The aim of the article is to outline an interpretation of the philosophical understanding of the concept of the good in pre-Platonic thought. The interpretation is based on those fragments only in which the concept actually appears. As a result of the adopted assumption, the ideas of the first philosophers, i.e. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, were outside the scope of the investigation, as well as those of Xenophanes, Eleatics, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Leucippus. In the case of the first philosophical systems of the pre-Platonic philosophy one notices a connection between the good and the One. It can also be found that understanding of the `the Best' is depended on, and results from, ‘the good’. This is true also in Heraclitus, though, at the same time, he introduces an significant reversal in this respect, for he abolishes the absolute difference between the good and evil, and turns it to a subjective relation. The good has no ontological basis in the Democritus' system as well, though the good’s connection with truth, accessible for every human being, allows to interpret him as arguing for an objectivistic conception of the good. The objectivity of good has subsequently been denied by the Sophists.
Sport is - and should be - an amoral phenomenon (what should not be confused with an immoral one); that is, a phenomenon which is completely independent from ethics, except of, possibly, deontological ethics which concerns professionals who have professional obligations towards their employers and other persons who are provided with and influenced by their services.Conduct according to rules of a given sport has no moral character. It has only pragmatic character, similarly as conduct in compliance with principles of the administrative code, the civil code or the penal code. Of course, when you act in accordance with rules of sports rivalry you can additionally realize also other aims - like, for example, aesthetic, spectacular or moral ones. However, in each case rules of the game and legal norms have priority, because they are the most important regulative determinant of conduct in various societies, including variously defined human teams. The above mentioned legal and sports regulations are not moral norms. They can, however, influence moral behaviours if they are in conflict with the law or rules of the game.From that viewpoint moral norms are exterritorial in their relation to assumptions and rules of a particular sport. Contestants and people responsible for them - like, for example, coaches or sports officials - as well as their employers are neither required to account for their moral beliefs, nor for their moral behaviours, if only they act in compliance with rules of sports rivalry.
The problematic field in this article is one of the most vivid, contemporary dispute, i.e. the dispute between “ethics of care” and “ethics of justice”. “Ethics of care” is Carol Gilligan’s concept derived from her controversy with Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. “Ethics of justice” is a summary term for different concepts developed within the traditional ethics. This traditional ethics tried to name universal principles of acting, independent from the acting person and her feelings. The central categories were “justice” and “the Good”. For the second kind of ethics the central category is “care” and moral duties are gradable. In this article I analyse the controversy in the field of psychotherapy. I maintain that dynamics of psychotherapeutic relation is such that it “imposes” the “ethics of care”. Referring to some examples from clinical practice I tend to prove how dangerous absence of the “ethics of justice” can be in psychotherapy. I claim that using only the “ethics of care” approach in understanding and approaching the patient’s acting may narrow the therapeutic process and slow down the patient’s moral growth.
The article is primarily concerned with the relationship between authority and freedom. From the pedagogical point of view, freedom comes from authority because to be free means to be able to express self-control in order to choose only what is good. Educational authority isn’t tyranny because the educator must be coherent and must act as he/she teaches. The main challenge to educating people and to people in education – both of them – is to be able to practice virtue, not only to recognize values. Nowadays, especially the “bad conduct” of youths, people are increasingly concerned about their relationship with permissive educational practices. In fact, the problem revolves around the fact that boys and girls have learned but are unable to lead themselves, they involved in addictions (drugs, alcohol, internet…) and they show their weakness in concrete decisions. It isn’t a matter of knowledge, but of will; it is related to the lack of will towards self-care. Why are boys and girls who attend school, are well informed and without economic problems not determined to reject what is bad not only from the moral point of view, but also from the point of view of their health? Because they are not educated to fix limits to their desires: that problem is related to the lack of authority because authority makes us able to face limitations. For this reason it is necessary to reconsider authority within educational theory and practice.
PL
Artykuł dotyczy przede wszystkim relacji pomiędzy władzą a wolnością. Z pedagogicznego punktu widzenia, wolność pochodzi od autorytetu, ponieważ bycie wolnym oznacza możliwość wyrażania samokontroli w celu wybierania tylko tego, co jest dobre. Instytucja edukacyjna nie jest tyrania, ponieważ wychowawca musi być spójny i musi działać jak uczy. Głównym wyzwaniem dla uczących i edukowanych jest to, aby móc praktykować cnotę a nie tylko do uznawać wartości. W dzisiejszych czasach ludzie są coraz bardziej zaniepokojeni obecnością permisywnych praktyk edukacyjnych. W rzeczywistości problem kręci się wokół faktu, że chłopcy i dziewczęta uczą się, ale nie są w stanie sobą kierować, uzależniają się (narkotyki, alkohol, internet ...) i przejawiają słabość w podejmowaniu konkretnych decyzji. To nie jest kwestia wiedzy, ale woli; jest to związane z brakiem woli to, by się o siebie troszczyć. Dlaczego chłopcy i dziewczęta, którzy uczęszczają do szkoły, są dobrze poinformowani nie potrafią odrzucić tego, co jest złe, nie tylko z moralnego punktu widzenia, ale także z punktu widzenia ich zdrowia? Ponieważ nie są nauczeni stawiania granic dla swoich pragnień: problem ten związany jest z brakiem autorytetu, bo autorytet umożliwia nam stawianie czoła ograniczeniom. Z tego powodu konieczne jest ponowne przyjrzenie się autorytetowi w teorii i praktyce edukacyjnej.
In this article the authoress has presented the understanding of the good as the motive for human action on the basis of the position of M. A. Krąpiec. At the beginning, the authoress has concentrated on an analysis of the fact of action, which includes three major factors: the end, the exemplar, and the efficient cause. The good-end here performs the most essential function. The good-end is the motive due to which action has come into existence rather than not. That “which throws” man “out of passivity” to action is described as the motive that appears as the good. In the next part of the article, the good is presented as a fundamental transcendental property of being. The connection of being with the good shows that the world that surrounds us is a world of goods, that is, of beings ordered to the will of a maker or of the Creator. The transcendental good thus understood constitutes the foundation for all action. In the final part of the article, an analysis is made of the functions that are shown by the good that constitutes the motive for action. The first of these functions is the cognitive apprehension of the good understood in the context of the end—the motive of action. At the end, the domains of goods are listed, in which the ontic good, which is a transcendental property of being, plays the most important role.
The paper analyses various conceptions of good and evil, as well as the bases of these two basic values. The author does not present these values in isolation but as elements of metaphysical conceptions and also of social systems.
The article attempts to clarify an important aspect of St. Thomas Aquinas’s theory of human action, namely to show these acts of man which are immediately caused by the will. According to some contemporary philosophers, the acts of the will are limited to those of trying or of intending. Do they exhaust the whole possibility of the will to act? The author seeks to answer this question basing his considerations on the analysis of the Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas.
The enduring debate on the question of whether an omnipotent, omniscient God exists amid the existence of evils in the world is crucial to understanding religions. Much recent discussion has taken an approach in which the focal question is whether we can cognitively—for example, logically, evidentially, and the like—and rationally justify that God’s full power and full goodness cannot be doubted amid the existence of evils. In this paper I argue that we can reasonably assume that God exists in an evil-afflicted world if he chooses to do so and if he tolerates evils. We can reasonably argue that he does exist in an evil-afflicted world because he chooses to tolerate evils for whatever reasons. I would like to make a stronger claim: he tolerates evils in order to give humankind a chance to grow in knowledge of good and evils by combating evils, which implies that his toleration of evils imposes a task on humankind to combat evils.
Skeptical theism—a strategy for dealing with so-called “evidential arguments from evil”—is often held to lead to moral skepticism. In this paper I look at some of the responses open to the skeptical theist to the contention that her position leads to moral skepticism, and argue that they are ultimately unsuccessful, since they leave the skeptical theist with no grounds for ruling out the possibility of maximal divine deception. I then go on to argue that the situation is particularly bleak for the skeptical theist, since the most prominent ways of dealing with this pervasive type of skepticism are not available to her. Furthermore, since this pervasive type of skepticism entails moral skepticism, it follows that moral skepticism will after all have found a way in “through the back door.” In order to solidify my case, I go on to outline and deal with three potential objections.
The article shows the Eastern awareness of evil from the perspective of Miłosz. Its essence is the ability to differentiate the good from the evil when there is an inevitable conviction that evil is necessary. The ground for this conviction is laid in an aversion to the impulsive forces of a body and the inherent powers of matter, as well as in the inevitability of yielding to them. These are the forces and powers which constitute the blind will of domination of one over another in different dimensions. The article explains that in the Eastern awareness of evil the knowledge of human sinfulness is of religious nature. The one who does a wrong thing and is painfully aware of this fact, due to this awareness, prevails (according to Dostojewski and Miłosz) over a pretentious aesthete who thinks he or she is good by nature. The aware sinner prevails because he or she does not turn down the original sin, does not place the God-Human in the position of Human-God, and does not give the world to the land (does not exchange the Christian eschatology for the secular eschatology). The article demonstrates that Miłosz, in alliance with Dostojewski, attacks Polish culture for the alleged unawareness of evil; he realizes that the Manichean awareness of evil has a weak point: it turns a man away from the world of matter, nature, micro- and macrocosm. Hence, the Slavic people have so few practical achievements in making the land their subject in comparison to the accomplishments of the Western men. Moreover, the Eastern awareness of evil, as the awareness of superiority over the ethical waste of effort of an ordinary day, shows, according to Miłosz, an inclination for a messianic bearing of suffering - passively enduring the suffering like a Christian. That is the mistake made by Dostojewski. The article indicates that Miłosz enriches the Eastern awareness of evil with the Western affirmation of what is physical and material.
This paper is a review article based on the tradition of realistic philosophy. Its goal is to collect and organize information on two categories emerging in the field of humanistic research into environmental protection. It is about the concepts of “common good” and “integral ecology”, and the assessment of the relationship between them. Another concept analyzed in realistic philosophy is that of “nature”. The good was presented as a universal property of beings, including nature understood as a complex multiplicity of individual beings connected by mutual physical, chemical and biological relations. Nature is regarded as a common good, i.e., a property of all people which serves the development of every individual that makes up the human community. What combines the common good in the sense of classical philosophy with the integral ecology based on Christian doctrine is the guarantee of sustainability and the most equitable access to natural resources. The principle of “diversity in unity” inscribed in the common good is particularly consistent with the assumptions of integral ecology. The interpretation of the common good in the ecological dimension leads to the statement that nature management cannot be based on unlimited liberal freedom, but must be subordinated to minimizing social inequalities and improving the difficult situation of people and entire nations living in poverty and unworthy social or natural conditions. What is needed here is justice, the essence of which consists of the ideas of human dignity, equality, and proportionality in interpersonal relations. These are also common elements of the idea of “common good” and integral ecology.
The rationale for choosing the object of research is the recognition of the socio-cultural validity of new ways of management (New Economy), interpreted as a response to the exhaustion of traditional ways in which societies function, i.e. those based on ideas of growth and ownership. The aim of the article is to analyse selected examples of redefinition of the concept of good in the context of new social narratives and the grounding of certain beliefs related to the idea of degrowth and sharing economy. The article is theoretical and references to contemporary research on cultural philosophy and social analyses of economic practice. A socio-regulatory concept of culture was adopted as a research perspective, and humanistic interpretation was used as an explanatory procedure. Qualitative data was analysed using atlas.ti, concept driven coding was used, and content analysis was limited to concept analysis and the creation of conceptual maps. The research results are supposed to show: 1. the impact of modern forms of economic practices using the Internet and IT technology on the redefinition of good, 2. how this redefinition builds the axiological background of society of collaborative consumption.
In EE H 2 Aristotle presents a typology of friendship starting from the puzzle whether the good or the pleasure is the object of love. But after indicating the reasons for loving and identifying three types of friendships he raises three important questions (1237a19–21): (1) whether there is any friendship without pleasure; (2) how the hedonical friendship differs from the ethically friendship; (3) on which of the two things the loving depends: do we love somebody because he is good, even if he is not pleasant, at any rate not for his pleasantness? The present article attempts to give answers to questions 1–3 and show that despite the coincidence of good and pleasure and the important role of pleasure in the hedonical and ethical friendship the typology does not lose its validity.
PL
In EE H 2 Aristotle presents a typology of friendship starting from the puzzle whether the good or the pleasure is the object of love. But after indicating the reasons for loving and identifying three types of friendships he raises three important questions (1237a19–21): (1) whether there is any friendship without pleasure; (2) how the hedonical friendship differs from the ethically friendship; (3) on which of the two things the loving depends: do we love somebody because he is good, even if he is not pleasant, at any rate not for his pleasantness? The present article attempts to give answers to questions 1–3 and show that despite the coincidence of good and pleasure and the important role of pleasure in the hedonical and ethical friendship the typology does not lose its validity
The paper examines the problematic nature of making generalisation ambivalent or, in other words, abstraction in pedagogical consequences. The paper adds to the discussion of good and evil in education by answering two questions. The fi rst question stems from the antinomous nature of educational aims (i.e. education is to servethe society but also to develop an individual): can educational antinomies be eliminated or is education an antinomous activity and hence it is necessary to take into account its ambivalence? The second question inquires to which extent do we understand what it means to be an authentic personality and the degree to which we can educate for authenticity. The paper proposes Kierkegaard’s and Blondel’s motive of authenticity as a partial way out of contradictions which result from the mentioned antinomies. The paper also shows that looking for education for authenticity is complicated by attempts at formulating a generally acceptable principle of education and that education suffers the most when it forgets about its antinomous nature. For its attempts to avoid contradictions lead to unacceptable abstractions and formalism. The paper then introduces the problem of making generalisation ambivalent in relation to educational competencies and concludes with describing the irrevocable yet restorative nature of antinomies.
The article discusses the connection of the good with being along three steps. First, it briefly considers the history of the word “good” to see what is hidden behind it and to what one should direct his or her thoughts and searches. Second, it looks at the beginning of inquiries on the nature and sources of the good. Three, it analyzes the originality of one of the most interesting solutions in this controversy surrounding the good, which appeared in the thirteenth century and which was contained in the short sentence, “bonum sequitur esse rei”—the good is a consequence of the existence of a thing.
While St. Thomas Aquinas has not written any separate treaty on beauty, the theme of beauty regularly appears in his writing from its very beginning as that which corresponds with the Platonic doctrine presented by Dionysius the Areopagite in his De Divinis Nominibus. The article is focused on three essential elements in Aquinas’ doctrine on beauty: 1) its identity with the subject, 2) its difference from the reason, and 3) its difference from the good.
Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds has been subject to numerous criticisms, both from his contemporaries and ours. In this paper I investigate a cluster of such criticisms based on the existence, abundance or character of worldly evil. As several Leibniz-inspired versions of optimism have been advanced in recent years, the aim of my investigation is to assess not just how Leibniz’s brand of optimism fares against these criticisms, but also whether optimism as a philosophy has the resources to meet these challenges. I show that none of the criticisms considered has sufficient force to pose a threat to Leibniz’s version of optimism or to one modelled on it.
Contemporary proponents of theodical generally believe that a theodical reply to the evidential argument from evil must involve some appeal to the afterlife. In Richard Swinburne's writings on theodical, however, we find two arguments that may be offered in opposition to this prevailing view. In this paper, these two arguments—the argument from usefulness and the argument from assumed consent—are explained and evaluated. It is suggested that both of these arguments are rendered ineffective by their failure to distinguish between the different ways in which persons may be of-use in the attainment of some good state of affairs.
The article presents the classical vision of beauty depicted by one of the most outstanding German philosophers alive. Trying to outline it independently, the German scholar is in principle inspired by the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle and Plato. In the article we get to know nearly all the most important aspects of beauty, which are in the scope of classical view. Thus, beauty is considered in the context of good, in the transcendental sense and with reference to joy. The issue of God’s beauty and the beautiful life is also explained. Finally, the attempt to define the concept of beauty is undertaken
Hardly any problem in contemporary theological-moral discourse causes such turbulence as the searching, reflection, and demarcation of the boundaries between good and evil in human acting. A fundamental problem is a criterion or a reference point according to which a person could reliably determine what is good and evil. Divergent theological views in the theological-moral dimension seem to have caused the clear boundaries between good and evil to disappear. Therefore, the crucial question is whether there is still a universal criterion for theological evaluation of a human act, as the situation in theological-moral discourse resembles an areopagus of opinions that have no common point in distinguishing between good and evil. This reflection examines the possibility if the Thomistic ethical analysis of a human act, together with the principle of double effect, may be a reference point for the demarcation of these boundaries.
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