A Leadership Role: Creating an Ethics of Diversity

Although we desire peace and tranquility, harmony and social stability, life can be harsh and brutish. We also acknowledge exploiting the values of others for self- aggrandizement negates their sacred personhood. And although we dance on the summit of individual rights and liberties conceding their personal and private nature, we need to understand democracy is built on a collectivity of like-minded people, on a foundation of dialogic civility, communal accountability, and a moral sensibility that is pubic and open to criticism and adjustments.

Ivan Karamazov as a Philosophical Type—but which one?

The article analyses a set of philosophical statements made by and attributed to Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in order to answer the question as to what kind of philosophy Ivan may be said to express in the novel. My close reading reveals that there is a significant distinction between, on the one hand, Ivan's most radical statements, that is his rational egoism and the idea that "everything is permitted," which are always given in reported speech, and on the other the “Ivan of direct speech,” a character characterized by far more moral sensibility (e.g. in the Pro et contra part). On the basis of these findings the article seeks to bring together two traditions in the reception of Dostoevsky—the philosophical and the narratological. By letting these approaches inform one another I suggest ways in which the structural organization of the text is itself a bearer of philosophical meaning. Moreover, the article takes seriously Bakhtin's claim that Dostoevsky's heroes are not merely stable representations of ideas, but engage with them through dialogue and encounters with others, as exemplified by Ivan Karamazov himself as well as by other characters' responses to his articulations.

Freedom and Obligation

This chapter has three aims. First, it gives an overview of the reception of Kant’s project of moral justification up to the twentieth century, showing that Kant’s first readers detected no great rift between the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. A consensus that Kant reversed or rejected the argument of Groundwork III only takes shape in 1960. Second, this chapter returns to the details of Groundwork III and argues that Kant appeals to the idea of an intelligible world to warrant our possession of a free will. Third, this chapter argues that, while the second Critique is mostly continuous with Kant’s earlier argument, it goes further by including a theory of moral sensibility.

Moral Sensibility

This chapter forms the next main thesis of the present study: the synthetic path of the second Critique is broader in scope, since Kant seeks to reveal a necessary connection between our consciousness of the moral law and our capacity to feel pleasure and displeasure. The chapter picks up where Chapter 3 left off by providing a close reading of Kant’s theory of moral sensibility in the Critique of Practical Reason. Two important results follow. First, it is argued that debates over the role of moral feeling in Kant’s moral psychology have failed to acknowledge Kant’s emphasis on the first-personal character of feeling as a feature of our common experience of morality. Second, these debates have failed to connect Kant’s theory of moral sensibility to his project of justification, which the present chapter aims to remedy.

The Vicious Undertow of Vanity in Young Adult

The film Young Adult offers a striking example of vanity and its entanglement with other vices. Mavis Garry is prompted to return to her home town to woo a married, former beau out of vanity: an overweening desire to be admired for her appearance and authorship. Vanity involves wishing to be seen possessing something valuable that others lack and bestowing excessive attention on it, as in Mavis’s repeated physical preening and buffing. Because comparison is central to vanity, it contributes to Mavis’s envy. Vanity also encourages her arrogance by inflating Mavis’s distorted view of her self-worth. At the film’s climax, Mavis’s defects are publicly witnessed, producing in her the salutary moral experience of shame. However, Mavis’s incipient self-awareness and shame are dissipated by a few words from a fawning fan, as the undertow of vanity pulls Mavis beneath the clarity of the moral sensibility that was momentarily evoked by shame.

Building the World New

When the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a world ended for Margaret Mead. Suddenly, the world’s problems seemed more massive and immediate than ever before in human history. Mead turned her prodigious energies to these problems by working with dozens of organizations, many of them international and interfaith. As Mead’s circle of friends, colleagues, collaborators, and students expanded, in keeping with the expansive vision of liberal Protestantism at the midpoint of the twentieth century, her family ties frayed. Only her relationship with her daughter survived to 1950. Her relationship with Christianity hit a rough patch, too. Publicly, she spoke harshly of American churches. When asked to articulate what she believed, she did not mention God. Privately, though, a stream of spirituality still flowed, feeding her moral sensibility and forming a legacy to pass on to Catherine.

The Philosophy of Nature in Diderot and Rousseau

Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were avid readers of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and active participants in the quarrels prompted by Rameau’s operas. To date, scholarship has focused primarily on their theorization of physiological and moral sensibility. Chapter 2 investigates Diderot’s and Rousseau’s response to the spectacle of nature, focusing on the affinity between the inspiration of the artist and the identification of the spectator. Jan Goldstein has characterized “enthusiasm” and “imagination” as eighteenth-century smear words. These terms are recuperated in Diderot’s writings on painting and the theater and Rousseau’s writings on opera and the novel, however. Enthusiasm, like pity, necessitates a movement outside oneself that facilitates union with the other and the forging of the ideal model. The chapter concludes by considering the alternate forms of natural spectacle that Diderot and Rousseau envision in their writings.

Artificial Intelligence in the Administration of Justice

Computer-operated systems are increasingly used for decision-making in public administration and private enterprise. Activities that were reserved to humans because they required decision-making in varied and unpredictable circumstances may now be performed by artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning is developing at such a pace that it is conceivable that algorithm-operated systems may be able to provide litigation services and even adjudication. Supplanting lawyers and judges by AI would have serious implications beyond the loss of jobs. AI lawyers and AI judges would change the adversarial system beyond recognition by reducing adjudication into one machine operation, putting an end to the visibility of court process, and eliminating the physical presence of the court. Court legitimacy would be undermined because AI adjudication would not be able to reflect human psychology; emotions, aspirations, beliefs or moral sensibility.

Disorders of Desire or Moral Striving?

This chapter takes one case of the dangers posed by desire across religious divides—in this instance the small event of a Muslim girl and a Hindu boy in one of the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi having fallen in love with each other. The scene of desire that transcends religious differences and transgresses a given moral code is a significant motif in the poetic imaginary in South Asia, but it rarely asks how such desire is sustained within the social? Usually such love affairs are presented either in the form of cautionary tales or as allegories of the closeness of love and death. In the case examined, the motif shifts to that of inhabiting a life in this difference. The chapter shows that it is not only the couple but everyone in the family who is given an opportunity to make shifts, to learn how to inhabit a newness. The notion of an adjacent self, parallel to the idea of the neighborhood of the actual everyday and the eventual everyday, is taken up to show a moral sensibility that is not about escape from the everyday but an inhabitation of the everyday through a realization of new possibilities within it.