Moral Subjects Research Articles

From psychology of personality to psychology of persons

The paper considers diverse approaches to human subjectivity conceptualization. On the one hand, a summary is made of an established psychological view of personality as an intrinsic psychological entity responsible for stylistic differences in the behavior of isolated individuals, founded on the traditional Cartesian view. On the other hand more recent views are presented, which take human subjectivity as personhood i.e. responsible action of moral subjects, placed within amongst-people space, and implying allied activity of persons in a social community. In addition, consideration is given to new methodological demands for psychologists who want to research the domain of human personhood as well as to deviations of a "new paradigm" of psychological investigations from scientific tradition in viewing methods that has prevailed in psychology until recently. Clarification of demands for studying personhood is a new trend in psychology, so it should be stressed that such orientation, despite its long-lasting past, virtually has a very short history.

Sexuality, AIDS, and the lures of modernity: Reflexivity and morality among young people in rural Tanzania

An understanding of young people's perceptions of AIDS and their sexuality is an essential precondition for the effective planning of AIDS campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa. In examining how young Luo men and women in Tanzania describe their sexual behavior, I show that cultural conceptions of sexuality, gender, and trust have an important impact on their actions. I also show that these conceptions have been rendered ambiguous by globalization, modernity, and by AIDS campaigns themselves. The values that are imparted to young people from family or peers often conflict with the preventive advice provided by both governmental and non-governmental organizations. However, by critically reflecting upon the ambiguities and inconsistencies in their lives, the young Luo have proven to be self-conscious actors and moral subjects who are actively involved in the process of social change. In the concluding section I suggest how elements of self-critique and self-reflection, as well as the often differing perspectives and dilemmas experienced by young men and women, can be taken into account in order to make future educational campaigns more effective.

Moral Subjects: The Natural and the Normative

Moral Subjects: The Natural and the Normative

Re-Configuring the Margins: Tracing the Regulatory Context of Ottawa Strip Clubs, 1974–2000

RésuméEn s'inspirant de la littérature sur la gouvernementalité, cette étude cherche à saisir la re-configuration du travail en marge du marché et de la moralité. En suivant l'évolution des clubs de «strip tease» à Ottawa de 1974 jusqu'en 2000, les auteurs expliquent comment des transformations du contexte discursif et des processus économique, légal et social de la modernité avancée re-constituent l'industrie et ses travailleuses. Les transformations d'une structure du travail organisée à partir du divertissement puis du service s'accompagnent d'une succession de stratégies de régulation incluant la contamination morale, la planification urbaine et la gestion de la santé. Les auteurs montrent que des questions de moralité, de responsabilité et de risque jouent dans le cadre de paramètres normatifs posés par les tribunaux. Dans ces débats et sous l'influence du néo-libéralisme, les travailleuses sont progressivement constituées comme des sujets éthiques auto-régulés. Or dans les marges, la «liberté» que confère ce statut n'en est pas moins contrainte et organisée par les discours et pratiques du droit, de la communauté et du travail.

Traditional climbing: metaphor of resistance or metanarrative of oppression?

This article examines the ways in which climbers negotiate their leisure activity within a social context. It is suggested that the wider social context is one of rationalized society, whereby efficiency and growth have become ends in themselves. Although climbing is depicted as a ‘free area’ in which climbers attempt to achieve a relative freedom from this society, the encroachment of rationalized society into the activity means that climbers find themselves both divided and besieged. The response of a group of traditional climbers in Australia has been to develop some symbolic behaviours that signify resistance to mainstream society. However, these behaviours have themselves become rigid and oppressive, and their chief protagonists as alienating as the rationalized society that they wish to resist. Whether this society emerges as a ‘metaphor of resistance’ or as a ‘metanarrative of oppression’ is dependant upon its members retaining their capacity as moral subjects, rather than existing in unquestioning obedience to these rules.

Agonal Communities of Taste: Law and Community in Nietzsche's Philosophy of Transvaluation

The post-war years have seen the emergence of a broad consensus on Nietzsche as a political thinker. Most commentators are in agreement on his strength as a critic of modernity, as they are on his weakness as a constructive political thinker. While exposing the failure of our most progressive projects and institutions (liberalism, democracy, enlightenment, etc.) to furnish rational justifications for themselves, Nietzsche is unable to offer us viable alternatives or anything positive to build on, capitulating instead to a blind, irrational voluntarism. Nietzsche's "tyrannophilia" (Staten), his "politics of domination" (Warren), his "religion of power" as "totalitarian rule" (Grau): these are the refrains to which we have become accustomed. In what can be called the standard political reading of Nietzsche's thought, 1 three moments stand out: Nietzsche is first and foremost an autarkic individualist (Stern, MacIntyre), philosophically insensitive to the sphere of social relations and deaf to the ethical claims of community. In the wake of a total critique of reason as will to power, Nietzsche (secondly) abandons the claims of reason altogether, turning instead to aesthetic and archaic values such as the "Tragic," the "Dionysian" and the "Noble" (Habermas). Since, on his own terms, modernity is too decadent or depleted to sustain such values, he (thirdly) entrusts our salvation to a mighty act of will on the part of superhuman redeemers (e.g., the Übermensch, Dionysos) who are yet to come. In MacIntyre's words, "let will replace reason and let us make ourselves autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will." 2

Emotions and Ethics in Buddhist History: The Sinhala Thūpavamsa and the Work of Virtue

While literature is often thought to be a product of culture, the writing of history in medieval Sri Lanka was based on the assumption that texts themselves can produce changes in culture by making people into virtuous devotees. A study of the Sinhala Thūpavamsa, a Theravāda Buddhist chronicle written in Sinhala around the thirteenth century, provides new material with which to examine the ways historical narratives can be crafted to manipulate and transform the readers and listeners of a text. In this instance, the text gives rise to emotions that are productive of a moral subjectivity in those who encounter its narrative. By making persons feel that the Buddha and other virtuous agents in the past have performed deeds to benefit those in the present, the text causes devotees to view themselves as having been aided by others. The Sinhala Thūpavamsa works to constitute its readers and listeners as the moral subjects of another's acts and thus obligates them to respond accordingly. More generally, religious histories can be complex literary works that offer the scholar much more than simply descriptions of past events. The Sinhala Thūpavamsa claims for itself the aesthetic capacity to effect certain emotional and ethical responses in an audience. These efforts to compose historical narratives appear designed to instill a heightened sense of oneself as a beneficiary of history who in turn is obliged to engage in the virtuous work of ritualised devotional practices.

A Critical Assessment of a Reflexive, Phenomenological Approach to the Residential Treatment of Troubled Youth

The author describes an unusual residential treatment program that uses a phenomenological and existential approach rooted in a critical humanism. This program bypasses the usual power struggles between staff and youth by recognizing youth autonomy and “intentionality,” and it uses the principles of authenticity, validation, reciprocity, and reflexivity to guide staff actions toward and in response to youth. This model has the advantage of recognizing that youth are persons and moral subjects, but it also has the disadvantages of expecting too much from youth, of problems of supervision and accountability of staff, and it ignores the power of nurturing relationships.

A Treatise of Human Nature (review)

Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 188-190 DAVID HUME. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by John P. Wright, Robert Stecker and Gary Fuller. London: J. M. Dent, 2003. Pp. lxx + 392. ISBN 0-460-88224-4, paper, $12.50. No reader of Hume Studies is likely to make use of an abridgement of the Treatise . Everyman editions, however, are aimed not at scholars but at members of that elusive species, the intelligent general reader (henceforth "IGR"); and the Treatise surely constitutes a paradigm case of a book that needs to be trimmed and tidied for consumption by non-speciaUsts. This was something Hume himself came to realize : hence the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals. But perhaps Hume trimmed and tidied too much. Perhaps the IGR should not feel she has to restrict herself to the Enquiries; perhaps she should be able to explore the secret passages and unused rooms of the Treatise, while remaining confident that she will easily find her way back to the principal corridors and chambers. This new edition might weU introduce Hume's first book to a readership it does not have at present, and is therefore to be welcomed. If my experience is anything to go by, in fact, even a reader of this journal might benefit from a read straight through a stripped-down version of the Treatise—a point I shall return to below. The Everyman text comes with a chronology, an introduction, a relatively small number of explanatory notes (seventy-seven for the entire Treatise), a summary (with quotations) of the principal trends in 250 years or so of Hume interpretation, a bibliography, and a comprehensive index. I have a feeling that the IGR might find the introduction a bit daunting, interesting though it most certainly is in its assessment of the nature of scepticism contained in the Treatise, and in its speculations as to why Hume came to repudiate his first book. I wonder whether the IGR approaching Hume and the Treatise might not want, first and foremost, a map, and a sense of what to look out for on the journey. Like any tourist, she will probably also want a bit of historical context: who were Hume's most important predecessors and contemporaries, what were the questions being discussed by philosophers when Hume was formulating his ideas, and how Hume altered the state of the art. The introduction dwells almost wholly on the last of these questions, and, in particular, on the debate, such as it was, between Hume and Reid. The difference between these two philosophers is characterized in terms of their understanding of the relation between science and common sense: for Reid science is an extension of common sense, while for Hume science challenges common sense, and inevitably generates scepticism as it does so. As I have said, this is very interesting; but I am not sure that it is likely to help the IGR to navigate her way through the immense depths of Hume's philosophy. Hume Studies Book Reviews 189 Most notably absent from the introduction is help with making sense of the subtitle Hume chose for the Treatise. Explanation of what experimental reasoning is, what moral subjects are, and what Hume means when he says he is introducing the former into the latter are all things a first-time reader of the book might feel grateful for. These matters are relegated to the notes to the text—and consequently might well escape the notice of the IGR. The notes make frequent reference to the letter to Michael Ramsay in which Hume encourages his friend to read Descartes, Malebranche, Bayle, and Berkeley as helps to the understanding of the Treatise. Perhaps this would have been a better point of departure for the introduction. The chronology provides a good deal of information about Hume's cultural and political context, but contains a regrettable number of typographical errors (especially when giving the titles of French works). The copy-editing of the supplementary material (but not of the text itself) is in general rather poorr in the introduction, though not in the chronology, the date of publication of Reid...

Community, Citizenship, and the third Way

This article analyses recent debates about the Third Way in politics in Britain and the United States. It suggests that what is most significant is the emergence of a new politics of conduct that seeks to reconstruct citizens as moral subjects of responsible communities. The author considers the presuppositions of such a politics and its implications for technologies of government.

Mothercraft, statecraft, and subjectivity in the Palestinian intifada

Focusing on Palestinian subjectivity during the intifada, / highlight connections between domestic processes and the nascent state. Empowered by the progressive‐nationalist movement, ordinary young men and women challenged the moral authority of the domestic patriarch. The new moral subjects were not, however, producing "themselves" individually and reflexively. In the face of paradoxical conditions of self‐making precipitated by the organized political struggle, young men with their mothers and sisters became moral persons through a collaborative and reciprocal exercise of self,[statecraft, kinship, political organization, gender, personhood, Middle East]

Moral Voices and Moral Choices: Canadian drama and moral pedagogy

What is the role of drama in moral education? This article aims to illustrate how watching and responding to plays is a useful pedagogical exercise by which to enhance moral consciousness, so that students can appreciate the value of context in moral reflection. I argue that plays contain compelling studies of moral subjects caught in complex dilemmas, through which the often ambiguous and paradoxical dimensions of moral conduct are exposed. I also suggest that class discussions that involve students in critical assessments of ethical issues addressed in a play are valuable for guiding students to develop a kind of moral reasoning that is based on identifying and evaluating the contextual variables underlying moral choices, before judging moral responses. This is the kind of moral deliberation that is useful for assessing moral agency in daily life. Furthermore, I demonstrate that contemporary Canadian drama offers useful fictional contexts to illuminate the intricate processes of moral response, and I cite concrete examples to illustrate the kinds of moral scenarios recent Canadian plays offer for critical deliberation.

Hogarth and his times: serious comedy

William Hogarth (1697-1764) is an artist whose popularity has never waned since his own day. His reputation has been based almost entirely on his prints, although he is now recognised as one of the great painters of the British school. This volume, published to mark the tercentenary of his birth, looks at the varied reactions to Hogarth's prints and the different identities imposed upon the artist over centuries: witty satirist, stern moralist, libertine, aggressive self-promoter, detached observer and of the people. Hogarth's art has long been adopted by various causes, from evangelical clergy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the left-wing Popular Front in the 1930s, but such partisan approaches have often diminished the richness and complexity of his work. David Bindman sets the prints within the context of their own time. He discusses Hogarth's public and his influences, from Roman satire to the political climate of his day. Much of the power of Hogarth's work lies in the vision of society he creates in the series he called 'Modern moral subjects'. The scenes are full of amusing and realistic detail, often set in recognisable parts of London, and they confront unflinchingly the sordidness of much daily life during the period. So persuasive has Hogarth's picture of that time been that it is easy to forget that his characters are entirely fictional.

Ethics Sensitivity and Awareness Within Organizations in Kuwait: An Empirical Exploration of Epoused Theory and Theory-in-Use

This paper highlights the potential harms in the current state of business ethics education and presents an alternative new model of business ethics education. Such potential harms in business ethics education is due largely to restricted cognitive level of reasoning, a limited level of ethical conduct which remains only responsive and adaptive, and the estrangement between strategic thinking and ethical thinking. As a remedy for business ethics education, denatured by these potential harms, a new dynamic model of business ethics education is proposed. The new model is composed of a basic foundation for business ethics education and three practical components of business ethics education. The basic foundation comprises of ethical reasoning, moral sentiments, and ethical praxis. Three practical components of business ethics education are, respectively, to intensify moral imagination, to develop ethical wisdom and courage, and to enhance meta-strategic competences. The ultimate purpose of these practical components is to help moral subjects to conduct ethical leadership, to actualize integrity between individuals and organization, and to fulfill the social responsibility of business firms. This new model is expected to attract attention to the effective business ethics education both in college and in industry, and to be used as a benchmark for new curriculum designs and development of teaching methods. Finally, some teaching methodologies and pedagogical experiments are introduced and discussed according to this new model of business ethics educaiton.

Mediating technological objects and moral subjects

Mediating technological objects and moral subjects

The discourse Principle and those affected

Focusing on the terms ‘possibly affected persons’ and ‘those affected’ in the Habermasian ‘discourse principle’, I argue that we need a notion of moral subjects in addition to that of a person (in terms of moral agents and moral discussants) and that this notion of moral subjects implies a ‘normative gradualism’ which weakens the participatory and consensual aspect of discourse theory and strengthens the aspect of enlightened ‘advocatory’ deliberation in terms of needs and the good life. I argue that this notion of moral subjects ('those affected') represents a challenge for the discourse principle. Confronted with the huge number of (different kinds of) moral subjects and of (hypothetical) future persons, demanding various kinds of advocatory representation, the Habermasian discourse principle, as stated in Between Facts and Norms, becomes unsatisfactory.

The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy, and: Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England, and: Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body, and: Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad Doctors in the English Court (review)

Reviewed by: The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy, and: Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England, and: Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body, and: Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad Doctors in the English Court Timothy Erwin Ronald Paulson. The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996). Pp. xix + 369. Dennis Todd. Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. 339. Aileen Douglas. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. xxx + 201. Joel Peter Eigen. Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad Doctors in the English Court. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995. Pp. 240. Several years ago Michael McKeon put forward in these pages a notion of interdisciplinary studies that sought to establish a clear awareness of the dialectical nature of disciplinary formation. Interdisciplinarity was not automatically the perquisite of cultural studies, but instead an ongoing project of recovering from the faded sweep of eighteenth-century intellectual history certain moments, glimpsed in different ways, when the interdisciplinary aspect of disciplinary division became visible (“The Origins of Interdisciplinary Studies,” ECS 28 [1994]: 17–28). Something of the same ambition may be found in each of the books under review here, interdisciplinary in different ways, which offer a daring extension of the visual field, a broad cultural context for the Scriblerian project, an acute material reading of the Smollett oeuvre, and a quantitative history of the insanity defense in the British courtroom toward the end of the long eighteenth century. Ronald Paulson’s The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange offers an innovative anatomy of cultural aesthetics in England from around 1712 until the picturesque decade of the 1790s. The keyword from the title is the middle one. Paulson throughout treats the emerging novel as a shifting category of mixed aesthetic experience, and the term Novel (always capitalized to distinguish it from the limited sense of prose fiction) comes to name the intersection of empiricist aesthetic, visual poetics, and the desire to create ever newer fictional narratives. The central figure is the William Hogarth we have come to know from Paulson’s biography (rev. ed. 1991–93), appearing now in much more skeptical guise than before. As part of a continuing effort to create a national countertradition in the visual arts, Paulson argues, Hogarth modified the Whig aesthetic of discovery in Addison’s Spectator papers on the pleasures of the imagination and made it his own. The resulting program influenced not only his fellow artists Zoffany, Rowlandson, and Gainsborough, but also Fielding, Goldsmith, and Sterne (whose Tristram Shandy Hogarth would of course illustrate). A third term mediating between opposed binaries, the aesthetic Novel bridges [End Page 329] the historical gap between the diminished feminine Beautiful of Addison and Shaftesbury and the masculine Sublime of Burke, and so may be aligned with the late-century landscape theory of Gilpin and Price. Earlier an aesthetic of novelty had allowed the family portrait of the conversation piece to take precedence over the imported academic tradition of history painting, and for Hogarth the conversation piece would lead boldly to the modern moral subjects and eventually to the Analysis of Beauty (1753). Paulson reads Hogarth’s project persuasively as at once an aesthetic of pursuit enlivened by contrast and variety and again as a skeptical deist hermeneutic of profound visual playfulness. Both aspects are then traced into the emerging novel. Interdisciplinary by definition, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange posits a distanced and nuanced four-term analogy across the arts where abstract qualities in the visual field are likened to similar qualities in literature (Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting [Chicago, 1982], pp. 1–6). A late chapter takes the form of a reception study to show how from its beginning the interpretation of Hogarth was in one period commentator or another novelized—filtered either through the theatricality of Fielding, the morality of Richardson, or the physical particularity of Sterne. Ernest Gilman and others have shown that the academic theory of painting, with its hieratic aura of mystery and its hierarchical ranking of genre, was never very...

Political terms in the Latin of Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes received a humanist education which gave him an excellent knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as of French, Italian and English. Throughout his life he read, wrote and translated between these languages. He was, therefore, very aware of the fluidity of natural languages. In the Preface toDe Cive (which this author has recently translated) Hobbes complains that, as a result of this fluidity, moral and political subjects have hitherto been treated more as rhetoric than as science. The fundamental requirement of a science is to fix the definitions of words. A small set of Latin words, carefully defined inDe Cive, provides the framework of this political thought. The article sets out this framework through the key words:jus, recta ratio andleges naturales; multitudo andcivitas; imperium, potestas, lex, dominium andservus; concilium, curia, senatus, coetus andecclesia. Attention is drawn to Hobbes's English equivalents for these words and to classical undertones, particularly from the notions ofpolis andecclesia.

Dividing the Indivisible

An office, or a mistress, cannot be apportioned out like a common. Jeremy Collier, Essays Upon Several Moral Subjects

Folk Ballads and the Aristocracy

Donald Holzman : Folk Ballads and the Aristocracy. Among the Southern Ballads called "Xiqu" (Western Lyrics) there are a certain number of tune titles that are attributed to aristocrats princes of the blood, generals, and high officials. The fact that these unpretentious folk songs should be attributed to aristocrats is not in itself surprising since men of the ruling class in all probability imitated folk literature from earliest times in China. What is surprising is that some of these attributions are so improbable and many of them are so manifestly inaccurate that we should make an attempt to understand why they have been made. The following hypothesis is suggested : the Southern Ballads, in their hedonistic acceptation of the pleasures of life, break new ground in Chinese literary tradition that had been, until the appearance of the Southern Ballads towards the end of the fourth century A.D., interested exclusively in moral and political subjects ; only by attributing them to men engaged in the center of political life could these unpretentious love songs be considered worthy of the attention of men of the ruling class.