Excerpt from Everyday Ethics A successful book on methods of teaching ethics will improve in the schoolroom the art of instruction in the most difficult province of study and practice. Ethics relates to all manner of deeds and habits of doing which concern one's fellow men, either as private individuals or as members of institutions - members of the social whole. One may conduct himself in such a manner as to obstruct the actions of his fellow men and thereby reduce (...) their labours and strivings to a nullity, more or less, according to his power and skill. Or, on the other hand, he may act in such a manner as to reenforce their labours and strivings and increase the net product of human endeavour. The fact that there are rational objects to be achieved by humanity - name them collectively as the conquest of nature for man's use and the peaceful combination of man with men to the end that each individual may share in the experience of all individuals - these objects ought to be the common aim of all rational beings: this fact furnishes the basis and norm of ethics. It makes evident the Source of Power. The individual who promotes the twofold end of civilisation increases the aggregate power of mankind and at the same time shares in that power. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This paper presents core features of the virtue ethics of American philosopher Ella Lyman Cabot. It offers an articulation of her position in Everyday Ethics (1906), and argues that Cabot's account has the resources to respond to a critique leveled against her mentor, Josiah Royce—namely, that a virtue ethics organized around loyalty is too easily corrupted by loyalty to bad causes. In addition to its importance to a full picture of the pragmatist tradition in moral philosophy, (...) engagement with Cabot's work is critical to an accurate grasp of the virtue ethics revival of the 20th century. (shrink)

This is an intellectual biography in the most literal sense; at no point in the history of American philosophy has an individual embodied the ideals that they wrote about at length. Philosophical idealism, pragmatism and feminism served as guides for Ella Lyman Cabot as she entered the discipline of philosophy, a discipline that continues to marginalize the work of women to this very day.

Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism provides an account of the life and writings of Ella Lyman Cabot (1866-1934), a woman who received formal training, but not formal recognition, in the field of classical American philosophy. It highlights the themes of idealism, pragmatism and feminism as they emerged in the course of career as an educational reformer and ethicist that spanned nearly four decades. Cabot's writings, developed in graduate seminars at Harvard and Radcliffe at the turn of the (...) century complement, and in many cases anticipate, the thinking of the "fathers" of the American philosophical cannon: Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, and John Dewey. Her formal philosophical writing focuses on the concepts of growth, creativity, and the moral imagination—a fact that is especially interesting given that these concepts are developed by a woman who faced serious obstacles in her personal and intellectual development. Indeed, these concepts are not merely philosophical ideals, but practical tools that Ella Lyman Cabot used to negotiate the gender roles and intellectual marginalization that she faces at the turn of the century. The discipline of philosophy was very slow to incorporate the insights of women into its self-definition. An analysis of the writings of Ella Lyman Cabot reveals this point, but also the pointed ways in which she sought to express her genuinely creative insights. (shrink)

This paper recovers and investigates the work of two forgotten figures in the history of American philosophy: Ella Lyman Cabot and Mary Parker Follett. It focuses on Cabot's work, developed between 1889 and 1906. During this period, Cabot took several classes given by Josiah Royce at Radcliffe College. Cabot's work creatively extends Royce's early thinking on the issues of growth, unity, and loyalty. This paper claims that Cabot's writing serves as a valuable type (...) of Roycean interpretation—an interpretation that sheds light on Royce's philosophy while redeploying his thinking in ways that explore its ethical and social implications. Cabot is an important figure in the community of classical American thinkers, a figure who deserves greater attention. This analysis concludes with a brief discussion of Cabot's legacy as it is carried on by Mary Parker Follett's progressive and feminist writings published in the early decades of the 1900s. Follett's contribution to the field of organizational management reveals her affinity with Cabot and variety of other American thinkers. (shrink)

In previous works such as Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition and Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot, John Kaag firmly established his "street cred" as a scholar and interpreter of American philosophy. His name will also be familiar to readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, and sundry other publications as he endeavors to impact a larger audience, off campus, to serve as a public intellectual, one (...) we need now more than ever—Richard Hofstadter's 1964 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is all too relevant as challenges cloud our democratic vistas.An ambitious work, American... (shrink)

This paper briefly examines the relationship between chance, creativity and ethics in Peirce's development of tychism. In the early 1900s Peirce began to suggest that chance ought to be understood as a type of agency or as "psychical action" upon matter. I discuss the ethical implicaof this suggestion. Peirce remained reticent to translate the speculations concerning chance and purpose into the language of applied ethics. It is for this reason that I look to Ella Lyman Cabot to (...) extend Peirce's metaphysical speculations. Cabot was an active interlocutor with Josiah Royce between 1888 and 1916. In comparison to Peirce, Cabot's interest in chance is overtly ethical; she believed that a specific orientation to chance events can dramatically alter the course of human conduct. This point is made clear in her unpublished papers from 1902 and in her Everyday Ethics (1906). Cabot's work stands as an original contribution to the canon that deserves serious attention. (shrink)

Sometimes, a form of discrimination is hard to register, understand, and articulate. A rich precedent demonstrates how victim testimonies have been key in uncovering such “hidden” forms of discrimination, from sexual harassment to microaggressions. I reflect on how this plausibly goes too for “attentional discrimination”, referring to cases where the more meaningful attributes of one social group are made salient in attention in contrast to the less meaningful attributes of another. Victim testimonies understandably dominate the “context-of-discovery” stage of research into (...) these initially opaque forms of discrimination; a victim’s encounter with the gap between their experience and dominant conceptual frameworks for understanding it is what provides an initial foothold for analysis to begin. Some object, however, to this methodology continuing to dominate the later “context-of-justification” stage, where the hypothesis is rigorously challenged. I argue that this objection underestimates not just how other methodologies are more likely to inherit the various mechanisms of invisibility hiding the discrimination in question, but also how victim testimonies are distinctively well-suited to recognize and challenge those mechanisms. Victim testimonies, then, ought to continue playing a dominant role into these later stages of research regarding hidden forms of discrimination. (shrink)

Malebranche et Leibniz affirment que Dieu a créé le meilleur des mondes possibles. Mais ces mondes possibles remplissent des fonctions argumentatives sensiblement différentes dans leurs théodicées respectives. S’ils s’accordent tous deux pour définir l’ordre d’un monde par la généralité de volontés divines, ils ont toutefois des conceptions distinctes de son unité. Les mondes malebranchiens peuvent exister dans le même espace alors que la maximalité des mondes leibniziens empêche une telle possibilité. Ces deux modes de composition des mondes règlent différemment le (...) choix divin. Ainsi, les mondes malebranchiens visent uniquement à prouver la perfection de ce choix, tandis que les mondes leibniziens permettent également d’en démontrer la liberté et la contingence. (shrink)

Consider a terrible situation that too many women find themselves in: 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales alone every year. Many of these women do not bring their cases to trial. There are multiple reasons that they might not want to testify in the courts. The incredibly low conviction rate is one. Another reason, however, might be that these women do not want the fact that they were raped to become the most salient thing about them. More specifically, (...) they do not want it to be the thing that others attend to the most—that others find most noticeable and memorable. In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘harmful salience perspectives’ to help to explain this and related phenomena. This refers either to attention on things that should not be salient, or not enough attention on things that deserve to be made salient. Following ideas within the feminist literature on objectification, I argue that we can be harmed when aspects of our identity that do not reflect our personhood—our agency, rationality, personality, and so on—are more prominent in the minds of others than aspects that do reflect our personhood. Crucially, these ways of attending do not need to implicate false beliefs and harmful ideologies to be harmful, but can be harmful in their own right. (shrink)

Lyman Abbott was an American liberal theologian and a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt. He was a moderate man who sought to re-establish Christian faith among the American people in a period of change. This book, first published in 1893, argued that spiritual experience is always new and therefore every age requires a new expression for it. A believer in the possibility of harmonious coexistence between the Church and evolutionary theory, Abbott proposed a 'more intelligible and credible' religion that endeavoured (...) to sustain faith by expressing it in contemporary terms. He maintained that science and faith were compatible and that both natural and spiritual elements belonged to a shared kingdom governed by the law of progress. Blending faith in historical Christianity with belief in progress and evolutionary theory, Abbott aimed to provide a bridge between religious life and late nineteenth-century philosophical thought. (shrink)

One theme in complaints from those with marginalized social identities is that they are seen primarily in terms of that identity. Some Black artists, for instance, complain about being seen as Black first and artists second. These individuals can be understood as objecting to a particularly subtle form of morally problematic attention: “relative attentional surplus on the wrong property.” This attentional surplus can coexist with another type of common problematic attention affecting these groups, including attentional deficits; marginalized individuals and groups (...) themselves are routinely insufficiently attended to in virtue of the surplus attention given to their social identity properties. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The living God.--The guest after God.--The hidden presence.--The power of vision.--Pursing God.--Listening to God.--The door.--Christ's yoke.--The fruits of the spirit.--Devout forgetting.--Devout remembering.

. Progress in technology has allowed dynamic research on the development of the human brain that has revolutionized concepts. Particularly, the notions of plasticity, neuronal selection, and the effects of afferent stimuli have entered into thinking about brain development. Here I focus on development from the age of four years to early adulthood, during which a 30 percent reduction in some brain synapses occurs that is out of proportion to changes in neuronal numbers. This corresponds temporally with changes in normal (...) child behavior from the loose‐associative, almost schizoid, thinking and art of the four‐year‐old to the more trained, or disciplined, or acculturated—and restrained—personality of the young adult. I propose that the synaptic changes can best be thought of as a winnowing process likely subject to environmental influences. Acquisition of language and the ability to link linguistic cognition to the plastic development of the brain provide a potentially powerful means of explaining the evolutionally explosive development of human cognition and culture. Schizophrenia, a disease that can be envisioned as representing a derangement of synaptic maturation, may provide an entry into the search for genes controlling the processes mediating the unprecedented development of Homo sapiens over the past 40,000 to 70,000 years. The recently completed mapping of the genome of the chimpanzee provides a new frame of reference that may speed the search. (shrink)

In a number of recent and forthcoming articles and papers, I have argued that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential, that we must choose utopia. Today, I want to try to give you the essence of that argument while also relating it to some new issues. Let me summarize my argument:1.Hope/desire for a better life in this life is a central aspect of the human experience.2.That hope/desire has often been distorted by ideology and religion.3.That hope/desire has (...) often been captured to serve the economic and political ends of the powerful.4.When that hope/desire is distorted or captured, it can become dangerous.5.That danger usually comes about because the hope/desire is warped so that the better life is only for a select few or in-group, thus creating an out-group, an other, who can be neglected, harmed, even killed to achieve the end. Such groups have included members of other religions, indigenous peoples, other ethnic groups, ideologies, and so forth. The boundaries of the other have often been changed to include some formerly in the in-group.6.Even so, that hope/desire for a better life is the only effective means of overcoming such distortion/capture. (shrink)

Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns’, referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange’. Despite their apparent (...) triviality, I argue that order-based salience patterns tend to make the content positioned first more salient – in the sense of attention-grabbing – in a way that can have surprising normative implications. Giving relative salience to gender differences over similarities, for instance, can result in the activation of cognitively accessible beliefs about gender differences. Where those beliefs are epistemically and/or ethically flawed, we can critique the salience pattern that led to them, providing an instrumental way of evaluating those patterns. I suggest that order-based salience patterns can also be evaluated on constitutive grounds; talking about gender differences before similarities might constitute a subtle form of bias. Finally, I reflect on how the apparent triviality of order-based salience patterns in language gives them an insidious strength. (shrink)

Learning to adapt to the new set of conditions that confound behavioral standards was made possible by the pandemic-driven change in the school system. Due to these conditions and the COVID-19 pandemic, students may experience behaviors like social media addiction and social anxiety that may affect their well-being or happiness. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of social media addiction and social anxiety on the happiness of tertiary students amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was conducted on 316 (...) first-year college students utilizing Google forms to disseminate questionnaires. After utilizing Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, Social Anxiety Scale, and Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, it was found that social media addiction (β = -0.30, p<.00) and social anxiety (β = -0.003, p<.00) has a significant negative effect on happiness. Therefore, the study recommended and designed a student wellness program that provides a range of recreational, healthimproving, self-esteem-boosting, and relationship-strengthening activities for students in order to mitigate the negative effects of problematic social media usage and social anxiety that negatively effect their happiness. (shrink)

There are many debates about what constitutes a utopia. Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical?

Recent scandals allegedly linked to CEO compensation have brought executive compensation and perquisites to the forefront of debate about constraining executive compensation and reforming the associated corporate governance structure. We briefly describe the structure of executive compensation, and the agency theory framework that has commonly been used to conceptualize executives acting on behalf of shareholders. We detail some criticisms of executive compensation and associated ethical issues, and then discuss what previous research suggests are likely intended and unintended consequences of some (...) widely proposed executive compensation reforms. We explicitly discuss the following recommendations for reform: require greater independence of compensation committees, require executives to hold equity in the corporation, require greater disclosure of executive compensation, increase institutional investor involvement in corporate governance (including executive compensation), and require firms to expense stock options on their income statements. We provide a brief summary discussion of ethical issues related to executive compensation, and describe possible future research. (shrink)