Ethical Virtuosity

Annotation Ethical Virtuosity challenges you to identify, articulate, defend and live the personal values and ethical principles that define who you are and how you lead others. Renowned author Dr. Louie Larimer presents seven simple steps that lead to ethical virtuosity. You'll discover the meaning of ethics, integrity, character, personal accountability and moral courage and how they are relevant within today's business environment.

Marion Goldman and Steven Pfaff define a spiritual virtuoso as someone who works toward personal purification and a sense of holiness with the same perseverance and intensity that virtuosi strive to excel in the arts or athletics. Since the Protestant Reformation, activist virtuosi have come together in large and small social movements to redefine the meanings of spiritual practice, support religious equality, and transform a wide range of social institutions. Tracing the impact of spiritual virtuosi from the sixteenth century Reformation through the nineteenth-century Anti-Slavery Movement to the twentieth-century Human Potential Movement and beyond, Marion Goldman and Steven Pfaff explore how personal virtuosity can become a social force. Martin Luther began to expand spiritual possibilities in the West when he charted paths that did not require the Church's intercession between the individual and God. He believed that everyone could and should reach toward sacred truths and transcendent moments. Over the centuries, millions of people have built on his innovations and embarked on spiritual quests that offer new possibilities for sacred relationships and social change.

Tasan Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836) is one of the most creative thinkers Korea has ever produced, one of the country’s first Christians, and a leading scholar in Confucian philosophy. Born in a staunchly Neo-Confucian society, in his early twenties he encountered writings by Catholic missionaries in China and was fascinated. However, when he later learned that the Catholic Church condemned the Confucian practice of placing a spirit tablet on a family altar to honor past generations, he left the small Catholic community he had helped found and ostensibly returned to the Neo-Confucian fold. Nevertheless, the Christian ideas he studied in his youth influenced his thinking for the rest of his life, stimulating him to look at Neo-Confucianism with a critical eye and suggest new solutions to problems Confucian scholars had been addressing for centuries. A Korean Confucian’s Advice on How to Be Moral is an annotated translation of Tasan’s commentaries on the Confucian classic Zhongyong (usually translated as The Doctrine of the Mean) in which he applies both Confucianism and Christianity to the question of how to best develop a moral character. Written as a dialogue with King Chŏngjo (r. 1776–1800), these texts reveal how Tasan interpreted his Confucian tradition, particularly its understanding of how human beings could cultivate morality, while the king’s questions illustrate the mainstream Neo-Confucianism Tasan was reacting against. Tasan challenged the non-theistic standard, insisting that living a moral life is not easy and that we need to be motivated to exert the effort necessary to overcome our selfish tendencies. He had abandoned his faith by the time he wrote these commentaries but, influenced by Catholic works and determined to find a more effective way to live a moral life than non-theistic Neo-Confucianism provided, Tasan constructed a Confucian philosophy of moral improvement centered on belief in God. This translation, helpfully annotated for context and analysis, is an exploration of early Korean engagement with the West and a powerful guide to all those interested in Confucianism, Christianity, and morality.

This edited collection examines the potential of dance training for developing socially engaged individuals capable of forging ethical human relations for an ever-changing world and in turn frames dance as a fundamental part of human experience. This volume draws together a range of critical voices to reflect the inclusive potential of dance. The contributions offer perspectives on contemporary dance training in Britain from dance educators, scholars, practitioners and artists. Through examining the politics, values and ethics of learning dance today, this book argues for the need of a re-assessment of the evolving practices in dance training and techniques. Key questions address how the concept of ‘technique’ and associated systems of training in dance could be redefined to enable the collaboration of skills and application of ideas necessary to twenty-first-century dance. The editors present these ideas in different modes of writing. This collection of essays, conversations and manifestos offers a way to explore, debate and grasp the shifting values of contemporary dance. Examining these values in the applied field of dance reveals a complex and contrasting range of ideas, encompassing broad themes including the relationships between individuality and collectivity, rigour and creativity, and virtuosity and inclusivity. This volume points to ethical techniques as providing a way of navigating these contrasting values in dance. It serves as an invaluable resource for academics as well as practitioners and students.

Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces of opportunity. Rather than turning exclusively to cognitive science and contemporary ethical theories, Hershock shows how classical Confucian and Socratic philosophies help to make visible what a history of choices about remaking ourselves through control biased technology has rendered invisible. But it is in Buddhist thought and practice that Hershock finds the tools for valuing and training our attention, resisting the colonization of consciousness, and engendering a more equitable and diversity-enhancing human-technology-world relationship. Focusing on who we need to be present as to avoid a future in which machines prevent us from either making or learning from our own mistakes, Hershock offers a constructive response to the unprecedented perils of intelligent technology and seamlessly blends ancient and contemporary philosophies to envision how to realize its equally unprecedented promises.

This book investigates the roles of habit and reflection in Hegel's account of subjective freedom in an objectively rational social order.

This book proposes that the highest expression of ethics is an aesthetic. It suggests that the quintessential performance of any field of practice is an art that captures an ethic beyond any literal statement of values. This is to advocate for a shift in emphasis, away from current juridical approaches to ethics (ethical codes or regulation), toward ethics as an aesthetic practice—away from ethics as a minimal requirement, toward ethics as an aspiration. The book explores the relationship between art and ethics: a subject that has fascinated philosophers from ancient Greece to the present. It explores this relationship in all the arts: literature, the visual arts, film, the performing arts, and music. It also examines current issues raised by ‘hybrid’ artists who are working at the ambiguous intersections between art, bio art and bioethics and challenging ethical limits in working with living materials. In considering these issues the book investigates the potential for art and ethics to be mutually challenged and changed in this meeting. The book is aimed at artists and students of the arts, who may be interested in approaching ethics and the arts in a new way. It is also aimed at students and teachers of ethics and philosophy, as well as those working in bioethics and the health professions. It will have appeal to the ‘general educated reader’ as being current, of considerable interest, and offering a perspective on ethics that goes beyond a professional context to include questions about how one approaches ethics in one’s own life and practices.

Drawing upon the past two decades of burgeoning literature in philosophy of music, this study offers a comprehensive, critical analysis of what is entailed in performance interpretation. It argues that integrity and other virtues offset the harm that virtuosity and rigid historical authenticity can impose on the perceptive judgment required of excellent musical interpretation. Proposed are challenging and provocative reassessments of the appropriate roles for virtuosity and historical authenticity in musical performance. Acknowledging the competitive ethos of the contemporary music scene, it details the kind of character a performer needs to develop in order to withstand those pressures and to achieve interpretive excellence. Performers are encouraged to examine and explore the ethical dimension of their art against their responsibilities to the diverse patrons they serve. Professional and student performers and instructors will appreciate this practical discussion of the ethical challenges performers confront when interpreting musical works. The ethical discourse applies to instrumental performance studies, the history and theory of music, general music pedagogy, and philosophy of music courses.