of Monty Python. At a more modest level I remember listening to the Beatles' first hit, Love Me Do, blasting out from my elder brother's bedroom on a Sunday afternoon in 1962. Little did I realise that the brown austerity of the 1950s was passing and that the 60s had arrived! Part of the culture Changes in the medical world don't happen in a vacuum. They happen within specific societies and wit...

Contrarily, rather than the action-based focus on rules governing action, the agent-based approach concerns the fundamental character and motivations of the individual agent. Under the agent-based approach, moral behavior is not limited to adherence to a rule or guideline but rather involves the individual rationally pursuing moral excellence as a goal in and of itself. In essence, ethics becom...

PURPOSE Increased use of prenatal technologies has increased the numbers of women and partners whose fetus is diagnosed with a severe impairment. Virtue ethics provides a useful perspective to consider truth telling in this context, specifically how couples and providers interpret the diagnosis and prognosis to create truth. Virtue ethics is person-centered rather than act-centered, with moral ...

An important role of normative economics is to provide an analytical framework to evaluate social states. Such an evaluation is based on value judgments derived from moral views of the members of the society. There exist three major approaches in normative ethics, which formalize many people’s moral views. These are consequentialism that focuses on consequences of actions such as utilitarianism...

The development of good character in Islam is mostly a process of dealing with one’s emotions. It helps to build and support positive or good emotions or virtues and to fight and suppress negative emotions. Character building would therefore, have much to do with patience and perseverance in controlling emotions leading to negative aspects and reinforcement of emotions leading to positive ethic...

Do human beings act morally because they obey socially defined rules and norms as the result of a routine of inculcated behaviors, or an embodied fear of sanction, or perhaps both? Conversely, do they act morally because they decide to do so as a consequence of a rational evaluation, or transformative endeavor, or inseparably both? In other words, do they follow a Kantian ethics of duty or an A...

There is a lot of talking and writing on virtues and education nowadays. In spite of this, a clear and convincing account of the defining characteristics of the virtue approach to moral education is still lacking. This paper suggests and discusses three different definitions of such an approach. With reference to each definition it is examined whether the virtue approach can be distinguished fr...

“IF MY THESIS IS CORRECT, KANT WAS RIGHT”: REVISITING KANT’S ROLE WITHIN MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT Although Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is famous for its critique of the Enlightenment project in moral theory, and although Immanuel Kant is usually considered the greatest protagonist of that project, Kant’s role within the argument of After Virtue is far less clear t...

Albert Schweitzer's ethics of reverence for life is more complex and interesting than fIrst appears. It contains themes relevant to contemporary environmental ethics, including a virtue-ethics approach that emphasizes personal responsibility and tolerance, empathy for living organisms, and the fundamental unity of life. Not surprising, then, Schweitzer has recently been acknowledged for pioneer...