Nietzsche e o problema da verdade: o papel da linguagem na constituição da verdade e da moral

Pós-graduação em Filosofia - FFC

La loi morale et le sentiment de respect : les deux ressorts de l’action morale chez Kant

Le présent texte porte sur la question du ressort ou mobile (« Triebfeder ») de l’action morale chez Kant. L’interprétation qui y est soutenue consiste à dire qu’il n’y a pas qu’un seul ressort de ce type chez Kant, comme le soutiennent maints commentateurs, mais plutôt deux : la loi morale et le sentiment de respect. Le nerf argumentatif de cette thèse réside dans la prise en compte systématique des aspects des facultés de l’esprit humain impliquées dans la question du ressort moral chez Kant. Deux éléments jouent ici un rôle particulièrement important : (i) les deux sens explicites attribués par Kant au mot « volonté », mot qui peut signifier (a) la raison pratique et (b) la faculté de désirer, et (ii) la division de la faculté de désirer en (a) (libre) arbitre et (b) raison pratique. Plus d’une douzaine d’interprétations, réparties sur plus d’un siècle, sont analysées de manière critique, et deux modifications du manuscrit allemand de la « Critique de la raison pratique » sont proposées pour le chapitre « Des ressorts de la raison pure pratique ».

Estética natural e ética ambiental, que relação?

This paper defends that environmental aesthetics provides a consistent basis for environmental philosophy, whereas aesthetic value plays an important role in the defense and preservation of natural areas. For several environmental philosophers the natural beauty is an inherent part of the ethical concern. Leopold states that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the balance and the beauty of the biotic community”. Notwithstanding, aesthetic value is still not a central issue in the environmental debate. On the other hand, the “positive aesthetics” (Allen Carlson), which is a recent approach that reevaluates “positively” natural beauty in the ethical context, obtains a core of objections. This paper sketches a few arguments defending the contiguity between environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics: (i) the emotional perception of inclusiveness and engagement on the aesthetics appreciation of nature; (ii) the feelings of grace and love toward nature inherent to the nature’s aesthetic appreciation which according Kant announces the moral feeling; (iii) the ecological knowledge of natural beauty in order to understand the full meaning of it, and that includes some natural entities seen as not beautiful.

Moral masochism: on the connection between guilt and self-punishment.

Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that guilty participants administered to themselves, the more their feelings of guilt were alleviated. We discuss how this method of atonement relates to other methods examined in previous research.

Educación moral y literatura infantil : estudio de la formación moral en la infancia a partir de algunas teorías de los sentimientos morales

Este trabajo realizado como requisito de grado del programa de Filosofía de la Universidad Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, aborda el tema de la educación moral en la infancia a partir del análisis y discusión de algunas teorías de la moral. También hace un acercamiento a la literatura infantil en lo relativo a la función que se le puede atribuir como recurso o herramienta para la formación moral. De este modo, el trabajo se estructura siguiendo una argumentación que primero pretende esclarecer los conceptos que se vinculan con el tema de la educación moral como los son el de socialización, el de infancia, el de desarrollo, el mismo concepto de educación moral, y otros que permiten identificar y problematizar esta cuestión en relación con los niños y las particularidades de su comportamiento, sus procesos cognitivos y el modo en que se dan sus relaciones sociales. Por ello el trabajo recoge aportes de la sociología y de la psicología que complementan el tema, que es observado aquí, principalmente, desde la filosofía moral. Estos conceptos ayudan a estructurar el problema que se plantea relativo a la manera cómo se construye lo moral en la infancia. A partir de ellos se desarrolla el resto del texto, primero, con el análisis crítico que se hace en el capítulo dos a la teoría racionalista de la moral, la cual se pone en discusión con los planteamientos de algunas teorías de los sentimientos morales y del desarrollo emocional. Luego, en el capítulo tres se examina la teoría de las virtudes de Aristóteles, destacando la mayor capacidad que tiene de comprender comportamientos morales no racionales, como los de la infancia, que se relacionan con lo que desde la sociología se entiende como el entorno social en el que se desarrolla la moral individual. Finalmente, en el capítulo cuatro, se examina la literatura infantil como un recurso que sirve para la formación moral en los niños, debido a los procesos cognitivos y sociales, que esta literatura favorece. En este capítulo se retoman las cuestiones tratadas a lo largo del trabajo acerca de lo moral y la formación en la infancia para ponerlas en relación con ejemplos de la literatura infantil tomados de los Cuentos de los Hermanos Grimm que permiten identificar algunos elementos que vinculan la lectura de estos cuentos con los procesos de formación moral.

Metaphysics of love as moral responsibility in nursing and midwifery

This study used a qualitative research design incorporating principles of social constructionism, hermeneutic dialectic method, Neo-Socratic dialogue and philosophy for reporting the tacit and social knowledge constructions underlying particular ways of knowing that inform the experiential reality of love in the practice of nursing and midwifery. The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, that culminated in his magnum opus of the ‘metaphysics of otherness’, provided the theoretical underpinning for the interpretation of the experiences nurses and midwives believed were examples of love in their clinical practice in Australia, Singapore and Bhutan. What is love in nursing and midwifery? The answer is moral responsibility. The relational context has a nurse and midwife constantly exposed to patient situations that give rise to expressions of love as moral responsibility. It is a form of love that centres on the ability of our being, or at least the possibility of our being, to transcend its everyday form to a metaphysical state of being moral. It enables a nurse and midwife to transcend the isolation associated with their personal being as a self-project, to be ‘for’ the patient as a first priority. But while the ‘Goodness’ of the ‘Good’ assigns the nurse and midwife responsible and is expressed to their personal being in the form of the ‘urge to do’, ‘what to do’ in caring for the patient is a matter of living out the command to be responsible and will be different for each nurse and midwife. However, no matter the outcome, love as moral responsibility will always leave a nurse and midwife feeling there is still more to be done in being responsible.

A inferência causal na filosofia moral de Hume.

Starting from the idea that the result of the Humean analysis of causal inferences must be applied coherently to the remaining part of his work, including its moral theory, the present master thesis aims at investigating whether Hume´s moral philosophy is essentially based on feeling, or whether this would not be rather essentially a consequence of our causal inferences in human actions and deliberations. The main idea consists in showing that our moral inferences, to the extent that they are for Hume empirical , depend on our belief in a connexion between something which has been previously observed and something which is not being observed ( but that it is expected to occur or to be observed in the future). Thus, this very belief must base our moral inferences concerning the actions and deliberations of the individuals. Therefore, must e o ipso induce us to associate actions and behaviors, as well as character and moral claims of men to certain moral feelings. Accordingly, the thesis is unfolded in three chapters. In the first chapter Hume´s theory of the perception is reported as essential part of the explanation or the principles that bind ideas in our mind and constitute our inferences. In the second chapter, the Humean analysis of causal inferences is presented and the way they contribute in the formation of our moral inferences is explained. In the third and last chapter, the formation of our moral inferences and the real contribution of the doctrine of freedom and necessity for the examination or our actions are analysed and discussed.

A ética do desperdício: a influência da compaixão no querer fazer moral de adolescentes

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

La formación de personalidades éticas: representaciones de sí y moral

The article presents the studies of a current investigation among 75 adolescents from 12 to 15 years old, students of private schools of Campinas city, that have as main objective to notice a possible correspondence among the moral judgements and the representation that individuals have about themselves. From the feeling of admiration the studies bring out the representations of these individuals and answer a questioning if they would have an ethics character or not and if these would correspond to their moral judgements. The results point out to a correspondence among those whose representations of themselves are characterized by more evolved ethics contents and judgements as for sensitivity to the feelings of the characters involved in the situations described. Such studies validate the intention of this article to discuss the correspondences between ethics (how the individual sees himself/herself) and moral (how he/she judges the moral of the situations).

O estatuto moral dos animais não-humanos em uma perspectiva sistêmica

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

A compaixão como fundamentação moral em Schopenhauer

The scope of this study was to investigate to what extent the feeling of compassion is important for the moral reasons. Thus, we will build on the analysis of moral reasoning of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in his essay “On The Basis of Morality”, who was a supporter of the feeling of compassion in their ethical reasoning. In order to deepen the discussion on the dichotomy of the human being, that the split between reason and sensibility in the moral field, also investigate Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian moral, which is fundamentally rational. We believe that analyzing both its moral foundation, as his critique of Kantian morality, we can understand the true import of the feeling of compassion in the moral field. Thus, we believe that one must take into account the value of this feeling on ethical grounds. As proposed will try an approach with regard to reason and sensitivity in the moral field.

Interpretación Modesta de la Responsabilidad Moral: Lectura de Strawson desde el sentido histórico y situado de la humanidad

En esta monografía reseño la forma como Peter Strawson enmarca el debate de la responsabilidad moral en un lugar que denomino más cerca de lo humano. Considero que son las actitudes reactivas, propuestas por Peter Strawson, una pieza fundamental para entender qué es la responsabilidad moral. Esta perspectiva no está libre de contradictores, es por ese motivo que plantearé una interpretación de la idea de Strawson que tiene como objetivo responder algunas críticas que recaen sobre esta forma de conceptualizar las relaciones interpersonales. Construiré la defensa alrededor de la interpretación de la responsabilidad moral que entiende la asignación de la responsabilidad moral como un tipo de lenguaje que adquiere su significado en la medida que se usa. De manera análoga, planteo el interrogante de si es posible pensar en un sistema de responsabilidad moral que se justifica en la medida que se usa. Considero que esta idea tiene sentido con algo denominado la circularidad virtuosa. La pregunta que sale a la luz de inmediato es ¿cómo es posible usar un sistema de responsabilidad moral que se va justificando en la medida que se usa? En realidad, no solo es en la medida que se usa, sino también en el trascurso en el que los seres humanos se reconocen unos con otros y entablan ciertas prácticas. Para entender y justificar esta cuestión planteo una interpretación de la postura de Strawson que denomino “Interpretación Modesta de la Responsabilidad Moral”.

Negotiating social and moral order in internet relay chat

Although internet chat is a significant aspect of many internet users’ lives, the manner in which participants in quasi-synchronous chat situations orient to issues of social and moral order remains to be studied in depth. The research presented here is therefore at the forefront of a continually developing area of study. This work contributes new insights into how members construct and make accountable the social and moral orders of an adult-oriented Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel by addressing three questions: (1) What conversational resources do participants use in addressing matters of social and moral order? (2) How are these conversational resources deployed within IRC interaction? and (3) What interactional work is locally accomplished through use of these resources? A survey of the literature reveals considerable research in the field of computer-mediated communication, exploring both asynchronous and quasi-synchronous discussion forums. The research discussed represents a range of communication interests including group and collaborative interaction, the linguistic construction of social identity, and the linguistic features of online interaction. It is suggested that the present research differs from previous studies in three ways: (1) it focuses on the interaction itself, rather than the ways in which the medium affects the interaction; (2) it offers turn-by-turn analysis of interaction in situ; and (3) it discusses membership categories only insofar as they are shown to be relevant by participants through their talk. Through consideration of the literature, the present study is firmly situated within the broader computer-mediated communication field. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis were adopted as appropriate methodological approaches to explore the research focus on interaction in situ, and in particular to investigate the ways in which participants negotiate and co-construct social and moral orders in the course of their interaction. IRC logs collected from one chat room were analysed using a two-pass method, based on a modification of the approaches proposed by Pomerantz and Fehr (1997) and ten Have (1999). From this detailed examination of the data corpus three interaction topics are identified by means of which participants clearly orient to issues of social and moral order: challenges to rule violations, ‘trolling’ for cybersex, and experiences regarding the 9/11 attacks. Instances of these interactional topics are subjected to fine-grained analysis, to demonstrate the ways in which participants draw upon various interactional resources in their negotiation and construction of channel social and moral orders. While these analytical topics stand alone in individual focus, together they illustrate different instances in which participants’ talk serves to negotiate social and moral orders or collaboratively construct new orders. Building on the work of Vallis (2001), Chapter 5 illustrates three ways that rule violation is initiated as a channel discussion topic: (1) through a visible violation in open channel, (2) through an official warning or sanction by a channel operator regarding the violation, and (3) through a complaint or announcement of a rule violation by a non-channel operator participant. Once the topic has been initiated, it is shown to become available as a topic for others, including the perceived violator. The fine-grained analysis of challenges to rule violations ultimately demonstrates that channel participants orient to the rules as a resource in developing categorizations of both the rule violation and violator. These categorizations are contextual in that they are locally based and understood within specific contexts and practices. Thus, it is shown that compliance with rules and an orientation to rule violations as inappropriate within the social and moral orders of the channel serves two purposes: (1) to orient the speaker as a group member, and (2) to reinforce the social and moral orders of the group. Chapter 6 explores a particular type of rule violation, solicitations for ‘cybersex’ known in IRC parlance as ‘trolling’. In responding to trolling violations participants are demonstrated to use affiliative and aggressive humour, in particular irony, sarcasm and insults. These conversational resources perform solidarity building within the group, positioning non-Troll respondents as compliant group members. This solidarity work is shown to have three outcomes: (1) consensus building, (2) collaborative construction of group membership, and (3) the continued construction and negotiation of existing social and moral orders. Chapter 7, the final data analysis chapter, offers insight into how participants, in discussing the events of 9/11 on the actual day, collaboratively constructed new social and moral orders, while orienting to issues of appropriate and reasonable emotional responses. This analysis demonstrates how participants go about ‘doing being ordinary’ (Sacks, 1992b) in formulating their ‘first thoughts’ (Jefferson, 2004). Through sharing their initial impressions of the event, participants perform support work within the interaction, in essence working to normalize both the event and their initial misinterpretation of it. Normalising as a support work mechanism is also shown in relation to participants constructing the ‘quiet’ following the event as unusual. Normalising is accomplished by reference to the indexical ‘it’ and location formulations, which participants use both to negotiate who can claim to experience the ‘unnatural quiet’ and to identify the extent of the quiet. Through their talk participants upgrade the quiet from something legitimately experienced by one person in a particular place to something that could be experienced ‘anywhere’, moving the phenomenon from local to global provenance. With its methodological design and detailed analysis and findings, this research contributes to existing knowledge in four ways. First, it shows how rules are used by participants as a resource in negotiating and constructing social and moral orders. Second, it demonstrates that irony, sarcasm and insults are three devices of humour which can be used to perform solidarity work and reinforce existing social and moral orders. Third, it demonstrates how new social and moral orders are collaboratively constructed in relation to extraordinary events, which serve to frame the event and evoke reasonable responses for participants. And last, the detailed analysis and findings further support the use of conversation analysis and membership categorization as valuable methods for approaching quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication.

"Well, now I'm upset": Moral and social orders in the playground

There is much still to learn about how young children’s membership with peers shapes their constructions of moral and social obligations within everyday activities in the school playground. This paper investigates how a small group of girls, aged four to six years, account for their everyday social interactions in the playground. They were video-recorded as they participated in a pretend game of school. Several days later, a video-recorded excerpt of the interaction was shown to them and invited to comment on what was happening in the video. This conversation was audio-recorded. Drawing on a conversation analysis approach, this chapter shows that, despite their discontent and complaining about playing the game of school, the girls’ actions showed their continued orientation to the particular codes of the game, of ‘no going away’ and ‘no telling’. By making relevant these codes, jointly constructed by the girls during the interview, they managed each other’s continued participation within two arenas of action: the pretend, as a player in a pretend game of school; and the real, as a classroom member of a peer group. Through inferences to explicit and implicit codes of conduct, moral obligations were invoked as the girls attempted to socially exclude or build alliances with others, and enforce their own social position. As well, a shared history that the girls re-constructed has moral implications for present and future relationships. The girls oriented to the history as an interactional resource for accounting for their actions in the pretend game. This paper uncovers how children both participate in, and shape, their everyday social worlds through talk and interaction and the consequences a taken-for-granted activity such as playing school has for their moral and social positions in the peer group.