Moral Sensitivity of Young People with Intellectual Disability – Its Role in The Process of Their Education

According to Heller and Życiński (1980) the primary regulator of human behaviour is the system of values therefore its development should be in the centre of all educational and upbringing measures. Our focus here is on moral sensitivity understood as the ability of an individual to see social situations from the perspective of moral good and moral evil that represent values embodied in moral norms adopted by the world and internalised by humans as the principles of conduct. The main research question was the following: How morally sensitive are persons with ID and how is their sensitivity associated with the degree of intellectual disability and gender? A non-probability sample 267 of Polish residents aged 16-30 years with mild (58.42%) or moderate (41.58%) intellectual disability was assembled. Men and women were almost in equal proportion. The Moral Sensitivity Inventory (MSI; Otrębski, Sudoł, 2020) has been used to measure the moral sensitivity of people with ID. It consists of 10 illustrated stories presenting typical social situations containing moral dilemmas, and an evaluation form. The tested person’s task is to answer the following question “Who, in this story, did something right or wrong, and what was that?” and to indicate as many moral elements in the story and the picture as they can. The results imply that the study participants had different ability to discern moral good and moral evil. They were more sensitive to the manifestations of good and evil bad associated with Understanding one’s behaviour and its impact on others (more than one-fourth of them had high scores) and less perceptive of those relating to Respect for others’ property and Conformance to principles and norms. The results of the study expand the knowledge of the overall moral sensitivity of persons with intellectual disabilities.

The Consumer Ideology and the Truth about Man

The formation of the human conscience is a controverted question in both philosophical ethics and moral philosophy. Conscience refers to one’s conception and understanding of the moral good. An especially significant manifestation of the problem of conscience in the 20th and 21st centuries is the impact of ideology on the individual person’s moral sense. This article considers the impact of two 19th century philosophies―Mill’s utilitarianism and Marxism―on contemporary moral thought insofar as the interaction of these two produce a powerful materialist ideology to determine the modern European and American conscience. We then turn to the thought of Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła), who in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor and in his earlier philosophical writings developed an account of moral truth by which the dangers of materialistic ideology can be overcome. It is argued, with John Paul II, that only in the context of truth can a coherent account of freedom of conscience under the moral law be developed.

Origin of a Risk-Based Security System

In general, from a long-term perspective, we implement various systems aimed to improve our lives. The exception, however, is war, which — by definition — assumes achieving certain benefits through losses. Therefore, in the case of armed conflicts, it is impossible to ensure stabilisation and balance of social relations, as every military conflict, while serving future goals, simultaneously ruins the present ones. After all, war is the manifestation of risks undertaken in the name of uncertain objectives and a tragedy experienced both by losers and winners. War always entails losses, suffering and widespread crime, as well as blurs the concept of moral good. From this point of view, war appears to be foolish and dangerous to life and health. Nevertheless, militarisation has been the most pronounced trend underlining the dynamics of history, driving technological progress and civilisational development, even at the cost of abandoning transcendental hope for the better. War, although an unquestionable evil, does not deter people, but rather entices them, as exemplified by various dangerous behaviours in common risk-taking at various levels.

Let's Play GOLF!

A central feature of the “free will defense” as developed by Alvin Plantinga is his response to the claim that God can create a world containing creatures with libertarian freedom that contains no moral evil. Plantinga’s response appeals to the notion of “morally significant freedom” according to which free creatures, in order to do moral good, must be capable of moral evil. In this paper, I argue, first, that morally significant freedom is not required for free creatures to do moral good and, second, that other recent attempts to necessitate a creaturely capability for evil likewise fail. The upshot of my paper is that the free will defense simply won’t work because it is possible and feasible for God to create a world containing libertarianly free creatures capable of moral good and yet containing no moral evil.

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN's AESTHETICS BETWEEN PLATO AND KANT (TO THE QUESTION OF FORMATION OF THE CATEGORIES OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME)

The article analyzes the aesthetic views of Friedrich Hölderlin, and, first, his understanding of the categories of the Beautiful and Sublime. Particular attention is paid to the comparison of Hölderlin's views with the aesthetic teachings of Plato and Immanuel Kant, who had a great influence on the German poet. The author of the article concludes that Hölderlin sought to unite the Platonian and Kantian understanding of beauty, seeing the similarity between the concepts of Plato and Kant in the question of the source of the beautiful. The central for aesthetics of Hölderlin was the problem of combining the spheres of aesthetic and ethical, to solve which he relied on the idea of Kant about beautiful as a symbol of the moral good and the Teaching of Plato on the climbing of the soul to the Good. Hölderlin pays less attention to the theoretical development of the category of the Sublime than to the comprehension of the category of the Beautiful, however, in his writings, the Sublime is present implicitly, and Hölderlin's understanding of this category is close, on the one hand, to Platonian, bringing together the Beautiful and the Sublime, and, on the other, to Kantian understanding, which brings the Sublime together with the idea of infinity, God and the sphere of morality. The conclusions to which Hölderlin comes, are far from Platonism, and from Kantianism. The poet concludes about the central and leading role of poetry and poetic gift in the knowledge of the world, which should be aesthetic. This indicates a romantic way to interpret Hölderlin's aesthetic concepts of Plato and Kant.

The ambivalent presence of economics in the work of Stuart Cunningham

In this short paper, I want to consider the ways in which Stuart Cunningham's focus on work that was policy-relevant and could speak to industry led him to an ambivalent relationship with the discipline of economics. Rejecting the binary opposition between alleged ‘neoliberal’ economics and the cultural sphere as a site of unbridled moral good, Cunningham sought to both engage with and critique the dominant paradigms of economics, and their influence in Australian public policy. In doing so, his work is strongly influenced by Ian Hunter's argument that scholarly work motivated by civically minded engagements with matters of public concern needed to go beyond moral grandstanding and engage critically with the institutional complexities of social and cultural governance.

Karl Barth's Moral Thought

Does theological ethics articulate moral norms with the assistance of moral philosophy? Or does it leave that task to moral philosophy alone while it describes a distinctively Christian way of acting or form of life? These questions lie at the heart of theological ethics as a discipline. Karl Barth’s theological ethics makes a strong case for the first alternative. This book follows Barth’s efforts to present God’s grace as a moral norm in his treatments of divine commands, moral reasoning, responsibility, and agency. It shows how Barth’s conviction that grace is the norm of human action generates problems for his ethics at nearly every turn, as it involves a moral good that confronts human beings from outside rather than perfecting them as the kind of creature they are. Yet it defends Barth’s insistence on the right of theology to articulate moral norms, and it shows how Barth may lead theological ethics to exercise that right in a more compelling way than he did.

Donor Identity, Morality, and Nonprofit Organizations: Soliciting Donations and Recruiting Volunteers for the Red Cross, 1863–1919

Recent literature has highlighted the central role that donor identity, the perception of oneself as a giving person, plays in fundraising. In this, nonprofit organizations develop strategies to encourage a generous self-perception among potential donors and volunteers to elicit donations. However, existing literature has not yet examined the cultural repertoires that organizations develop to portray convincing representations of donor identity to their donor and volunteer base. This article argues that nonprofit organizations draw on broad, culturally defined notions of the moral good to create idealized depictions of a donor identity. To demonstrate, the article looks at the early decades of the Red Cross movement. It shows that the movement developed four different logics to depict romanticized notions of donors and volunteers, each based on a different idea of the social good. The article argues that such meaning-making is a key aspect of nonprofit organizations’ work.

Adherence to public institutions that foster cooperation

Humans typically consider altruism a moral good and condition their social behavior on the moral reputations of others. Indirect reciprocity explains how social norms and reputations support cooperation: individuals cooperate with others who are considered good. Indirect reciprocity works when an institution monitors and publicly broadcasts moral reputations. Here we develop a theory of adherence to public monitoring in societies where individuals are, at first, independently responsible for evaluating the reputations of their peers. Using a mathematical model, we show that adherence to an institution of moral assessment can evolve and promote cooperation under four different social norms, including norms that previous studies found to perform poorly. We determine how an institution’s size and its degree of tolerance towards anti-social behavior affect the rate of cooperation. Public monitoring serves to eliminate disagreements about reputations, which increases cooperation and payoffs, so that adherence evolves by social contagion and remains robust against displacement.

Who Studied at the Beit Midrash?: Funding Palestinian Amoraic Education

The house of study of Amoraic Palestine has resisted study because of its informality. By situating it alongside Hellenistic, Roman and Christian education, this article argues that examining their funding provides a means of understanding the structural tendencies of these study circles. Communal support appears mostly aspirational, providing clues as to intention and conflicts regarding inclusion. Similarly, narratives concerning individual gifts urge their moral good rather than their reliability, thus pointing inevitably to fees as the underlying means of support for the beit midrash. The necessity of fees in turn demands consideration of how those of more marginal means, including scribes, could afford this tuition. Finally, that teaching younger children provided one avenue of such support reveals a complex interdependency of those who had easier access to this education and those who had less access, as well as the barely glimpsed suggestion of other educational alternatives.