scholarly journals Paths of Glory and the Tyranny of the Greater Good

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 324-338
Author(s):  
Donald R. Riccomini
Keyword(s):  
Moral Vision ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Professional Advancement ◽  
Limited Success ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Moral Consistency ◽  
Moral Intent ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Utilitarian Ethic

In Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957) the individual's moral intent is distorted, compromised, and eventually co-opted by the overriding utilitarian ethic of ensuring the survival of the system – the ultimate ‘greater good’ – at all costs. The individual may challenge the system in a noble quest for justice, like Dax. He may hypocritically seek professional advancement from striving to serve it, like Mireau. Or he may cynically manipulate it for political purposes, like Broulard. In each case, the consequences are ultimately the same – the individual is forced to align his particular moral vision, however noble or ignoble, with the imperative of the greater good. The individual may resist or affirm the system and achieve some level of moral consistency and purity, but only momentarily and with limited success. In the end, whatever the value or relevance of the individual conscience to a particular situation, it is overridden by the demands of the greater good.

Progress, Success, and Failure in Urban Modelling

1979 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 863-878 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Batty
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Theory ◽  
Modelling Activity ◽  
Limited Success ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
Uncertain Knowledge ◽  
Urban Modelling ◽  
History Of ◽  
Real Value ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This essay is an attempt to describe from three related perspectives the successes and failures characterising the short but turbulent history of urban modelling: from the broader perspectives of knowledge or scientific theory, and of action or design; and from the narrower perspective of the modelling activity itself. It is argued that modelling is concerned solely neither with science nor with design but with both; that is, it is concerned with the relationship between science and design and must be examined accordingly. Various arguments pertaining to these themes are elaborated in terms of the inadequacy of its theory and the dictates imposed by policy. Viewed from the individual perspectives of science or design, modelling is often judged a dismal failure but in this essay it is argued that as such views are necessarily incomplete, some compromise must be sought. In these terms, the field manifests a limited success. Much has been learned about the activity itself but, as in all situations involving immature science, the real value of these experiences may be in raising awareness of the conflicts and dilemmas which occur when uncertain knowledge is applied to problems whose perception is continually changing.

scholarly journals The Advance Care Compass– A New Mechanics for Digitally Transforming Advance Directives

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikola Biller-Andorno ◽  
Armin Biller
Keyword(s):  
Intensive Care ◽  
Advance Directives ◽  
Treatment Preferences ◽  
Care Planning ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future State ◽  
Limited Success ◽  
Advance Care ◽  
The Individual

Advance directives allow people to declare their treatment preferences for a potential future state of incompetency. Covid-19, with its high numbers of quickly deteriorating patients requiring intensive care, has acutely demonstrated how helpful it would be for clinicians to have reliable, readily available, up-to-date information at hand to be able to act in accordance with what the individual patient would have wanted. Yet for the past few decades advance directives have fallen short of their potential, for various reasons. At worst, advance directives are perceived as unwieldy legal documents that put excessive demands on patients without providing useful guidance for better care. Recent efforts such as advance care planning have tried to remedy some of these shortcomings but have so far met with limited success. We suggest a new concept—the Advance Care Compass—that harnesses the potential of digitalization in healthcare to overcome many of difficulties encountered so far.

Dewey, John (1859–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek La Shot
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Education ◽  
William James ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Psychology Laboratory ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Educational Theorist ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University ◽  
Over Time

John Dewey was an American philosopher, educational theorist, and one of the three major pragmatists, along with William James and Charles Saunders Peirce. After obtaining a doctorate at Johns Hopkins, he began his academic career at the University of Michigan, where he established a psychology laboratory that studied stimulus reflexes. Later, at the University of Chicago, he turned to the reform of primary and secondary education and founded programs that could better integrate immigrants into American culture. He defended democracy, envisioning it as a sense of community in which the individual interests of all could eventually be understood. Individualism necessitated the appeal to mutual dependence and institutions, which were tested and constantly changed over time for the greater good, in a kind of perpetual scientific experiment. Central to his thinking on education was the notion of experience. Knowledge, he held, was always obtained after reflection upon concrete experiences. In this model, called the "Dewey flux," one generates abstractions (mental ideas) after having concrete experiences. These abstractions in turn then have to be rendered material—Dewey’s version of the "hermeneutic circle." The mission of progressive education, for Dewey, was to get students to become conscious of this perpetual "flux" between concrete experiences and abstractions.

The Illusion of Freedom Separated From Moral Virtue

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Raymond L. Dennehy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Individual

This essay proposes that liberal democracy cannot survive unless a monistic virtue ethics permeates its culture, A monistic philosophical conception of virtue ethics has its roots in natural law theory and, for that reason, offers a rationally defensible basis for a unified moral vision in a pluralistic society. Such a monistic virtue ethics--insofar as it is a virtue ethics--forms individual character so that a person not only knows how to act, but desires to act that way and, moreover, possesses the integration of character to be able to act that way. This is a crucial consideration, for immoral choices create a bad character that inclines the individual to increasingly worse choices, A nation whose members lack moral virtue cannot sustain its commitment to freedom and equality for all.

A Theory of Professionalization in Politics

1970 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 865-878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon S. Black
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Professional Advancement ◽  
Political Hierarchy ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Over Time

Professionalization, in customary usage, refers to the assimilation of the standards and values prevalent in a given profession. Every profession, including politics, tends to have some set or sets of values that are widely held and which define what it means to be a “professional” within that field. These values are important because they affect the likelihood that the individual will achieve success in his profession. If the values are widely held, those that deviate from them are likely to be sanctioned by their colleagues, and people who fail to maintain the minimal standards of their profession are not likely to obtain professional advancement. Those who do behave according to the dominant values of their profession, however, are likely to be accorded the status of “professional” in the eyes of their colleagues, and that designation will contribute to the success of their careers.In the profession of politics, as in other professions, there is seldom one set of standards and values that prevails in all places at all times. These normative elements are likely to vary from political system to political system, to vary within a political system, and to vary within the profession of politics over time. In a highly centralized local political organization, for example, the achievement and maintenance of a position is likely to depend upon such values as deference and loyalty to the leaders of the political hierarchy.

scholarly journals Value, Morality, and Ethics

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dustin Marcus Feigerle
Keyword(s):  
Group Selection ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
The Individual

What is the nature, origin, and ontological status of what we call 'value'? This article argues that value does not exist objectively, but is a purely non-objective phenomenon. Most importantly, I seek to clarify the concept of value and change the orientation of value toward the individual by considering Mackie, Ross, Spinoza, Hobbes, and recent theories regarding group selection. Finally, I conclude by asserting that any form of "greater good" must rest on and be considered at the level of the individual.

scholarly journals How to Know This Is a Good Thing: A Developmental Analysis of Inter-Cultural, Anti-Racist Education

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-486
Author(s):  
Ronnie F. Blakeney
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Developmental Stages ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Developmental Needs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Limited Success ◽  
Developmental Analysis

The tension between cultural pluralism and social cohesion is perhaps the single most resonant moral paradox for contemporary democracies. The challenge is no less daunting for public education. In the past forty years North American projects for Inter-cultural and Anti-racist education have had limited success. This paper argues that such projects have suffered from an unclear moral vision and from a pedagogical indifference to the developmental stages of children and adolescents as learners. This paper describes two distinct moral aims of education for democratic citizenship. It argues that the tension between the two approaches can be resolved by reference to the developmental needs of various groups of learners. A developmental approach to Inter-Cultural, Anti-racist Education is outlined.

Introducing the Cosmic Person: An ecocentric legal subject

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-130
Author(s):  
Jana Norman
Keyword(s):  
Individual Life ◽  
Life Project ◽  
Legal Subject ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Limited Success ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Legal Subjects

Legal philosophers and environmental activists concerned with transforming the human–Earth relationship typically focus on expanding the community of legal subjects to include the non-human. The limited success of this strategy prompts consideration of an alternative: expanding the concept of the human legal subject to facilitate mutually beneficial human–Earth relations. The abstract character of the rational autonomous individual normalises the pursuit of the individual life project with devastating consequences for the earth. The Cosmic Person introduced here is a Universe-centred, Earth-embedded multi-dimensional self that normalises an interest in the project of life itself.

The Mill on the Floss and Antigone

PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Moldstad
Keyword(s):  
Central Problem ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Social Convention ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Higher Law

The Mill on the Floss, like Sophocles' Antigone, illustrates George Eliot's belief in the recurring conflict between the individual moral vision and social convention. The central problem in Antigone, she wrote, lay between “reverence for the gods” and “the duties of citizenship: two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each.” Whenever man's moral vision collides with social convention the opposition between Antigone and Creon is renewed. Her words seem applicable to the dominant conflict in The Mill. An honorable but unimaginative person, Tom Tulliver clashes with his sister Maggie when she refuses to abide by conventions which seem inhumane or hurtful to those she loves. As Antigone espouses a higher law by burying Polynices in defiance of Creon, so Maggie espouses a higher law in opposing the vengeance against Wakem. Although Tom and Maggie are both partly right in their quarrel over Maggie's secretly seeing Philip Wakem, Tom, like Creon, is foolishly overconfident in crediting his conventional honor, which is simply no measure of the case. The conflict between Maggie and her brother is further aggravated by the tendency of the practical-minded Tom to domineer over his imaginative and (to him) inconsistent sister.

Sacrifice: an ethical dimension of caring that makes suffering meaningful

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 414-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaija Helin ◽  
Unni Å Lindström
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Deontological Ethics ◽  
Caring Science ◽  
Caring Relationship ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Utilitarian Ethic

This article is intended to raise the question of whether sacrifice can be regarded as constituting a deep ethical structure in the relationship between patient and carer. The significance of sacrifice in a patient-carer relationship cannot, however, be fully understood from the standpoint of the consistently utilitarian ethic that characterizes today’s ethical discourse. Deontological ethics, with its universal principles, also does not provide a suitable point of departure. Ethical recommendations and codices are important and can serve as general sources of knowledge when making decisions, but they should be supplemented by an ethic that takes into consideration contextual and situational factors that make every encounter between patient and carer unique. Caring science research literature presents, on the whole, general agreement on the importance of responsibility and devotion with regard to sense of duty, warmth and genuine engagement in caring. That sacrifice may also constitute an important ethical element in the patient-carer relationship is, however, a contradictory and little considered theme. Caring science literature that deals with sacrifice/self-sacrifice indicates contradictory import. It is nevertheless interesting to notice that both the negative and the positive aspects bring out the importance of the concept for the professional character of caring. The tradition of ideas in medieval Christian mysticism with reference to Lévinas’ ethic of responsibility offers a deeper perspective in which the meaningfulness of sacrifice in the caring relationship can be sought. The theme of sacrifice is not of interest merely as a carer’s ethical outlook, but sacrifice can also be understood as a potential process of transformation towards health. The instinctive or conscious experience of sacrifice on the part of the individual patient can, on a symbolic level, be regarded as analogous to the cultic or religious sacrifice aiming at atonement. Sacrifice appears to the patient as an act of transformation to achieve atonement and healing. Atonement then implies finding meaningfulness in one’s suffering. The concept of sacrifice, understood in a novel way, opens up a deeper dimension in the understanding of suffering and makes caring in ‘the patient’s world’ possible.

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