This paper analyses a situation where a patient's suffering provoked feelings of compassion in a student nurse, and distress at her patient's circumstances. The reported behaviour of qualified nurses within the situation suggests that they lacked compassion, had inadequate knowledge, and that they failed to understand their patient's plight. An account of the situation is followed by an exploration of the nature of moral agency, and understanding in nursing. Nurses' capacity for moral imagination is shown to be of crucial importance (...) to the care that patients receive. The extent of nurses' responsibility for their behaviour is considered, and in particular, the extent of nurses' responsibility during times when they experience strain. Argument leads to the conclusion that we are justified in holding nurses responsible for their behaviour in situations of patient care, although we must not judge a nurse's behaviour too hastily. Attention is drawn to the need for a moral climate to sustain those nurses who struggle to give good patient care, despite the strain that is ever present within today's world of health care. (shrink)

This article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political (...) absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition. (shrink)

Much social theory tends to emphasize the external goods of social practices, often neglecting the internal goods of those practices. For example, many analyses of religious rituals over-emphasize the instrumental and individualistic ends of prayer and liturgy by describing such religious practices as effective means for achieving external ends like positive emotions, psychological benefits, social status, or social capital. By contrast, we use a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective to analyze the relational goods, such as trust and intimacy, which are expressed (...) and sustained through ritualized social practices. Using ethnographies of Haitian and Ghanaian Christians in the U.S., we demonstrate that prayer and liturgy can also be understood as constitutive-ends practices, practices in which human persons engage to sustain relations with others because there are goods inherent to those relationships. We further argue that in many religious practices, the end goals and the means—i.e. specific aspects of the practice—are inseparable. Our approach to developing theory combines critical engagement with numerous other theorists and also exploring how well various theories can explain the motivations and experiences of participants in the religious rituals where we conducted our ethnographies. (shrink)

In recent discussions of the so-called “value of truth,” it is assumed that what is valuable in the relevant way is not the things that are true, but only various states and activities associated with those things: knowing them, investigating them, etc. I consider all the arguments I know of for this assumption, and argue that none provide good reason to accept it. By examining these arguments, we gain a better appreciation of what the value of the things that are (...) true would be, and why it would matter. We also encounter three indications that what is true really is valuable, each of which provides a promising starting point for a serious argument with that conclusion. (shrink)

Contemporary moral philosophy is split between an inherently a-historical moral philosophy/theory on the one hand and a growing interest in moral history and the historicity of morality on the other. In between these, the very moments of moral change are often left insufficiently attended to and under-theorized. Yet moral change is, arguably, one of the defining features of present day moral frameworks, and thus one of the main things we need to make sense of in moral philosophy. In this paper, (...) I present an account of moral change through the use of three metaphors: the tipping point, the bargaining table and the strong rope. I suggest these as coordinates for the development of a full-blown, historically sensitive conception of morality. (shrink)

We often come to value someone or something through experience of that person or thing. You may thereby come to embrace a value that you did not grasp prior to the experience in question. Moreover, it seems that in a large and important subset of cases you could not have fully appreciated that value merely by considering a report of the reasons or arguments that purport to establish that it is valuable. Despite its ubiquity, this phenomenon goes missing in a (...) great deal of contemporary work in ethics and political philosophy. In this paper I further specify the phenomenon of interest by developing a series of examples. Then I support the claim that philosophers routinely overlook it by surveying several significant philosophical positions that do so. (shrink)

In this thesis I look at possible implications of the philosophical use of sight metaphors as rendered visible in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Through Murdoch’s reading of Plato, and together with the perspectives added by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul de Man, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Mats Persson, I argue that some contemporary philosophy as shaped by science and logic might be partially blind to essential aspects of human life and human awareness. I show that this partial blindness becomes visible in an (...) inability to acknowledge and understand the philosophical importance of that which cannot be seen from a distance, and I argue that this may be due to a modern understanding of clarity. I claim that this understanding of clarity essentially differs from that of Plato and that it becomes particularly evident in Plato’s reliance on metaphors and allegories, not as unclear and obfuscating aspects to be untangled, but as depicting essential dimensions of the inexhaustible complexity of life. I finally argue that it is vital to recover and to philosophically consider these obscurer aspects if philosophy is to stay relevant to actual human beings living in the muddle that is everyday life. (shrink)