When Dewey scholars and educational theorists appeal to the value of educative growth, what exactly do they mean? Is an individual's growth contingent on receiving a formal education? Is growth too abstract a goal for educators to pursue? Richard Rorty contended that the request for a “criterion of growth” is a mistake made by John Dewey's “conservative critics,” for it unnecessarily restricts the future “down to the size of the present.” Nonetheless, educational practitioners inspired by Dewey's educational writings may ask (...) Dewey scholars and educational theorists, “How do I facilitate growth in my classroom?” Here ShaneRalston asserts, in spite of Rorty's argument, that searching for a more concrete standard of Deweyan growth is perfectly legitimate. In this essay, Ralston reviews four recent books on Dewey's educational philosophy—Naoko Saito's The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson, Stephen Fishman and Lucille McCarthy's John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope, and James Scott Johnston's Inquiry and Education: John Dewey and the Quest for Democracy and Deweyan Inquiry: From Educational Theory to Practice—and through his analysis identifies some possible ways for Dewey-inspired educators to make growth a more practical pedagogical ideal. (shrink)
In James Gouinlock's essay "Dewey's Theory of Moral Deliberation," he argues that Morton White and Charles L. Stevenson's criticisms of John Dewey's ethical theory are based upon fundamental misinterpretations of Dewey's theory of moral deliberation. In this paper, I attempt, in the spirit of Gouinlock's 1978 essay, to widen and enrich the discussion of Dewey's theory of moral deliberation by relating it to a claim of political philosophers and theorists that is recently in vogue, namely, that Dewey's writings contain a (...) nascent theory of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democratic theorists contend that deliberation is the group activity that transforms individual preferences and behavior into mutual understanding, agreement and collective action. If Deweyan democracy is identified with deliberative democracy, do Dewey scholars risk making Dewey's democratic vision a useless relic for theorizing about democracy in the wake of the deliberative turn? The paper is organized into four sections. In the first, I summarize the positions of those scholars defending the view that John Dewey was a proto-deliberative democrat, in effect anticipating the deliberative turn in democratic theory. The second section examines Gouinlock's thesis that despite White and Stevenson's mistaken accounts, Dewey offered a distinctive and insightful way of understanding moral judgment. In the third section, my analysis reveals the political dimension of Dewey's theory of moral deliberation. The fourth and concluding section explores the lesson that my analysis might impart to commentators enamored with the idea that Dewey's vision of democracy is essentially deliberative. (shrink)
Many commentators cite John Dewey's support for Woodrow Wilson's administration and U.S. entry into the First World War as evidence against the claim that he was a pacifist. However, what they ignore is his leadership of the Outlawry of War Movement and his subsequent renunciation of his earlier pro-war views. This paper examines the controversy, beginning with Dewey's debate with Randolph Bourne over American involvement in the war to "make the world safe for democracy" and ending with his activities as (...) a leader of the Outlawry of War Movement. The touchstone essays for the debate between Dewey and Bourne are Dewey's "What America Will Fight For" and Bourne's "Twilight of the Idols." For Dewey's involvement in the Outlawry of War Movement, the essays "If War Were Outlawed" and "What Outlawry of War is Not" are instructive for how we might salvage Dewey's pacifist vision as a resource for the contemporary Peace Movement. I conclude that Dewey's writings and actions do provide good reason to restore his credentials as a philosopher of peace. (shrink)
Most contemporary deliberative democrats contend that deliberation is the group activity that transforms individual preferences and behavior into mutual understanding, agreement and collective action. A critical mass of political theorists committed to the value of democratic deliberation also claims that John Dewey's writings contain a nascent theory of deliberative democracy. Unfortunately, very few commentators have noted the similarities between Dewey and Robert Goodin's theories of deliberation, as well as the surprising contrast between their modeling of deliberation and the predominant view (...) in the deliberative democracy literature. Both Dewey and Robert Goodin have advanced theories of deliberation which emphasize the value of internal, monological or individual deliberative procedures, rather than external, dialogical and group ones. What distinguishes Goodin and Dewey's conceptions of deliberation is that Dewey's concerns the psychological activity of imagining possible ways to solve moral problems, whereas Goodin's pertains to the process of internal consideration that precedes political dialogue and decision making, or 'deliberation within.' Despite this difference, Dewey's theory of moral deliberation appears to share more in common with Goodin's account of deliberation within than with the dialogical models widely embraced by contemporary deliberative democrats. So, if deliberative theorists truly want to appropriate Dewey's model of moral deliberation, then, I argue, they ought to reconsider Goodin's alternative (monological) account as a pragmatic strategy for sustaining the deliberative turn in democratic theory. (shrink)
Robert Talisse objects that Deweyan democrats, or those who endorse John Dewey’s philosophy of democracy, cannot consistently hold that (i) “democracy is a way of life” and (ii) democracy as a way of life is compatible with pluralism, at least as contemporary political theorists define that term. What Talisse refers to as his “pluralist objection” states that Deweyan democracy resembles a thick theory of democracy, that is, a theory establishing a set of prior restraints on the values that can count (...) as legitimate within a democratic community. In this paper, it is argued that his pluralist objection succumbs to some combination of four charges. The first two sections of the paper are devoted to presentations of Talisse’s two formulations of his pluralist objection, as they appear in his essay “Can Democracy be a Way of Life?” and his book A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy , respectively. The four charges against the pluralist objection receive attention in the second section. In the third section, Dewey’s pluralist procedure is articulated and illustrated using a recent Canadian public policy debate, followed by some concluding remarks on the acceptability of relying on contemporary political examples of Deweyan democracy in action. (shrink)
In chapter two of The School and Society, entitled "The School and the Life of the Child," the renowned American philosopher John Dewey demonstrates how the model of the "ideal home" can impart lessons about a model of the "ideal school." It is argued that education should give direction to the student's natural impulses, just as the concerned parent guides the growth of the child. There are at least two ways in which to interpret this argument. One is that home (...) schooling is the ideal form of early education. The other is that school life should emulate family life. Though advocates of home schooling would prefer the former account, the case is difficult to make, for (i) Dewey rarely recommended specific institutions or practices and (ii) the interpretation does not align with the book's other thesis that the classroom should be a microcosm for the best that the community has to offer. So, consistent with the overall theme of the work, it is the latter reading, viz., that school life should resemble family life, I contend, that proves more persuasive. School teachers have an ethical responsibility to care for their students' interests and, ideally, to provide a quality of mentorship approaching, if not on par with, that delivered by concerned parents. However, unlike student-centered education, in which educators curry favor with students by appealing to their native interests, what I call Dewey's model of "education as family life" imposes discipline on the student's natural desires, directing them in ways that are intended to enrich their future adult lives. (shrink)
In a recent article, Carolyn Hendricks and Lyn Carson begin to remedy the deficit of literature on deliberative democracy consultancy, or the provision of deliberation goods and services for a fee, by observing that the competitive, entrepreneurial and business-driven nature of this growing deliberative industry might threaten those conditions for generating an open and participatory process of democratic governance. Building on their important contribution to the literature, the present paper provides a parallel assessment based on John Dewey's notions of public (...) spirit and socialized intelligence. While the growth of the deliberative consultancy industry might appear dangerous to the prospects for an engaged citizenry and open government, the specter, I argue, is more apparent than real, the result of two implicit dualisms, one between citizens and experts and the other between the individual and the community. Some might claim that Dewey's critique of the epistemological industry also applies to the deliberation industry. However, this is not the case. Deliberative consultancy pertains to the business enterprise behind deliberative democracy (or the commodification of the deliberative ideal), not the academic enterprise of producing knowledge about deliberative democracy. Dewey's notion of public spirit defuses the tension between citizen and expert, or deliberators and consultants, by understanding them as engaged in collaborative partnerships. Moreover, Dewey's idea of socialized intelligence reunites the individual and her community, or the deliberative entrepreneur and the larger community of inquirers. In this way, the threat, in Jon Elster's terminology, that the market poses to the forum does not manifest in the relationship between deliberative consultants and deliberating publics so long as a few ethical norms guide the practice of deliberative consultancy. (shrink)
Interest in Barack Obama’s status as a philosophical pragmatist has recently surged in scholarly circles, particularly within the disciplines of Philosophy and Political Science, as well as among policy pundits and conspiracy theorists. Arguments and speculation concerning Obama’s pragmatist credentials can be found in philosophers’ blogs (e.g. Michael Eldridge’s “Barack Obama’s Pragmatism” and Mitchell Aboulafia’s “Obama’s Pragmatism”), political commentators’ blogs (e.g. Robert Reich’s “Obama and Pragmatism: Thinking Through Values” and Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten’s “Barack Obama: Pragmatic Progressive”) and even (...) academic papers (e.g. Bart Shultz’s “Obama’s Political Philosophy" and Michael Eldridge’s “Adjectival and Generic Pragmatism: Problems and Possibilities"). One could dismiss the phenomenon as equivalent to the surge of speculation during the past eight years that philosophical Straussians (or followers of the late Leo Strauss, such as Paul Wolfowitz) had captured the Bush administration’s policy agenda: that is, a species of conspiracy theory with only circumstantial evidence supporting it. Yet, more evidence seems to confirm the Obama-as-pragmatist hypothesis than the Straussian-capture theory. However, the lacunae in these Obama-as-pragmatist accounts, whether in the scholarly journals, the blogosphere or the traditional news media, concerns whether his pragmatist approach extends beyond domestic affairs. Some only address his pragmatism in the realm of domestic politics; others uncritically assume that it does carry over to international politics. So, is Obama also a pragmatist in international affairs? Although pragmatism does not fit nicely into any of the traditional theoretic frameworks in foreign policy/international relations (realism, liberalism and constructivism), I argue that it represents a mixed-methods approach that floats freely between multiple frameworks, tailoring them to the conditions of the international situation and crafting tools to resolve or ameliorate particular global problems. In defending this thesis, I rely on two papers authored by the classic American Pragmatist John Dewey: “Three Independent Factors in Morals” and “Imperialism is Easy.”. (shrink)
In an underappreciated tract by George Novack, Pragmatism versus Marxism, the American Trotskyite and union organizer launched a vicious attack on John Dewey's career as a professional philosopher. He alleged that Deweys ideas were inaccessible to all but a small community of fellow academicians. While Novack concedes that Deweys philosophical inquiries had a cross-pollinating influence on other academic fields, he doubts that the beneficial products of those inquiries traveled far beyond the walls of the so-called ivory tower. Larry Hickman (...) understands Dewey's claim in Experience and Nature that philosophy serves as a liaison officer to mean that philosophers should provide a common lexicon that translates between distinct disciplinary discourses. Philosophy's role, in other words, is to facilitate interdisciplinarity. According to my thesis, both Novack and Hickman are mistaken, though in different degrees and for different reasons. The problem is that Novacks challenge is perfectly compatible with Hickmans interpretation of Deweys liaison officer claim. While Hickmans account is more warranted than Novacks, it still offers an interpretation of Dewey's expansive view of philosophy's function that is far too limited to overcome challenges resembling Novacks, or so I argue. (shrink)
During the 1960s and 1970s, institutionalists and behavioralists in the discipline of political science argued over the legitimacy of the institutional approach to political inquiry. In the discipline of philosophy, a similar debate concerning institutions has never taken place. Yet, a growing number of philosophers are now working out the institutional implications of political ideas in what has become known as “non-ideal theory.” My thesis is two-fold: (1) pragmatism and institutionalism are compatible and (2) non-ideal theorists, following the example of (...) pragmatists, can avoid a similar debate as took place between institutionalists and behavioralists by divulging their assumptions about institutions. (shrink)
John Dewey's metaphysics of experience has been criticized by a number of philosophers - most notably, George Santayana and Richard Rorty. While mainstream Dewey scholars agree that these critical treatments fail to treat the American Pragmatist's theory of what exists on its own terms, there has still been some difficulty reaching consensus on what the casual reader should take away from the pages of Experience and Nature, Dewey's seminal work on naturalistic metaphysics. So, how do we unearth the significance of (...) Dewey's misunderstood metaphysics? One way is for philosophers to look to geographers for help. To fully grasp the movement of experience, geographers recommend that we start with an experiential activity, such as touring. The activity of sea kayak touring, I contend, discloses the general movement of experience in Dewey's metaphysics between its primary and secondary phases. With this illustration and a closely connected metaphor, I demonstrate that Dewey's naturalized metaphysics can not only withstand the objections of the likes of Santayana and Rorty, it can also assist us in gaining a deeper appreciation of the qualitative richness of our own day-to-day practices. (shrink)
According to the 'incompatibility thesis,' tenets of Marxist and Pragmatist ethics are incompatible at a very basic level. An opening move in the strategy of defending the incompatibility thesis is to summon the ghosts of Pragmatists and Marxists past, such as John Dewey and Leon Trotsky, and recount how their positions in a debate concerning ethics proved to be fundamentally at odds. The central claim of the paper is that despite the initial promise of this strategy, scholars should be wary (...) of citing the 1930s debate between Dewey and Trotsky and the differences revealed in this exchange as evidence in support of the incompatibility thesis. Significant areas of agreement between the two thinkers, both in their exchange and in the events surrounding it, ought to make us question the claimed incompatibility between Marxist and Pragmatist ethics. After presenting its standard interpretation, the ethical dimension of the debate is brought to the fore. Two versions of the debate - one offered by a Trotskyite and contemporary of Dewey and Trotsky's (George Novack) and the other by a recent Dewey biographer (Alan Ryan) - are reviewed. Both, it is argued, exaggerate Dewey and Trotsky's differences. Next, four areas of agreement between the two thinkers' ethical views are identified, each drawing support from the content of their debate as well from select events in the years preceding and following it. By way of reconstructing the Trotsky-Dewey debate, it is possible to trace a vital thread between Pragmatist and Marxist ethics - or so it is argued. (shrink)
The ballot is, as often said, a substitute for bullets. But what is more significant is that counting of heads compels prior recourse to methods of discussion, consultation and persuasion, while the essence of appeal to force is to cut short resort to such methods. Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as foolish as its critics charge it with being. But it never is merely majority rule.There have been two distinguished critics who declare great admiration for Dewey's work and (...) yet are constrained to say they find it essentially defective. Both Morton White and Charles L. Stevenson have reluctantly judged that Dewey's ethical theory fails at decisive points.In this paper, I argue that many recent interpretations .. (shrink)
Is Benjamin Franklin the old Dewey or the new Socrates? James Campbell embraces the view that he is the old Dewey, or, at least, following the late H.S. Thayer, a nascent pragmatist of a Deweyan stripe. Lorraine Pangle, among others, defends the view that Franklins thought and writings are distinctly Socratic. I would like to accomplish two objectives in this essay that might initially appear incompatible, one, to question the premise of the question and, two, to assume the premise's acceptability (...) for the sake of exploring the claim that pragmatism is quintessentially American, or as Colin Koopman puts it, a corollary to the experiment of American democracy. If indeed pragmatism has its roots in the American experience, then we would expect to find a heavy deposit of pragmatist ideas in America's formative experience, especially in the thinking of its Founders and revolutionaries, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and John Adams, among others. While Franklins writings surely have philosophical significance, giving them a gloss based on the insights of other philosophical figures, such as John Dewey and Socrates, means reconstructing them for other purposes, and thus risks distortion by reading them through a foreign filter, what I call the filtering strategy. Still, if we accept the premise that this American founder possesses philosophical credentials that would make him resemble one figure more than the other, greater evidence can be found to support the conclusion that Franklin is the old Dewey, rather than the new Socrates. The upshot of this thesis is that the claim that pragmatism is quintessentially American gets off the ground. Furthermore, this claim has the resources to withstand a familiar criticism, namely, that pragmatism reflects philosophically shallow American values, such as practical know how, pioneer like ingenuity and the capitalist spirit. (shrink)
Dewey and Russell's debate over the status of logic in the twentieth-century is, by now, well-trodden ground for scholarly inquiry. However, Dewey's novel theory of propositions, first articulated in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, has received comparatively less attention than the debate that touched upon it. The paucity of interest among philosophers of language is probably due to a variety of reasons, such as the theory's unorthodox character and, what at least appears to be, its naive simplicity when (...) compared to other more common (syntactic and pragmatic) theories of propositions. In this paper, I would like to examine the three most extensive treatments, one by the late H.S. Thayer, another by Tom Burke, and the most recent exposition by Larry Hickman, with the intention of reviving scholarly interest in Dewey's theory of propositional form. Another objective of the present project is to situate Dewey's theory relative to more contemporary theories and debates about propositional form in the philosophy of language literature. (shrink)
In several of John Dewey's works on education, including Democracy and Education and The School and Society, he models the ideal school after the ideal community, conceiving the former as a microcosm of the latter. More recently, James Fishkin in Democracy and Deliberation and The Voice of the People renders a deliberative poll design with an eye to making its randomly selected deliberators representative of much larger groups, and in this way microcosms of the population-at-large. Thus, the smaller group (...) deliberates as if it were the much larger population assembled together to deliberate in mass-scale citizen assemblies. Although random selection is not widely accepted as a legitimate method for selecting political representatives (as, for instance, it was among the ancient Athenians), it has many desirable features, the most important of which is its ability to constitute bodies that resemble, and in this sense, represent larger populations. This last notion that smaller deliberative bodies can perform as if they are the larger populations represented-which I call the 'microcosm concept'-is not distinctly American, though many commentators trace it back to the musings of John Adams and some of the Anti-Federalists. In this paper, I argue that insights derived from Dewey's model of an educational microcosm can be appropriated and employed as resources to defend Fishkin's model of a deliberative microcosm against contemporary critics, such as Robert Goodin and Cass Sunstein. Besides defending Fishkin's deliberative poll design against its critics, I also argue that a Dewey-Fishkin partnership can help to improve actual deliberative institutions. I show how the Dewey-Fishkin microcosm concept operates in an actual deliberative event: the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, whereby a group of randomly-selected citizens were assembled and charged to deliver recommendations on whether to change the existing electoral system in the Canadian province of Ontario. (shrink)
In chapter 8 of The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal, Victor Kestenbaum disputes the naturalistic-instrumentalist reading of John Dewey's A Common Faith. Rather than accept the orthodox reading, he challenges mainstream Dewey scholars to read Dewey's theism from a phenomenological perspective. From this vantage, Kestenbaum contends that Dewey was wagering on transcendence, gambling on an ideal realm of supersensible entities, and hoping that the payoff would be universal acknowledgement of "a widening of the place of transcendence and faith (...) in every area of his philosophy." In a long-neglected correspondence between John Dewey and Albert Balz, Dewey responds to Balz's misreading of his logic as a correspondence theory of truth by stating that through the translation of all the ontological into the logical in the context of inquiry, he is "on the side of the angels." I argue that Dewey is accomplishing much the same thing in A Common Faith by naturalistically unifying the real and the ideal under the heading of the religious. In this respect, Dewey's naturalism and instrumentalism, rather than Kestenbaum's transcendentalism, is firmly "on the side of the angels.". (shrink)
Was Benjamin Franklin the old John Dewey or the new Socrates? While this might strike the reader as an absurd question, scholars have supplied plausible answers. James Campbell takes the position that he was the old Dewey—or, at least, a nascent Deweyan pragmatist. Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson agrees, claiming that Franklin "laid the foundation for the most influential of America's homegrown philosophies, pragmatism" (491). Lorraine Pangle, on the other hand, defends the view that Franklin's thought and writings were distinctly Socratic. (...) I would like to accomplish two objectives in this article that might initially appear incompatible: one, to doubt whether the question is a good one and, two, to assume the .. (shrink)
What Talisse refers to as his “pluralist objection” states that Deweyan democracy, or John Dewey’s theory of democracy as contemporary Dewey scholars understand it, resembles a thick account, that is, a theory establishing a set of prior restraints on the values that can count as legitimate within a democratic community, and thus is incompatible with pluralism, at least insofar as contemporary political theorists define that term. In this paper, I argue that by undermining the pluralist objection, a reunion of Deweyan (...) democracy and pluralism—two ideas that have been torn asunder by Talisse’s misreading of Dewey andDeweyans—becomes possible. (shrink)
In this article, I outline a teaching demonstration that lasts approximately twenty-two minutes, which a candidate can employ when interviewing for a position in ethics. Since job openings in ethics, and especially applied ethics, are becoming increasingly common, I think that this outline will be helpful to many candidates deliberating about the topic and structure of their future teaching demonstrations. This demonstration is also especially well-suited to a search at a teaching institution, whether a community college, state college, or state (...) university, where faculty and administration place more emphasis on success in pedagogy than success in research and publication. In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for ways to adapt this outline for a longer teaching demo. (shrink)
John Dewey’s metaphysics of experience has been criticized by a number of philosophers—most notably, George Santayanaand Richard Rorty. While mainstream Dewey scholars agree that these critical treatments fail to treat the American Pragmatist’s theory of what exists on its own terms, there has still been some difficulty reaching consensus on what the casual reader should take away from the pages of Experience and Nature, Dewey’s seminal work on naturalistic metaphysics. So, how do we unearth the significance of Dewey’s misunderstood metaphysics? (...) One way is for philosophers to look to spatial and socialcultural geographers for help. To fully grasp the movement of experience, these geographers recommend that we start with an experiential activity, such as touring. The activity of sea kayak touring, I contend, discloses the general movement of experience in Dewey’s metaphysics between its primary and secondary phases. With this illustration and a closely connected metaphor, I demonstrate that Dewey’s naturalized metaphysics can not only withstand the objections of the likes of Santayana and Rorty, it can also assist us in gaining a deeper appreciation of the qualitative richness of our own day-to-day practices. (shrink)
Starting with the interest and effort of the children, the whole community has become tremendously interested in starting gardens, using every bit of available ground. The district is a poor one and, besides transforming the yards, the gardens have been a real economic help to the people.I do not wait for permission to become a gardener but dig wherever I see horticultural potential. I do not just tend existing gardens but create them from neglected space. I, and thousands of people (...) like me, step out from home to garden land we do not own. We see opportunities all around us. Vacant lots flourish as urban oases, roadside verges dazzle with flowers and crops are harvested from land that we assumed to be fruitless. .. (shrink)
Standard methods for teaching Deliberative Democratic Theory (DDT) in the philosophy classroom include presenting theories in the historical order in which they originated, by theorist (or groups of theorists) or in various thematic categories, including criticisms of the theories. However, if Simone Chambers is correct and DDT has truly entered “a working theory stage,” whereby the theory and practice of deliberation receive equal consideration, then such approaches may no longer be appropriate for teaching DDT. I propose that DDT be taught (...) using the Critical Friends (CF) discussion protocol. This protocol enables high quality deliberation in the context of a supportive intellectual community. The key advantage of my proposal is that the CF pedagogical framework empowers students to conceive DDT through the lens of their own and others’ deliberative practices. By referring to a rather than the strategy, this proposal does not specify the single right way to teach DDT, but suggests one among a field of possibilities. (shrink)
Starting with the interest and effort of the children, the whole community has become tremendously interested in starting gardens, using every bit of available ground. The district is a poor one and, besides transforming the yards, the gardens have been a real economic help to the people....we understand different episodes in the history of organized garden projects as distinct discursive formations that have been constituted through material practice and myriad discourses or tropes during each era by advocates, organizers, observers, participants, (...) and theoreticians.What is the normative significance of school gardening for environmental activism today? While philosophical treatments generally highlight .. (shrink)
In the past twenty years, scholarly interest in John Dewey's later writings has surged. While later works such as Art as Experience (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939) have received considerable attention, Knowing and the Known (1949), Dewey's late-in-life collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley, has been largely neglected. A common bias among Dewey scholars is that this work, instead of developing Dewey's Logic, departs from its spirit, reflects the overbearing influence of Bentley on Dewey (...) (who was at the time an octogenarian), and, therefore, merits little serious scholarly consideration. However, Dewey and Bentley engaged in an extended correspondence, collected in John .. (shrink)
This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)
Three of the articles included in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy - Ron Amundson and Shari Tresky's "On a Bioethical Challenge to Disability Rights"; Rachel Cooper's "Can It Be a Good Thing to Be Deaf?"; and Mark T. Brown's "The Potential of the Human Embryo" - interact (in various ways) with the concepts of disability, humanity, and personhood and their normative dimensions. As one peruses these articles, it becomes apparent that terms like "disability," "human being," and (...) "person" carry with them great normative significance. There is, however, much disagreement concerning both the definition and the extension of such terms. This is significant because different terms and definitions are associated with different sets of normative requirements. In what follows we reconstruct the argument of each of the articles, and then offer some brief critical analysis intended to stimulate further thought about and discussion of the issues that each raises. (shrink)
In recent years, multidisciplinary study has become all the rage in academic circles. Scholars have been going all out for interdisciplinarity, not only in research programs, but pedagogically in the classroom, and structurally in higher education curricula. Fewer and fewer cautionary voices are being heeded or even heard in this conversation. In this essay, I advocate a mediating position on this issue that has emerged from reflecting on my own professional work with interdisciplinary scholarship. That work includes research, scholarship, and (...) teaching in the fields of theology, religion and science, and religion and literature, as well as ten years of editorial experience with the American Journal of Theology and .. (shrink)
A martial artist and author of Zen Body-Being explains how to master self-awareness through the practice of becoming comfortable with not knowing and breaking ...
This paper presents a cross-cultural analysis of ethics with U.S. and Hong Kong Chinese managers as subjects. These managers were given the Strategies of Upward Influence instrument and asked to evaluate the ethics of using various political strategies to attain influence within their organizations. Differences were found between Hong Kong and U.S. managers on a variety of dimensions, indicating important differences between these two groups on their perceptions of ethical behavior. In the paper, we identify potential reasons for the findings, (...) and suggest directions for future work in this area. (shrink)
As a result of recent legislative developments and greater ease of accessibility, the Human Resources Manager (HRM) faces the challenge of not only maintaining records but also that of protecting employees from misuse of personal information contained in their individual personnel files. The widespread use of computers for maintaining employee records has resulted in new ethical dimensions and/or challenges for the HRM. Serious questions regarding accessibility to and dissemination of such personal information now confront the HRM. Unless policies are developed (...) by organizations for dealing with such questions, eventually government will mandate such policies in order to protect employee rights. (shrink)
The intellectual tools every business person needs in the boardroom. Includes two rare essays by Ayn Rand! With government and the media blaming big business for the world economic crisis, capitalism needs all the help it can get. It's the perfect time for this collection of essays presenting a philosophical defense of capitalism by Ayn Rand and other Objectivist intellectuals. Essential and practical, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy reveals the importance of maintaining philosophical principles in the corporate environment at all levels (...) of business from daily operations to executive decisions, and provides the tactical and tactful rational thinking required to defend companies from ideological attacks. (shrink)
D. Christopher Ralston; Justin Ho (Eds.): Philosophical Reflections on Disability Content Type Journal Article Pages 247-249 DOI 10.1007/s10677-010-9237-8 Authors Franziska Felder, Ethikzentrum der Universität Zürich, Graduiertenprogramm für Interdisziplinäre Ethikforschung, Zollikerstrasse 115, 8008 Zürich, Switzerland Journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Online ISSN 1572-8447 Print ISSN 1386-2820 Journal Volume Volume 14 Journal Issue Volume 14, Number 2.
We must admire the ambition of Prinz’s title question. But does he provide a convincing answer to it? Prinz’s own view of morality as “a byproduct – accidental or invented – of faculties that evolved for different purposes (1),” which appears to express a negative reply, does not receive much direct argument here. Rather, Prinz’s main aim is to try to show that the considerations he believes are typically presented by moral nativists are insufficient or inadequate to establish that morality (...) is innate. He discusses, individually, how much evidential weight the (alleged) existence of (1) universal moral norms, (2) universal moral domains, (3) fixed stages in moral development, and (4) precursors to morality among non-human animals lend to nativist claims, and, in addition, he argues that poverty-of-the-moral-stimulus arguments are as yet unconvincing. “[C]urrent evidence,” Prinz claims, “is consistent with the conclusion that children acquire moral competence through experience (22).” It is not my intention here to follow Prinz’s piecemeal criticisms of moral nativism. In their attacks on linguistic nativism (see, e.g., Cowie 1999) and now on moral nativism, empiricists typically deploy the.. (shrink)
In this response to Malt's and Prinz's commentaries, I argue that neo-empiricist hypotheses fail to threaten the argument for the elimination of ‘concept’ because they are unlikely to be true of all concepts, if they are true at all. I also defend the hypothesis that we possess bodies of knowledge retrieved by default from long-term memory, and I argue that prototypes, exemplars, and theories form genuinely distinct concepts.
The essays in this book are meant to serve as an introduction to those ideas of Ayn Rand, which are of particular relevance to business people. Rand was known as a spirited defender of the laissez-faire free enterprise system. It is less commonly known that Rand was also deeply committed to the centrality of the enterprise of philosophy for both public and private life. The essays in this book try to bridge the gap between these two aspects of Rand’s thought. (...) The results of the review of the book are mostly positive. The review attempts to separate the different themes in the book such as the importance of philosophy in general, the importance of philosophy for business, the philosophical defense of the free enterprise system and then to evaluate the evidence and arguments presented by the essayists for each claim. (shrink)
Prinz claims that empirical work on emotions and moral judgement can help us resolve longstanding metaethical disputes in favour of simple sentimentalism. I argue that the empirical evidence he marshals does not have the metaethical implications he claims: the studies purporting to show that having an emotion is sufficient for making a moral judgement are tendentiously described. We are entitled to ascribe competence with moral concepts to experimental subjects only if we suppose that they would withdraw their moral judgement on (...) learning that they were fully explained by hypnotically induced disgust. Genuine moral judgements must be reason-responsive. To capture the reason-responsiveness of moral judgement, we must turn to either neo-sentimentalism or to a non-sentimentalist metaethics, either of which is fully compatible with the empirical evidence Prinz cites. (shrink)
Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are (...) merely expressing our emotions. Prinz argues that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, he turns to a defense of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. Prinz surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and he draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. He also criticizes evidence from animal behavior and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. Prinz concludes that there is no single true morality, but he also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible. Throughout the book, Prinz relates his views to contemporary and historical work in philosophical ethics. His views echo themes in the writings of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, but Prinz supports, extends, and revises these classic theories using the resources of cutting-edge cognitive science. The Emotional Construction of Morals will stimulate and challenge anyone who is curious about the nature and origin of moral values. (shrink)
Prinz (Perceptual the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis, MIT Press, 2002) presents a new species of concept empiricism, under which concepts are off-line long-term memory networks of representations that are ‘copies’ of perceptual representations – proxytypes. An apparent obstacle to any such empiricism is the prevailing nativism of generative linguistics. The paper critically assesses Prinz’s attempt to overcome this obstacle. The paper argues that, prima facie, proxytypes are as incapable of accounting for the structure of the linguistic mind as (...) are the more traditional species of empiricism. This position is then confirmed by looking in detail at two suggestions (one derived from recent connectionist research) from Prinz of how certain aspects of syntactic structure might be accommodated by the proxytype theory. It is shown that the suggestions fail to come to terms with both the data and theory of contemporary linguistics. (shrink)
