not yet been composed. Christians were the first to develop such a discipline; people like John Hick, Leonard Swidler, Paul Knitter, and Perry Schmid-Leukel come to mind. From the Jewish side, little has been done in this growing field, although there have always been interreligious dialogs and indeed it has always been and is today impossible to avoid the religious other. There is a profound need for investigating traditional sources that have relevance to the Jewish relation to other religions and for revisiting early positions in light of today's interfaith relations. The fact is that from a Jewish point of view, other religions were often seen as highly problematic. The religious other is frequently depicted negatively in the Jewish tradition. However, we are now more and more in contact with other narratives and with people of other religions who look for recognition and acceptance and who are ready to cooperate in order to create a more humane society. The encounter with real people rather than with abstractions and religious systems is challenging. In an increasingly global world, our contacts with others have become a daily reality. Moreover, there is a consensus between religious humanists that religions are valuable in as far as they contribute to the bettering of society. For these people, the “truth” of the various religions is measured in accordance with their effectiveness in promoting the formation of a peaceful society. In present-day open societies, the “truth” of religions is understood differently than it was in the past and is associated with moral purposes. This may lead to the recognition that the ultimate truth is not the possession of one particular religious community and that we all reflect aspects of the unreachable truth. From this perspective, one has to learn from other religious persons in order to approach what is finally unutterable. For all these reasons, in view of today's challenges, it has become imperative to develop a Jewish theology of world religions and a praxis of interreligious dialog.