Benedict de Spinoza’s Virtue

Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was about the most radical of the early modern philosophers who developed a unique metaphysics that inspired an intriguing moral philosophy, fusing insights from ancient Stoicism, Cartesian metaphysics, Hobbes and medieval Jewish rationalism. While helping to ground the Enlightenment, Spinoza’s thoughts, against the intellectual mood of the time, divorced transcendence from divinity, equating God with nature. His extremely naturalistic views of reality constructed an ethical structure that links the control of human passion to virtue and happiness. By denying objective significance to things aside from human desires and beliefs, he is considered an anti-realist; and by endorsing a vision of reality according to which everyone ought to seek their own advantage, he is branded ethical egoist. This essay identified the varying influences of Spinoza’s moral anti-realism and ethical egoism on post-modernist thinkers who decried the “naïve faith” in objective and absolute truth, but rather propagated perspective relativity of reality. It recognized that modern valorization of ethical relativism, which in certain respects, detracts from the core values of the Enlightenment, has its seminal roots in his works.

Treasure Hunt: Ethical Egoism vs Individual Anarchism

This creative project is a novel with an urban-fantasy as the setting and adventure fiction as the plot framework. This novel is depicting a team of a treasure hunters, Michael Harmanto and Lucius Ferdinan. The two of them are trying to find the lost treasures of Kahja, in which they will be asked and tested in their perseverance and ego. In this creative work, I use Egoism as my topic, and I chose on understanding how egoism if applied ethically, can be treated as a good thing as my theme. Through this, I can show the process and the struggle of people clashing and betraying each other in the name of the egoistic desire of reaching their own personal goal. This story, topic, and theme were inspired by how it would be contrasting to the Indonesian philosophy as a nation. The main viewpoints which are ethical egoism and egoistical anarchism will be depicted in the way the two main characters Michael and Lucius’ attitudes, methods, and results. Keywords: ethical egoism, egoistic anarchism, urban-fantasy, adventure

Ethical Analysis of Office Romance and Sexual Favoritism Policies in the #MeToo Workplace and “Cancel Culture” Era

While most employers, managers, and employees have heard and read much about the #MeToo movement, little academic attention has been devoted to ethical analysis of office romance and sexual favoritism polices in the modern workplace. Everyone is likely to agree that romantic relationships will continue in the workplace regardless of organizational policies; nevertheless appropriate, policies should be in place to protect against any adverse legal consequences stemming from romantic relationships in the workplace; and these policies also should be promulgated and enforced in such a manner that all workplace policies and actions can be considered moral and ethical. Accordingly, in this article, we provide a thorough ethical analysis of office romance and sexual favoritism in the sensitive era of the #MeToo movement as well as the “canceled culture” era. We offer specific recommendations to management and human resources professionals on how to provide a safe and healthy work environment for all employees, how to avoid liability for sexual harassment cases as they relate to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, as well as how to ensure that the workplace is fair and just for all. We conclude that every company’s management and human resources departments should take full responsibility for ensuring that business decisions, especially those affecting the employees, are aligned with legal, moral, and, of course, ethical norms. First and foremost, appropriate policies, programs, procedures, and training are necessary to combat sexual discrimination and harassment and thus to ensure a fair, just, and functional workplace. We believe that prevention is the best means of proactively eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace. Each firm should include a clear and strong policy statement against sexual harassment and discrimination in their code of conduct expectations. The policy should have direct statement of the intolerance and prohibition of any form of sexual harassment and illegal discrimination. Each firms should also have an effective policy distribution, communication to employees and enforcement plan. Finally, retaliation must be avoided. As such, there should be assurances that complaining employees will be protected from harassment or retaliation. Keywords: office romance, love contracts, sexual favoritism, #MeToo movement, ethical egoism, ethical relativism, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics.

Offering the “Sociological Eye” to Examine Ethical Egoism at an Illustrative Homeless Shelter for Men: A Pedagogical Exercise

This is an exploration into the philosophical realm of misplaced ethics at an illustrative homeless shelter where human service practitioners should be keeping better focus on delivering services to destitute men in a large industrial city. The question raised is whether or not the cause of the ethical egoism seen there, that results in problems typical of homeless shelters around the world, is structurally based. The problems result in mistrust of the shelter and a diminishment of services to a vulnerable population. Sociologically framed questions serve as a tool for the use of the case method of teaching.

Ethics–Comparing Ethical Egoism with Confucius’s Golden Rule

Both the Eastern and Western societies have an extensive and celebrated history of ethics education. Although normative ethics have been rigorously studied epistemologically and vigorously debated, abstract ethics theories are very difficult to interpret or apply. On the other hand, applied ethical standards can usually provide more direct guidance on specific personal or business conduct in determining whether it is ethical. In this paper, we will focus on the Ethical Egoism principle. Five examples of real-world personal and/or business conducts will be provided to demonstrate how to apply this ethical standard. We will also apply Confucius’s Golden Rule to the same examples in determining whether the similar ethical evaluations can be observed.

Egoism and altruism

Henry Sidgwick conceived of egoism as an ethical theory parallel to utilitarianism: the utilitarian holds that one should maximize the good of all beings in the universe; the egoist holds instead that the good one is ultimately to aim at is only one’s own. This form of egoism (often called ‘ethical egoism’) is to be distinguished from the empirical hypothesis (‘psychological egoism’) that human beings seek to maximize their own good. Ethical egoism can approve of behaviour that benefits others, for often the best way to promote one’s good is to form cooperative relationships. But the egoist cannot approve of an altruistic justification for such cooperation: altruism requires benefiting others merely for their sake, whereas the egoist insists that one’s ultimate goal must be solely one’s own good. One way to defend ethical egoism is to affirm psychological egoism and then to propose that our obligations cannot outstrip our capacities; if we cannot help seeking to maximize our own well being, we should not hold ourselves to a less selfish standard. But this defence is widely rejected, because psychological egoism seems too simple a conception of human behaviour. Moreover, egoism violates our sense of impartiality; there is no fact about oneself that justifies excluding others from one’s ultimate end. There is, however, a different form of egoism, which flourished in the ancient world, and is not vulnerable to this criticism. It holds that one’s good consists largely or exclusively in acting virtuously, and that self-interest properly understood is therefore our best guide.

Ethics, Motivation, and Egoism

To show how this metaphysical machinery intersects with Spinoza’s ethics, chapter seven begins with a fresh account of what the author calls Spinoza’s psychological ethics, a series of descriptive claims about human desires that underwrites his metaethics. It is further argued that moral motivation for Spinoza is based on an agent’s intrinsic, appetite-based motivation for fundamental desire satisfaction. Most importantly, when this account of moral motivation is combined with his conceptualist metaphysics, Spinoza has a distinctive way of showing how moral agents can have self-interested, non-prudential moral motives to pursue the interests of others. This proposed reconciliation of Spinoza’s ethical egoism with other-regarding interests turns on his conceptualist account of how moral agents are individuated, thereby revealing just how deeply his ethics draws on his conceptualist metaphysics.

Reconceiving Spinoza

In Reconceiving Spinoza, Newlands returns to Spinoza’s self-described foundational project and provides an integrated interpretation of his metaphysical system and the way in which his metaphysics shapes, and is shaped by, his moral program. One of the overarching theses of this book is that conceptual relations form the backbone of Spinoza’s explanatory project and perform a surprising amount of work in his metaphysics and ethics. Conceptual relations are the philosophical grease that keeps the Spinozistic machine running smoothly, allowing him to do everything from reconciling monism with diversity to providing non-prudential grounds for altruism within an ethical egoist framework. One of the author’s main goals is to exhibit how much work conceptual relations do for Spinoza and how much seeing this changes our understanding of his philosophical outlook. Furthermore, given Spinoza’s metaphysics of individuals, a moral agent’s interests and even self-identity can vary, relative to some of these different ways of being conceived. This will have the startling implication that Spinoza’s ethical egoism, when combined with his concept-sensitive metaphysics, is ultimately a call to a radical kind of self-transcendence. We will thus be challenged to reconceive not only the world, but also Spinoza’s project, and perhaps even ourselves, along the way.