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Moral Choices (moral + choice)
Selected AbstractsSexual Desire, Moral Choice, and Human EndsJOURNAL OF SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Issue 2 2002Laurence Thomas First page of article [source] Historians and Moral EvaluationsHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2004RICHARD T. VANN In dem Gebiet der Geschichte liegt die ganze moralische Welt. ,Schiller ABSTRACT The reappearance of the question of moral judgments by historians makes a reappraisal of the issues timely. Almost all that has been written on the subject addresses only the propriety of moral judgments (or morally charged language) in the written texts historians produce. However, historians have to make moral choices when selecting a subject upon which to write; and they make a tacit moral commitment to write and teach honestly. Historians usually dislike making explicit moral evaluations, and have little or no training in how to do so. They can argue it's not their job; they are only finders of fact. Historians holding a determinist view of actions do not think it appropriate to blame people for doing what they couldn't help doing; for those believing there is an overall pattern to history, individual morality is beside the point. Finally, since earlier cultures had values different from ours, it seems unjust to hold them to contemporary standards. This essay modifies or rejects these arguments. Some historians have manifested ambivalence, acknowledging it is difficult or impossible to avoid making moral evaluations (and sometimes appropriate to make them). Ordinary-language philosophers, noting that historiography has no specialized vocabulary, see it as saturated by the values inherent in everyday speech and thought. I argue that the historicist argument about the inevitably time-bound limitation of all values is exaggerated. Historians who believe in the religious grounding of values (like Lord Acton) obviously disagree with it; but even on a secular level, morals are often confused with mores. If historians inevitably make moral evaluations, they should examine what philosophical ethicists,virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists,have said about how to make them; and even if they find no satisfactory grounding for their own moral attitudes, it is a brute fact that they have them. I end with an argument for "strong evaluations",neither treating them as a troublesome residue in historiography nor, having despaired of finding a solid philosophical ground for moral evaluations, concluding that they are merely matters of taste. I believe historians should embrace the role of moral commentators, but that they should be aware that their evaluations are, like all historical judgments, subject to the criticisms of their colleagues and readers. Historians run little risk of being censorious and self-righteous; the far greater danger is acquiescing in or contributing to moral confusion and timidity. [source] Contrasting Role Morality and Professional Morality: Implications for PracticeJOURNAL OF APPLIED PHILOSOPHY, Issue 1 2003Kevin Gibson Investigating role morality is important, since the mentality of role morality may allow agents to believe they can abdicate moral responsibility when acting in a role. This is particularly significant in the literature dealing with professional morality where professionals, because of their special status, may find themselves at odds with their best moral judgments. Here I tell four stories and draw out some distinctions. I conclude that role morality is a genuine and useful distinction. However, I suggest that the purported distinction between role morality and professional morality is over-determined. Therefore, alleged conflicts between the demands of role and profession (such as the different pressures on Pinto designers as employees and as engineers) are not conflicts between different kinds of demands, but rather conflicts arising from divergent roles that most workers will encounter regularly. Another analytical perspective is to look at moral choices at work in terms of power and the ability to bring about change. Finally, I draw the implication that we should stress moral awareness at a fairly abstract level for all employees and reinforce the moral primacy of individual choice. [source] The Ethics of Integrity: Educational Values Beyond Postmodern EthicsJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2001Mark Mason I address the problems of diminished moral responsibility and of moral relativism, typically associated with education in late modern society, by developing, beyond the problematic contemporary formulations of postmodern ethics, an ethics of integrity as a moral resource for education. This ethics is constituted by the principles of respect for the dignity of persons, and the acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of our moral choices. I show how it offers more than the scant resources of postmodern ethics to educators who seek to enable their students to develop a deeply-founded sense of moral comportment and an authentic identity in the face of the moral complexity of late modernity's globalised and plural society. [source] Business Ethics as PracticeBRITISH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2007Stewart Clegg In this article we develop a conceptualization of business ethics as practice. Starting from the view that the ethics that organizations display in practice will have been forged through an ongoing process of debate and contestation over moral choices, we examine ethics in relation to the ambiguous, unpredictable, and subjective contexts of managerial action. Furthermore, we examine how discursively constituted practice relates to managerial subjectivity and the possibilities of managers being moral agents. The article concludes by discussing how the ,ethics as practice' approach that we expound provides theoretical resources for studying the different ways that ethics manifest themselves in organizations as well as providing a practical application of ethics in organizations that goes beyond moralistic and legalistic approaches. [source] | ||||||||||