Moral Subjectivity Research Articles

Autonomy and the concrete universal. Moral subjectivity and its function in Hegel’sPhilosophy of Right

Autonomy and the concrete universal. Moral subjectivity and its function in Hegel’s<i>Philosophy of Right</i>

Moral Geographies and the Disciplining Of Senses Among Swedish Salafis

The formation of a new moral subjectivity is a complex process; it generally involves drastic changes to the everyday lives of practitioners. In trying to escape what they define as corrupting and immoral surroundings, the informants of this study often develop alternative strategies and more flexible stands to manage to live as Salafi Muslims in Sweden. This can be related to the view held by some human geographers that spaces are deemed as moral or immoral. As such, the informants included in this study understand spaces as arranged around social practices known to take places therein. Peoples’ identities are thus (presumingly) shaped within such spaces. From such a perspective, this article will analyze how a particular Salafi purist group cultivates piety in their everyday lives by disciplining their senses and creating moral geographies. The article is qualitative in its approach and employs ethnographical methods such as observations and informal interviews.

Why sustainable and ‘nutritionally correct’ food is not on the agenda: Western Sydney, the moral arts of everyday life and public policy

Within a context of delivering food security into the future, dietary guidelines are being reframed, corporations are replacing unsustainable products, and consumers are being encouraged to become ecological citizens. While there is a growing literature on the food practices of ‘alternative’ consumers, ‘mainstream’ consumers are less well understood. This paper describes qualitative research undertaken in a socio-economically disadvantaged area of Sydney, Australia, which aimed to uncover consumer views towards sustainable and healthy diets. Most participants indicated a discrepancy between their desired and actual behaviours: while they want to support Australian, or local, food producers they gravitate towards cheap and tasty food from ‘anywhere’; and while they associate nutritious food with fresh food, they will buy processed foods which can be less expensive, appeal to children and are prone to less waste. Reflecting mainstream Australian political culture, participants were compromising household food budgets in order to pursue a socially acceptable standard of living (including decent housing, car-reliance). They were also incorporating the pleasure and desires of family members as part of ‘the moral arts of everyday life’. Using social theories of consumption and practice sociology we argue that food choices and practices – easy or not – need to be interpreted as part of the role that consumption plays in political citizenship and moral subjectivity. In the Western Sydney context, food practices are essentially household budget and family nourishment practices rather than nutrition and sustainability practices; a position which is not addressed in the government’s new food policies or wage determination processes.

On love: Remaking moral subjectivity in postrehabilitation Russia

ABSTRACTLove, I argue, is a demand around which moral experience—and thus moral subjectivity—takes shape. Love entails the struggle to ethically remake oneself, and the response to its unavoidable demand has consequences for both oneself and others. I examine the moral experience of love as it was lived by two former participants in a Russian Orthodox Church–run heroin rehabilitation program in St. Petersburg. My discussion thus contributes conceptually and ethnographically to the growing literature on the anthropology of moralities.

Sabar:body politics among middle‐aged migrantPakistani women

This article explores the relationship among suffering, Islamic moral concepts, subjectivity, and agency within a cohort of middle‐aged women who migrated fromPakistan to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s as the wives or daughters of industrial workers. These women were preoccupied with their ageing bodies and complained about the cumulative assaults on their health they had experienced, and which they felt had been neglected by health professionals and family alike. By examining how these women bear chronic illness through a discourse ofsabar(patience or silent forbearance), I show how women were able to transform their illness into a selfless and virtuous consequence of shouldering the burdens of kinship.Sabarsuggests passive acceptance or fatalism to some observers, but attending to how women situate their illness in a religious and eschatological frame, we see that they actively appropriate rather than passively imbibe the norm ofsabar. Moreover, turning from narratives to everyday contexts of friendship, family, and inter‐generational relations, we see that there are tensions between self‐sublimation and self‐assertion in the practice ofsabar. It is argued that ethnographic attention to subjectivity and reflexivity are crucial to understandingsabaras an agential capacity.

Conviction without Being Convinced: Maintaining Islamic Certainty in Minangkabau, Indonesia

In Minangkabau society in West Sumatra, Indonesia, Islam provides the solid ground of truth and morality. I examine the role that a notion of conviction plays in allowing Minangkabau people to maintain a sense of commitment to that truth despite practices and experiences that contradict it. Drawing from person‐centered research, I argue that individuals can maintain the certainty of Islam and the Islamic nature of their own selves in the subjective realm of conviction. The ambiguity of conviction gives individuals the room to creatively manage the disparities between experience and a totalizing conception of Islamic Truth. Situated within a discussion about selfhood and moral subjectivity in Muslim societies, I develop this article to demonstrate how notions of belief can be used to maintain the sense of an absolute commitment to a totalizing truth even in the context of ambiguous experience, obviating the motivation to pursue a fundamentalist agenda.

The Normativity of Clinical Health Care: Perspectives on Moral Realism

The paper argues that a particular version of moral realism constitutes an important basis for ethics in medicine and health care. Moral realism is the position that moral value is a part of the fabric of relational and interpersonal reality. But even though moral values are subject to human interpretations, they are not themselves the sole product of these interpretations. Moral values are not invented but discovered by the subject. Moral realism argues that values are open to perception and experience and that moral subjectivity must be portrayed in how moral values are discovered and perceived by the human subject. Moral values may exist independent of the particular subject's interpretative evaluations as a part of reality. This epistemological point about normativity is particularly significant in medical care and in health care. The clinician perceives moral value in the clinical encounter in a way that is important for competent clinical understanding. Clinical understanding in medical care and health care bears on the encounter with moral values in the direct and embodied relations to patients, with their experiences of illness and their vulnerabilities. Good clinical care is then partly conditioned upon adequate understanding of such moral realities.

Michel Foucault's moral subjectivity and the semiotic modeling of knowledge

Michel Foucault's theory of moral subjectivity, as a trained relation of the subject to itself, contains a latent semiotic theory of self-knowledge. The formation of the moral subject is seen by Foucault as a sign system, given the name of technology, and placed in a broader context of semiotic and non-semiotic paths to knowledge. In such a framework, signification as a technology, the self as a binary opposition, and the in-between space of binaries emerge as important methodological elements in self-knowledge. Furthermore, a semiotic argument comes forth about the epistemological role of culture in the modeling of knowledge at large.

The Source of the Idea of Equality in Confucian Thought

Although the traditional society in China was not necessarily a society of equality, and the classical Confucianism did not speak much about the principle of universal equality, in modern times, in the midst of a transformation of value systems, people still find correlating sources within the Confucian tradition that is connected to the modern idea of equality. This essay makes a detailed study on this correlation and points out that ancient Chinese society and the western feudal society are different in terms of social systems and education systems. For example, China has the imperial examination but no patrimonial aristocracy. Confucianism opposed the huge gap between the poor and the rich, and this idea has become a modern tradition in the ideal of “great harmony under the sky,” especially in Kang Youwei’s 康有为 Datong Shu 大同书 (Book of Great Harmony). There were also some elements of agricultural socialism and equalitarianism in traditional Confucianism. The potential idea of equality (or reciprocity) in “friendship,” embodied in the principle of Confucian ethics of the Three Bonds and the Five Relations, is explored and explained in a modern way. The theory that the sages are equal with the masses, which originated from the theory of human being’s intrinsic goodness, may be directly connected with modern principle of equality. The modern transformation of equality is both political and ethical. The former is to struggle for individual rights; the latter is to establish moral subjectivity. Therefore, equality between sages and the masses manifests modernity. Like the epistemic subjectivity, which could not be discussed without referring to group-individual relationship, the moral subjectivity also contains a consciousness of equality.

Justice as Reconciliatory Praxis: A Decolonial Mujerista Move

This article proposes a theory of justice elaborated from below, from the reality of lo cotidiano; that is, the everyday struggles of grassroot peoples. This theory has as its goal to contribute to, facilitate, increment or sustain the moral agency and historical subjectivity of those who suffer injustice and who struggle against it. I am proposing a theory of justice that is a response to injustice and is based on a praxis of struggle for life, for the good life, for fullness of life. Such a proposal is a Mujerista proposal, for it arises from the lived experiences of Latinas living in the USA, committed to our liberation and the liberation of all peoples.

Moral Distress: Inability to Act or Discomfort with Moral Subjectivity?

Amidst the wealth of literature on the topic of moral distress in nursing, a single citation is ubiquitous, Andrew Jameton's 1984 book Nursing practice. The definition Jameton formulated reads '... moral distress arises when one knows the right thing to do, but institutional constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action'. Unfortunately, it appears that, despite the frequent use of Jameton's definition of moral distress, the definition itself remains uncritically examined. It seems as if the context of how moral distress arises (i.e. anger, frustration etc.) has been co-opted as its definition. This current work suggests that the current definition is not moral distress as defined by Jameton, but rather, in large part, nursing's discomfort with moral subjectivity in end-of-life decision making. A critical examination of how the Catholic tradition's normative ethical framework accounts for moral subjectivity in end-of-life decision making serves to aid nursing's discomfort and as a starting point to recontextualize moral distress.

The soul freed of cares? Islamic prayer, subjectivity, and the contradictions of moral selfhood in Minangkabau, Indonesia

ABSTRACTIn this article, I explore conceptions and individual experiences of Islamic prayer among Minangkabau people in Indonesia, describing their role in the constitution of selfhood and moral subjectivity. I show how prayer serves as an arena in which the contradictions between conflicting visions of moral selfhood may be engaged, ideally promising reconciliation and transcendence but also inviting experiences of failure. I argue that a rich ethnographic account of Islam's role in constituting selves and subjectivities must address not only the logic and coherence of particular discursive traditions and practices but also the experiential tensions that are central to their application and embodiment. [Islam, prayer, subjectivity, self, morality, Indonesia, Minangkabau]

Moral Perfectionism: Ethical Theory from a Pragmatic Approach

Moral Perfectionism: Ethical Theory from a Pragmatic Approach This article tries to rescue the perfectionist approach to moral theory from the pragmatic tradition and inspiration. Based on the philosophy of Dewey and taking into account authors like H. Putnam or S. Cavell, it tries to defend the idea that pragmatism allows us to understand moral perfectionism in a new way. In that way, perfectionism is bound to a certain interpretation of practical rationality, and a new understanding of moral objectivity and human subjectivity. Finally, moral perfectionism is not a theory that aims to solve all moral dilemmas but provides an understanding of how to face up to the problems of ordinary moral life.

The Call, Community, and Class: Feminist Frustrations with the Language of No-Self

The Call, Community, and Class:Feminist Frustrations with the Language of No-Self Julie B. Miller (bio) In this essay, Mary Engel has taken up what I believe to be one of the most difficult tasks in the academic study of religion in her attempt to explain exactly what mystics are talking about when they utilize the language of no-self as they try to describe their experience of oneness or communion with the divine. Further, she questions if feminism and mysticism are compatible. How can it be, she seems to be asking, that in order to be truly, wholly spiritually fulfilled we are to deny our very selves, as mystical rhetoric seems to assert. For if feminism is grounded on the assertion and development of women's selfhood and spirituality/ mysticism is grounded on the denial of that self, the two appear to be incommensurate. Ultimately, she argues that feminists can (and should?) utilize this mystical language of no-self in order to fashion a "new vision" that includes both active, public work and individual spirituality and that allows one to experience "no-self in relation to the One." My first thoughts when reading this essay centered on Engel's construction of the goals of feminism and her preoccupation with finding her true calling. In regard to the former, it is certainly true that much feminist thought and theory of the past forty years has focused on the liberation of women from the bondage of a variety of oppressions and the subsequent development of women's full moral agency and subjectivity. However, this is definitely not the whole story. One key movement that has been made is the theoretical exploration of the subject, of identity, in light of the historical construction of the self.1 While early stages of this attempt focused on the differences between the "feminine" relational self as opposed to the autonomous, rational "male" self, more recent attempts have moved beyond this binary to the much more complex construction of the "postmodern" self. This move to the postmodern self is one that might alleviate some of Engel's anxieties, at least theoretically, as it embraces the notion of the nonessential "nature" of the self, or, as she might say, the "no-selfness" of the self. But this is a move that Engel does not make as she seems to hold on tightly to the more typical modern construction of the self in her desire to be an "active, free, responsible, and gloriously individual self" (146). With one core identity and indeed one core "calling" to live out, such a self, perhaps, cannot but run up against the rigid boundaries that keep it from experiencing the ecstasy of communion and even union with the divine other. To be perfectly honest, I empathize with Engel's depiction of her spiritual [End Page 173] dilemma. I personally haven't figured out how a person actually thinks of herself differently if she accepts a postmodern concept of the self as opposed to the modern individuated and autonomous concept of the self. On a practical level, at least for me, I still think of myself as "me." As a person with a "core," and yes, maybe even a soul that has had a past and that will persist forward into the future. So while I wonder what Engel would make of postmodern theory and how it might be applicable to her situation, I also recognize that understanding and utilizing such language need not mean that we actually experience ourselves in such a way. A second question that arose for me while reading Engel's essay concerned her construction of spirituality. I believe many feminists do not make clear distinctions between spirituality and activism as Engel seems to be doing; rather, they find spiritual strength in the work they do for justice as well as in the relationships they create with like-minded people fighting similar battles.2 In her call for a "new vision" of spirituality, Engel seems to be maintaining the dualistic construction of spirituality versus activism, which she simultaneously is trying to deconstruct. As she states in her introduction, she is calling for "a broader communal vision that embraces...

Being Anorexic

This article explores the embodied process of being anorexic and the moral repertoires within which this process is entangled. The point of departure for this discussion is that, while critical feminist epistemology plays an important role in politicizing anorexia as a symbolic cluster of meanings, it has provided us with limited analytical tools for an in-depth understanding of an anorexic's lived experiences and of the embodied realities involved in being anorexic. At the same time, autobiographical accounts of anorexia provide insightful emic perspectives on being anorexic but are not engaged with symbolic and theoretical etic perspectives on anorexia. This article attempts to bridge this gap through an anthropological exploration of anorexia from within; that is, as a situated embodied knowledge of anorexic women anchored in concrete lived experiences. Findings from an ethnographic study of young women who were diagnosed with anorexia and admitted to an outpatient hospital unit in Israel suggest that anorexic women actively construct a "heroic moral subjectivity," in which the experience of hunger plays a crucial role, and in which everyday (mundane) practices gain "out-of-the-ordinary" meanings. While these findings partially accord with feminist philosophical explorations of anorexia, I argue that it is only via a detailed ethnographic account that we can follow the ongoing phenomenological and semiotic process through which such heroic subjectivity actually develops. Using an anthropological perspective to bear on the phenomenology of anorexia as an embodied experience contributes toward extending our understanding of the concrete ways in which "culture" becomes present in anorexia. The concluding section discusses gaps between feminist and anorexic narratives of anorexia in terms of therapeutic encounters.

Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World

Abstract MacIntyre shares with others, such as John McDowell, a broad commitment in moral epistemology to the centrality of tradition and both regard forms of enculturation as conditions of moral knowledge. Although MacIntyre is critical of the thought that moral reasons are available only to those whose experience of the world is conceptually articulated, he is sympathetic to the idea that the development of subjectivity involves the capacity to appreciate external moral demands. This paper critically examines some aspects of MacIntyre’s account of how knowledge is related to tradition, and suggests ways in which the formation of moral subjectivity involves the ability to experience the world.

Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality: A Postphenomenological Analysis

This article analyzes the moral relevance of technological artifacts and its possible role in ethical theory, by taking the postphenomenological approach that has developed around the work of Don Ihde into the domain of ethics. By elaborating a postphenomenological analysis of the mediating role of ultrasound in moral decisions about abortion, the article argues that technologies embody morality and help to constitute moral subjectivity. This technological mediation of the moral subject is subsequently addressed in terms of Michel Foucault’s ethical position, in which ethics is about actively co-shaping one’s moral subjectivity. Integrating Foucauldian ethics and postphenomenology, the article argues that the technological mediation of moral subjectivity should be at the heart of an ethical approach that takes the moral dimensions of technology seriously.

Shared Legacies of the War: Spirit Mediums and War Veterans in Southern Zimbabwe

AbstractThis paper explores the nature of ongoing relationships between war veterans and spirit mediums in Zimbabwe, as well as the continuing salience of a shared chimurenga legacy of co-operation by these two groups, and how it has been put to use, and acted out by both in the context of Zimbabwe's recent fast track land reform project. In emphasising this continuity, the paper also considers whether a corresponding disparity between the ideology of the ruling political elite and the practices, experiences and performances of guerrillas, spirit mediums and others acting on the ground, which materialised during the liberation struggle, has re-emerged, despite or alongside the recent collaboration of some war veterans with the ruling party's rhetoric of 'patriotic history'. Engaging with Lambek's work on moral subjectivity and Mbembe's 'logic of conviviality' of postcolonial states and their subjects, it argues that war veterans and spirit mediums sometimes share a 'moral conviviality' which appears during bira possession ceremonies, in the shared demands for the return and reburial of the war dead from foreign countries, or for 'national' ceremonies held at Great Zimbabwe and elsewhere to thank the ancestors, as well as in the similar way in which spirit mediums and war veterans subject their agency to that of the ancestors in their narrative performances. It concludes by suggesting that although many war veterans have undeniably been closely complicit in the violent 'authoritarian nationalism' of the state, in this shared war legacy of spirit mediums and war veterans lies the opportunity for radical alternative imaginations of the state.

Zwierzę w filozofii moralności

The discussion about the rights of animals is always up-to-date. The dichotomy division into philoanimalists and philohominists, although reasonable, is not satisfactory to everyone. It is too strongly associated with the division into people and things in Roman law. To avoid this association in the context of biocentric trends in ecological ethics, accomplishments of evolutionary psychology and the concept of animal welfare, it is suggested that a third moral dimension dealing with creatures with highly developed nervous system be introduced between moral objectivity of creatures with high perception and moral subjectivity of people - creatures characterized by self-awareness and reflexive awareness. Human beings on the one hand are responsible for recognizing their rights given by nature and on the other hand, they are obliged to create a law to protect themselves.

Paths of Speech

The Muinane, an indigenous group of the Colombian Amazon, narratively present individual subjectivity as stemming from cultivated substances that constitute the bodies of human beings, or else from wild substances that usurp the role of proper stuffs. Moral subjectivity in particular stems from the tobacco, coca and other substances shared by a community. Subjectivity in such an account is both individual and collective, and either divine or animalistic as well. Muinane people’s rhetoric at times seems to present subjectivity as radically determined by extra-individual entities. However, the author argues that consciousness of the self is very much a part of their accounts of action — that is, that they understand their own actions to be self-directed as well as other-directed, and furthermore, that their ways of speaking about their own social interactions and thoughts/emotions performatively shape them. The author stresses the achieved character of social life and the intrinsically social character of selfhood, without making a case for a monolithic culture that monologically determines subjectivity and sociality.