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Moral Notion (moral + notion)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Mind, World and Language: McDowell and Kovesi

RATIO, Issue 3 2002
Brian Morrison
The ideas of John McDowell concerning the relations between mind, world and language are brought into contact with those of Julius Kovesi, with a view to seeing whether the latter can illuminate and flesh out the former. McDowell's dialectic in Mind and World is expounded and reviewed, hinging on the notion of ,conceptual second nature' as his suggested way of showing that there is nothing mysteriously non,natural in human animals learning to find their way about both in a world characterised by lawlike connections and in one characterised by rational connections. Kovesi's redrawing, in Moral Notions, of the Aristotelian material/formal metaphysical distinction as one between the logical elements of concepts, is adduced to show how the world is ,shot through' with concepts and reasons: the formal elements of concepts are nothing other than the reasons we have for collecting varied features of the material world under a concept, to meet our bodily and social needs. The mind can then be treated as a set of acquired capacities and dispositions to become conversant with these features and with the corresponding needs. Some possible objections to this bringing together of the two sets of ideas are briefly examined, and overall conclusions drawn. [source]

GLOBAL JUSTICE AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 221 2005
Dale Dorsey
To a great extent, recent discussion of global obligations has been couched in the language of human rights. I argue that this is a mistake. If, as many theorists have supposed, a normative theory applicable to obligations of global justice must also respect the needs of justice internal to recipient nations, any such theory cannot take human rights as an important moral notion. Human rights are inapplicable for the domestic justice of poor nations, and thus cannot form a plausible basis for international justice. Instead, I propose an alternative basis, a form of welfarist maximizing consequentialism. My alternative is superior to rights-based theories in dealing with the special problems of justice found in poor nations. [source]

The origins of the global city: ethics and morality in contemporary cosmopolitanism

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2003
Deiniol Jones
This article makes the case for a strong delineation of ethical and moral categories in contemporary international relations theory,specifically, within the theory of cosmopolitanism. The argument draws on the history of ideas, particularly observations about the nature of Stoicism in classical political thought, and a range of contemporary ,ethical' texts to make the case that there is a missing ethical category in contemporary approaches. Contemporary reflections on world citizenship and the global city, such as those contained in Linklater and Held, adopt a specifically moral notion of normativity and neglect an ethical component which is both distinct and theoretically practicable. The article offers a specific policy area,the area of international drug control,as a potential area of policy application. [source]

Moral Agency, Cognitive Distortion, and Narrative Strategy in the Rehabilitation of Sexual Offenders

ETHOS, Issue 3 2010
James B. Waldram
I demonstrate that what forensic psychologists refer to as a "cognitive distortion" or "thinking error" is often embedded within a broader narrative, and that these narratives reveal the existence of identifiable strategies designed to communicate something salient, enduring, and moral about the offender. Through the examination of narratives offered by imprisoned sexual offenders, several such narrative strategies containing the seeds of moral agency are identified. It is suggested that CBT's current focus on cognitive distortions effectively eliminates this narrative context and thus serves to disguise and even eradicate the positive, moral notions of self that most offenders exhibit in some form or another. A rehabilitative approach that works with narrative, facilitating development of shared narratives among offenders and therapists, would allow for the emergence of a plan for morally agentive living, transcending what is currently possible within the hostile, challenging framework of CBT. [narrative theory; cognitive behavior therapy; moral agency; sexual offenders; prisons] [source]