In his paper “Scientific research is a moral duty”, John Harris argues that individuals have a moral duty to participate in biomedical research by volunteering as research subjects. He supports his claim with reference to what he calls the principle of beneficence as embodied in the “rule of rescue” (the moral obligation to prevent serious harm), and the principle of fairness embodied in the prohibition on “free riding” (we are obliged to share the sacrifices that make possible social practices from which we benefit). His view that biomedical research is an important social good is agreed upon, but it is argued that Harris succeeds only in showing that such participation and support is a moral good, among many other moral goods, while failing to show that there is a moral duty to participate in biomedical research in particular. The flaws in Harris’s arguments are detailed here, and it is shown that the principles of beneficence and fairness yield only a weaker discretionary or imperfect obligation to help others in need and to reciprocate for sacrifices that others have made for the public good. This obligation is discretionary in the sense that the individuals are free to choose when, where, and how to help others in need and reciprocate for earlier sacrifices. That Harris has not succeeded in claiming a special status for biomedical research among all other social goods is shown here.
In his work from 1868, 'On Schopenhauer,' Nietzsche criticizes the philosopher for dressing up a 'totally obscure, inconceivable X' in 'brightly coloured clothes, with predicates drawn from a world alien to it, the world of appearance'. Failing logical proof that the thing-in-itself is Will, Schopenhauer relies instead, according to Nietzsche, on a 'poetic intuition' to make this identification (Nietzsche 1998: 260). In part, Nietzsche is correct: Schopenhauer does rely on poetic intuition to draw the conclusion that the world is, ultimately, Will, and he uses such poetic intuitions throughout his main work in order to make sensible, as far as possible, the character of the thing-in-itself, which, by definition, cannot be a representation for a subject. But Schopenhauer is in good company in using a form of poetic insight for the purpose of giving some sensible representation to a concept that lies beyond the 'bounds of sense.' Indeed, it was pursued already in Kant's works from the 1790s, and especially with his recognition of beauty as the symbol of the morally good.In this paper, I seek to show first how Schopenhauer adopts a means similar to Kant's for making a merely thinkable concept sensible, albeit without being able to provide any direct intuition thereof, and second, how he also transforms the Kantian symbolic relationship (between beauty and the morally-good) into one that I will term 'metonymic'. In a nutshell, the feeling of aesthetic will-lessness and the objects of aesthetic perception give one sensible access through a part to the whole. A key theme throughout Schopenhauer's main work is the attempt to gain knowledge of that which is supersensible or which touches on the mystical through experiences available to all human beings. In the access one has to one's own acts of willing, one can gain knowledge (however incomplete) of the 'in-itself' of the world, and in aesthetic experience one gains a partial understanding of the mystical experience of ascetic will-lessness as well as insight into the multifaceted, essential character of human existence through experience with particular works of art and music. Whereas Kant explains that profoundly felt structural analogies can give one some sensible confirmation of the good will, Schopenhauer employs the experience of felt contiguities between things that were hitherto thought to be distinct. This metonymic thinking, which has not been appreciated in Schopenhauer scholarship to date, is a primary recurring motif in Schopenhauer's philosophy, and the means by which he believes human beings may have indirect access to the world as it is in itself.
At the apex of his influence, from about 1860 up to the start of World War I, Arthur Schopenhauer was known first and foremost as a philosopher of pessimism, sparking an entire “pessimism controversy” in German philosophy in the latter part of the 19th century. Still today, his main reputation is as one of the few philosophers to have argued that it would have been better never to have been. Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare aims to complicate and challenge the predominant picture of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought. The reconstruction is novel in three main ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most commentators have been apt to recognize. Second, it sees Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an evolving rather than static body of thought, especially with respect to the place of the Platonic Ideas in his system. Schopenhauer’s views in the philosophy of nature changed as he encountered proto-Darwinian thought, and this change weakens Schopenhauer’s own grounds for pessimism. A third novelty is the claim that there are really two Schopenhauers rather than one as concerns his ethical thought, for the tensions between his ethics of compassion and resignationism are so acute that we ought to see Schopenhauer as giving us two mutually incompatible ethical ideals.
The aesthetic category of the sublime has been theorized (especially in the Kantian tradition) as integrally intertwined with the moral. Paradigmatic experiences of the sublime, such as gazing up at the starry night sky, or out at a storm-whipped sea, lead in a moral or religious direction depending on the cognitive stock brought to the experience, since they typically involve a feeling of awe and reflection on the peculiar situation of the human being in nature. The monumental is a similar aesthetic category, integrally intertwined with the political, but, by contrast, has garnered almost no attention from aestheticians. My main goal in this paper is to sketch a theory of ‘the monumental’ as an aesthetic category—one that is a species of the sublime but differs qualitatively from the natural/environmental sublime in significant ways, and thus merits a distinctive label. In doing so, I aim to shed light on the nature and power of monuments specifically, and to begin to address a lacuna in our understanding of a long-standing and culturally important form of public art.
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