Fighting Female Sexual Harrasement in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions

Tertiary institutions all over the world including Nigeria are known for academic and moral excellence aimed at shaping leaders and intellectuals for the development of the world. However, the moral fabric that holds the tertiary institutions is seriously eroded because of the menace of sexual harassment to the female students in a developing country like Nigeria. Although, the menace is not only peculiar to tertiary institutions but across all workplace where male and female interact and relate with each other. In recent time the menace has negatively change the integrity and respect accosted for people in the tertiary institutions occasioned by incessant report of sexual harassment mostly directed to female students. Thus, there is constant need and clamour for way through which female students sexual harassment can be fight to the barest minimum in our tertiary institutions especially as attempt to stop this menace in the past has not yielded little or no positive outcomes. The methodology adopted in the study is the qualitative method using a content analysis approach. The concept of sexual harassment as given by various scholars and researchers were adequately domesticated in the study. The paper also beams its search light on some disturbing sexual harassment directed to the female students in the past so as to justify the presence of this menace. The study also analyses factors contributing to sexual assault. Based on these summations, the paper was able to give stringent policies that could be used to fight the scourge of sexual harassment. Received: 16 November 2020 / Accepted: 8 March 2021 / Published: 17 May 2021

Thomas Aquinas on Sexual Difference: The Metaphysical Biology and Moral Significance of Human Sexuality

Thomas Aquinas offers for his time a novel take on human sexual difference, in that he grounds human sexuality in what we might term a metaphysical biology and accords it a privileged role in the moral life. Though his biology is drawn from Aristotle, which leads Aquinas to make problematic statements on sexual difference, he nonetheless offers a perspective that remains deeply relevant and significant for today. His method or approach of tethering sexual difference first and foremost to our animal-like biological design remains perennial, particularly at a time when many seek to dismiss biology as irrelevant to sexual identity and gender difference. The latest findings of the emerging field of neurobiology, which have uncovered structural differences between the male and female brains, offer key support to Aquinas’s approach. Even more important, he holds, in an unprecedented move, that sexual design and inclination provide a veritable source of moral excellence. He goes so far as to locate the mean of virtue in our sexual design and appetites.

Environmental vices as ethical and anthropological roots of the environmental crisis

The root of environmental crisis is not only the failure to recognize the intrinsic value of the non-human world, but it can also be perceived as a failure in moral excellence and in the cultivation of virtue. The word “virtue” is an old-fashioned one, representing tradition and today we mostly associate it with academic discussion. However, the term is not only connected with traditional ethical reflection; nowadays, we can witness a revival of virtue discourse in environmental ethics, namely in environmental virtue ethics. The paper analyses the problem of cardinal virtue and vice, and tries to answer which vices are the most responsible for the environmental crisis. Thus the five crucial environmental vices are defined as egoism, greed, arrogance, ignorance and apathy.

Friedrich Schlegel, Coleridge, and the Ethics of Amathonte

Chapter seven discusses Robinson’s final attempt at making a living as a professional comparatist, or intercultural ‘literator’, to use his own term – his translation and critical transmission of Christian Leberecht Heyne’s ‘Persian tale’ Amathonte (published by Longman under the title Amatonda in 1811). Amathonte, in all its humour and playfulness characteristic of Heyne, is a scathing satirical attack on the habitual indifference with which one imbibes, from familial and social authorities, motives for decision-making. Robinson, in the preface to his translation, hence praises the book as ‘a picture of moral excellence and domestic felicity’, not least for its abolitionist appeal and advocation of emancipated communal life. This chapter hence argues that Robinson undertook the transmission of the work, encompassing his critical introduction of Friedrich Schlegel to his readers as well as appended samples from Jean Paul, according to his pioneering approach of ‘Free Moral Discourse’. Amathonte subsequently caught the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who discussed and praised it in a letter to Robinson of March 1811. Chapter seven therefore also recapitulates Robinson’s ‘intimate acquaintance’ with, and ‘enthusiasm for’ (Diana Behler), the critical school of the Schlegel brothers, in particular their Athenaeum.

Science and the Unearned Virtues of the ‘Really Religious People’: Exploring the Association between Perceived Religiosity and Science Rejection among Students in the Midwestern United States

Formal school education in the US is a prime site where epistemological legitimacy is forged between science and faith. The intersection of science and faith in American school classes is guarded by both students and teachers with variable ideological commitments, and equally variable visions of what an appropriate boundary politics should be. Long examines the discourse of students who credit evolution or climate change rejection to ‘the really religious people’, as his informants describe it. Students who profess an ecumenical – or what Wuthnow (2005) would describe as a ‘both–and’ approach to science/faith boundaries – see rejection of these scientific orthodoxies by their peers as both the product of extreme religious views, but also, curiously, use language which ascribes such views with an amplified form of virtuous practice. At the same time, these same religiously temperate students do not describe their own form of practice as being a potential site of moral excellence in service of science. In this chapter, Long asks why this is. How did this deference to extremism emerge as a discourse? What social work does this discourse do? Through the lens of MacIntyre’s (1981) After Virtue, he analyses this power differential for both its likely discursive function and offers ways to make this insight pedagogically useful to scholars of science and religion.

Forming Students’ Character through School Culture in Senior High School Taruna Nusantara Magelang

Policy on character education has long been applied in Indonesia, with the hope to develop a civilization to be more dignified and become savvy citizens and not experiencing a moral crisis. However, by looking at the reality of the matter at this time, a moral crisis never stops destroying the nation's generation. If not treated immediately it will trigger the development of characters that do not reflect the identity and character of the nation that will result in a weak future generation. Therefore, this study aims to determine the character of the students that is implanted or formed through the school culture in Taruna Nusantara. The research is a qualitative case study research, the data collection techniques used were interviews, observation and documentation. The results showed that the effective character education is the transformation of culture and life in a boarding school that is in Taruna Nusantara High School in Magelang. Character formation of students can be achieved through school's culture as being in the grand of designing character education, because of character as a "moral excellence" or morals in the wake of various policies (virtues) who in turn only has meaning when based on the values that apply in the culture.

“Where Are We Going?” Dante’s Inferno or Richard Rorty’s “Liberal Ironist”

This paper elucidates the structure of moral action by arguing that Dante’s explanation in the Inferno of why people end up in their respective circles of hell is superior in terms of accounting for the structure of moral reasoning to Richard Rorty’s promotion of the “liberal ironist.” The latter suffers an internal contradiction—it wants a well-lived life without any overriding aims, but such a life is understandable only in light of affirming life-aims. The former convincingly shows that the structure of action reveals the truth of the well-known apothegm—“we reap what we sow.” The main point for Dante is not who is rational (for even the rational can be vicious, as depicted in the Inferno), but whose aims actually fulfill the practical life. This comparison of Dante and Rorty can have larger pedagogical aims, helping students to understand better what Albert William Levi calls “the moral imagination” and deepening their appreciation of how metaphors and paradigms of moral excellence provide, or fail to provide, an overriding unity and purpose to our actions.