El presente artículo muestra cómo la preocupación del filósofo chileno Jenaro Abasolo por la justicia social, le lleva a proponer una teoría de la justicia que anticipa la forma del Estado social de derecho. Pues su propuesta política, manteniendo los rasgos esenciales del liberalismo, conecta de manera particular los fines sociales con los políticos, hasta llegar a defender la necesidad de establecer leyes que regulen la esfera económica y la libertad de industria. En consecuencia, la crítica de Abasolo a la (...) forma de Estado liberal, toca en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX a una serie de publicistas liberales, siendo José V. Lastarria el más prominente y quien sirve aquí de contraste. Y adquiere, además, dicha crítica una renovada importancia en el debate actual que intenta determinar la forma de Estado y, por tanto, qué teoría de la justica, es más admisible para las sociedades democráticas que no sólo aspiran al pluralismo sino, también, a la justicia social. (shrink)

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In this introduction, we first give a brief overview of the debate over multiculturalism in political theory. We then situate Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition in that context by highlighting his major normative thesis, according to which there are reasons of principle, in a liberal democracy, to grant special forms of public recognition and accommodation to cultural minorities. Finally, we present a succinct summary of the nine articles that follow (...) this introduction and that critically engage with Patten’s arguments. (shrink)

Maria Morales’s striking and thought-provoking argument in Perfect Equality is that John Stuart Mill’s egalitarianism unifies his practical philosophy and that this element of his thought has been neglected in recent revisionary scholarship. Placing Mill’s arguments for the substantive value of “perfect equality” in The Subjection of Women at the center of her analysis, Morales develops a distinctive interpretation of Mill as an egalitarian liberal. Morales also aims to counter many recent communitarian critiques of liberalism as founded upon a (...) conception of the self as atomistic and individualistic. Like other Mill scholars, Morales sees Mill’s liberalism as an appealing alternative to the dominant Rawlsian theory, and she offers Mill’s approach as a response to “the still popular view that liberalism is structurally incompatible with a rich conception of the human good, particularly with a substantive commitment to equality”. Mill’s theory is not “doggedly individualistic,” and it rejects the model of liberal social life as atomistic and abstract. The well-constituted communities of the title are based upon “sympathetic, cooperative, and egalitarian values”. (shrink)

The triumph of the Sandinista Revolution on July 19, 1979 marked the beginning of a period of intensification of the struggle of the insurgent movements in El Salvador and Guatemala that, encouraged by the victory of their Sandinista comrades, tried to emulate the defeat of the oligarchy in their respective countries. Nicaragua acquired a relevant role as it had not had in the region until then, becoming one of the actors that would mark the course of the isthmus during the (...) eighties of the last century. One of the effects of this new role was the strengthening of relations between the Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Nicaraguan government with the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front of El Salvador and the National Revolutionary Unity. of Guatemala. The climate of revolutionary optimism that very graphically expressed this Central American vision of the revolution was summed up in the motto of the time: "If Nicaragua won, El Salvador will win and Guatemala will follow." The objective of this article is to describe and analyze the relationships that were forged between the FSLN, the FMLN and the URNG in the 1980s. (shrink)

Why is it that for many people questions of sexual behavior are the quintessential moral questions, while for others they are at the periphery of serious moral inquiry? Such a difference of opinion undoubtedly reflects substantive moral disagreement, but might also reflect different conceptions of what morality is about. Probably it reflects both sorts of differences, and both will receive attention in this article.

One Morality or many? Liberal morality and Socialist morality; bourgeois morality and Georges Sorel's “morality of producers”; Protestant morality and Catholic; Greek morality and Christian; “aristocratic” morality and “slave” morality, “open” morality and “closed” morality—what, if any, is the relevance of such distinctions as these to moral philosophy?

Getting What You Want? offers a critique of liberal morality and an analysis of its understanding of the individual as a 'wanting thing'.

It is a matter for both surprise and disappointment that so little has been written from a philosophical perspective about the moral tradition enshrined in Europe''s oldest living literature, the Icelandic sagas. The main purpose of the present essay is to start to ameliorate this shortcoming by analysing and assessing the moral code bequeathed to us by the saga literature. To do so, I draw attention to the striking similarities between saga morality and what tends to be called an (...) ''ancient moral outlook'' (with special reference to Aristotle''s much-maligned virtue of megalopsychia) and then try to defend the credentials of both outlooks in so far as they clash, or seem to clash, with certain aspects of a ''modern moral outlook.''. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Concept of Neutrality Liberal Moral Neutrality Liberal Political Neutrality The Implications of Liberal Political Neutrality Notes.

In a recent study appearing in Neuroethics, I reported observing 11 significant correlations between the “Dark Triad” personality traits – Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy – and “conservative” judgments on a 17-item Moral Intuition Survey. Surprisingly, I observed no significant correlations between the Dark Triad and “liberal” judgments. In order to determine whether these results were an artifact of the particular issues I selected, I ran a follow-up study testing the Dark Triad against conservative and liberal judgments on 15 (...) additional moral issues. The new issues examined include illegal immigration, abortion, the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools, the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the war on terrorism, laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and environmentalism. 1154 participants (680 male, 472 female; median age 29), recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk, completed three surveys: a 15-item Moral Intuition Survey (MIS), the 28-item Short Dark Triad personality inventory, and a five-item demographic survey. The results strongly reinforce my earlier findings. Twenty-two significant correlations were observed between “conservative” judgments and the Dark Triad (all of which were significant past a Bonferonni-corrected significance threshold of p = .0008), compared to seven significant correlations between Dark Triad and “liberal” judgments (only one of which was significant past p = .0008). This article concludes by developing a novel research proposal for determining whether the results of my two studies are “bad news” for conservatives or liberals. (shrink)

Bob Brecher claims that it is wrong to think that morality is simply rooted in what people want. Brecher explains that in our consumerist society, we make the assumption that getting "what people want" is our natural goal, and that this goal is usually a good one. We see that whether it is a matter of pornography or getting married--if people want it, then that's that. But is this really a good thing? Getting What You Want offers a critique (...) of liberal morality and an analysis of its understanding of the individual as a wanting thing. Brecher boldly argues that the Anglo-American liberalism cannot give an adequate account of moral reasoning and action, or any justification of moral principles or demands. (shrink)

In this work, originally published in 1986, Victor Seidler explores the different notions of respect, equality and dependency in Kant’s moral writings. He illuminates central tensions and contradictions not only within Kant’s moral philosophy, but within the thinking and feeling about human dignity and social inequality which we take very much for granted within a liberal moral culture. In challenging our assumption of the autonomy of morality, Seidler also questions our understanding of what it means for someone to (...) live as a person in his or her own right. The autonomy of individuals cannot be assumed but has to be reasserted against relationships of subordination. This involves a break with a rationalist morality, so that respect for others involves respect for emotions, feelings, desires and needs, and establishes a fuller autonomy as a basis for freedom and justice. (shrink)

By examining the range of factors pressing on medical professionals faced with a decision in a case of late-term abortion, it becomes apparent that the theological resources ruled out of bounds by the standard account can be considered an essential part of a truly liberating and properly supple moral account of medical decision-making. Close attention to the social, political and legal context of contemporary medicine reveals that the standard account of medical ethics, Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, (...) despite its universalist aspirations, disempowers rather than empowers moral decision-making by medical professionals. (shrink)

Since the establishment of the Human Genome Project and the identification of genes in human DNA that play a role in human diseases and disorders, a long, moral and political, battle has began over the extension of IPRs to information contained in human genetic material. According to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, over the past 20 years, large numbers of human genes have been the subject of thousands of patent applications. This paper examines whether human gene patents can be justified (...) in terms of liberal theories of morality such as natural law, personality development, just reward and social utility. It is argued that human gene patents are in conflict with fundamental principles of liberal morality and justice because they result in "genetic information feudalism". (shrink)

I INTRODUCTION: RESPECT, EQUALITY AND THE AUTONOMY OF MORALITY We often invoke a notion of respect to express our sense of human equality. ...

The book also points to some of the ways in which polities currently termed 'liberal democracies' fall clearly short of the values that might legitimize them.

This paper takes issue with the exemplarist strategy of fostering virtue development with the specific goal of improving its applicability in the context of education. I argue that, for what matters educationally, we have good reasons to endorse a liberal account of moral exemplarity. Specifically, I challenge two key assumptions of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017), namely that moral exemplars are exceptionally virtuous agents and that imitating their behavior is the main strategy for acquiring the virtues. I will (...) introduce and discuss the notions of enkratic exemplars and injustice illuminators and show that we have good reasons to consider them moral exemplars although they fail to satisfy (either of) the key assumptions. (shrink)

_Moral Politics_ takes a fresh look at how we think and talk about political and moral ideas. George Lakoff analyzed recent political discussion to find that the family—especially the ideal family—is the most powerful metaphor in politics today. Revealing how family-based moral values determine views on diverse issues as crime, gun control, taxation, social programs, and the environment, George Lakoff looks at how conservatives and liberals link morality to politics through the concept of family and how these ideals diverge. (...) Arguing that conservatives have exploited the connection between morality, the family, and politics, while liberals have failed to recognized it, Lakoff explains why conservative moral position has not been effectively challenged. A wake up call to political pundits on both the left and the right, this work redefines how Americans think and talk about politics. (shrink)

Moral disengagement was initially conceptualized as a process through which people reconstrue unethical behaviors, with the effect of deactivating self-sanctions and thereby clearing the way for ethical transgressions. Our article challenges how researchers now conceptualize moral disengagement. The current literature is overly liberal, in that it mixes two related but distinct constructs—process moral disengagement and the propensity to morally disengage—creating ambiguity in the findings. It is overly conservative, as it adopts a challengeable classification scheme of “four points in moral (...) self-regulation” and perpetuates defining moral disengagement via a set of eight psychological mechanisms, narrowing our understanding of the phenomenon. To address these problems, we propose to define process moral disengagement intensionally (specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for correct application of the term) as intrapsychic cognitive reasoning processes through which people selectively reconstrue a moral judgment “behavior B by actor A is morally wrong” and shift it toward becoming “behavior B is not morally wrong” or “actor A is not responsible for behavior B.” This definition achieves disambiguation and increased concept clarity. We leverage the definition to motivate a classification scheme for psychological mechanisms of moral disengagement along two dimensions—reconstruing morality and reconstruing agency—and to initiate an open inventory of psychological mechanisms that specify how process moral disengagement operates. (shrink)

Moral foundations research suggests that liberals care about moral values related to individual rights such as harm and fairness, while conservatives care about those foundations in addition to caring more about group rights such as loyalty, authority, and purity. However, the question remains about how conservatives and liberals differ in relation to group-level moral principles. We used two versions of the moral foundations questionnaire with the target group being either abstract or specific ingroups or outgroups. Across three studies, we observed (...) that liberals showed more endorsement of Individualizing foundations with an outgroup target, while conservatives showed more endorsement of Binding foundations with an ingroup target. This general pattern was found when the framed, target-group was abstract and when target groups were specified about a general British-ingroup and an immigrant-outgroup. In Studies 2 and 3, both Individualizing-Ingroup Preference and Binding-Ingroup Preference scores predicted more Attitude Bias and more Negative Attitude Bias toward immigrants, more Implicit Bias, and more Perceived Threat from immigrants. We also demonstrated that increasing liberalism was associated with less Attitude Bias and less Negative Bias toward immigrants, less Implicit Bias, and less Perceived Threat from immigrants. Outgroup-individualizing foundations and Ingroup-Binding foundations showed different patterns of mediation of these effects. (shrink)

Wendy Donner contends here that recent commentators on John Stuart Mill's thought have focused on his notions of right and obligation and have not paid as much attention to his notion of the good. Mill, she maintains, rejects the quantitative hedonism of Bentham's philosophy in favor of an expanded qualitative version. In this book she provides an account of his complex views of the good and the ways in which these views unify his moral and political thought.

I attempt in this paper to do two things: to offer some comments about recent discussions of the suggested institutionalization of surrogacy agreements; and in doing so, to draw attention to a range of considerations which liberals tend to omit from their moral assessments. The main link between these concerns is the idea that what people want is a fundamental justification for their getting it. I believe that this idea is profoundly mistaken; yet it is an inevitable consequence of a (...) liberal notion of the individual and liberals' extremely limited conception of harm. My intention, then, is to illustrate how unease about a concrete problem—whether or not surrogacy agreements should be institutionalized—might interact with dissatisfaction about liberal individualism to make clearer what the unease consists in and to suggest why liberal individualism is inadequate as a basis for moral philosophy. (shrink)

It is from the mere announcement of the possibility of human cloning that moralists have formulated critical arguments against the permissibility of introducing this practice. A critical survey of these arguments, however, shows that they are not well founded, i.e. that frequently they are not such that they can be used as legitimate arguments in the debate about what is publicly permissible in a state, that they rely on mistaken premises, or that they are non coherent with permissions in relation (...) to other forms of human reproduction. Each argument in favor of the banning of human cloning is analyzed by at least one of these means: whether it is coherent with the fundamental principles of contemporary democracies , whether it relies on well-founded and widely accepted results of scientific researches, and whether it is coherent with the usual and widely shared moral attitudes related to other forms of human reproduction. The most important argument that is taken as a good foundation for the prohibition of human cloning is the moral duty not to harm future persons. The result of the rejection of traditional moral arguments against human cloning does not represent an overall justification of human cloning, it only shows that new, or more sophisticated, arguments must be found if human cloning is to be banned. (shrink)

I attempt in this paper to do two things: to offer some comments about recent discussions of the suggested institutionalization of surrogacy agreements; and in doing so, to draw attention to a range of considerations which liberals tend to omit from their moral assessments. The main link between these concerns is the idea that what people want is a fundamental justification (other things being equal, of course) for their getting it. I believe that this idea is profoundly mistaken; yet it (...) is an inevitable consequence of a liberal notion of the individual and liberals' extremely limited conception of harm. My intention, then, is to illustrate how unease about a concrete problem—whether or not surrogacy agreements should be institutionalized—might interact with dissatisfaction about liberal individualism to make clearer what the unease consists in and to suggest why liberal individualism is inadequate as a basis for moral philosophy. (shrink)

A bold exploration of the feminist revolution in Roman Catholic ethics, this book addresses controversial issues head on. This is the long-awaited first offering by the well-known feminist theologian, a professor of religion at Carleton College and a past president of the Catholic Theological Socity of America.

I argue that, in the second half of the second Millennium, three parallel processes took place. First, normative ethics, or natural morality, that had been a distinct subject in the education of European elites from the Renaissance times to the end of the eighteenth century, disappeared as such, being partly allotted to the Churches via the teaching of religion in State School, and partly absorbed by the study of history and literature, assumed to be channels for imbibing younger generations (...) with the shared values of the State, the Nation, or the People. Second, religion, or better the prevailing religion or, in most countries, the “State Religion,” became a compulsory subject in the State school. Both the State school and Religion as a discipline were indeed novelties. Third, a result of a tacit pact between two ruling groups was that the canon of European culture was transformed into something less consistent and less comprehensive than its previous post-Renaissance version had been. In more detail, the tradition to be transmitted to younger generations was construed around a fable, or better a lie, namely that the modern European is the ancient Greek’s grandson, and the ancient Hebrew had nothing to bequest to the Modern European. Besides, the canon was reduced to a bark without a kernel, in so far as literature and history took the place that used to belong to “philosophy” or to Studia Humanitatis. (shrink)

A brief review of the social and educational context of Hong Kong shows that the publication of the General guidelines on moral education in schools in 1981, by the Hong Kong Education Department, marked a milestone in the development of moral education. The Guidelines explicitly asserted moral education as one function of schooling, whilst also formally recognizing the home and the community as two main influences. This paper narrates how three moral sources of influence – namely Confucian‐parental, Christian‐religious and (...) class='Hi'>liberal‐civic – have shaped the development of moral education in Hong Kong from 1973 to 2003. It then examines in more detail: parental influence at home – the Confucian moral source in Chinese family; schooling influenced by religious sources – taking Christian schools as an example; and the Independent Commission Against Corruption as an official agency for moral education – a liberal source calling for civic morality. In conclusion, the post‐colonial emergence of nationalistic influence in the recently constituted Chinese Special Administrative Region, advocating national identity as the new core value, is traced and the implications for future moral education in Hong Kong are considered. (shrink)

In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics, William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophers' belief that moral expertise is inconsistent with liberal–democratic values, when in fact they (...) are compatible. In this paper, we provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine Smith's observation by utilizing and extending global data on philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise, involving 4087 philosophers from 96 countries. Our findings support Smith's theoretical observation and show that societal levels of support for liberal–democratic values are associated with greater skepticism about moral expertise. We suggest that these findings might be explained by the cognitive process of motivated reasoning and an invalid inference of “is” from “ought.” Consequently, the potential tension between moral expertise and liberal–democratic values is invalidly used for rejecting the existence of moral expertise, while its main and valid implication is for how moral expertise should be applied in liberal–democratic settings. (shrink)

Background -- The moral manualists -- Initiating reform : Odon Lottin -- Retrieving Scripture and charity : Fritz Tillman and Gérard Gilleman -- Synthesis : Bernard Häring -- The neo-manualists -- New foundations for moral reasoning, 1970-89 -- New foundations for a theological anthropology, 1980-2000 -- Toward a global discourse on suffering and solidarity -- Afterword: The encyclicals of Pope Benedict XVI.