Suchergebnisse

The contention that future people have interests & rights that we are obligated to respect is not new & did not originate in modern "environmentalist" sensibilities. It received an early airing two centuries ago from thinkers as disparate as Kant, Burke, & Thomas Jefferson. I deal in the main with Jefferson's claim that "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living" & its implications for protecting posterity's interests, & secondarily with ideas about intergenerational relations in Kant, Burke, & Paine. That these ideas had their origins in a decidedly different political context -- ie, in reactions to & reflections on the French Revolution -- does not preclude their being recycled & reused in our own day for quite different purposes. 31 References. Adapted from the source document.

"Character" is today a key concept in conservative discourse & is virtually absent from the language of liberalism. I argue that liberals can, & perhaps ought to, reclaim the concept of character from its near-monopoly by conservatives. One way to do so is to look back to John Stuart Mill's proposed "science" of character-formation, which in his System of Logic (1843) he called "ethology." Although he never wrote a treatise on ethology, his major works can be read as case studies in applied ethology. His Autobiography shows how a single individual, viz. himself, was able to reform a partially deformed character. The Subjection of Women is about the deformation & possible reformation of the characters of half the human race, viz. women. Considerations on Representative Government is concerned with the formation of civic character & not least, On Liberty is concerned with the conditions conducive to the formation of vital & vigorous individual characters. I conclude by contrasting Mill's conception of character with that of a prominent neoconservative social scientist. Adapted from the source document.