References for Theme: Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity
- MacIntyre, Alasdair
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.106) About human goods what is of the first importance from this point of view is, as I have already emphasized, that individuals should understand that they can achieve their own individual goods only through achieving in the company of others those common goods that we share as family members, as collaborators in the workplace, as participants in a variety of local groups and societies, and as fellow citizens. Take away the notion of such common goods and what is left is a conception of the individual abstracted from her or his social relationships and from the norms of justice that...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.111) Earlier I argued that the initial task of theoretical enquiry is to articulate and develop further what is implicit in or presupposed by practice. And it needs to be stressed once again that agents engaged in such theoretical reflection continue to need to learn from each other, albeit not primarily as fellow students of theory, but as fellow agents engaged in achieving common goods in the practical and productive activities of everyday life, so that their moral and political education needs to be very different from that of the academic theorist.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.118) ...for an Aristotelian, individuals can achieve their own individual goods only in and through achieving those common goods that they share with others, qua family member, qua colleague in the workplace, qua fellow citizen, qua friend, so that care of one’s family, of the ethos of one’s workplace, of the justice of one’s political society and of one’s friends are characteristically and generally marks of a good human life.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.129) What individuals need is that without which they will be unable in adult life to engage in those activities and to discharge those responsibilities that are the mark of a fully participant member of their society. . Their needs are not only biological needs. Indeed, individuals whose needs so understood are met also need to enjoy at least some aspects of their lives and to find point and purpose in their activities. It matters therefore what attitudes, feelings, and desires are elicited in the course of their everyday routines, as they meet their needs, engage in activities, discharge responsibilities, and...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.130) Activities too may engage or fail to engage us in various ways. Consider the attitudes of Japanese workers in automobile factories before and after the reforms designed by Japanese manufacturers under the influence of the maverick American management theorist, W. Edwards Deming. Before, most workers were subjected to mindless routines on production lines, just as in American factories of the same period, each worker engaged in making one part for a whole to be assembled later, their work monitored for quality by inspectors. After, workers became members of teams, each team having the responsibility for making a particular car, taking...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.170) Much depends for families on what resources are available to them, resources which, especially under modern conditions, they are characteristically unable to supply for themselves. Three kinds of resource are indispensable: money, most often in the form of wages from the work-place; the education of children afforded by schools; the law, order, and other public goods provided by government. [...] The common goods of those at work together are achieved in producing goods and services that contribute to the life of the community and in becoming excellent at producing them.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.171) The fact that it is the production of worthwhile goods that gives productive work its point and purpose, but both take it that such work serves a common good to which each worker contributes.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.173) They do so [teachers educate badly] when they focus more or less exclusively on the acquisition of skills with far less attention to the variety of uses to which those skills might be put or to the ends that they might serve. They do even worse when they concentrate on just those skills for which there is a demand in the workplace rather than on developing the powers of each child. One function of education in the school is of course to prepare students for apprenticeship in the workplace, but this is only one function among several, and students are...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.175) The discovery that those who pursue common goods [including in the workplace qua productive worker] must have made, if they are to act as they do, is that it is only through directing themselves toward the achievement of common goods that they are able to direct themselves toward the achievement of their own good qua individual….Institutions, families, schools and workplaces will be understood as sometimes obstacles to and sometimes means for achieving the satisfaction of those preferences.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.176) The discovery that those who pursue common goods [including in the workplace qua productive worker] must have made, if they are to act as they do, is that it is only through directing themselves toward the achievement of common goods that they are able to direct themselves toward the achievement of their own good qua individual….Institutions, families, schools and workplaces will be understood as sometimes obstacles to and sometimes means for achieving the satisfaction of those preferences.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.179) Such communities [as per Thorupstrand] do of course vary in many respects. What they share, as Højrup emphasizes, is that their work is not a means to an external end but is constitutive of a way of life, the sustaining of which is itself an end.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.180) It matters that the Guild [of Thorupstrand] is an association of families as well as of individuals, so that the relationship of the common good of the family to that of the workplace is understood.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.192) What Aristotle and Aquinas stress is our fallibility, our liability to error, without such shared deliberation. “In important matters we deliberate with others, not relying on ourselves for certitude” (Nicomachean Ethics III, 1112b10–11), wrote Aristotle, while Aquinas was more emphatic, arguing that a single individual is always liable to consider some aspects of a particular case at the expense of others, a danger that may be remedied if one consults with others (Summa Theologiae Ia–IIae, qu. 14, art. 3)...It matters, then, as I also noticed earlier, with whom we deliberate and how we deliberate with them...The particular forms that such...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.222) The first is a matter of identifying a set of goods whose contribution to a good life, whatever one’s culture or social order, it would be difficult to deny. They are at least eightfold, beginning with good health and a standard of living – food, clothing, shelter – that frees one from destitution. Add to these good family relationships, sufficient education to make good use of opportunities to develop one’s powers, work that is productive and rewarding, and good friends. Add further time beyond one’s work for activities good in themselves, athletic, aesthetic, intellectual, and the ability of a rational...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.4) Consider two different types of occasion which give us good reason to reflect upon our desires. Occasions of the first type are part of the fabric of everyone’s life, occasions when we cannot avoid making choices that will dictate the shape of our future lives, as when students decide for what kind of work to prepare themselves, or someone in midcareer faces alternative career paths, or someone decides to get married or not to get married, or someone decides to commit themselves to a life of religious contemplation or a life of revolutionary politics.
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.71) philosophical enquiry is almost exclusively the work of professionalized academic teachers whose professionalization ensures the inculcation of certain habits of thought, among them habits that ensure the stability of academic hierarchies. The prerequisites for initiation into academic professions are such that those engaged in philosophical enquiry are generally, like the members of other professions, limited in their life experience. They will rarely have been soldiers or trade union organizers, worked on farms, in fishing crews, or on construction sites, played in string quartets or been in prison. This is of course no fault of theirs. Yet what the compartmentalization of...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
(p.72) A shared assumption of almost all contemporary moral theorizing is that the judgments made by moral agents are singular first person judgments, answers to the question ‘How am I to act?’ Suppose, however, that, contrary to this common view, it is, as I suggested in presenting the NeoAristotelian account in section 1.8 of Chapter 1, a prerequisite for acting as an adequately reflective agent that one should recognize that in many situations the question to be answered is not ‘How am I to act?’, but ‘How are we to act?’, just because what is at stake is a common good...
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (2016)
- Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016)
(p.39) internal goods are “the excellence specific to those particular types of practice which individuals achieve or move towards in the course of pursuing particular goals or particular occasions".
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