Books on the topic 'Moral Identity (MID)'

One of the most overlooked moral responsibilities of parenting is nurturing a child’s unique personality and providing guidance toward an independent future. Children with delays in development depend on parents for prolonged periods, for physical care and for nurturing their emerging personhood. Following theories of family holding and identity formation proposed by Hilde Lindemann, this chapter analyzes the moral task of upholding identity for children whose special needs include speech or developmental delays. The parent must encourage the emergence of a child’s personhood in the absence of verbal confirmation, guard the child’s unique potential, and avoid imposing on the child their own desires. Nurturing an identity for a child who may never be able to refute it is a task requiring exquisite openness to a child’s nonverbal responses. The parent must create a unique life story for a child who may never be able to verbalize it for themselves.

In her groundbreaking ethnography The Asian Gang, published in 2000, Claire Alexander explored the creation of Asian Muslim masculinities in South London. Set against the backdrop of the moral panic over ‘Asian gangs’ in the mid-1990s, and based on 5 years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explored the idea of ‘the gang’, friendships, and the role of ‘brothers’ in the formation, performance and negotiation of ethnic, religious and gendered identities. The Asian Gang Revisited picks up the story of ‘the Asian gang’ over the subsequent two decades, examining the changing identities of the original participants as they transition into adulthood in the context of increased public and political concerns over Muslim masculinities, spanning the War on Terror, ‘grooming gangs’ and knife crime. Building on her ongoing relationships with the men over 25 years, the book explores education, employment, friendship, marriage and fatherhood, and religious identity, and examines both the changes and the continuities that have shaped this group. The book is based on two sets of interviews (in 1996 and 2012) and over 25 years of friendship. It traces the lives of its participants from their teenage years through to their early-mid 40s. A unique longitudinal study of this small, diverse but still close cohort of men, the book offers an intimate, rich and textured account of what it means to be a Muslim man in contemporary Britain.

The chapter explores the metaethical foundations of the argument from universal reason. This argument relies on the idea that moral values are universal and attainable through reason. Drawing on comparative constitutional practice, the chapter contends that universality and reasonableness in this argument take two distinct forms: the deductive model assumes that reasoning will point to mind-independent values, and the reflective model holds that the process of reasoning makes courts better attuned to the moral commitments of their own constitutional community. The chapter argues that the deductive model is implausible, and that the reflective model is plausible but builds on moral attitudes already present in the argument from constitutional identity and common sentiment. The chapter concludes that the argument from universal reason cannot be an independent basis of constitutional moral judgment.

In these essays Stephen White examines the forms of psychological integration that give rise to self-knowable and self-conscious individuals who are responsible, concerned for the future, and capable of moral commitment. The essays cover a wide range of basic issues in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, moral psychology, and political philosophy, providing a coherent, sophisticated, and forcefully argued view of the nature of the self. Beginning with mental content and ending with Rawls and utilitarianism, each essay argues a distinctive line. Together they are a unified and powerful philosophical position of considerable scope, one that provides a unique vision of the mind, consciousness, personhood, and morality. White argues that the unity of the self revealed in personal identity and moral responsibility is best understood in normative terms. Basic to such features of the self are the patterns of self-concern in which they are characteristically displayed and the internal justification that supports such concern. The treatment of intentionality and consciousness that grounds this account emphasizes privileged selfknowledge and practical rationality and their corresponding contributions to the unity of the self. A final source of unity emerges from the analysis of our fundamental commitments, an analysis that ensures a central place in moral theory for the notion of the self. Bradford Books imprint

Raising a child with multiple special needs or disabilities is a time-consuming and difficult task that exceeds the usual parameters of parenting. This book examines all the facets of that task, from the better-known physical, financial, and emotional burdens to the previously invisible moral work involved. Drawing from narratives written by parents of children with a variety of special needs, academic research in ethics and disability, and personal experience in pediatrics, this book begins to recognize the moral consequences of providing long-term care for a child with complex needs. Using a virtue ethic framework based on Joan Tronto’s phases of care, it isolates the various tasks involved and evaluates the moral demands placed on the parent performing them. Raising a child with special needs requires an excess of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, and demands from the parent a reassessment of their personal and social lives. In each phase, moral work must be done to become the sort of person who can perform the necessary caregiving. Some of the consequences are predictable, such as the emotional and physical burden of constant attentiveness and numerous unexpected responsibilities. But the need for competence, which drives an acquisition of medical knowledge, has not previously been analyzed. Nor has there been recognition of the enormous moral task of encouraging identity formation in a child with intellectual delays or autism. For a child who cannot attain independence, parents must continue to provide care and support into an uncertain future.

The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.

A systematic reappraisal of Leibniz’s philosophy of mind. The main argument of this book is easy to state:Leibniz offers a fully natural theory of mind. In today’s philosophical climate in which much effort has been put into discovering a naturalized theory of mind Leibniz’s efforts to reach a similar goal three hundred years earlier will provide a critical stance from which we can assess our own theories. But while thegoals might be similar thecontent of Leibniz’s theory significantly diverges from the majority of today’s theories. Leibniz’s philosophy of mind meets the standards of whathe would regard as a fully natural theory. Perhaps surprisingly Leibniz’s theological commitments yield a thoroughgoing naturalizing methodology: the properties of an object are explicable in term of the object’snature. This book argues that Leibniz pursued his philosophy of mind with this methodology in hand. If we keep this commitment to a naturalizing project in mind then we will find in Leibniz a rich and interesting philosophy of mind. This book provides an account of Leibniz’s naturalizing constraints and traces them through Leibniz’s philosophy of mind. It covers issues relating to mental representation perception sensation consciousness memory and moral identity.

This book is an exploration of the reorientations that take place when attention is given priority in the analysis of mind. In this book it is argued that attention has an explanatory role in understanding the concept of the intentionality or directedness of the mental; the nature of mental action in general; of specific mental actions such as intending, remembering, introspecting, and empathizing; the character of the phenomenal and of cognitive access; the unity of consciousness; the epistemology of perception; the nature of persons and their identity; the distinction between self and other, and the moral psychology that rests upon it.

This book offers a picture of madness as a category and a tool in the early Chinese tradition, giving an account of how early Chinese thinkers developed a conception of mental illness connected to both medicine and ethics, particularly in the Warring States and Han periods. Specifically, it is concerned with the connections between madness, mental illness in general, and philosophical positions on personhood, moral agency, responsibility, and social identity. Madness is a near universal category in human thought. In early China, madness (kuang ?) has particular unique forms, shaped through consideration of the features of mind and body, cultural norms, and illness and health. While madness and other forms of mental illness were taken as either foils or ideals by different thinkers in early China, they were nearly always contrasted with operability, proper communal development, and progress on a specifically moral path. This book explores these conceptions of madness in early Chinese thought.

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighboring fields, such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion. This book is the eleventh volume in the series. It contains the work of both established and younger scholars, including the essays that won the Sanders Prize in Metaphysics in 2016 and 2017: Andrew Bacon’s “Relative Locations” and T. Scott Dixon’s “Plural Slot Theory.” Topics covered in this volume include the nature of space and time, the relationalism vs. substantivalism debate, change and fragmentalism, quantum metaphysics, modal combinatorialism, the theory of relations, Humean supervenience, and vagueness.

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks. Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics, he uses standard theories to paint a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems. While human lives don't change greatly in the em era, em lives are as different from ours as our lives are from those of our farmer and forager ancestors. Ems make us question common assumptions of moral progress, because they reject many of the values we hold dear. Read about em mind speeds, body sizes, job training and career paths, energy use and cooling infrastructure, virtual reality, aging and retirement, death and immortality, security, wealth inequality, religion, teleportation, identity, cities, politics, law, war, status, friendship and love. This book shows you just how strange your descendants may be, though ems are no stranger than we would appear to our ancestors. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.

This book defends a novel and distinctive approach in ethics that is inspired by ancient philosophy. Ethics, according to this approach, starts from one question and its most immediate answer: “what is the good for human beings?”—“a well-going human life.” Ethics thus conceived is broader than moral philosophy. It includes a range of topics in psychology and metaphysics. Plato’s Philebus is the ancestor of this approach. Its first premise, defended also in Book I of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, is that the final agential good is the good human life. Though Aristotle introduces this premise while analyzing human activities, it is absent from approaches in the theory of action that self-identify as Aristotelian. This absence is, the book argues, a deep and far-reaching mistake, one that can be traced back to Elizabeth Anscombe’s influential proposals. And yet, the book is Anscombian in spirit. It engages with ancient texts in order to contribute to philosophy today, and it takes questions about the human mind to be prior to, and relevant to, substantive normative matters. In this spirit, the book puts forward a new version of the Guise of the Good, namely, that desire to have one’s life go well shapes and sustains smaller-scale motivations. A theory of good human lives, it is argued, must make room for a plurality of good lives. Along these lines, the book lays out a non-relativist version of Protagoras’s Measure Doctrine and defends a new kind of realism about good human lives.Plato, Aristotle, Guise of the Good, theory of action, motivation, desire, good, good life, conception of a good life, Anscombe, ancient philosophy, contemporary ethics.

TOWARDS THE NEW LIFE Theology and Importance of Christian Initiation for the Life of Faith The book is in equal parts a presentation and an invitation. The subject matter of both is the mystagogical initiation leading to the personal encounter with God and eventually to the union within the Church in Christ, which happens initially and particualry in the sacramental liturgy. Mystagogy was the essential experience of life in the early Church and now is being so intensely discussed and postulated by the ecclesial Magisterium and through the teaching of the recent popes and synods. Within the ten chapters of this book the reader proceeds through the aspects strictly associated with Christian initiation, noticeable in catechumenate and suggestive for further Christian life. It is not surprising then, that the study begins with answering the question about the sense of dealing with catechumenate at all. The response developed in the first chapter covers four key points: the contemporary state of our faith, the need for dialogue in evangelization, the importance of liturgy in the renewal of faith and the obvious requirement of follo- wing the Church’s Magisterium, quite explicit in the subject undertaken within this book. The introductory chapter is meant to evoke interest in catechumenate as such and encourage comprehension of its essence, in order to keep it in mind while planning contemporary evangelization. For doing this with success and avoiding pastoral archeology, we need a competent insight into the main message and goal of Christian initiation. Catechumenate is the first and most venerable model of formation and growth in faith and therefore worth knowing. The second chapter tries to cope with the reasons and ways of the present return to the sources of catechumenate with respect to Christian initiation understood to be the building of the relationship with God. The example of catechumenate helps us to discover, how to learn wisely from the history. This would definitely mean to keep the structure and liturgy of catechumenate as a vehicle of God’s message, which must be interpreted and adapted always anew and with careful and intelligent consideration of the historical flavour on particular stages within the history of salvation and cultural conditions of the recipients. For that reason we refer to the Biblical resources and to the historical examples of catechumenate including its flourishing and declining periods, after which we are slowly approaching the present reinterpretation of the catechumenal process enhanced by the official teaching of the Church. As the result of the latter, particularly owing to the Vatican Council II, we are now dealing with the renewed liturgy of baptism displayed in two liturgical books: The Rite of Baptism for Children and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). This version for adults is the subjectmatter of the whole chapter, in which a reader can find theological analyses of the particular rites as well as numerous indications for improving one’s life with Christ in the Church. You can find interesting associations among the rites of initiation themselves and astounding coherence between those rites and the sacraments of the Eucharist, penance and other sacraments, which simply means the ordinary life of faith. Deep and convincing theology of the process of initiation proves the inspiring spiritual power of the initial and constitutive sacraments of baptism and confirmation, which may seem attractive not only for catechumens but also for the faithful baptized in their infancy, and even more, since they might have not yet had a chance to see what a plausible treasure they have been conveying in their baptismal personality. How much challenge for further and constant realization in life may offer these introductory events of Christian initiation, yet not sufficiently appreciated by those who have already been baptized and confirmed! We all should submit to permanent re-evangelization according to this primary pattern, which always remains essential and fundamental. Very typical and very post-conciliar approach to Christian formation appears in the communal dimension, which guards and guarantees the ecclesial profile of initiation and prepares a person to be a living member of the Church. The sixth chapter of the book is dealing with ecclesial issues in liturgy. They refer to comprehending the word of God, especially in the context of liturgy, which brings about a peculiar theological sense to it and giving a special character to proclaiming the Gospel, which the Pope Francis calls “liturgical proclamation”. The ecclesial premises influence the responsibility for the fact of accompanying the candidates, who aim at becoming Christ’s disciples. As the Church is teaching also in the theological and pastoral introduction to the RCIA, this is the duty of all Christians, which means: priests, religious and the lay, because the Church is one organism in whose womb the new members are conceived and raised. As this fact is strongly claimed by the Church the method of initiation arises to great importance. The seventh chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the catechumenal method stemming from Christ’s pedagogy and His mystery of Incarnation introducing a very important issue of implementing the Divine into the human. The chapter concerning this method opens a more practical part of the book. The crucial message of it is to make mystagogy a natural and obvious method which is the way of building bonds with Christ in the community of the people who already have these bonds and who are eager to tighten them and are aware of the beauty and necessity of closeness with Christ. Christian initiation is the process of entering the Kingdom of God and meeting Christ up to the union with Him – not so much learning dogmas and moral requirements. This is a special time when candidates-catechumens-elected mature in love and in their attitude to Christ and people, which results in prayer and new way of life. As in the past catechumenate nowadays inspires the faithful in their imagination of love and mercy as well as reminds us about various important details of the paschal way of life, which constitute our baptismal vocation, but may be forgotten and now with the help of catechumenate can be recognized anew, while accompanying adults on their catechumenal way. The book is meant for those who are already involved in catechumenal process and are responsible for the rites and formation as well as for those who are interested in what the Church is offering to all who consciously decide to know and follow Christ. You can learn from this book, what is the nature and specificity of the method suggested by the Rite itself for guiding people to God the Saviour and to the community of His people. The aim of the study is to present the universal way of evangelization, which was suggested and revealed by God in His pedagogy, particularly through Jesus Christ and smoothly adopted by the early Church. This way, which can be called a method, is so complete, substantial and clear that it deserves rediscovery, description and promotion, which has already started in the Church’s teaching by making direct references to such categories as: initiation, catechumenate, liturgical formation, the rereading the Mystery of Christ, the living participation in the Mystery and faith nourished by the Mystery. The most engaging point with Christian initiation is the fact, that this seems to be the most effective way of reviving the parish, taking place on the solid and safe ground of liturgy with the most convincing and objective fact that is our baptism and our new identity born in baptismal regenerating bath. On the grounds of our personal relationship with God and our Christian vocation we can become active apostles of Christ. Evangelization begins with ourselves and in our hearts. Thinking about the Church’s mission, we should have in mind our personal mission within the Church and we should refer to it’s roots – first to our immersion into Christ’s death and resurrection and to the anointment with the Holy Spirit. In this Spirit we have all been sent to follow Christ wherever He goes, not necessarily where we would like to direct our steps, but He would. Let us cling to Him and follow Him! Together with the constantly transforming and growing Church! Towards the new life!