Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

Husserl focused perhaps more than any other philosopher on the relationship between philosophy and psychology. This problem was important to him because the European project of universal science must include sciences of consciousness that address questions of meaning, value and purpose so crucial for humanity. This paper provides a sketch of the later Husserl’s thinking on this issue in order to clarify the relationships among transcendental philosophy as the mother of the sciences, psychology as the foundational mental science, and the (...) various regional sciences of persons. Radicalizing and extending the transcendental tradition to free philosophy from naturalism, Husserl developed methods and fundamental concepts for understanding consciousness in its distinctive world constituting function. In parallel fashion, Husserl traced the historical failures of psychology to its naturalistic philosophy, from which he liberated the discipline by means of phenomenological reflections on the intentional property of its subject matter. This pure focus on mental processes resulted in the clarification of the transcendental phenomenological foundation of psychology as well as a recognition of the paradoxical manner in which psychological processes are both world constituting and mundanely present in the lives of persons. The apperceptive synthesis of transcendental consciousness and mundane embodiment in the identification of the person is proposed as essential for a non-naturalistic, intentional psychology, which provides appropriate concepts and the method of intentional analysis for such sciences of persons as sociology, history, literary studies, and religious studies. The problems, means, and inevitable inadequacies of communicating transcendental insights in language are discussed. Analysis of the complexity of living persons discloses their transcendental dimension in the manifolds their mundane activities and in their products, including use, cultural, and art objects as well as social institutions. Attention is drawn to resources in phenomenology beyond Husserl and in the genuine psychological intuitions of non-phenomenologists for generating non-naturalistic, phenomenologically grounded person sciences. (shrink)

The core of J.G. Herder's philosophy of nationalism lies in the conviction that human creativity must be embedded in the particular culture of a communal language. While he acknowledged that this cultural particular must be integrated into a more universal humanity, he insisted that each culture should preserve its incommensurable distinctiveness. He also called for a new method of enquiry regarding history, one that demands empathetic sensitivity toward the uniquely individual while realizing that there are few gains without losses. F.M. (...) Barnard demonstrates that Herder, despite his innovative work on the idea of nationality, was fully aware of the dangers of ethnic fanaticism, but also of the hazards of what is now known as globalization, recognizing that these must be tempered by a sense of universal humanity. Barnard shows that Herder anticipated modern theories of the dynamics of cultures and traditions through the problematic interplay of persistence and change and that his speculations on cultural and political pluralism, on language as a democratic bond, and on the possible fusion of communitarian and liberal dimensions of public life remain relevant to contemporary debates. (shrink)

Recent epistemology divides theories of knowledge according to their diagnoses of cases of failed knowledge, Gettier cases. Two rival camps have emerged: naturalism and justificationism. Naturalism attributes the failure of knowledge in these cases to the cognizer's failure to stand in a strong natural position vis-à-vis the proposition believed. Justificationism traces the failure to the cognizer's failure to be strongly justified in his belief. My aim is to reconcile these camps by offering a version of naturalism, a reliability theory of (...) knowledge, that conforms to the central justificationist tenets. I argue that proposed reliability theories of knowledge, reliable indication theories, offer no prospect of a reconciliation because they misdiagnose failed knowledge in such a way as to violate a basic justificationist tenet. Proposed versions of justificationism, it turns out, fare no better with this tenet. I offer an alternative reliability theory of knowledge, a reliable process theory, that conforms to the justificationist tenet. (shrink)

"The Fragility of Consciousness is the first published collection of his essays and contains several of his best known writings as well as unpublished work. The essays in this volume exhibit a long interdisciplinary engagement with the relationship between faith and reason in the context of the crisis of culture that has marked twentieth- and twenty-first century thought and practice. Frederick G. Lawrence, with his profound and generous commitment to the intellectual life of the church, has produced a body of (...) work that engages with Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Strauss, Voegelin, and Benedict XVI among others. These essays also explore various themes such as the role of religion in a secular age, political theology, economics, neo-Thomism, Christology, and much more. In an age marked by social, cultural, political, and ecclesial fragmentation, Lawrence models a more generous way--one that prioritizes friendship, conversation, and understanding above all else."--. (shrink)

Norms are widely regarded as kinds of templates of performance, resident in agents. As such they are thought to determine unilaterally what kinds of thought or action accords with them. Under philosophical elaboration this view has led to multiple perplexities: among them the question of how there can be evaluation, justification, and rectification of such unilaterally determining entities. Sometimes one can appeal to other, supervening norms; but the need to terminate the regressive procedure typically leads to appeals to dubious "foundations," (...) to conventions, or to sheer prejudice. In a feat of surpassing acuity Wittgenstein exposed this view of norms to be inadequate in the apparently paradigm contexts to which traditionally it seemed best suited, these being those of mathematical rules and principles. An alternative general view of norms is one with important congruences with the view taken by the Critical-Pragmatic philosophy concerning the constitutive role played by norms in creating the texture of human life and thought. This view is that norms are intrinsically socio-psychological entities that interlock with each other and are rooted deeply in the practices of individuals and their communities. Embedded in these practices, norms are in principle open-textured: open to further definition and revision when serious anomalies in their extant forms are encountered. This article explores certain features of the alternative view, concentrating upon the illumination it sheds and the guidance it provides in the conduct of the fundamental philosophical activities of assessment, criticism, and revision of broad and deep personal and communal norms. Normen werden üblicherweise verstanden als eine Art Handlungsschablonen im Innern des jeweils Agierenden. Als solche wird von ihnen angenommen, daß sie einseitig festlegen, welche Arten von Gedanken oder Handlungen mit ihnen übereinstimmen. Bei philosophischer Überprüfung führt diese Sichtweise zu vielfältigen Schwierigkeiten: unter ihnen die Frage, wie solche einseitig bestimmenden Wesenheiten bewertet, gerechtfertigt und berichtigt werden können. Manchmal kann man sich auf andere, übergeordnete Normen berufen; aber angesichts der Notwendigkeit, überhaupt zu einem Ende zu kommen, führt das regressive Verfahren typischerweise zu einer Berufung auf zweifelhafte "Grundsätze", auf Konventionen oder auf ein bloßes Vorurteil. In einer Meisterleistung von außerordentlicher gedanklicher Schärfe hat Wittgenstein diese Sichtweise von Normen als inadäquat gerade für den scheinbar paradigmatischen Zusammenhang entlarvt, auf den sie nach traditioneller Anschauung am besten passen soll: den von mathematischen Regeln und Prinzipien. Eine demgegenüber alternative, allgemeine Sichtweise von Normen stimmt in wesentlichen Punkten mit der Perspektive überein, die von der kritisch-pragmatischen Philosophie im Hinblick auf die konstitutive Rolle eingenommen wird, die Normen bei der Schaffung der Strukturen menschlichen Lebens und Denkens spielen. Diese Sichtweise besteht darin, daß Normen eigentlich sozialpsychologische Entitäten sind, die ineinandergreifen und tief in der Praxis von Individuen und ihren Gemeinschaften wurzeln. Eingebettet in diese Praxis sind Normen prinzipiell offen strukturiert: offen für weitere Definition und für Revision, falls man auf ernstzunehmende Anomalien ihrer bestehenden Fassung stößt. Dieser Beitrag untersucht bestimmte Aspekte jener alternativen Sichtweise. Er konzentriert sich dabei auf die von ihr bewirkte Klärung und die Leitung, die sie bietet, wenn es um die Handhabung so fundamentaler philosophischer Aufgaben wie Bewertung, Kritik und Revision von weit und tief reichenden persönlichen und gesellschaftlichen Normen geht. (shrink)

A rash of very public scandals, of which the behavior of President Clinton and the activities of the late Princess Diana are merely the most famous examples, has raised the question of the appropriateness of the disclosure, or the newsworthiness, of the so-called “private” lives of so-called “public” figures or “public” officials. That is the question I address in this essay.

Using the right to die and the United States Supreme Court case of Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health as exemplars, this article explores the notion of third-order decisionmaking. If first order decisionmaking is about what should happen, and second-order decisionmaking is about who should decide what should happen, then third-order decisionmaking is about who should decide who decides. This turns out to be an apt characterization of constitutionalism, which is centrally concerned with the allocation of responsibility for making (...) decisions about the allocation of responsibility. Deference to erroneous second-order decisions, as in the Cruzan case itself, may merely be an example of this central feature of constitutionalism. Keywords: constitutionalism, Cruzan case, right-to-die, rules CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Ever since Jeremy Bentham wrote his scathing critique of the law of evidence, both philosophers and legal scholars have criticized the exclusionary rules of evidence, arguing that formal rules excluding entire classes of evidence for alleged unreliability violate basic epistemological maxims mandating that all relevant evidence be considered. Although particular pieces of evidence might be excluded as unreliable, they argue, it is a mistake to make such judgments for entire categories, as opposed to making them only in the context of (...) particular pieces of evidence offered for specific purposes. This paper challenges these claims, arguing that rule-based exclusions serve similar purposes to those served by rules in rule-consequentialist moral theories, and that, even more importantly, they are entirely consistent with the exclusionary nature of legal rules in general. Indeed, once we see the role that exclusionary rules might serve in legal epistemology, we can see that they might have a role to play in epistemic appraisal more generally. (shrink)

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) has been called the German Rousseau. Yet while Rousseau is recognized as a political thinker, Herder is not. This book explores each thinker's ideas--on nature and culture, selfhood and mutuality, paternalism, freedom, and autonomy--and compares their conceptions of legitimate statehood. Arguing that the crux of political legitimacy for both men was the possibility of "extended selfhood," Barnard shows that Herder, like Rousseau, profoundly altered human self-understandings, thus influencing modes of justifying political allegiance.

Psychologists have recently begun to study the psychological dimensions of judging, but to date almost all of the research has been on lay experimental subjects. Implicit in the research, therefore, is that the judge's attributes as a human bring are more important than the judge's attribute's as lawyer and/or as judge in explaining judicial behavior. This may possibly be true, and it is relatively consistent with a Legal Realist understanding of judges and judging, but there remains a need for research (...) directed specifically to the question whether judges by virtue of legal training, self-selection to judging, or judicial experience think and reason and make decisions differently from lay people. More specifically, when judges engage in tasks typically reserved to judges - finding and interpreting the relevant law, most prominently - are their cognitive processes different from those of lay people engaged in analogous tasks, and from those of lay people engaged in different and more fact-focused tasks? Until we can answer these questions based on systematic research, we will not know whether there is a psychology of judging at all, as opposed simply to general psychology applied to some of the tasks in which judges, like all other decision makers, engage. (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)