Moral Perfection Research Articles

Little Did He Know


 Continental philosophers and their followers seem to be, for the most part, untroubled by the machinations, lies, political accommodations, inactions, and ethical breaches by major figures in that tradition. This does not lead to recognition of irony by the scholars who then recommend these major figures as guides for ethics. Catherine Zuckert goes so far as to that “philosophical dialogue and textual hermeneutics are essentially ethical” (GR, 234). Cavell has chosen to declare an ethics as well. The theme of “moral perfectionism” that one can find in many of Cavell’s books, particularly the works dealing with the repositioning of Thoreau and Emerson, is part of an ongoing project to locate something “American” in concerns about “moral perfectionism” and the everyday. We even have a book about what “Christians might learn from [Cavell].” Stanley Bates can serve as a representative of a chorus of writers who not only embrace Cavell as someone presenting an ethical viewpoint, but who also have become proponents of that viewpoint. Bates has no hesitation in claiming on Cavell’s behalf a connection between ethics and politics: “Cavell is interested in the dimension of moral life that must be lived by an individual within a political setting, a life that a ‘good enough’ state of political justice makes possible, but that is not, and cannot be, determined by rules” (SCE, 42-43). Bates ends his essay by telling us that in at least one important way, Cavell is like Nietzsche, and it seems as if Bates intends that to be a positive comparison. Bates seems free of any knowledge of Nietzsche’s posthumous “political setting” in the National Socialist period.
 

SHEIKH KUNTA HAJI KISHIYEV IN THE SPIRITUAL CULTURE OF THE CHECHENS: MILESTONES OF HIS LIFE, THE ESSENCE OF HIS TEACHING AND ITS MODERN SIGNIFICANCE

The article outlines the major milestones in the biography of Sheikh Kunta Haji, a prominent spiritual teacher of the Chechens and the Ingush, the founder of the Qadirio order in the North Caucasus. The article accentuates controversial points of the discourse about the Sheikh and legends about his religious activities. The author also points out the important views of his peacekeeping doctrine that calls for patience and humbleness and directs believers towards spiritual, moral and humanistic perfection. The article emphasizes the place of Kunta Haji’s teaching in the spiritual culture of the Chechen nation and its significance for spiritual and cultural development.

Православная мысль о личности и нравственном совершенствовании

Православная мысль о личности и нравственном совершенствовании

Make Love and Lose Your Religion and Virtue: Recalling Sexual Experiences Undermines Spiritual Intentions and Moral Behavior

In contrast with traditional considerations, sexuality is often perceived today as being rather compatible with religion/spirituality and morality. However, there may be some inherent opposition between (a) sexuality (thoughts, affects, and pleasure) and (b) religion/spirituality (attitudes, motives) and (interpersonal) morality (dispositions, behavior). The two imply, respectively, self‐enhancement versus self‐transcendence, disinhibition versus self‐control, and disgust indifference versus sensitivity. We hypothesized that sexual experience attenuates spiritual and moral concerns and behaviors. In three online experiments, young adults were asked to recall a personal sexual experience. Compared to a control condition, sexual induction diminished spiritual behavioral intentions (Experiments 1 and 2), in particular among those with high individual disinhibition (Experiment 1), as well as behaviors of prosociality and integrity/honesty (Experiment 3). The effects were independent of individual religiousness/spirituality. These findings suggest that combining sexual pleasure with self‐transcendence and moral perfection, even if a legitimate ideal, is not an easy enterprise.

A Philosopher and a Gentleman: Xenophon's Oeconomicus

A Philosopher and a Gentleman: Xenophon’s Oeconomicus STEPHEN EIDE KEITH WHITAKER introduction Socrates was no gentleman, as even his keenest admirers would have to admit. He had unsavory companions , was a notorious mooch, and his wife and children lived in poverty while he indulged his passion for philosophy . In Xenophon’s Symposium, when asked what skill he takes most pride in, Socrates responds “pimping.” Socrates’ outrageousness set him at odds with conventional Athenian society and would eventually lead to his being sentenced to death. One could even say that a conspiracy of gentlemen— Athenian fathers—was responsible for Socrates’ execution. And yet Xenophon’s Oeconomicus makes clear that Socrates had a deep interest in the gentleman as a moral possibility . The term in Greek is kalos kagathos, literally “beautiful (kalos) and (kai) good (agathos).” There’s no true English equivalent, though 18th century British classicists began the tradition of rendering the term “gentleman,” a usefully provocative translation which forces readers to compare how men of wealth and station of the ancient world differed from those of other times. The Oeconomicus ranks alongside Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters Written to His Natural Son on Manners & Morals as among the most probing analyses of what it means to be a gentleman. All are now fairly obscure, thanks mostly to the tension between egalitarian mores and the elitist ideal of the gentleman. That’s a shame, because it’s impossible to reflect on the nature of moral perfection without exploring gentlemanliness. Dandies are beautiful, saints are good, but a gentleman is the whole package. arion 24.2 fall 2016 the dramatic context xenophon sets Socrates’ exploration of gentlemanliness in the context of a dialogue about how to manage a household. His interlocutor is a young Athenian named Critobulus. Critobulus comes from a wealthy family, and he’s ambitious, like many Socratic interlocutors, but he’s no Alcibiades. He wants tips on how to make money quickly, though he recognizes how odd (ridiculous, really) it is to expect such advice from the famously impecunious Socrates. “Oeconomicus,” from which “economics” descends, means “household manager ” in Greek, but the discussion between Socrates and Critobulus collapses the two meanings. For Critobulus especially , one who excels at managing households not only serves as steward of his property, he increases it. Socrates steers the discussion from the means of gentlemanliness to its ends. He emphasizes to Critobulus, who’s apparently unaware of the point, that it takes more than wealth to be a true gentleman. The superficially “kalos” are more abundant than the truly “agathos.” To describe the true gentleman, Socrates relates at length a dialogue he once had with a man named Ischomachus, whom “everyone—men and women, strangers and townsmen—called ‘gentleman.’” This dialogue within a dialogue takes up 15 of the Oeconomicus’s 21 chapters. Unlike most other writings of Plato and Xenophon, the “Socratic” or “midwife” technique is not in evidence here. Xenophon casts Socrates in the role of the junior interlocutor. Ischomachus takes the lead, with Socrates there mostly to prompt him to say more. This reversal allows gentlemanliness to take shape naturally, as it were, and to display four chief features. The gentleman, as exemplified by Ischomachus, is diligent, unerotic, honest, and moderate. diligent ischomachus is a busy man. He speaks frequently of the value he places on “diligence,” both for himself and his suba philosopher and a gentleman 94 ordinates. The source of Ischomachus’s wealth is farming, but he claims there’s really nothing to it. Anyone can learn the rudiments of sowing, hoeing, reaping, et cetera. What truly sets apart successful farmers is diligence. In other cultural contexts, the gentleman is distinguished for having a good conscience about his leisure (Oscar Wilde refers in The Portrait of Dorian Gray to “the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing”). But Ischomachus is most passionate in speaking about his work, not the purposes to which he puts his idle hours, of which he has few. (When Socrates notes that he’s never at leisure, Ischomachus takes the remark as a compliment.) The Oeconomicus offers a useful corrective to the democratic prejudice against gentlemen as...

Human Rights. The question of origins

The article outlines two traditions of philosophical thought proposing each their understanding of human rights. The significance of these two traditions goes beyond the question of rights and touches on the role of morality in human life. One tradition considers that humans have limited social obligations towards each other in order to ensure peaceful co-existence, while the other tradition considers moral perfection an essential aim of social life, thus enabling man to realize its humanity. This outline is attended by a critique of Samuel Moyn’s book The Last Utopia. Finally, the article proposes a third conception based on autonomy.

Text educational space: Old Russian pedagogical thought of the second half of 15th–16thcenturies

The fragment of text educational space, associated with the advent of the first attempts of the secular interpretation of the meanings and significances of upbringing and their fixation in the Old Russian literature of the second half of 15th – 16th centuries is considered in the paper. The researcher connects the changes appeared in text educational space of that chronographic period with social and political changes in Rus` (the old name for Russia–comment of the translator ). Reflections of Old Russian authors about the ways of ethic rising of a human being and joining him to life as a continuous moral activity, studied in theoretical-methodological and historical-pedagogical way, are linked with pedagogical search of ways and methods of moral perfection and spiritual growth of a man.The results of the research can be applied in the field of theory and history of pedagogy and philosophy of education.

Social Pragmatism and Religiosity of Contemporary Russian Youth

It presents the results of a study aimed at defining the nature of religiosity of students of higher educational institutions and the specifics of relationship of religiosity with regard to pragmatic life goals. The data obtained illustrate the peculiarities in the perceptions of students, differently characterizing their belief in God, about a notion of a true believer, motivation of their countrymen when turning to God, the nature of religion’s influence on human beings, as well as circumstances under which interviewed subjects personally turn to God. It is established that most of the Russian youths do not think themselves true believers and express doubts about the existence of true believers, demonstrate with regard to the religiosity of their contemporaries’ skepticism and explain the appeal to religion by ignorance, fashion trend and being under human influence of significant others. At the same time, along with their peers, claiming to be true believers, they tend to view religion as a means of consolation and support, and not that of moral perfection and spiritual renewal. In addition, the facts ascertain the presence in true youth believers of egoistic religious motivation and attitude towards God from the standpoint of personal well-being, which suggests their pseudo-religiosity. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s5p135

Two Stances of Otherness the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the fairytale The Old Woman’s Daughter and the Old Man’s Daughter, by Ion Creanga

The relationship with the other is the key to the notion of “otherness”. This relationship is placed in the center of two different works with respect to the formal completion: one is a parable, The Parable of the Good Samaritan, the other is a fairytale, The Old Woman’s Daughter and the Old Man’s Daughter. What they have in common is the presence of a character that contradicts the idea of selfishness, specific for the ordinary people, and the notion of negative devaluation of the unknown person, highlighted by anthropologists. Both works place in the center the notion of “otherness” and they highlight two possible attitudes connected to this: that other person can become “a limit” or “an object” in the fulfillment of the existential adventure. In other words, that person can be a step towards moral perfection or, on the contrary, a limit in the way of personal development. The two “spiritual creations” (the parable and the fairytale) put into question a moral problem, that of the person next to us or “the Other one”, they both comprise a debate on ethical matters and they are built on the relationship I – the other one, placing in the center the same type of character: “the good man”, gifted with a high ethical sense, the one who, in his journey through life, shows no indifference, but he constantly relates to the person next to him – “the other one” whom, most of the times, is seen in opposition with or they have a conflictual relationship. At the same time, both works comprise the subject of “the road”, that of “the journey”.

Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism, Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting

This article argues that Stanley Cavell's notion of moral perfectionism must be understood, within the American cultural context, as deeply intertwined with myths of heroic American masculinity. It traces connections between Cavell's descriptions of moral perfectionism, the transcendentalist authors (primarily Emerson and Thoreau) on whom he relies, and writings about the myth of the American frontier hero. When understood as a tradition of masculinity, it becomes possible to trace moral perfectionism across much wider areas of American cinematic culture than Cavell's reading suggests; Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997) is used as an example which further illuminates the relationship between moral perfectionism and American masculinities. Psychoanalysis, a major feature of Good Will Hunting as well as an important aspect of Cavellian moral perfectionism, must also be revisited in terms of the differences in its popular mythologisation for men versus for women.

Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock

William Rothman is one of the great close readers of film, and he pioneered techniques of meticulous, exhaustive and astonishing frame-by-frame analysis in his 1982 book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. For Rothman, what sets these films apart is that Hitchcock's images always think. While any juxtaposition of images cannot help but produce meaning, in a Hitchcock film there are no chance encounters between images. There are no mere accidents of formulaic editing, as the studio-era sometimes produced, nor, as in the case of experimentalists like Andy Warhol, does the camera ever simply run as a way of not thinking. Rothman argues that Hitchcock's films are different because every frame is related to and constitutes the whole of what Hitchcock, as auteur, is thinking. Indeed, The Murderous Gaze might be summed up as a lesson in how to recognize Hitchcock's filmic thought. In his new book, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Rothman again performs virtuoso acts of close viewing Hitchcock's films, and he both develops and substantially revises his conclusions from The Murderous Gaze. Following the work of Stanley Cavell's classic 1981 book on comedies of the 1930s, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Rothman now wants to see Hitchcock's films, particularly his later films, in the very terms that Cavell applied to the new and decidedly American vision of self-invention we find in It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) or His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). For Cavell, these films were different because the obstacle to marriage was not an external conflict of social class but internal to characters who had to overcome their own limits and reinvent themselves as worthy partners for each other. For Cavell, these films were examples of Emerson's moral perfectionism, and they were profound affirmations of an American optimism. However, they are also comedies, in the strictest sense, about and ending in marriage. Rothman's attempt to interpret Hitchcock in these terms is problematic, as he well knows. To begin with, Hitchcock's subject is not marriage but murder, and while few of his films are strictly tragedies, they are all characterized by a kind of European pessimism. Indeed, Hitchcock's reception has always characterized him as a kind of lapsed Catholic who believes in original sin by way of UFA studios and German expressionism. In a significant way, Rothman's new book reads against many of the commonplaces of Hitchcock's long reception.

The 'New' Economic Thinking on Adam Smith of Vines and Morris Leads to the Same Old Errors About Adam Smith

The belief that the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham is an outgrowth of Adam Smith’s approach in The Wealth of Nations is a contradiction in terms, given that the Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments are both based on Smith’s Virtue ethics approach, which completely and totally rejects any role for the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham or any other kind of utilitarianism. The term "self interest" in the Wealth of Nations was called "prudence" in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Prudence is that virtue involving individual human behavior that was circumspect, judicious, thrifty, frugal, careful, patient, and hardworking. The prudent or self-interested person developed his talents and became a financial success or was well off. However, this was only the first step in a process aiming at moral perfection that would culminate in the virtue of beneficence. Only at this stage in a person’s life would real happiness emerge. Smith’s views on economic growth have to do with justice and his application of Aristotle’s Golden Mean. Smith never viewed commercial society (capitalism) or economic growth as a path leading to happiness for the greatest number of citizens as the amount of material and consumer goods increased over time. This view was Bentham’s, not Smith’s.Finally, there never was an Adam Smith problem except in the minds of economists intent on foisting Bentham’s hedonic-hedonistic calculus onto Adam Smith. However, there is another, much more severe problem. The problem is that, since the 1790’s, the vast majority of economists, who are utilitarians, have been constantly trying to redefine Smith as a utilitarian and "read into" the Wealth of Nations their own utilitarian ethics and approach to probability and decision making. The remaining economists can be categorized as nihilists, such as the Post Keynesians and Institutionalists. Nihilists find no role for probability analysis in economics. Both approaches lead to myths, such as (a) the existence of some "Invisible Hand" force that coordinates the conflicting microscopic, price expectations-plans of market participants in such a manner so that a socially optimal, macroscopically, stable equilibrium is obtained over time; (b) Smith believed in Laissez faire; (c) Smith believed in a 100% Free Trade policy or (d) Keynes was an anti-mathematical, anti-formalist who realized that mathematics and statistics played no role in a world of Shackle-Davidson uncertainty. None of these myths has any support in the Wealth of Nations or in any of Keynes’s works

Kant on Religious Moral Education

AbstractWhile scholars are slowly coming to realize that Kant’s moral philosophy has a distinctive theory of moral education, the import of religion in such education is generally neglected or even denied. This essay argues that Kant’s reflections on religion in parts II and III of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason interpret religion specifically as one aspect of moral education, namely moral ascetics. After first clearly distinguishing between a cognitive and a conative aspect of moral education, I show how certain historical religious practices serve to provide the conative aspect of moral education. Kant defines this aspect of moral education as practices that render the human agent ‘valiant and cheerful in fulfilling his duties’ (MS, 6: 484). By this it is meant that certain practices can inspire moral interests either by justifying rational hope in living up to a certain standard of moral perfection (Christology) or by endeavouring to unite human beings in a universal, invisible ethical community that inspires cooperation rather than adversity (ecclesiology).

Moral perfectionism and moral values, virtues, and judgments: Further investigations

In a first psychological investigation of moral perfectionism, Yang, Stoeber, and Wang (2015) adapted items from the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale to differentiate perfectionistic personal moral standards and concern over moral mistakes. Examining a sample of Chinese students, Yang et al. found that personal moral standards showed unique positive relationships with moral values, virtues, and judgments, whereas concern over moral mistakes did not. The present study aimed to replicate Yang et al.'s findings in a sample of Western students (N=243), additionally including measures of moral identity and moral disengagement. Furthermore, the study examined whether moral perfectionism explained variance in moral attitudes beyond general perfectionism. Results largely replicated Yang et al.'s findings. Personal moral standards (but not concern over moral mistakes) showed unique positive relationships with moral values, virtues, and judgments and a unique negative relationship with moral disengagement. Furthermore, moral perfectionism explained significant variance in moral attitudes beyond general perfectionism. The present findings suggest that moral perfectionism is a personality characteristic that is relevant in both Asian and Western cultures and explains individual differences in moral attitudes beyond general perfectionism.

La iniciación fulani a través de los relatos iniciáticos recopilados por Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Our aim is to examine the function of certain stories which have been used in Fulani initiation rites, to describe their main features and to specify the reasons that lead the writer to collect them. These stories are literary works, the tools used by initiation masters to show their particular vision of the world and the path to follow to move towards moral perfection. As they are traditions, we will analyse the social context in which they appear and focus on those who transmitted them to the oral tradition researcher, Amadou Hampâte Bâ.

The Purpose-Driven Darwinist: Henry Ward Beecher and the Theology of Progress

Henry Ward Beecher's sermon series on evolution in the summer of 1885 reconciled Christianity to the new science in a way that asserted far more than the mere compatibility of natural selection and divine providence: The Brooklyn preacher appropriated Darwinism to support a uniquely bourgeois political theology, one that envisioned the spiritual progress of humanity through commercial republicanism, aided by a morally assertive (but emphatically modernist) church. Coming from so prominent a clergyman, this early adaptation of evolution theory highlights the liberal and postmillennial tendencies of American Christianity in the late nineteenth century, as well as the pliability of Darwin's scientific insights to diverse social agendas. Beecher's sermons, however, also open a window onto the philosophical dilemmas that preoccupied early progressives. Addressing both the ontological revolution of Darwinism and the social realities of industrialization, Beecher articulates an account of progress that succeeds without the supervision of government, that prizes the liberty and property of the individual, and that arches toward a télos of moral perfection – a perfection that conforms, more or less, to the Protestant ethic.

Finding a High Road: The Moral Case for Salvific Pluralism

What more than anything else probably motivates sympathy among Christians for the view that other religious traditions might be capable of leading to salvation are moral concerns about Christian exclusivism. The idea that the most devout and ethical persons of non-Christian faiths might find themselves in hell simply because they do not believe one of the essential tenets of Christianity seems difficult to reconcile with God’s moral perfection. Despite this, most arguments for salvific pluralism have rested largely on epistemological and metaphysical concerns. John Hick, for example, sometimes argues that the fundaments of the major religious traditions correctly describe different aspects of ultimate reality and sometimes argues that ultimate reality is unknowable, leaving all religions on roughly equal ground. In this essay, I attempt a purely moral case for salvific pluralism by developing the ethical intuitions that I think ultimately ground pluralist sympathies. I argue that there is nothing culpable, by itself, in accepting certain non-Christian religious traditions. Since it would be unjust to punish someone for a non-culpable behavior or state, it follows that salvation does not depend on assent to the fundaments of Christianity.

AJARAN SOSIAL DAN IMPLIKASINYA TERHADAP PERILAKU PENGIKUTNYA (STUDI KASUS TAREKAT NAQSYABANDIYAH KHOLODIYAH DI SOKARAJA BANYUMAS)

Abstract: The results of this study show that tarekat (congregations) should aim to increase the degree of Ihsan with various rituals that accompany it, in order to improve the moral and spiritual perfection. But in the era of globalization, many people think is not responsive to the advancement of age (anti-progress). In fact, the congregation became a place for salik to avoid the bustle of the world lives. Tarekat should hold social change and must be explained in three aspects, religious, social and even political. However, such an assumption does not occur in the Naqshbandi Kholidiyah Sokaraja Banyumas. This congregation is to have a social doctrine that affect the social behavior of his followers, both in the fields of religion, social, economic and political as explored in this study.
 Keywords: Doctrine, Naqshbandi Kholidiyah Sokaraja, Social Behavior

Moral Perfection and the Demand for Human Enhancement

In this article I discuss one of the most significant areas of bioethical interest, which is the problem of moral enhancement. Since I claim that the crucial issue in the current debate on human bioenhancement is the problem of agency, I bring out and examine the conditions of possibility of selfunderstanding, acting subjects attributing responsible authorship for their actions to themselves. I shall argue that the very idea of moral enhancement, properly understood, fails to justify the claims that enhancing the “biological” factor that plays a part in the process of making moral choices, whether through biomedical or genetic interventions, will actually increase the probability of having “morally better future motives”.

Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On the Ethics of Beckett’s Endgame

This essay explores the ethical dimensions of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame , in spite of—indeed, because of—the play’s apparent negation of all positive talk of human value and community. In the first part of the paper, I examine Stanley Cavell’s suggestion, put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988, that Beckett’s play can be read as a work that embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. In part two, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell’s ethical outlook, I then ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form, something that I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett’s play. While retaining some important features of Cavell’s “thematics of perfectionism,” this approach aims at the same time to move beyond it in order to grasp how Endgame might, in Beckett’s own words, provide “an inkling of the terms in which our [human] condition is to be thought again.”