Moralism, Moral Individualism and Testimony

2021 ◽  
pp. 175-195
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Moral Individualism

The Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
David L. Norton
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Informal Group ◽  
Moral Individualism ◽  
Four Books ◽  
American Thought

Henry Thoreau boasted that he was widely travelled in Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there on 12 July 1817, and he died there on 6 May 1862, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four years. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College, and in 1838 he joined Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the informal group that became known as the New England Transcendentalists. The author of four books, many essays and poems, and a voluminous journal, he is best known for the book Walden and the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, and for the circumstances attending these two milestones in American thought and literature.

Socratic Citizenship. By Dana Villa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 370p. $65.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-816
Author(s):  
Gerald Mara
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Moral Reflection ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
Moral Individualism ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Times ◽  
Shared Commitment

The publication of Dana Villa's Socratic Citizenship coincides accidentally with recent events that have shaken and solidified American society. Yet the issues his book addresses are directly relevant to how a democratic society confronts such challenges. Villa investigates various forms of democratic citizenship and argues for a kind of civic activity that has been dangerously obscured within modern debates about democracy. Particularly within periods of regime stress, liberalism's good citizen who votes, pays taxes, and plays by the rules seems underequipped to meet the commitments the times require. The framework of the communitarians or the civic republicans wherein one discovers the value of “a shared commitment to something bigger than one's self… [endorsing a] life of community or civic engagement” (p. x) seems more helpful. Villa's concern is that this view of citizenship too easily enlists the community's members in projects of collective affirmation, while ignoring the importance of a critical rationality that asks skeptical questions about the content and the moral consequences of a politics driven by a “newly rediscovered sense of political membership” (p. x). In response, he rediscovers the possibility of a form of citizenship that places “intellectual doubt at the heart of moral reflection,” demanding not commitment but conscientiousness (p. xii). It is this form of citizenship that seems most compatible with moral individualism, and thus with the basic premises of democracy. He plausibly finds the origin of this kind of citizenship in the practices of Socrates as they are portrayed within the early Platonic dialogues, Apology,Crito, and Gorgias.

Moral Individualism and the Justification of Liberal Democracy

Ratio Juris ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 320-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sirkku Kristiina Hellsten
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Moral Individualism

Responding to the Kairos of HIV/AIDS

2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-381
Author(s):  
Rachel Sophia Baard
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Moral Individualism ◽  
Corporate Moral Responsibility ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Aids Pandemic ◽  
Individual Choices ◽  
Hiv Aids

The purpose of this essay is to contribute to the development of a framework for thinking theologically about the kairos of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic by critically retrieving elements of Augustine's hamartiology. Despite a tendency to associate sin too easily with sexuality, Augustine's hamartiology can provide helpful theological resources for responding to HIV/AIDS, for two reasons: it transcends moral individualism by locating individual choices in a broader reality of corporate moral responsibility, and it never understands sin without the “higher” reality of divine grace. As such, an Augustinian-type doctrine of sin, adapted to allow for greater structural focus than might be encountered in a classical world-negating form of Augustinianism, may help to shape a moral vision that can counter a judgmental moralism and ground the church's moral responses to HIV/AIDS.

The Ontological and Moral Status of Organizations

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 541-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Moral Individualism ◽  
Social Entities

Abstract:The paper has two parts. The first considers the debate about whether social entities should be regarded as objects distinct from their members and concludes that we should let the answer to this question be determined by the theories that social science finds to have the most explanatory power. The second part argues that even if the theory with the most explanatory power regards social entities such as organizations as persons in their own right, we should not accord them citizenship in the moral realm. Rather we should accept moral individualism, the thesis that only individual humans can have rights and duties. The moral status of corporations and other organizations is often thought to depend on their ontological status. In particular, it is thought to depend on whether they can be said to exist as distinct entities, and especially as persons distinct from the individuals who are their members. In this article I argue that the two questions are actually independent of each other. No matter what the ontological status of organizations, they should not be accorded citizenship in the moral realm in their own right.

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