Suchergebnisse

One of the brand new areas of historiography is analyzed. Availing of the research of historical conscience launched in Germany, the author explores the possibility of applying this new practice to the analysis of Lithuanians' historical conscience. The perspectives, theoretical-methodological objectives & tasks are analyzed. Special attention is drawn to the ideological aspect of a historical conscience & to the problem of "left" & "right" in the Lithuanians' mass conscience during the last decade. A relationship between the "left" & "right" identity & a specific version of the past being defended, an attempt by Lithuania's politicians to manipulate the historical perspectives, a tendency toward mythologization as evident in Lithuania's contemporary historical conscience is emphasized. Adapted from the source document.

The article presents the survey, comparison & evaluation of the concepts of individual & social well-being used in the contemporary social science, with the main attention paid to their value assumptions & problems of measurement. In the neoclassical economics, presently predominant in the economic science, individual well-being is identified with welfare & is defined as satisfaction of informed preferences of an actor. This "welfarist" idea of well-being, accepted also by liberal social philosophy, is consequently subjectivist & formalist. According to the critics of welfarism, this idea is erroneous because it neglects the influence exercised by the production & advertising upon the consumer's desires, & because of its minimalist idea of social welfare, reduced to the concept of Pareto optimum. According to anti-welfarists, the evaluation of well-being should take as its point of departure not individual's wants, but objective human needs, providing the foundation for the substantive (content-rich) concept of well-being as individual's or society's high quality life. However, according to welfarists, the enriching of the idea of "good life" with substance goes hand in hand with the increasing danger of its instrumentalization to legitimate the paternalist suppression of the experiments with the alternative projects of the good life. On the article author's opinion, the reformed welfarist concept of well-being is most acceptable. In this concept, well-being is defined as the satisfaction of agent's informed preferences, which are compatible with her metapreferences. In this definition, values are conceived as wants of wants or metapreferences. Normally, human beings prefer do not have many of those wants, which they have as a matter of fact; they prefer to have some other wants instead of them. Advertising & pop culture do harm for individual well-being inasmuch as they "pollute" agent's wants, "seducing" them to satisfy the wants which they (meta)want do not have. The article closes by advancing a hypothesis, how non-linear character of the relation between the objective & subjective aspects of well-being which was discovered by Ronald F. Inglehart in his research on the value change in the developed countries, could be explained, This hypothesis ex-plains "Inglehart's effect" by the differences in the temporal dynamics & risk of failure characteristic for the consumption & self-realization activities. Adapted from the source document.