Practical Wisdom and Honesty

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-133
Author(s):  
Christian B. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Motivational States ◽  
Common Observation

The previous chapter focused on the motivational side of the virtue of honesty. But moral virtues are normally understood to consist of more than just motivational states. Virtuous thoughts of various kinds, for instance, play a role, and honesty is no exception. Here is another common observation about moral virtues: they are connected in some way to practical wisdom. This has long been held by Aristotelian approaches in particular, and it is important to clarify what relationship, if any, practical wisdom bears to honesty. Hence the goal of this chapter is to explore the role of virtuous thoughts and practical wisdom with respect to the virtue of honesty.

Self-Interest and Virtue

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neera K. Badhwar
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Empirical Psychology ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Self Interest

The Aristotelian view that the moral virtues–the virtues of character informed by practical wisdom–are essential to an individual's happiness, and are thus in an individual's self-interest, has been little discussed outside of purely scholarly contexts. With a few exceptions, contemporary philosophers have tended to be suspicious of Aristotle's claims about human nature and the nature of rationality and happiness (eudaimonia). But recent scholarship has offered an interpretation of the basic elements of Aristotle's views of human nature and happiness, and of reason and virtue, that brings them more into line with common-sense thinking and with contemporary philosophical and empirical psychology. This makes it fruitful to reexamine the question of the role of virtue in self-interest.

scholarly journals The Relative Role of the Intellectual and Moral Virtues in Sustainable Management Decisions: The Case of Practical Wisdom and Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natàlia Cugueró-Escofet ◽  
Josep M. Rosanas
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Decision Maker ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Relative Role ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Wise Person ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Ideal

We analyze the status of virtues in management by going in some depth into the two main virtues, justice and practical wisdom. We next study how ethics requires that all virtues should be present under the ideal concept of a ‘unity of virtues’ for a completely wise person and discuss the practical limitations of this concept. Then, we draw a framework for decision making depending on whether the decision maker possesses justice and practical wisdom or lacks one of them and then discuss which one is better to have. We conclude that justice is more important, as it is about setting objectives and prioritizing, whereas practical wisdom is about attaining these objectives, once listed, in a rationally wise and contextual way. Hence, we conclude that objectives (justice) must come first, because this makes it more likely that, in the end, practical wisdom is developed, and thus we end up having the two virtues.

Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartik Kalyan Raman
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
British India ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
The One

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.

Virtue Ethics and/or Virtue Epistemology: A Response to Anton Froeyman

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-446
Author(s):  
Herman Paul
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Ethical Perspective ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Intellectual Courage ◽  
Virtuous Behavior ◽  
Moral Dimensions ◽  
Ethical Approaches

Abstract In response to Anton Froeyman’s paper, “Virtues of Historiography,” this article argues that philosophers of history interested in why historians cherish such virtues as carefulness, impartiality, and intellectual courage would do wise not to classify these virtues unequivocally as either epistemic or moral virtues. Likewise, in trying to grasp the roles that virtues play in the historian’s professional practice, philosophers of history would be best advised to avoid adopting either an epistemological or an ethical perspective. Assuming that the historian’s virtuous behavior has epistemic and moral dimensions (as well as aesthetic, political, and other dimensions), this article advocates a non-reductionist account of historical scholarship, which acknowledges that the virtues cherished by historians usually play a variety of roles, depending on the goals they are supposed to serve. Given that not the least important of these goals are epistemic ones, the articles concludes that virtue ethical approaches, to the extent that they are focused on the acquisition of moral instead of epistemic goods, insufficiently recognize the role of virtue in the pursuit of such epistemic aims as knowledge and understanding.

West Hollywood as Symbol: The Significance of Place in the Construction of a Gay Identity

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Forest
Keyword(s):  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
West Hollywood ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
The City

The 1984 municipal incorporation of West Hollywood, California offers an opportunity to explore two related themes: (1) the role of place in the creation of identity generally, and (2) the role of place in the creation of sexual identity in particular. Work on the second subject has largely concentrated on the political economy of gay territories, although there has been an ongoing concern with the symbolic importance of these places. Although these studies have provided valuable insights on these themes, they do not reflect the renewed concern in humanistic geography with the normative importance of place, and the study of morally valued ways of life. These latter topics provide alternative avenues into questions of identity. In the coverage of the incorporation campaign, the gay press presented an idealized image of the city. In defining a new gay identity, the gay press utilized the holistic quality of place to weave together the ‘natural’ and cultural elements of West Hollywood. This idealized ‘gay city’ united the place's real and imagined physical attributes with social and personal characteristics of gay men. More simply, the qualities of the city itself expressed intellectual and moral virtues, such that characterizations of the city became part of a narrative defining the meaning of ‘gay’. This new gay male identity included seven elements: creativity, aesthetic sensibility, an orientation toward entertainment or consumption, progressiveness, responsibility, maturity, and centrality. The effort to create an identity centered on West Hollywood was relatively conservative in the sense that it was not a fundamental challenge to existing social and political systems. Rather, it reflected a strategy based on an ethnicity model, seeking to ‘demarginalize’ gays and to bring them closer to the symbolic ‘center’ of US society.

scholarly journals THE RELATION BETWEEN FINANCIAL KNOWLEDGE AND ECONOMIC DECISIONS

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-67
Author(s):  
Sabina Kołodziej
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Young People ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Financial Education ◽  
Financial Knowledge ◽  
Economic Decisions ◽  
Current Economic Situation ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
Saving Decisions

Nowadays policymakers, government agencies and educators in Poland and in many European countries emphasize the role of individual possibilities to take independent decisions regarding one’s financial resources. Consequently, the increased interest in financial education programs is observed. Moreover, the complexity of financial products further demonstrates the need for a financial knowledge when making decisions in this sphere. However, simultaneously, the common observation of numerous examples of irrelevant decision-making, consequently leading to financial (e.g. abundant debt) or professional (e.g. loss of work) problems as well as results of studies on the level of financial knowledge show that in many cases our society, most probably, does not have the indispensable level of analyzed knowledge. The article presents results of 2 studies on the relation between financial knowledge and economic decisions made by Polish young adults. The study 1 focuses on the correlation between financial knowledge and saving decisions while the study 2 financial knowledge and respondents debts. In both studies the level of financial knowledge was measured by the test relating to the current economic situation of Poland, knowledge of basic economic and financial concepts and understanding of basic market mechanisms. Specially designed questionnaires analyzed respondents’ savings (study 1) and debts (study 2) decisions. The results of those studies show that examined a group of Polish young adults has an average level of financial knowledge. Moreover, the first study found positive correlation (on the level of statistical trend) between financial knowledge and savings decisions. The results of study 2 showed the higher financial knowledge among people who took credits or loans from bank in comparison with people who take credit and loans outside the banking system. Results obtained in the studies reinforce the idea of the important role of financial education in preparing young people to make their own economic decisions. Key words: debt, financial education, financial knowledge, saving, young people.

scholarly journals Controlling Influences

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-90
Author(s):  
Jonathan Pugh
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Individual Decision ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
Individual Decision Making ◽  
Rational Persuasion ◽  
Motivational States ◽  
Autonomous Decision

Drawing on the rationalist account of autonomy outlined in the previous chapter, this chapter provides a framework for identifying different forms of influence on individual decision-making. The author explains how his theory allows for a broader understanding of rational persuasion than that which is suggested by the standard account, and shows how different forms of persuasion can be compatible with autonomous decision-making. Such persuasion can be contrasted with psychological manipulation, which serves to directly alter an individual’s motivational states in a manner that bypasses the cognitive element of the target’s decisional autonomy. Having identified the various forms that psychological manipulation can take, the author argues that global forms of manipulation, which involve wholesale changes to an individual’s psychological economy, raise concerns about identity and responsibility but not autonomy. Finally, he outlines the implications of his theory for informational manipulation and deception.

Stratification and Social Mobility, Slavery in Islam

2016 ◽  
pp. 250-271
Keyword(s):  
Social Mobility ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Status Inconsistency ◽  
General Proposition ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Latent Function

In this chapter we propose a Weberian three dimensionality of stratification to explore the amount of upward and downward movement that goes on within and between Islamic societies and the industrial world. Our argument regarding social mobility provides intriguing clues as to the connection between legal systems (specifically civic laws based on religious jurisprudence), and stratification systems. We will discuss the issue of slavery and status inconsistency and contrast it with the caste system, which forbids upward, downward, inter-caste and intergenerational social mobility. We argue that the slavery system of stratification is more complex than the caste system, as there is an element of uprising and resistance built into the slave system by means of religious economic values. We will pay close attention to the role of Islam as a belief system which provides pathways for social mobility through the production and distribution of goods and services. In a previous chapter on sociality and inequality, a general proposition was made that, as human groups are formed, ranking and hierarchies come into existence in correspondence with rewards and the manner in which they should be distributed. From this viewpoint, inequality is a manifest function of a sociality whose latent function is to create poverty. This is an ethical issue for which Islam devised a variety of mechanisms to address. . For Marx, with his locus of attention on the specific, inequality is a manifest function of capitalism whose latent functions, among others, are monopolization and the enlargement of stratification.

Effective Problem-Solving

2017 ◽  
pp. 103-112
Author(s):  
David J. Kolko ◽  
Eric M. Vernberg
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Problem Situation ◽  
Problem Solving Skills ◽  
Step Process ◽  
Problem Solve ◽  
Effective Problem

This chapter introduces problem-solving skills to children. The content includes an overview of identifying problems, determining options, and making decisions based on goals. Emphasis is placed on reviewing materials from the previous chapter regarding the role of thoughts and interpretations. These skills are generalized to various areas of the child’s life before being applied to fire-related situations. A multi-step process is introduced to help the child learn to, first identify problems and goals, then problem-solve and consider consequences. These skills are then practiced by applying them to a recent problem situation that the child experienced. Worksheets provided in the appendix are used to facilitate the implementation of these activities.

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