Download or read book Realism and Imagination in Ethics written by Sabina Lovibond and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Moral Imagination written by John Paul Lederach and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.
Download or read book Moral Properties and Moral Imagination written by Tyler Doggett and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Moral Realism" is about an argument against moral realism, why it is unsound, and what emerges from that. The argument is that if there were moral properties, they would be queerly related to non-moral properties and this is sufficient reason to think there are no moral properties. The argument is unsound for two reasons. The first emerges from consideration of sensational properties like being in pain or being in ecstasy-they bear the queer relation to non-sensational properties. The second emerges from consideration of vice properties like being an instance of greediness-they are not queerly related to non-moral properties. Analogies between moral and sensational properties are discussed. A disanalogy between the moral and sensational is important to "The Explanatory Gap" which discusses Levine's notion of an explanatory gap, relates it to the queer relation discussed in "Moral Realism," and criticizes one use to which it is put. The criticism emerges from consideration of the disanalogy between the moral and sensational: our moral imagination is considerably more limited than our sensational imagination. That there are limits to our moral imagination is interesting. "Imaginative Resistance" solves an old puzzle from Hume about the limits of our imaginative capacities, for example, the inability of some people (myself, for example) to imagine that baseless killing is morally permissible. Both the puzzle and solution illuminate the natures of imagination and possibility and the relation between them.
Download or read book Morality for Humans written by Mark Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A welcome renewal and defense of John Dewey's ethical naturalism, which Johnson claims is the only morality ‘fit for actual human beings.’” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews What is the difference between right and wrong? This is no easy question to answer, yet we constantly try to make it so, frequently appealing to absolutes, whether drawn from God, universal reason, or societal authority. Combining cognitive science with a pragmatist philosophical framework, Mark Johnson argues that appealing solely to absolute principles is not only scientifically unsound but even morally suspect. He shows that the standards for the kinds of people we should be and how we should treat one another are frequently subject to change. Taking context into consideration, he offers a nuanced, naturalistic view of ethics that sees us creatively adapt our standards according to given needs, emerging problems, and social interactions. Ethical naturalism is not just a revamped form of relativism. Indeed, Johnson attempts to overcome the absolutist-versus-relativist impasse that has been one of the most intractable problems in the history of philosophy. Much of our moral thought, he shows, is automatic and intuitive, gut feelings that we attempt to justify with rational analysis and argument. However, good moral deliberation is not limited to intuitive judgments supported after the fact by reasoning. Johnson points out a crucial third element: we imagine how our decisions will play out, how we or the world would change with each action we might take. Plumbing this imaginative dimension of moral reasoning, he provides a psychologically sophisticated view of moral problem solving, one perfectly suited for the embodied, culturally embedded, and ever-developing human creatures that we are.
Download or read book Inside Ethics written by Alice Crary and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Crary offers a transformative account of moral thought about human beings and animals. Instead of assuming that the world places no demands on our moral imagination, she underscores the urgency of treating the exercise of moral imagination as necessary for arriving at an adequate world-guided understanding of human beings and animals.
Download or read book Being True to the World written by Jonathan A. Jacobs and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1990 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins with a critique of moral relativism and proceeds to develop a realist account of practical wisdom. The central claims are that there are objective moral facts and that knowledge of these facts can be action-guiding. The justification for these claims involves explaining the role of imagination in moral judgment and action and also showing how a realist approach to morality enables us to better account for immorality, revealing it to involve ignorance, error or falsification. The book concludes with an analysis of how the character of social relations is crucial to the formation of self-conceptions and the development of moral knowledge and moral imagination.
Download or read book Anthropological Realism written by Stephen J. A. Ward and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropological Realism is a new theory of ethics that transforms static moral principles into global normative ideals. Two prominent weaknesses in the field provide the rationale for this book. First, as a discipline, ethics lacks a strong theoretical basis. A second concern is moral parochialism. Technologies are global, but international perspectives rarely reflect an ethics anchored in humanity as a whole. Progress in developing a moral globalism as the basis for ethics has been prevented by unproductive dualisms that lead to stalemates. Ethics is typically divided into opposites such as individual and society, consequentialism and deontology, and local and global. To deal constructively with this history of unproductive disputes, the book focuses on a fundamental rivalry in philosophical ethics—the opposition between realism and anti-realism. To move the field forward, the authors create a next-generation moral theory of hybrid moral realism that promotes a sustainable global ethics of humaneness and human flourishing.
Download or read book Film and the Ethical Imagination written by Asbjorn Gronstad and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the turn to ethics in literature, film, and visual culture. It discusses the concept of a biovisual ethics, offering a new theory of the relation between film and ethics based on the premise that images are capable of generating their own ethical content. This ethics operates hermeneutically and materializes in cinema’s unique power to show us other modes of being. The author considers a wealth of contemporary art films and documentaries that embody ethical issues through the very form of the text. The ethical imagination generated by films such as The Nine Muses, Post Tenebras Lux, Amour, and Nostalgia For the Light is crucially defined by openness, uncertainty, opacity, and the refusal of hegemonic practices of visual representation.
Download or read book How To Re Imagine The World written by Anthony Weston and published by New Society Publishers. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to BIG ideas — to reawakening the radical imagination for social transformation. Who says that all possible social and political systems have already been invented? Or that work -- or marriage, or environmentalism, or anything else -- must be just what they are now? This book is a conceptual toolbox for imagining and initiating radical social change. Chapters offer specific, focused, and shareable techniques: Seeking a Whole Vision: creating a pull and not just a push toward change. Generative thinking: Looking for "Seeds" and "Sparks", Stretching and Twisting Ideas, and Going Two Steps Too Far. Looking for Unexpected Openings: "Weeds" and "Wild Cards", Inside Tracks, Leverage Points, and Hidden Possibilities. Working at the Roots: Reconstructing the built world, cultural practices, even worldviews. Building Momentum: Playing to our Strengths; Reclaiming the Language; "Allying Everywhere"; Doing it Now, Going for Broke... Leap-frogging new kinds of cars and better mass transit in turn, why not a world in which "transportation" itself is unneeded? What about remaking New Orleans as a floating city, or putting only extreme surfers in the path of hurricanes? And why not dream of the stars? The question is not whether radical change is coming. It is already well underway. The only question is who will make it. Why not us?
Download or read book Anti Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism written by Stanley G. Clarke and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a timely collection of important papers. It gives focus to a new development in moral philosophy, by defining the problems it addresses, by identifying the similarities and differences among various representatives, and by articulating the common themes which run through the works of these people." -- John Kekes "The book reveals an underlying unity to what might at first appear to be a diverse body of literature. The first section on "Anti-theory in Ethics" collects all of the most important contributions to the growing skepticism about moral theory as it is currently practiced. In itself it would make an interesting and useful collection. By combining it with the second section on moral conservatism, the editors reveal that the implications of the anti-theorists' arguments are not merely negative, and extend beyond the confines of methodological disputes in academic philosophy. The essays in part two both discuss moral conservatism and exemplify it; in so doing they reveal that attempting to build comprehensive theories is not the only way in which moral philosophy can be both rigorous and critical." -- Arthur Ripstein This volume documents a movement from theory and rules in ethics to an account of morality based on local practice and perception of the particular case. The Introduction lays the foundation for this position, then the authors draw from the analytic tradition as they forcefully argue against theory derived from different philosophical ancestors. In the second half they examine moral conservatism, exhibiting how placing moral practice as primary does not restrict one to any form of political conservatism.
Download or read book Essays on Moral Realism written by Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of influential essays illustrates the range, depth, and importance of moral realism, the fundamental issues it raises, and the problems it faces.
Download or read book Compassionate Moral Realism written by Colin Marshall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colin Marshall offers a ground-up defense of objective morality, drawing inspiration from a wide range of philosophers, including John Locke, Arthur Schopenhauer, Iris Murdoch, Nel Noddings, and David Lewis. Marshall's core claim is compassion is our capacity to perceive other creatures' pains, pleasures, and desires. Non-compassionate people are therefore perceptually lacking, regardless of how much factual knowledge they might have. Marshall argues that people who do have this form of compassion thereby fit a familiar paradigm of moral goodness. His argument involves the identification of an epistemic good which Marshall dubs "being in touch". To be in touch with some property of a thing requires experiencing it in a way that reveals that property - that is, experiencing it as it is in itself. Only compassion, Marshall argues, lets us be in touch with others' motivational mental properties. This conclusion about compassion has two important metaethical consequences. First, it generates an answer to the question "Why be moral?", which has been a central philosophical concern since Plato. Second, it provides the keystone for a novel form of moral realism. This form of moral realism has a distinctive set of virtues: it is anti-relativist, naturalist, and able to identify a necessary connection between moral representation and motivation. The view also implies that there is an epistemic asymmetry between virtuous and vicious agents, according to which only morally good people can fully face reality.
Download or read book Impossible Dreams written by Susan Babbitt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both contemporary philosophy and commonsense morality presuppose a personal autonomy and integrity that an unjust social system may make impossible for some people. Babbitt examines the implications of this insight, drawing on feminist and antiracist political theory, contemporary analytic ethics and philosophy of mind, and nonphilosophical literature. She argues for the role of moral imagination in discovering and defending a more humane social vision. }Conventional wisdom and commonsense morality tend to take the integrity of persons for granted. But for people in systematically unjust societies, self-respect and human dignity may prove to be impossible dreams.Susan Babbitt explores the implications of this insight, arguing that in the face of systemic injustice, individual and social rationality may require the transformation rather than the realization of deep-seated aims, interests, and values. In particular, under such conditions, she argues, the cultivation and ongoing exercise of moral imagination is necessary to discover and defend a more humane social vision. Impossible Dreams is one of those rare books that fruitfully combines discourses that were previously largely separate: feminist and antiracist political theory, analytic ethics and philosophy of mind, and a wide range of non-philosophical literature on the lives of oppressed peoples around the world. It is both an object lesson in reaching across academic barriers and a demonstration of how the best of feminist philosophy can be in conversation with the best of mainstream philosophyas well as affect the lives of real people. }
Download or read book John Dewey and Moral Imagination written by Steven Fesmire and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-04 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While examining the important role of imagination in making moral judgments, John Dewey and Moral Imagination focuses new attention on the relationship between American pragmatism and ethics. Steven Fesmire takes up threads of Dewey's thought that have been largely unexplored and elaborates pragmatism's distinctive contribution to understandings of moral experience, inquiry, and judgment. Building on two Deweyan notions -- that moral character, belief, and reasoning are part of a social and historical context and that moral deliberation is an imaginative, dramatic rehearsal of possibilities -- Fesmire shows that moral imagination can be conceived as a process of aesthetic perception and artistic creativity. Fesmire's original readings of Dewey shed new light on the imaginative process, human emotional make-up and expression, and the nature of moral judgment. This original book presents a robust and distinctly pragmatic approach to ethics, politics, moral education, and moral conduct.
Download or read book Moral Realism written by Keith Edward Burkum and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Feminist Interpretations of David Hume written by Anne Jaap Jacobson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays cover a diversity of subjects in Hume's work. They discuss his theory of knowledge: his conception of human inquiry and the human mind: his views on our knowledge of the external world and the future: his treatments of the passions, emotions, and virtue, his conception of moral education and his views on aesthetics and religion and his historical work.
Download or read book Rationalism Realism and Relativism written by Robert L. Arrington and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1970s and 1980s, the field of ethics underwent a profound change in perspective from noncognitivism to cognitivism regarding moral judgments and reasoning. Although metaethical noncognitivism had been the predominant point of view during the previous three decades, a series of attacks had undermined its authority by the 1970s, and it gave way to the cognitivist belief that moral judgments have truth values. This book provides a descriptive and critical guide to the often bewildering scene that resulted from these controversies in contemporary moral epistemology.
