(in)Fidelity: The Narrative Rationality of Tiger Woods

In this article, the narrative paradigm is applied to the documented life of Tiger Woods, viewing his story as sports folklore and public moral argument, asking, what patterns exist in his narrative? What values? And how can the narrative of Tiger Woods be described in terms of narrative rationality? Looked at as a mythic hero, Tiger feathers the line between fantasy and reality and has gone through the requisite rituals of violation and reconstruction. Accordingly, the duplicity in his character revealed through scandal, and the fallibility of his superhuman image exposed through injury give him something to overcome. As long as he redeems himself each time he falls the conditions of the mythic hero are kept intact. However, implicit in his story is the notion that ends can justify means as he has overcome scandal, criticism of his training methods, and criticism of his character throughout his career.

Critical reasoning

This chapter explores the process of moral reasoning. It explains that often moral judgements are complex. There is no single rule that can be used to identify the correct answer. The chapter explains what makes a good or bad moral argument. It explores how different approaches can be combined to resolve an ethical dilemma.

Anger and Sadness as Moral Signals

Three studies examined the relationship between emotions and moral judgment from an interpersonal perspective. In Studies 1 and 2, participants justified their decisions in sacrificial dilemmas to an imagined interlocutor. Linguistic analyses revealed that Don’t Sacrifice justifications contained more anger-related language than sadness-related language, whereas Sacrifice justifications contained roughly equal proportions of anger and sadness language. In Study 3, participants made character inferences about an actor who chose to/refused to sacrifice one person to save multiple people. We manipulated the actor’s ratio of anger to sadness. Participants rated the Don’t Sacrifice actor more negatively when they displayed high anger relative to sadness but rated the Sacrifice actor negatively whenever they exhibited high anger (independent of sadness). These data highlight novel ways in which actors and observers use emotions to complement the substance of a moral argument.

Evil and Divine Power: A Response to James Sterba’s Argument from Evil

In this article, I offer a response to James P. Sterba’s moral argument for the non-existence of God. Sterba applies to God the so-called Pauline Principle that it is not permissible to do evil in order that good may come. He suggests that this is the underlying element in discussions of the Doctrine of Double Effect, a doctrine that has been largely overlooked by philosophers of religion. Although, as hypothetical trolley cases demonstrate, human beings sometimes cannot avoid doing or permitting evil in order to prevent a greater evil, Sterba argues that the same cannot be said of an omnipotent God and that, since our world contains horrendous evils, the existence of a God who is both omnipotent and good is therefore logically impossible. I argue that, if God is thought to be a conscious being with unlimited power to prevent horrendous evils, Sterba’s argument might be valid. I also argue, however, that divine power need not be construed in this way. Drawing on some ideas derived from the work of Charles Hartshorne, I suggest that God is not a kind of divine micromanager and that it is more coherent and, indeed, helpful to think of God as a social influencer whose power is a source of positive energy for the promotion of goodness.

The Third Antinomy Resolved

This chapter examines the resolution of the third antinomy. Kant argues that the thesis and antithesis are (roughly speaking) sub-contraries rather than contradictories. However, the sense in which he maintains that the thesis and antithesis ‘can both be true’ is delicate. He holds that the truth of neither claim excludes the truth of the other; but this is compatible with necessary falsehood of the thesis, which affirms the existence of human freedom. Importantly, Kant does not take himself to show on theoretical grounds that freedom is even logically possible. The chapter also discusses: Kant’s conceptions of intelligible causality and of empirical and intelligible character; moral responsibility; moral growth; the rationality of blame; Kant’s criticisms of Leibniz’s compatibilism; the third antinomy as an indirect argument for Transcendental Idealism; and the first-Critique’s version of a moral argument for freedom. Kant emerges as a ‘soft determinist’ of a highly unusual stripe.

Aristotelian and Kantian Virtues and Education

Virtues are conditions for education, a part of education, and a result of it. Virtues are stable, desirable traits of persons. For a person to be virtuous, these traits of character must be regularly expressed in action. Choosing rationally to perform good actions is not sufficient for virtue; even though it may be a necessary condition for an action to be good, performing is necessary as well to exercise virtue. It is sometimes claimed that moral theory along utilitarian and deontological lines neglected or forgot the virtues in its theoretical work in the 20th century. This is true about much of 20th-century moral theory. Aristotelian moral theory has grown in influence since the early 1970s and it can be reasonably said that it is now just as influential as deontology and utilitarianism if not more so. Naturalism is a part of Aristotelian moral theory and has proved a much stronger base for moral action and moral argument than 20th-century moral theory was willing to accept with its fundamental distinction between facts and values. Values are just as fundamental to our understanding of the world as facts. Arguments in moral theory move easily from facts to values and values to facts. The relation between facts and values is more complicated than much of 20th-century moral theory allowed for. Immanuel Kant is often taken as an example of a philosopher who neglected the virtues. Yet Kant wrote a work, The Metaphysics of Morals, half of which was devoted to virtues. Education is a normative endeavor aiming at well-rounded individuals capable of fulfilling those functions that modern society requires from them, such as being a citizen, entering working life with valuable complex skills, or governing one’s own life. It is not possible to fulfill these functions without mastering the moral and intellectual virtues.