Conclusion

This concluding chapter highlights some criticisms of the virtues. David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche both challenged the traditional construal of the virtues and their role. Hume’s approach to morality was based upon ‘moral sentiment’ where moral feelings were central to one’s deliberation about ethics and so one’s practical reason was simply a means to best secure the satisfaction of one’s various desires. Nietzsche argues that the traditional virtues are merely terms used and cultivated by the weak to control the strong. He draws up a ‘genealogy of morals’ and concludes that terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ have no real meaning apart from self-descriptions of the people who employ them.

ethics of caring in the child-friendly projects: new challenges

This paper aims to consider the implications of Noddings’ ethics of care theory for child-friendly projects and their underlying philosophical assumptions. It is explained that this theory with its emphasis on the children’s needs and rights and, more importantly, the emphasis on the care relation and care encounter indicates how Noddings’ main concepts and ideas could be taken into consideration in exploring the challenges of implementing child-friendly projects. Therefore, the main concepts of ethics of care theory including need and right, empathy and sympathy, receptive and projective, care about and cared-for, expressed and inferred needs were investigated by considering their adaptation with the origin and the destination of child-friendly projects. Accordingly, a series of questions was set out to illustrate the theoretical challenges that may have been reflected in implementing the child-friendly project. These questions were also categorized in light of three core characteristics of Noddings’ theory of caring: 1) relational ontology; which refers to the relational nature of children life, 2) attention with concern; which refers to the moral sentiment/non-rational life of children and 3) particularism; which refers to the particularity of children’s lives. As individuals/researchers and as members of the child-friendly community we can focus on these questions to understand the challenges of the project and provide a potential for its qualitative evaluation.

The Idea of the Aesthetic

Lawrence spoke readily of art and its relation to life but was suspicious of the word ‘aesthetic’, which had been inflected by the aestheticism of the preceding generation. It is nonetheless a necessary term which his thought and practice help to clarify. The idea of the aesthetic has been controversial since its emergence in the late eighteenth century partly in response to the movement of moral sentiment and the fashion of sensibility. Rather than simply reject the excesses of sensibility, the aesthetic condition sought to transmute the quality of the emotion, turning feeling into impersonal understanding. But the cultural war over the value of feeling continued into the modernist generation who sometimes identified as ‘classical’ or ‘romantic’ in their view of emotion. Lawrence mocked such ‘classiosity’ as fear of feeling. This chapter compares him with his major contemporaries and suggests his significance within a broader history of thinking on the aesthetic.

The Creature as a Figure of Unrestitutability, or Monsters in Paradise not Allowed: Benevolence and Restitution in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

This chapter brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in conversation with two moral sentiment philosophers of the 18th century, Joseph Butler and David Hume. It focuses on the connection between the modern restitutive trope and reparation as premised on shared humanity. The ‘problem’ that the Creature from Frankenstein illuminates is the conditional logic of restitution, which is open only to those who are already included in human society; animals, monsters, and other non-humans do not partake in restitution. By showing that the concept of benevolence has a central place in the construction of prelapsarian desires in Shelley’s novel, the chapter argues that the Creature represents for the other protagonists the humanity’s ‘radical outside’; he is both excluded from the benevolent society and divested of restitutive possibilities. The Creature is a figure of ‘unrestitutability’ because the possibilities of return, undoing and repair are barred from him by the virtue of his constitutive exclusion from humanity.

Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus: A Collection of 35k Tweets Annotated for Moral Sentiment

Research has shown that accounting for moral sentiment in natural language can yield insight into a variety of on- and off-line phenomena such as message diffusion, protest dynamics, and social distancing. However, measuring moral sentiment in natural language is challenging, and the difficulty of this task is exacerbated by the limited availability of annotated data. To address this issue, we introduce the Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus, a collection of 35,108 tweets that have been curated from seven distinct domains of discourse and hand annotated by at least three trained annotators for 10 categories of moral sentiment. To facilitate investigations of annotator response dynamics, we also provide psychological and demographic metadata for each annotator. Finally, we report moral sentiment classification baselines for this corpus using a range of popular methodologies.