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Building the Moral Community: Radical Naturalism and Emergence demonstrates how very simple models of moral engagements based on natural, incomplete, value-laden frames of the world can lead to general moral progress for the human community. All moral behavior affects more than one person, which means that the moral community is more than the sum of the individuals included in it. David W. Chambers argues that there is no ethically detached and superior position from which to operate, and that such claims are focused on ethics, not on acting morally. Therefore, he cautions against mistaking theories of ethics composed on statements about what is good and right for actual moral behavior that moves broadly and inevitably toward a better world. This book explores naturalistic ethics, offering a modified classical analytic philosophy exploration of morality that is consistent with emerging thinking in psychology, neurobiology, game theory, and self-adjusting systems.
Becoming Good: Building Moral Character (2000) is a study of character—the kind of people we are, our habits, dispositions, inclinations, virtues, and vices. Without good character we do not have the strength or wisdom to fight off temptation and do the right thing, no matter how good our principles may be. For this study Jesus’ Beatitudes are the primary guide, with Paul’s faith, hope, and love a close second. Becoming Good digs deep into the biblical text and vocabulary, listens to the great biblical and ethical teaching of the past two millennia, and provides abundant contemporary illustrations and applications. Becoming Good works as a stand-alone study (the ethics of “being,” virtue ethics), but it is also the companion to Doing Right (the ethics of “doing,” decision and action).
Contributions by churches to public discourse have become disconnected from the fabric of communal relationships in which Christians stand by virtue of the reconciling work of God in Jesus Christ. We argue individualistically, legally, ideologically, but seldom as members of a body for whom relationships of basic trust with others are fundamental. This book seeks a strategy for recovering these missing connections. The heart of the argument is that churches need to recover the vocation of providing primary moral formation, of shaping people's moral identity, long before politicized policy arguments begin.
The author argues for much greater attention to ethical education and responds to sceptics who say that it can't be done in the face of a pluralistic secular society badly fragmented over values. Seeking always for themes and issues that unite rather than divide, the author provides a conceptual foundation for ethical education broad enough for building consensus among teachers and parents, yet focused enough to provide guidance for highly specific learning activities. The second half of the book takes the reader through a carefully devised series of steps by which a school community might proceed in building their ethical school. The final chapter reminds of the many difficulties to be met along the way, but offers encouragement to strengthen the resolve of the school community. The book concludes with two helpful appendices: the first provides detailed information on exiting initiatives already underway in ethical education, the second offers an annotated bibliography of books and essays which are available for those educators who need or want to read more on the topic of ethical education.
Suffering is an unavoidable reality in health care. Not only are patients and families suffering but also the clinicians who care for them. Commonly the suffering experienced by clinicians is moral in nature, in part a reflection of the increasing complexity of health care, their roles within it, and the expanding range of available interventions. Moral suffering is the anguish that occurs when the burdens of treatment appear to outweigh the benefits; scarce human and material resources must be allocated; informed consent is incomplete or inadequate; or there are disagreements about goals of treatment among patients, families or clinicians. Each is a source of moral adversity that challenges clinicians' integrity: the inner harmony that arises when their essential values and commitments are aligned with their choices and actions. If moral suffering is unrelieved it can lead to disengagement, burnout, and undermine the quality of clinical care. The most studied response to moral adversity is moral distress. The sources and sequelae of moral distress, one type of moral suffering, have been documented among clinicians across specialties. It is vital to shift the focus to solutions and to expanded individual and system strategies that mitigate the detrimental effects of moral suffering. Moral resilience, the capacity of an individual to restore or sustain integrity in response to moral adversity, offers a path forward. It encompasses capacities aimed at developing self-regulation and self-awareness, buoyancy, moral efficacy, self-stewardship and ultimately personal and relational integrity. Clinicians and healthcare organizations must work together to transform moral suffering by cultivating the individual capacities for moral resilience and designing a new architecture to support ethical practice. Used worldwide for scalable and sustainable change, the Conscious Full Spectrum approach, offers a method to solve problems to support integrity, shift patterns that undermine moral resilience and ethical practice, and source the inner potential of clinicians and leaders to produce meaningful and sustainable results that benefit all.
Western society today lives from community fragments and moral fragments alone, and these fragments are being destroyed more quickly than they are being replenished. Larry Rasmussen assesses the long-term reasons for this situation and then proposes the forms and tasks that churches can undertake to help mend and improve civil society. This book, which had its origin in the Hein/Fry Lectures in 1991-92, functions both as an assessment of the moral climate in America today and also as a proposal for the church in contemporary society.
This book explores the religious, educational, and social practice of a Muslim congregation and the moral world it generated within a mosque in UK. The life of the mosque is described through religious practice, communal activities and informal encounters and the history and ideas that shaped the moral world and thinking of the Indo-Guyanese who built it. Marked by a double diaspora experience with its implication of loss and re-imagining, the congregation’s conception of living a Muslim life is embodied in both ritual and in styles of comportment and socializing while religious concerns are voiced in sermons, in religious classes and in responses to everyday situations. Links are made between anthropology and developmental and psychoanalytic understandings of embodied experience and the emergence of ethical capacity. This account contributes to the literature on Muslim communities in Europe and ‘ordinary ethics.’ As such, the book will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists, to those involved in religious and psycho-social studies, and to clinicians working with Muslim communities.
Are humans at their core seekers of their own pleasure or cooperative members of society? Paradoxically, they are both. Pleasure-seeking can take place only within the context of what works within a defined community, and central to any community are the evolved codes and principles guiding appropriate behavior, or morality. The complex interaction of morality and self-interest is at the heart of Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s approach to evolutionary economics, which is designed to bring about a better understanding of human behavior. In From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, Hodgson casts a critical eye on neoclassical individualism, its foundations and flaws, and turns to recent insights from research on the evolutionary bases of human behavior. He focuses his attention on the evolution of morality, its meaning, why it came about, and how it influences human attitudes and behavior. This more nuanced understanding sets the stage for a fascinating investigation of its implications on a range of pressing issues drawn from diverse environments, including the business world and crucial policy realms like health care and ecology. This book provides a valuable complement to Hodgson’s earlier work with Thorbjørn Knudsen on evolutionary economics in Darwin’s Conjecture, extending the evolutionary outlook to include moral and policy-related issues.
"In Spare the Rod, historian Campbell F. Scribner and philosopher Bryan R. Warnick think deeply about punishment and discipline practices in American schooling. To delve into this controversial subject, the authors carefully consider two major issues. The first involves questions of meaning. How have concepts of discipline and punishment in schools changed overtime? What purposes are they supposed to serve? And what can they tell us about our assumptions about education? The second issue involves the justification of punishment and discipline in schools. Are public school educators ever justified in punishing or disciplining students? Are these things important for moral education? Or, are they fundamentally opposed to education? If some form of punishment is justified in schools, what ethical guidelines should direct its administration? The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the past century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment (such as suspension), school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes, they argue, disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental ethos of education. What we need is a view of discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools should be"--
"John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.