This paper will show that if we take conventional ethics seriously, then there is no moral justification for business profits. To show this, we explore three conventional ethical theories, namely Christian ethics, Kantian ethics and Utilitarian ethics. Since they essentially reject self-interest, they also reject the essence of business: the profit motive. To illustrate the relationship, we will concretize how the anti-egoist perspective expresses itself in business and business ethics. In business, we look at what many businesses regard as proof (...) of their virtue. In business ethics, we look at what many business ethicists say about the relationship between morality and self-interest and, thus, the profit motive. Ultimately, we will argue that conventional ethics can, at most, only justify the means of business, but not the end of business. (shrink)

This article identifies the moral premises of contemporary business ethics. After analyzing thirty business ethics texts, the article shows that many business ethicists hold the conventional view that being moral is altruistic. This altruistic perspective logically implies a negative evaluation of self-interest and the profit motive, and business. As a result, the prevailing attitude in mainstream business ethics is that without altruistic restraints businesspeople are inclined to lie, steal, and cheat, not create and earn wealth through honest production and voluntary (...) trade. Therefore, the central concern in current business ethics is to curb businesspeople morally, not to empower them in their self-interested desire to make money. In the final analysis, the article shows how the anti-egoist assumptions manifest themselves in a moral prejudice against business, leading to a biased, unfair, and misleading account of the business world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Frede V. Nielsen, “Didactology as A Field of Theory and Research in Music Education”Marja HeimonenFrede Nielsen describes the two main aspects of music pedagogy as the normative (and prescriptive) and the descriptive (and analytical) aspects. As a precondition for his discussion, he explores some important concepts and terms such as Didaktik. He argues that it is impossible to translate and transfer certain concepts into English. The (...) German tradition, however, has influenced Scandinavian pedagogical discussion and the content of pedagogical terms and concepts in Denmark and Finland is usually congruent with German terminology. Therefore, Nielsen analyzes the German concepts carefully.An example from my own experience as a teacher of both pedagogy and didactics at the Helsinki Conservatory/Polytechnic may throw some light on this [End Page 98] matter from the Finnish perspective. The traditional title of the subject "piano pedagogy" (offered to students who aim to become instrumental teachers) was changed to "piano didactics" some years ago. The content of this course also changed in that alongside practical work (teaching) theoretical courses were also included. The reason for this change was expressed in the same terms that Nielsen presents in his paper: Didaktik (in Finnish didaktiikka) signifies both a theoretical and a practice-oriented approach to teaching.According to Nielsen, the principal question concerning Didaktik is What is the essential content in music education? This is a philosophical (as well as a legal) issue concerning the aims of education and the matter of who has the right to decide the content. These kinds of matters can also be drawn on a larger canvas: the education of human beings generally. Music education (especially in the context of general education) is not only concerned with the skills that will enable pupils to become competent musicians. On the contrary and more profoundly, it aims to broaden the mind and expand the possibilities of thought and feeling. According to several researchers (such as Estelle Jorgensen, Anthony E. Kemp, David Best, Matti Huttunen, and Heidi Westerlund) music teachers should cultivate a wide understanding of the meaning of education so that music education can relate to human experience and social practices.Nielsen has created four paradigms that might be used when the content of music teaching is formulated. The point of departure may be (a)the subject itself, music, (b)the pupil's culture (or the local culture); in other words, the micro-cultural level, (c)the social problems or conditions of democracy (the macro-cultural level), and/or (d)the fundamental existential condition of human beings. These paradigms do not exclude one another. I consider their function to resemble that of legal principles: they have to be weighed and balanced in a particular situation and context. One or several may, for some time, take priority and push the others into the background just as Nielsen argues. Legal principles are not used as legal rules, but they are "strong" as rules.Legal rules have been compared with rails: rules and regulations (just as rails) are either followed or not. This comparison to a train running on rails also clarifies the relationship between legal regulations and human behaviour: most of these rules are obeyed by habit without profound thinking about aims and principles (c.f. Nielsen's paradigms) behind the legal texts.The most important question Nielsen attempts to raise is the relationship between music and pedagogy (Didaktik). He points out that his aim is not to give normative regulations about what should or should not be taught. Raising questions is an important aim of philosophical research. However, this kind of research may also have normative implications. For instance, philosophical [End Page 99] questions regarding the aims and the content of a subject (such as music) are included in the planning of a National Curriculum (or the National Framework Curriculum formulated by the National Board of Education, as we used to have in Finland). This curriculum is normative: the regulations have to be obeyed when syllabi are formulated in schools at the local level. The Framework Curriculum includes several educational aims; for instance, "a good relationship to music" should be created between the pupil and music. The normative character of this kind of... (shrink)

English Summary: Self and the spirit : the modern subject in Christian idealistic nationalism and Rolf Lagerborg's cultural radicalism in Finland c. 1800-1914.

"This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition..., offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship"--Front flap of dust jacket, volume 1.

This open-ended anthology is a journey into the very canon that Mary Daly has argued to be patriarchal and demeaning to women. This volume deauthorizes the official canon of Western philosophy and disrupts a related story told by some feminists who claim that Daly’s work is unworthy of re-reading because it contains fatal errors. The editors and contributors attempt to prove that Mary Daly is located in the Western intellectual tradition. Daly may be highly critical of conventional Western epistemological and (...) theological traditions, but she nevertheless appropriates themes “out-of-context” for the building of her own systematic philosophy. The following are just a few of the many themes explored in this volume: • the question of subjectivity understood as an ongoing process of be-coming • the ambiguity of the need for feminists of colonial nations to speak out about violence against women in other parts of the world while that speaking carries with it the stamp of a colonial location • the territoriality of lesbian and women’s space • the theological dimensions of twentieth-century Western philosophy. Contributors are Wanda Warren Berry, Purushottama Bilimoria, Debra Campbell, Molly Dragiewicz, Frances Gray, Amber L. Katherine, AnaLouise Keating, Anne-Marie Korte, María Lugones, Geraldine Moane, Sheilagh A. Mogford, Laurel C. Schneider, Renuka Sharma, and Marja Suhonen. (shrink)

Is there such a thing as natural knowledge of God? C. Stephen Evans presents the case for understanding theistic arguments as expressions of natural signs in order to gain a new perspective both on their strengths and weaknesses. Three classical, much-discussed theistic arguments - cosmological, teleological, and moral - are examined for the natural signs they embody. At the heart of this book lie several relatively simple ideas. One is that if there is a God of the kind accepted by (...) Christians, Jews, and Muslims, then it is likely that a 'natural' knowledge of God is possible. Another is that this knowledge will have two characteristics: it will be both widely available to humans and yet easy to resist. If these principles are right, a new perspective on many of the classical arguments for God's existence becomes possible. We understand why these arguments have for many people a continued appeal but also why they do not constitute conclusive 'proofs' that settle the debate once and for all. Touching on the interplay between these ideas and contemporary scientific theories about the origins of religious belief, particularly the role of natural selection in predisposing humans to form beliefs in God or gods, Evans concludes that these scientific accounts of religious belief are fully consistent, even supportive, of the truth of religious convictions. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 57-59.

This paper evaluates several recent efforts to interpret the work of Nāgārjuna through the lens of modern symbolic logic. An attempt is made to uncover the premises that justify the use of symbolic logic for this purpose. This is accomplished through a discussion of (1) the historical origins of those premises in the Indian and Tibetan traditions, and (2) how such assumptions prejudice our understanding of Nāgā rjuna’s insistence that he has no “proposition” (pratijñā). Finally, the paper sets forth an (...) alternative interpretation that takes into account the literary dimensions of Nāgārjuna’s writing. (shrink)

While for many years Locke was viewed almost universally as the prophet of liberalism, today a successive reading of C.B. Macpherson's Possessive Individualism, John Dunn's The Political Thought of John Locke and Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics and Locke's �Two Treatises of Government�, might produce a schizophrenic vision of Locke as simultaneously an accumulative bourgeois villain, an irrelevant Calvinist moralist and a radical egalitarian revolutionary hero. This essay addresses an issue examined to a greater or lesser extent by these and other (...) interpreters: John Locke's thoughts on the conduct of everyday political life. Consideration of this topic can serve to moderate one's impression of Locke, just as currently Ashcraft holds Locke to be less radical and Dunn finds Locke less irrelevant than they did before. The essay seeks to identify the group of persons Locke presumed would govern in a well-ordered nation, to examine the qualities required of these governors in order for them to perform their calling, and to illuminate Locke's personal efforts to promote these qualities in the governors of the next generation. In particular, I will examine the concept of trust, which John Dunn in recent years has found to be of continuing political relevance. In the first section, I will review the use of the word �trust� in Locke's Second Treatise to display the fact that trustworthiness in governors is constituted by possession of the qualities of virtue and prudence in the second section, I will argue that Locke's educational writings ought to be viewed as attempts to encourage the formation of the qualities necessary for good governors. In the following two sections, I will examine the meaning Locke ascribes to both �prudence� and �virtue� in his various political, philosophical, and educational writings. Finally, I will endeavour to show that an understanding of these qualities, along with the importance of status and breeding, are instrumental to an understanding of Locke's conception of the conduct of everday political life. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a logical formalization of the emotion triggering process and of its relationship with mental attitudes, as described in Ortony, Clore, and Collins’s theory. We argue that modal logics are particularly adapted to represent agents’ mental attitudes and to reason about them, and use a specific modal logic that we call Logic of Emotions in order to provide logical definitions of all but two of their 22 emotions. While these definitions may be subject to debate, we (...) show that they allow to reason about emotions and to draw interesting conclusions from the theory. (shrink)

Three famous sophists are referred to together in the Apology of Sokrates as still practising their enviably lucrative itinerant profession in 399 B.C. (not, by implication, in Athens): Gorgias of Leontinoi, Prodikos of Keos and Hippias of Elis. The last of these was the least well known to the Athenian demos, having practised mainly in Dorian cities. There is no extant reference to him in Old Comedy, but we can assume that he was sufficiently famous - especially for his fees (...) (possibly the highest charged by any sophist) - to justify his inclusion as the third of this 'triad'; cf. the triad Protagoras - Hippias - Prodikos in the Protagoras, considered further below. Gorgias was by now a grand old man of about ninety (with more than a decade of active life still ahead of him), the last survivor of the first generation of fee-taking educators, associated first and foremost in the popular mind with the suspect arts of political and forensic persuasion. Prodikos and Hippias were probably in their sixties. (shrink)

C A Wringe; Reply to Antony Flew, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 149–158, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1979.t.

There is the world of ideas and the world of practice; the French are often for sup pressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. -Matthew Arnold The Function of Criticism at the Present Time From its inception, bioethics has confronted the need to reconcile theory and practice. At first the confrontation was purely intellectual, as writers on ethical theory (within phi losophy, theology, or other humanistic disciplines) turned their attention to topics from the (...) world of medical practice. Recently the confrontation has grown more intense. The ap pointment of clinical ethicists in hospitals and other health care settings is an accelerating trend in North America. Concomitantly, those institutions involved in training peo ple in clinical ethics have added organized exposure to the world of practice, in the form of placement requirements, to the normal academic course load. In common with other dis ciplines, bioethics has begun to see clinical training as a con dition of didactic theory and apprenticeship. (shrink)

Cultural education for the soldiers of People army of Vietnam.

Монографія "Функціональність релігії: український контекст".

The Hutchinsonian movement exercised considerable influence on thought about various topics of importance in England's Enlightenment/Counter-Enlightenment debates. Its epistemological stance, derived from a group of Irish writers of the early eighteenth century, places the movement at the centre of these debates and does much to explain its attraction to contemporaries. The article emphasises the persistence of Hutchinsonian thought and the continuing importance of its epistemological underpinnings into the early nineteenth century, drawing attention particularly to the writings of Bishop William Van (...) Mildert. (shrink)

On 5 August 1968, publication of the Harvard Committee’s report on the subject of “irreversible coma” established a standard for diagnosing death on neurological grounds. On the same day, the 22nd World Medical Assembly met in Sydney, Australia, and announced the Declaration of Sydney, a pronouncement on death, which is less often quoted because it was overshadowed by the impact of the Harvard Report. To put those events into present-day perspective, the authors reviewed all papers published on this subject and (...) the World Medical Association web page and documents, and corresponded with Dr A G Romualdez, the son of Dr A Z Romualdez. There was vast neurological expertise among some of the Harvard Committee members, leading to a comprehensible and practical clinical description of the brain death syndrome and the way to diagnose it. This landmark account had a global medical and social impact on the issue of human death, which simultaneously lessened reception of the Declaration of Sydney. Nonetheless, the Declaration of Sydney faced the main conceptual and philosophical issues on human death in a bold and forthright manner. This statement differentiated the meaning of death at the cellular and tissue levels from the death of the person. This was a pioneering view on the discussion of human death, published as early as in 1968, that should be recognised by current and future generations. (shrink)