Cultivation Of Virtue Research Articles

Moral education within the social contract: Whose contract is it anyway?

ABSTRACTIn A Theory of Moral Education, Michael Hand defends the importance of teaching children moral standards, even while taking seriously the fact that reasonable people disagree about morality. While I agree there are universal moral values based on the kind of beings humans are, I raise two issues with Hand’s account. The first is an omission that may be compatible with Hand’s theory; the role of virtues. A role for the cultivation of virtues and rational emotions such as compassion is vital in accounting for the emotional aspect of morality. The second issue pertains to Hand’s foundational premise of human beings’ rough equality. Following Martha Nussbaum, I argue that contractarian approaches must be critically evaluated to ensure the social contract properly includes and accounts for the human dignity of those who are typically excluded from the benefits of society. Hand’s justificatory arguments rely upon a contractarian premise, and the contract itself needs scrutiny and adjustment if it is to support a viable theory of moral education.

Flow with the go: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as embodied spirituality

ABSTRACTThe martial art of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) provides the opportunity for the development of an embodied spirituality by seeking divine blessing in three ways. Firstly, BJJ provides an opportunity to learn respect for our God given physicality, and our finitude. Secondly, the pursuit of and engagement in a state of flow provides a model for biblical holism and the cultivation of virtue. Thirdly, the chief virtue that can be cultivated is that of humility, as BJJ is both a competitive and collaborative activity.

Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor

Reviewed by: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor Wessel Reijers Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, Oxford University Press, 2016. Some books can be said to represent ‘new beginnings’, opening up new spaces for academic discourse and new methods and perspectives. Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues can rightfully be claimed to be one of those books. There is much about this book that is not only laudable but also urgent. First, it has managed to firmly establish virtue ethics as a tradition worthy of consideration in the field of ethics of technology. Other authors have suggested such a turning (Ess 2009; Coeckelbergh 2012), but none have done it so far in a manner that can live up to the comprehensiveness of Technology and the Virtues. Second, the book has served the virtue ethics tradition well in convincingly arguing for its continuing relevance in a time of serious sociotechnical challenges. As our moral critiques of technologies are increasingly entangled in discussions of existential threats that are claimed to be too complex to be handled by common human beings and call for an enhancement of our species, Vallor’s urgent call back to earth, back to our own human capabilities, will be welcomed by many. Third, it establishes a way of approaching matters in moral philosophy that is quite uncommon today, namely drawing from not only the ‘Western’ perspective but also systematic moral philosophies from other cultures: Buddhist and Confucian ethics. This echoes the increasing need in a multipolar world to build bridges between moral traditions, to construct a global dialogue (insofar possible) concerning the good life and the kind of societies we want to live in. Vallor’s book is structured in a convincing way and guides the reader from foundational questions to a framework of the ‘technomoral’ virtues, and to a series of in-depth case studies of contemporary technologies: social media, surveillance technologies, robots, and human enhancement technologies. In the introduction and Part I of the book, Vallor has three main objectives. The first is to argue for the existence of a so-called state [End Page E-17] of “acute sociotechnical opacity” (6) in the 21st century, which means that the practical circumstances of our everyday lives are changing so rapidly due to technological innovations that we cannot reasonably anticipate the impact of future states of affairs on our morality. This notion provides Vallor with the resources to argue against the use of utilitarian ethics, due to its false reliance on transparent choices based on the rational calculation of their outcomes, and against Kantian ethics, due to the impossibility of any categorical rule to respond to highly contingent future states of affairs. Virtue ethics is presented as a modest but viable alternative, in that enables us to acknowledge the existence of sociotechnical opacity and at the same time offers us a strategy for self-cultivation that empowers us to manage it prudently. The second objective is to introduce the revival of the virtue ethics tradition, to connect it to contemporary philosophy of technology, and to make the claim that both should be wary of their Western provincialism and engage in a global dialogue because the problems they address (e.g. climate change) are of a global character. The third objective is to lay down the fundamentals of the three virtue ethics traditions used in the book (Aristotelian, Buddhist, and Confucian) and to argue for their convergence on four major issues: a conception of the highest human good, of virtues as cultivated states of character, of a practical path for moral self-cultivation, and of a the existence of an essence of human beings (44). In Part II of the book, Vallor presents seven “core elements” (64) or perhaps rather conditions of the practices that mediate the cultivation of technomoral virtues. These conditions pertain to the ‘how’ of the cultivation of technomoral virtue, indicating according to what kinds of standards we could for instance evaluate our educational, mentoring, and training practices. Vallor painstakingly discusses the details of the accounts of cultivation of virtue in the three virtue ethics traditions she...

"The emprentyng of hire consolacioun": Engraving, Erosion, and Persistent Speech in The Franklin's Tale

When Dorigen's friends console her in The Franklin's Tale, the Franklin says that their words take effect in the same way that engraving makes an impression in a stone. This comparison recalls a similar analogy found in Boccaccio's Il filocolo, and cited there from Ovid's Ars amatoria, which holds that a lover's petitions will move his lady in time, just as dropping water hollows out hard rock. In the first part of this article, I trace the history of this analogy from the Ovidius minor to its appearances in the work of Chaucer's contemporaries. Ovid and his medieval inheritors recognized that the analogy could motivate many different kinds of persistent speech, from lovers' complaints to petitionary prayer, but they also sought to qualify its overstated claim that a speaker might reshape a listener's desires by sheer persistence, and to suggest instead that persistent speech might be a good in itself, an opportunity for creative expression and for the cultivation of virtue. In the second part, I argue that The Franklin's Tale continues to think in terms of this analogy as its characters test their own powers of persistent speech. Dorigen comes to reappraise it as she complains about the black rocks and discovers that stone can resist erosion and petition for a long time, but Aurelius goes to great lengths to avoid this kind of realization and to sustain the illusion the analogy encodes, that a persistent speaker can "emprent" his desires on other people.

A Revelation of Stephen Angle’s Notion of “Coherence”

Stephen C. Angle has translated the core idea “Li” (理) in Neo-Confucianism as “Coherence,” which denotes “the valuable, intelligible way that things fit together.” With his definition, Angle has virtually redefined Li and, his idea of Li inclining to Wang Chuanshan’s (王船山) idea instead of Zhu Xi’s (朱熹) or Wang Yangming’s (王阳明), he relies heavily on it to develop his account of Neo-Confucianism. As a result, he has had to downplay both the ontological and the immanent aspects of the expressions in the sources he relies on. This article reveals where Angle’s interpretation departs from the original ideas in the source texts, and indicates why his theory of the cultivation of virtue implies that external factors could be an obstruction to moral improvement.

Weighing Knowledge

AbstractThis article studies the influence of late Qajar cultures of politics and ethics upon a Sufi theory of knowledge. It argues that Mīrzā Ḥasan Iṣfahānī (known in Sufi circles as Ṣafī ʿAlī Shāh) performed the role of public intellectual in his treatise on knowledge and ethics Mīzān al-maʿrifah (The Scale of Knowledge). I propose that the text’s ethical directives actually serve to dictate the conditions under which a particularly modern subject can claim knowledge. Being someone who knows does not mean being someone who has access to data; it means being someone who can look, and act, as a knower should. Humanity is book’s titular “scale of knowledge,” but, in that text, to truly be human entails the cultivation of virtue and the correct performance of one’s role, as coded in norms of class, profession, and gender, norms conveyed within many of the text’s explanatory analogies.

Political reality and cultural superiority: Song China’s attitude toward the Khitan Liao

In the 10th century, the nomadic Khitan, with their Liao dynasty, became the most dominant power in East Asia, posing enormous threats to the Chinese Song dynasty in the south. Based on an analysis of the traditional Chinese world view, this paper examines the two opposing views of the Song Chinese about their Khitan neighbours in the north. The Song Chinese acknowledged the military prowess of the Khitan and thus advocated flexible diplomatic policies based on realistic observation and careful assessment, demonstrated by the diplomatic parity set by the Treaty of Chanyuan in 1005. In the meantime, many held firm belief in their cultural superiority over the “barbarians”, which derived from the tradition of a cultural sino-centrism. The Song looked for Confucian sources to justify their concession by turning their attention to the cultivation of virtue and were confident that they were the centre of culture and civilisation.

Kelly Joan Whitmer. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment.

In this lucid and engaging book, Kelly Joan Whitmer describes the Halle Orphanage (das hallesche Waisenhaus)—an orphanage founded around 1700 by German Lutheran Pietists in the Prussian city of Halle—as a pathbreaking scientific institution. Composed of an orphanage for the care of young boys, primary schools together serving over one thousand pupils, an elite boarding school (Pädagogium), a seminar for teachers, an oriental studies seminar (Collegium orientale), and several other institutions, the orphanage was also a scientific society that trained young men in mathematics, natural history, and physics. And, above all, argues Whitmer, the orphanage was a scientific community devoted to piety and the formation of good observers. Coursing through The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community is a concern with the epistemic ideals and persona of a good observer. To be a good observer required a commitment to knowledge as a social good, as something created and shared in a community devoted to common epistemic ideals and the cultivation of particular virtues. In contrast to other early modern institutions such as scientific academies or the famed Ritter academies, the Halle Orphanage opened its doors and collections to the public and educated the children not just of the elite but also of craftsmen, preachers, teachers, and doctors.

Consideration of the Contradictory Mentality presented in Yi, Ha-gon’s Poetry and Prose

李夏坤은 18세기 전반의 대표 문인이며 서화비평가로 학계의 주목을 받았다. 기존 연구에서 이하곤의 생애는 일대기의 정리에 그치거나 또는 산수를 좋아하여 은거한 인물로 평가하였다. 「두타초」를 통독하며 기존의 평가에 동의하기 어려웠던 필자는 그의 시문에 표출된 상반된 심리의 고찰을 통해 그가 어떤 사유의 소유자인지 구명하여, 그의 문학 연구에 기하고자 한다. 이하곤은 立德과 立言에 從事하여 당대에 혜택을 끼치고 후대에 명성을 남기고자 하였다고 밝혔다. 반면에 산수를 좋아하여 여덟아홉 살 때부터 산에서 살고자 했다고 하였다. 이처럼 그는 공명심의 소유자이면서도 은거를 지향한 인물이다. 大科에 급제하지 못한 이하곤은 평생 야인으로 생활하였다. 그는 “자적하는 삶이 귀중하다.[人生貴自適]”라고 천명하고, 상당 기간을 진천에서 한가로운 삶을 보냈다. 그러나 1716년에 지은 <李子有哀辭>에서 “귀향한 뒤로 쓸쓸하게 지내며 어울리는 사람이 없다가……[自余歸鄕以來, 杜門蕭然, 無與過從者, ……]”라고 하였다. 知性人으로서 공명 성취의 의지를 완전히 버리지 못한 채 어울릴 사람도 없이 벽지에서 지내면서 밀려오는 외로움에 이하곤은 힘겨워했다. 그 외로움은 그가 추구했던 자적과는 다른 느낌으로 표출되었다. 이러한 점으로 볼 때 이하곤은 진정한 隱者라기 보다는 不遇者에 가깝다. 그는 자신의 불우를 스스로 달래는 내용의 시를 다수 남겼는데, 이는 그가 진정으로 바랐던 것은 은거가 아니라 공렬과 명성 수립이었음을 의미 한다. 결국 이하곤은 자신이 소원한 공명 수립에는 실패했지만 자신이 사랑 하는 산수 속에서 외로움을 견디며 자적하는 삶을 살고자 한 인물이라고 하겠다. 한 작가의 작품을 감상하고 이해하기 위해서는 기본적으로 그의 사유세계를 파악해야 한다. 은자가 아니라 불우자에 가깝다고 해서 이하곤의 문학적 성취나 문학사적 위상이 떨어진다고 생각하지는 않는다. 본고의 고찰이 그의 문학을 바르게 이해하는 데 기여하기를 바란다.Yi, Ha-gon was a representative literary person in the first half of the 18 th century, and he also received attention from academic circles as a critic of paintings and writings. In the existing researches on Yi, Ha-gon’s life, they ended in organizing his life at most, or evaluated him as a person who loved landscapes while living in seclusion. Actually, it was difficult for this paper writer to agree to the existing evaluation of Yi, Ha-gon while reading through Lee, Ha-gon’s Dutacho(頭陀草) : Yi, Ha-gon’s collection of poetry and prose ; however, this writer intended to do research on Yi, Ha-gon’s literature by bringing light on what sort of a person of thinking he really was through consideration of the contradictory mentality expressed in his poetry and prose. Yi, Ha-gon himself proclaimed that he wished to benefit people of the day, and leave a good name to future generations by engaging in cultivating virtues, and presenting didactic words. In contrast, he made it clear that he would live in the mountains from the age of eight or nine because he was much attached to landscapes. Like this, Yi, Ha-gon was eager for fame, but he was also a person aiming for retiring from the world. Yi, Ha-gon, who failed in the civil service state examination, spent all his life as a person out of the government service. He clarified, “It’s important for a person to lead his/her life in self-contentment[人生貴自 適]”, and accordingly, he spent a life of leisure at Jincheon for a considerable period of time. However, as shown in <Ijayuaesa(李子有哀 辭)> written in 1716, saying ‘Without a person to socialize with while living lonesomely after returning home’[...Jayeogwihyangirae, dumunsoyeon, muyeogwajongja(自余歸鄕以來, 杜門蕭然, 無與過從者,)...], Yi, Ha-gon had to be harassed with loneliness without a person to socialize with. Yi, Ha-gon made hard work of surging loneliness while living in a remote area without a person to mingle with in a state where he didn’t completely give up his will to distinguish himself as an intellectual of the day. The loneliness is displayed in his poetry and prose in other feelings than self-contentment he pursued. In this respect, Yi, Ha-gon is approximate to an unlucky person rather than a true recluse. Yi, Ha-gon left a large number of poems having the contents of soothing his unlucky situation in person, which means what he really wished was not living in retirement but achieving great services and fame through virtue cultivation and conveyance of his didactic words. Eventually, it might be safe to say that Yi, Ha-gon failed in he-wished achievement of great services and fame, but he was a person trying to lead a self-contented life while enduring loneliness in the mountains. Basically, to appreciate and understand a writer’s work, it’s necessary to grasp his/her world of thinking. This writer thinks that because Yi, Ha-gon was a person approximate to an unlucky person other than a recluse doesn’t mean his literary achievements, or status of the Korean literature history falls. This researcher hopes that consideration in this paper could contribute towards the right understanding of his literature.

Towards ethical principles for participatory design practice

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to identify the kinds of ethical issues practitioners have to consider in participatory design (PD) practice and use these to inform a set of ethical principles, which can be used to guide practice. It begins by discussing the ways in which PD, as a discipline, has engaged with ethical issues in the past and looks at how other disciplines have identified ethical principles to support ethical practice. It, then, draws upon interviews with researchers who have the experience of collaborative and PD projects to identify ethical considerations that they have encountered in their work and uses these to propose a set of ethical principles. Finally, it ends with a discussion on how a principles-based approach can be combined with other approaches, such as the cultivation of virtues, to support ethical practice in PD.

Faith schools and the cultivation of tolerance

Faith schools in England are often regarded as ill-suited to cultivating the abilities, attitudes, and dispositions required for living together harmoniously in an ethnically and religiously diverse society. These concerns might be formulated in terms of the thesis that faith schools in England are considerably sub-optimal for the cultivation of civic virtues compared to the feasible non-faith alternatives. Focusing on one particular civic virtue, namely, tolerance, this article aims to assess this sub-optimality thesis. It identifies a range of factors that might be thought to affect whether a faith school provides an environment that is conducive to the cultivation of tolerance, and then considers the available evidence, both direct and indirect, that bears upon what effect these factors actually have. It argues that the evidence that is available gives insufficient support to the sub-optimality thesis, but it does provide a powerful case for regulating faith schools in various ways.

Playing with Intoxication: On the Cultivation of Shame and Virtue in Plato’s Laws

AbstractThis paper examines Plato’s conception of shame and the role intoxication plays in cultivating it in theLaws. Ultimately, this paper argues that there are two accounts of shame in theLaws. There is a public sense of shame that is more closely tied to the rational faculties and a private sense of shame that is more closely tied to the non-rational faculties. Understanding this division between public and private shame not only informs our understanding of Plato’s moral psychology, but his political and ethical theory as well.

Interpreting the Virtues of Mindfulness and Compassion: Contemplative Practices and Virtue-Oriented Business Ethics

The article aims to provide a standpoint from which to critically address two broad concerns. The first concern surrounds a naive view of mindfulness, which takes it as a given that it is a good thing to cultivate mindfulness and attendant qualities like compassion because these virtues are key to improving the quality of life and bettering effective decisionmaking within business. Yet the virtue of mindfulness has roots in religious and spiritual traditions, and the virtue of compassion is complex and contextual; neither of these virtues operate in a vacuum. Nor do they function independently from other virtues and values. Reasonable people of goodwill possessing the virtues of mindfulness and compassion in good measure, may nevertheless strongly disagree about what the compassionate, mindful thing to do is, particularly in a business setting. It is, moreover, conceivable that intensively cultivating mindfulness and compassion could lead one to reject altogether the “dog-eat dog” culture of competitive business that draws upon selective features of mindfulness meditation that lie in the corporate comfort zone yet which are not especially countercultural from a religious or spiritual vantage point. The second concern is that Western virtue-based business ethics is largely confined to academic philosophical theories. As such, virtue-driven business ethics is often more centered around developing theoretical wisdom than developing “hard core” practical wisdom earned through yoga asanas, meditation, chanting, and breathing, whereas for contemplative practices the reverse is the case, with practical wisdom (“knowing how-to”) emphasized over theoretical wisdom (“knowing that”). Accordingly, the article examines prospects for cross-fertilization between, on the one hand, mindfulness and compassion interpreted as virtues in Eastern contemplative practices, and on the other hand, mindfulness and compassion as interpreted within Western virtue-oriented business ethics. Illuminating a pathway for such interpretative cross-pollination calls for an appropriate conceptual frame of reference that the article organizes around a set of interconnected themes. The first theme is that mindfulness and compassion represent key virtues within contemplative practices. This indicates a promising touchpoint between Eastern and Western traditions: their respective focus upon character, inner states, intrinsic motivation, and self-improvement toward ethicality in the world. The second theme is that such virtues in Eastern contemplative practices, as well as character traits integral to Western virtue-oriented approaches, denote contested “normative-interpretive” concepts that engage philosophical debate rather than indisputable empirical-criterial concepts that can be taken at face-value. The third theme advocates moving beyond behaviorist and neuropsychological accounts of virtue, approaching character traits of Eastern contemplative practice and Western virtue ethics through nonscientific inquiry into normative interpretive questions concerning such virtues (questions about meaning, responsibility, the nature of the self, reasons for acting). This supports debate over competing views of the nature, purpose, cultivation, and cultural context of mindfulness, compassion, and other virtues – issues arising as mindfulness enters the business management sphere -- to be conducted on normative grounds. With the background conceptual framework established, the article presents key points about the prospects for cross-fertilization between virtue ethics and contemplative practice, and why it matters, with reference to business ethics.

The role of practice and habituation in Socrates’ theory of ethical development

ABSTRACTThe goal of this paper is to challenge the standard view that Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues is an intellectualist with respect to virtue. Through a detailed analysis of the educational theory laid out in the early dialogues, it will be argued that Socrates believes that the best way to cultivate virtues in his interlocutors is not to convince them of ethical truths by way of reason and argument alone, but to encourage them to participate in the practice of virtue. Habit and practice are essential to the cultivation of virtue because they mould the desires and dispositions of the agent and promote a kind of knowledge that cannot be achieved discursively – craft-knowledge. Only when agents have achieved craft-knowledge can they be counted on to act virtuously on every occasion; and craft-knowledge can only be achieved by way of practice and habituation.

A systems perspective on the role mentors play in the cultivation of virtue

Mentoring during training and the early career is one possible means of cultivating virtue in the practice of science. To examine its perceived impact, we approached virtue and its cultivation using a conceptual framework compatible with virtue ethics: the systems model of good work. We discuss two studies which show that many leading scientists report a wide range of ethical responsibilities and that scientists mentored by moral exemplars absorb ethical commitments from their mentors. A third study found that early-career scientists’ assimilation of scientific virtues diverged in focus and scope from exemplars’ mentees. These findings expand our perspective on, and raise questions about, mentoring for virtue in the sciences today. We discuss conceptual implications of the systems model of good work for the cultivation and practice of scientific virtues and show how the model can help frame questions and generate hypotheses related to virtue in science.

The phenomenology of shame: a clarification in light of max Scheler and Confucianism

This paper will investigate the phenomenology of shame with referring to Max Scheler’s description of the phenomenon and to the tradition of Confucianism. Section I explores the conflict between spirit, life and pleasure in the experience of shame. Shame implies a hierarchy of value, and it is felt when there is a conflict among different values and when the agent intends to sacrifice a higher value for a lower one. Shame also takes place when one is treated by others as a mere object or merely as a sensuous being rather than a spiritual being possessing personal dignity. Section II clarifies the problem of destructive shame and humiliation. While genuine shame is indispensable for a person as such, wrongly felt shame is destructive to the cultivation of virtue. Differences between shame and humiliation and how one should treat humiliation will also be reexamined.

Neuromedia and the Epistemology of Education

AbstractThis paper explores the implications of a technological revolution that many in the industry think is likely soon to come to pass: neuromedia. In particular, the paper is interested in how this will constitute an especially persuasive kind of extended cognition, and thereby will facilitate extended epistemic states. This will in turn have ramifications for how we understand the epistemic goals of education. The paper argues that the challenges posed by neuromedia remind us that the overarching epistemic goal of education is not orientated towards facilitating a body of knowledge (or the development of mere cognitive skills) but rather is concerned with the development of intellectual character, where this in turn essentially involves the cultivation of intellectual virtues, character traits that are not amenable to extended cognition.

The notion of character friendship and the cultivation of virtue

AbstractMost theories about virtue cultivation fall under the general umbrella of the role model approach, according to which virtue is acquired by emulating role models, and where those role models are usually conceived of as superior in some relevant respect to the learners. I argue that although we need role models to cultivate virtue, we also need good and close relationships with people who are not our superiors. The overemphasis on role models is misguided and misleading, and a good antidote draws on the Aristotelian concept of character friendship. Character friendship (a) constitutes a unique form of experience in which we share a substantial way of seeing with a close other; (b) facilitates a unique form of knowledge, the knowledge of a particular person (my‐self and the other's self); (c) develops other emotions important for virtue cultivation besides admiration, such as love, shame, trust, and hope; and (d) is a praxis in which cooperative interactions and discussions function as a bridge between habituation of virtue at home and the public life. Character friendship provides necessary elements for human cultivation of virtue that the sole experience of having a role model does not.

On the Virtue Cultivation of Chinese Teacher Volunteers in Thailand —Based on the International Chinese Teachers' Standards

The revival of virtue ethics, as well as the rising of Chinese teacher volunteers in the late twentieth Century, opened a new era in philosophical and educational circles. Increasing prominence of contemporary moral crisis has become a strong call for the revival of virtue; the development of reform and opening has provided a favorable opportunity for Chinese to go abroad. Chinese teacher volunteer, as a new career orientation, is necessary for us to carry out a full range of research, in which the moral cultivation of volunteers is an indispensable content of inquiry.

Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. Katherine Eggert. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. xi+351.

<i>Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England</i>. Katherine Eggert. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. xi+351.