Kant helps us understand the conditions for peace by reminding us that lasting peace requires both cosmopolitan legal reform and individual moral improvement, including resistance to egoism and the ...cultivation of cosmopolitan attitudes. The duty to pursue peace includes the duty to promote the rule of domestic and international law and work against its unilateral subversion. The juridical cosmopolitanism of a worldwide league of free peoples enables resistance to the dangers posed by authoritarian regimes and their dangerous willingness to manipulate their subjects and ignore international law. Constraining egoism enables people to overcome the tyranny of their desires and cultivates a sense of affiliation with the larger community of humanity in general, providing the moral foundation needed to support a cosmopolitan legal order. Moral development to a great extent is fostered through the arts and humanities, and a robust cultural life therefore ought to play a central role in the pursuit of global peace.
Emmanuel Levinas proposed a philosophical critique that worked to unsettle and decenter generalizing, totalizing, and thematizing attempts to define the self. However, on the other hand, Levinas ...provides the space for the formation of a configuration of the self that has been conditioned by ethical relation and even points to some of the ingredients for (or shape of) such a self. Throughout Levinas’ work, the concept of
hineni
(“Here I am”) is used to illustrate the moral event that best characterizes the “psyche.” In the following paper, we consider how to apply the notion of
hineni
to modern psychological constructs of the human self. In the first section, we flesh out the characteristics of a self lived as
hineni
. We argue that such a self is “shaped” or oriented morally toward the outside and is radically exposed to the Other (not merely a bearer of moral consciousness or moral attributes). It is a remembering of the preoriginal and primordial ethical relation. In the second section, we use the psychoanalytic concept of transference to illustrate how the moral shape of the self can be forgotten, and how the self enters a state of “mineness” wherein the Other is reduced to one’s own history (Levinas
1990
). In this state of forgetfulness, we argue that a “concreteness of egoism” (Levinas
1969
) is maintained and a self lived toward the outside remains untenable. Transference, we argue, is an impoverished relation and a forgetting of and violence to the Other. Its proper use, however, in the therapeutic alliance allows for the possibility of a remembering of the Other and a calling beyond oneself.
This paper examines an important issue facing academia-pay inversion. It discusses how inversion is accompanied by ethical issues including secrecy, moral dilemmas for faculty, honesty, and keeping ...promises. It then examines this issue from five ethical viewpoints: a legalistic perspective, ethical egoism, utilitarianism, distributive justice, and Kant's deontological approach. As part of the discussion, the effect of the moral philosophy on the university's corporate culture is examined, with attention given to morale and productivity. Finally, alternatives to pay inversion that universities may want to consider are discussed.
A variety of thought experiments suggest that, if the standard picture of practical rationality is correct, then practical rationality is sometimes an obstacle to practical success. For some, this in ...turn suggests that there is something wrong with the standard picture. In particular, it has been argued that we should revise the standard picture so that practical rationality and practical success emerge as more closely connected than the current picture allows. In this paper, I construct a choice situation—which I refer to as the Newxin puzzle—and discuss its implications in relation to the revisionist approach just described. Using the Newxin puzzle, I argue that the approach leads to a more radically revisionist picture of practical rationality than current debate suggests.
This paper analyses managers' moral decision-making, and studies the role of ethical theories in it by following the research tradition using the multidimensional ethics scale. The research question ...is: what kinds of ethical dimensions do Finnish business managers reveal when they are making moral decisions, and how have these dimensions changed in the 1990s? This question is answered by examining what kinds of factors emerge when the multidimensional ethics scale is used to analyse Finnish managers' attitudes toward moral dilemmas. The results show that Finnish managers' decision-making reflects a variety of ethical theories. Teleological thinking is strongly emphasised by Finnish managers, and relativist thinking is used as well, but often combined with either deontology or justice thinking. In addition, a strong moralistic dimension emerged in Finnish managers' decision-making. The analysis was carried out in two different surveys in years 1994 and 1999, and the results show that the ways of decision-making were more complex at the end of the 1990s than almost six years earlier.
The aim of this paper is to answer the question whether there is a real demand for equal access to health care or--better--to medical care and which interest groups (patients, health care ...professionals, policy makers and others) are interested in equal access. The focus is on EU countries including recent case law from the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. We discuss whether there is a need to have legislative safeguards to protect equal access to medical care and whether such norms really work. The paper concludes that some of the key players in medical care are not primarily governed by a real willingness to have equal and just access to medical care, but by rather egoistic approaches. It seems that policy makers and politicians are the only ones who, surprisingly, must at least formally call for and enforce equal access to medical care. Interests of other groups seem to be different.
Understanding Narcissism in Clinical Practice is a new volume in the eagerly anticipated clinical practice monograph series from the Society of Analytical Psychology. Aimed primarily at trainees on ...psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling courses, these compact editions will be invaluable to all who wish to learn the basics of major psychoanalytic theories from an integrated viewpoint. The authors are Jungian analysts trained at the SAP; highly experienced in both theory and practice.
Some liberals think that free institutions will dispense those benefiting from them to display political or civic virtue. Tocqueville does not share this view. In this contribution, I want to discuss ...the way Tocqueville deals with the problems one meets when maintaining, on the one hand, that free institutions need politically virtuous people and, on the other, that democratic individuals are not politically virtuous. As will be shown, Tocqueville tries to solve the problem by relying on two mental mechanisms—believing and forgetting—and on participatory mechanisms. Democratic man must, while participating politically, believe that one can participate for other than self-centered reasons and sometimes forget that his reasons are unselfish. Though this kind of believing and forgetting may help us preserve liberty in peaceful times, it may be doubted that they will also be sufficient when troubled times will demand that the individual sacrifice his life for the free republic.
Egotism and Delinquent Behavior Costello, Barbara J.; Dunaway, R. Gregory
Journal of interpersonal violence,
05/2003, Letnik:
18, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A recent work by Baumeister, Smart, and Boden suggested that “threatened egotism” is an important cause of violent behavior. Challenging the view that low self-esteem causes violence, Baumeister et ...al. held that those with inflated levels of self-esteem are likely to react violently when faced with ego threats. This article presents a preliminary test of the threatened egotism hypothesis with a sample of junior high and high school students in a small Southern city. The results show that egotism is positively associated with violent and nonviolent delinquency and that this relationship holds when a number of important predictors of delinquency are controlled, including social control and self-control. These results provide some support for the threatened egotism hypothesis and suggest that further research in this area is warranted.
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