Search Results

Too often, since the 19th century, sensitivity is dismissed as mere “sentimentality” in philosophy and in literature. It is charged that sentimentality is distorting, self-indulgent, self-deceptive. I argue that all of these charges are misplaced or themselves distorted and betray a suspicion of emotions and the tender sentiments that is unwarranted.

There seems to be no end to moralizing about the vices, but there is too little appreciation of them as mere human foibles and an essential part of the “human circus.” There are also serious questions about whether some of the so-called deadly sins are sinful at all.

Finally, I return to the theme of sentimentality with a particular focus on art and what is often called “kitsch” I ask, as I did for sentimentality in general, What's wrong with kitsch? And I defend it, as I did for sentimentality, by suggesting that the attacks on kitsch are often not what they seem to be.

When Cecil Maurice Bowra talked of training the mind, this was no platitude. He meant every word. He believed that his generation had unparalleled opportunity. The constraints of Victorianism had been dispersed. It was now possible to think freely, as the Greeks had advocated. In retrospect, Maurice would agree that many of the opportunities of the 1920s had been lost or misused. Opportunities always are. There had been too much silliness and some self-indulgence. However in establishing the principle that everything could be talked of and nearly everything done, the 1920s had opened gates that would be hard to close. In Oxford, there was no doubt about who captained the new wave. A. J. Ayer and others were clear that Maurice was ‘by far the most influential’ don in the University. According to Elizabeth Longford, he was ‘Voltaire and the Sun King rolled into one’.

This chapter is an essay which reviews William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying, the story of the corpse of a woman in late middle age. As I Lay Dying is concerned not with death, but merely with the chemical changes which happen in a dead body. The history Faulkner relates is the history of this body before it is finally buried. It may be said that the novel's most interesting character, or at least the character in which Faulkner shows most interest, is the corpse in its dead, or rather gruesomely alive, state. The effect that this story produces is one of self-indulgence, disgust rather than horror. The essay argues that there is nothing much to be said for As I Lay Dying except for a few isolated accounts of violent action.

If virtue is an intrinsic good, how does its value compare with those of other goods such as pleasure, knowledge, and achievement? Whereas many philosophers hold that virtue is the greatest good, this chapter argues that virtue is a lesser good in the following sense: the value of an attitude to an object is always less than the value of that object, so, for example, the goodness of compassion for another's pain is always less than the evil of that pain. After presenting a series of arguments for this view, the chapter considers several objections to it, including one about sadistic pleasure, and then applies it to specific issues about moral self‐indulgence, private charity, and the theological problem of evil.

Examines the question of whether it is morally permissible to treat people in ways ruled out by the Principle of Permissible Harm (PPH; this was introduced in Ch. 7 and provides an account of certain restrictions/constraints on killing) only for the sake of minimizing violations of the PPH itself, or whether there is a constraint on doing this. Ch. 9 examines further one approach to the Selection Problem introduced in Ch. 8 that arises in justifying restrictions/constraints, namely, agent differentiation: the fact that something would be done by me rather than by someone else. Traditional victim‐focussed views (the victim's right or the inappropriateness of the relation in which he would stand to those for whom he would be sacrificed constrain and make it wrong for the agent to kill) are contrasted with four revisionist (agent‐relative and agent‐focussed) views on dealing with cases in which one person is killed in order to save others from being killed. Different notions of the self, act‐scenes, negative factors to be avoided, temporal dimensions, doomed victims, and degrees of self‐indulgence are examined in relation to the problem of justifying the constraint. One revisionist view is shown to bear a crucial similarity to the traditional view.

This chapter examines the conceptual significance of the term ‘sensible’ and explores it in relation to the irrevocable tension between freedom and coercion that characterises the government of liberal societies. Being sensible, it is argued, sits at the precarious fulcrum of the need to invest in and engage with the market as consumers while at the same time identifying and managing the negative externalities of such consumption choices. The chapter argues that maintaining this delicate balance between self-indulgence and self-restraint requires the creation and deployment of socially normative behaviours. Being sensible as a tool of governance is given relevance not just for who is acting, but where these actions are taking place.

This chapter offers a message of hope in the face of anxiety and fear by stating that an education devoid of play, wonder, optimism, and curiosity will cultivate dry skepticism at best, and nihilism and despair at worst. Today's youth face an uncertain future: a world with multiple and no longer deniable threats to the environment, new and highly contagious infectious diseases, multiple war fronts, and intractable ethnic conflicts within countries and across regions. The chapter provides a “third option” beyond Dionysian self-indulgence and nihilistic despair; a reminder that human agency is a liberating, life-enhancing force and must be at the core of any socially conscious, responsible educational project in this global era.

Ethical self-commitment is a commitment to one’s living up to a certain reflective conception of the ethical that includes both one’s conduct and all aspects of the mind’s activities, where such commitment is linked up with one’s sense of honor and disgrace. In this chapter, I discuss the way Confucians spell out the idea of ethical self-commitment, and the way they regard it as providing the basis for a state of reflective equanimity. I then consider whether idealizing ethical self-commitment renders an ethical view vulnerable to the charge of ethical self-indulgence, and argue that it does not as it requires the reflective conception of the ethical to play only a constraining role, not a directly motivating role.

Chapter 4 reviews contemporary research on psychological writing in order to sketch the possibilities and limits of such prose, rooted in a style of writing that goes beyond “typical” social scientific conventions. Drawing on the author’s reflections of how he chose to write about the lives of exiled Tibetans, he makes the case that this more narrative style is particularly suited to the experiences of those who have been displaced because it allows for a deeper representation of the efforts to understand the effects of profound violence on another person. The author reviews the challenges that come with this sort of writing as well, including the complexities of reflexivity, the emotional components of fieldwork, and the historical legacy of subaltern studies.