Philosophy as a Contributor to Well-Being

1998 ◽  
pp. 132-136
Author(s):  
Walter B. Gulick
Keyword(s):  
Goal Setting ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Existential Meaning ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View

In this essay, I sketch five complementary arenas of concern are set forth as candidates for a cogent contemporary theory of paideia. First, a searching, goal setting form of reflection is central to paideia today even as it was in Hellenistic times. A second contributor to paideia is critical reflection. But, third, reasoning is also connected to embodied activity through feeling. Thus, sensitivity to existential meaning helps people determine what they really want and believe, and it also joins them to the persons, things, and events that matter most to them. Fourth, use of the moral point of view safeguards individuals against wallowing in mere self-indulgence heedless of the welfare of others or of the world as a whole. Finally, only by being open to the complex challenges of the world can a person be receptive to the mysterious dimension of life and discern ultimate priorities. I claim that persons guiding themselves by the five-leveled notion of paideia articulated here will again experience the power of philosophy to confer well-being upon themselves and the world.

The Focus of Interpersonal Morality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Dorsey
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
What Matters

An important question that a theory of morality must answer concerns morality’s focus: what about people matters? What do we take into consideration when we consider a person from the moral point of view? This paper discusses two answers to this question, and proposes a third. The first, and perhaps most obvious, answer is welfarist: what matters about people, from the moral point of view, is their well-being, the quality of their lives. But a welfarist account of the focus of interpersonal morality has faced a number of challenges, to which a preferentist account has been thought to adequately respond. However, this paper argues that neither a welfarist nor a preferentist account of the focus of morality is adequate. It proposes an alternative, according to which the focus of morality can and should reflect the special normative circumstances that people inhabit given their normatively significant roles, associations, or commitments.

The Human Good and the Ambitions of Consequentialism

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
Human Good ◽  
The Right

I want to look at one aspect of the human good: how it serves as the basis for judgments about the moral right. One important view is that the right is always derived from the good. I want to suggest that the more one understands the nature of the human good, the more reservations one has about that view.I. OneRoute toConsequentialismMany of us think that different things make a life good, with no one deep value underlying them all. My own list includes: enjoyment, accomplishing something with one's life, deep personal relations, certain sorts of understanding, and the elements of a characteristically human existence (autonomy, liberty).Most of us also think that moral right and wrong are based, in some way or other, in how well individual lives go, and that the moral point of view is, in some sense or other, impartial between lives. Utilitarianism is a prominent, but not the only, way of spelling out this intuition. There is no reason why an account of the human good needs to be confined, in the classical utilitarian way, to happiness or to fulfillment of desire (on the usual understanding of that notion). Nor is there any reason why impartiality has to be confined to maximizing the good, counting everybody for one and nobody for more than one. We may generalize.Let us broaden the notion of the good. We might say, for instance, that though happiness is a good, so are the other items on my list. But though broadened, this notion of the good stays within the confines of individual goods; it still has to do with human well-being, with what promotes the quality of one person's life.

Two-Tier Thinking: A Moral Point of View

1996 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-188
Author(s):  
Adi Ophir
Keyword(s):  
Belief Systems ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Context Dependence ◽  
Philosophical Argument ◽  
Tier 1 ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
Truth Claims

Among those who know Yehuda's work, the term “two-tier thinking” is usually associated with a problematic relativist position (Elkana 1978). But “two-tier thinking” is not a name for a philosophical argument; it is best understood, I think, as a term designating certain conditions of knowledge: universal, or modern, or perhaps only postmodern conditions, but in any case, they are generalizations derived from anthropological and psychological observations on matters of facts. This is how things actually work in the sphere of knowledge: Western intellectuals and scientists tend to acknowledge that their truth claims and certainly their normative claims are incompatible with other claims that stem from other belief systems, frameworks of thought or genres of discourses, and there is no final, impartial instance of judgment to adjudicate between the incompatible claims and the conflicting systems. Lack of “final,” impartial judgment does not hinder people from taking their truth claims seriously and acting as realists within the world constituted by their particular belief systems — tier 1. But when they come to reflect upon it, as some of them do, sometimes, they acknowledge the context-dependence of this realism and the fact that there is no way to make good on its claim to universality; theirs, they know, is but one particular “belief system,” or “genre of discourse,” among many.

Biocentrism

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-34
Author(s):  
John Basl
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Considerability ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View

Chapter 1 articulates the commitments of biocentrism vis-à-vis explaining the form of moral status that advocates of the view take living things to have, moral considerability, as well as the strategies these advocates employ both for arguing that all living things are morally considerable, and for excluding certain things, such as artifacts and ecosystems, from being morally considerable. The foundation of biocentrism is a commitment to the importance of welfare in grounding moral status and delineating the boundaries of moral status. For the biocentrist, welfare or well-being is necessary for having moral status; anything that lacks a welfare or that can’t be benefitted or harmed, can only matter from the moral point of view in some indirect or derivative way. And, biocentrists argue, it is because nonsentient organisms have a welfare and because artifacts and ecosystems do not that the boundaries of moral status can be neatly drawn.

Looking at Catonsville

Worldview ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 6-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Berrigan
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View

We are faced, I think, in spite of all hopes to the contrary, with a very long haul. From a moral point of view, good men are being required to grow the organs and resources needed to survive in the wilderness of the world.I am convinced, in fact, that things are going to worsen unutterably before they grow perceptibly better. So the political import, in the deepest spiritual sense, of a thing like Catonsville, it seems to me, remains very much a matter of continuing debate, a debate which, I suppose and hope, would bo one of love and fraternity rather than one of suspicion or enmity.

A Typology of Moral Progress

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Premarital Sex ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Point

This chapter identifies a number of developments that are candidates for moral progress: abolition of the Atlantic chattel slavery, improvements in civil rights for minorities, equal rights for women, better treatment of (some) non-human animals, and abolition of the cruellest punishments in most parts of the world. This bottom-up approach is then used to construct a typology of moral progress, including improvements in moral reasoning, recognition of the moral standing or equal basic moral status of beings formerly thought to lack them, improvements in understandings of the domain of justice, the recognition that some behaviors formerly thought to be morally impermissible (such as premarital sex, masturbation, lending money at interest, and refusal to die “for king and country”) can be morally permissible, and improvements in understandings of morality itself. Finally, a distinction is made between improvements from a moral point of view and moral progress in the fullest sense.

Poetry?

2021 ◽  
pp. 364-380
Author(s):  
Floris Bernard ◽  
Kristoffel Demoen
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Wide Sense ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
The Difference

This chapter gives an overview of how Byzantines conceptualized “poetry.” It argues that from the Byzantine point of view, poetry only differs from prose in a very formal way, namely that it is written in verse. Both prose and poetry belonged to the category of logoi, the only label that was very frequently used, in contrast to the term “poetry,” which was reserved for the ancient poetry studied at schools. Many authors considered (and exploited) the difference between their own prose texts and poems as a primarily formal one. Nevertheless, poetry did have some functions that set it apart from prose, even if these features are for us less expected. The quality of “bound speech” gained a spiritual dimension, since verse was seen as a restrained form of discourse, also from a moral point of view. Finally, the chapter gives a brief overview of the social contexts for which (learned) poetry was the medium of choice: as an inscription, as paratext in a wide sense, as a piece of personal introspection, as invective, as summaries (often of a didactic nature), and as highly public ceremonial pieces.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document