Only Connect: The Place of Self-Knowledge in Ethics

1987 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 308-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Mullett
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Human Love ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Caring Relations

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.(E.M.Forster)How important is self-knowledge in moral life? What kind of self-knowledge, if any, is necessary for full moral agency? What kinds of self-knowledge are there? What is ‘full moral agency’? Despite the great proliferation of theories about the self in psychology in this century, questions like these have not been addressed very often in recent literature on ethics in the Anglo-American tradition. And, although in 1958 Anscombe recommended that we stop doing moral philosophy altogether until we have a better moral psychology, the main response to this suggestion has been a renewed interest in the virtues. Another approach to these problems can be found in feminist ethics, with its interest in caring relations. In this paper I shall describe a few of the connections between caring and self-knowledge. I shall then compare the insights generated by this approach with the views of two authors, who work from radically opposed frameworks, Richard Brandt and Charles Taylor. Both have produced interesting, but completely different descriptions of self-knowledge and its place in moral life.

Jus Tempus in the Magna Carta: The Sovereignty of Time in Modern Politics and Citizenship

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 463-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth F. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Place Of Birth ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Right ◽  
Constitutional Tradition

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectivelyjus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through whichjus tempusbecame a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points aboutjus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle ofjus tempusis applied in a diverse array of political contexts.

‘Inevitable and Unacceptable?’ Methodological Rawlsianism in Anglo-American Political Philosophy

1998 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Norman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Parallel Tasks ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
English Speaking World

This article attempts two parallel tasks. First, it gives a sympathetic explication of the implicit working methodology (‘Methodological Rawlsianism’) of mainstream contemporary political theory in the English-speaking world. And second, principally in footnotes, it surveys the recent literature on justification to see what light these debates cast on the tenets of this methodology. It is worth examining methodological presuppositions because these can have a profound influence on substantive theories: many of the differences between philosophical traditions can be traced to their methodologies. My aim is to expose the central features of methodological Rawlsianism in order to challenge critics of this tradition to explain exactly where and why they depart from the method. While I do not defend it at length, I do suggest that methodological Rawlsianism is inevitable insofar as it is basically a form of common sense. This fact should probably lower expectations about the amount of progress consistent methodological Rawlsians are likely to make in grounding comprehensive normative political theories.

scholarly journals Rethinking the Perceived Self: Samples from Facebook

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Anita Kasabova
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
The Self ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
The Real ◽  
Group I ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Anglo American

Abstract How the self perceives reality is a traditional topic of research across several disciplines. I examine the perceived self on Facebook, as a case-study of self-knowledge on „classical” social media. Following Blascovich & Bailenson (2011), I consider the distinction between the real and the virtual as relative. Perceptual self-knowledge, filtered through social media, requires rethinking the perceived self in terms of social reality (Neisser, 1993). This claim dovetails Jenkins’s (2013) notion of the self as an active participant in consumption. I argue that the perceived self in social media could be conceived in terms of how it would like to be perceived and appraised by its virtual audience. Using Neisser’s (1993) typology of self-knowledge and Castañeda’s (1983) theory of I-guises, I analyse seven samples from Anglo-American and Bulgarian Facebook sites and show that the perceived self produces itself online as a captivating presence with a credible story. My samples are taken from FB community pages with negligible cultural differences across an online teenage/twens (twixter) age group. I then discuss some problematic aspects of the perceived self online, as well as recent critiques of technoconsumerism.

The Anglo-American Tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-138
Author(s):  
B. Guy Peters
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Management ◽  
New Public Management ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Administrators ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
New Public ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Definition Of

The Anglo-American tradition is perhaps the most difficult to characterize. Although there are common roots, there has been a divergence between the United Kingdom and other Westminster systems and the United States. There are common roots among these cases, including a contractarian conception of the state, an emphasis on the separation of politics and administration, an emphasis on management rather than law in the role definition of public administrators, and less commitment to uniformity. But these common values are interpreted and implemented differently in the different countries. For example, the United States has a more developed system of administrative law than do most of the Westminster systems. All these administrative systems, however, have been more receptive to the ideas of New Public Management (NPM) than have other governments, although the United States and Canada had implemented many of those ideas long before NPM was developed.

Moral sentiments

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Jay Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Moral Emotions ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Moral Beliefs ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The Enlightenment

Moral sentiments are those feelings or emotions central to moral agency. Aristotle treated sentiments as nonrational conditions, capable of being moulded into virtues through habituation. The moral sense theorists of the Enlightenment took sentiments to provide the psychological basis for our common moral life. Kantian approaches deny the primacy of sentiments in moral personality, and treat moral sentiments as conditioned by our rational grasp of moral principles. A central issue is whether moral sentiments incorporate moral beliefs. Accounts which affirm a connection with moral beliefs point to the complex intentionality (object-directedness) of such states as resentment or indignation. Against this, some observe that moral emotions may be felt inappropriately. Of special interest are the sentiments of guilt and shame. These seem to reflect different orientations towards moral norms, and questions arise about the degree to which these different orientations are culturally local, and whether either orientation is superior to the other.

Women’s Healthcare Through a Feminist Ethics Lens

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Lori d’Agincourt-Canning ◽  
Carolyn Ells
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Healthcare Providers ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Feminist Ethics ◽  
Centered Care ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Feminist Bioethics

This chapter provides the book’s rationale, reviews themes that are central to the book, and presents an overview of its chapters. The collection aims to bring insights from healthcare providers, clinical ethicists, scholars, and community together as a way of broadening feminist bioethics and being responsive to ethical issues in women’s healthcare. A starting premise is that gender is central to the evaluation of healthcare and healthcare practices. Several feminist themes that are pertinent to the ethics analyses throughout the book are described. These include relational components of moral life, justice and oppression, women-centered care, implications of sex and gender distinctions, and examining issues through an ethics lens. The overview of chapters highlights the specific gaps in the literature each one fills, along with how they fit together as a collection.

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