Ethics Emotion Education And Empowerment

Universities teach courses in ethics, but do they teach students how to be ethical in practice? Lisa Kretz’s Ethics, Emotion, Education, and Empowerment explores the ways that philosophical ethics are currently taught and argues that dominant approaches fail to adequately support ethical action, in part because emotions are all too often ignored or repressed in university classrooms. In isolation, abstract theoretical content fails to motivate. The ability to reason through an ethical dilemma does not, by itself, of necessity impact ethical action. Empowered action requires intentional emotional engagement. Kretz argues that part of the reason affective pedagogy fails to get sufficient uptake is due to the operations of oppression. There is a long history of the reason-emotion dualism undermining recognition of the necessary and valuable epistemic roles emotions play in moral life, and serving as a political tactic to undermine the experience of oppressed groups. This impoverishes ethical pedagogy because it is to the detriment of their ability to teach ethics in a comprehensive way and strips the potential of supporting students to enact their own reflectively held ethical beliefs and values. Using the example of the environmental crisis, Kretz makes a case for supporting students as engaged activists aware of their capacity to ethically change the world.

What can Aristotle teach us that is relevant to contemporary moral and educational concerns? What can we learn from him about the nature of moral development, the justifiability and educability of emotions, the possibility of friendship between parents and their children, or the fundamental aims of teaching? The message of this book is that Aristotle has much to teach us about those issues and many others. In a formidable display of boundary-breaking scholarship, drawing upon the domains of philosophy, education and psychology, Kristján Kristjánsson analyses and dispels myriad misconceptions about Aristotle’s views on morality, emotions and education that abound in the current literature - including the claims of the emotional intelligence theorists that they have revitalised Aristotle’s message for the present day. The book proceeds by enlightening and astute forays into areas covered by Aristotle’s canonical works, while simultaneously gauging their pertinence for recent trends in moral education. This is an arresting book on how to balance the demands of head and heart: a book that deepens the contemporary discourse on emotion cultivation and virtuous living and one that will excite any student of moral education, whether academic or practitioner.

This volume focuses on ‘fittingness’ as an ethical-aesthetical idea, and in particular examines how the concept is beneficial for environmental ethics. It brings together an innovative set of contributions to argue that fittingness is a significant but under-investigated facet of human ethical deliberation with both ethical and aesthetic dimensions. In widely diverse matters – from architecture to table manners – individuals and communities make decisions based on ‘fittingness’, also expressed in related terms, such as appropriateness, prudence, temperance, and mutuality. In the realm of environmental ethics, fittingness denotes a relation between conscious embodied persons and their habitats and is of relevance to judgements about how humans shape, and take up with, the non-human environment, and hence to ethical decisions about the development and use of the environment and non-human creatures. As such, fittingness can be of great benefit in reframing human relationships to the non-human, stimulating a way of living in the world that is fitting to the preservation of its fruitfulness, goodness, beauty, and truth.

Practical ethics training is now a requirement of nearly all professional training programmes. This timely and accessible book provides sustained, critical and multi-disciplinary treatment of the important and much-discussed question of addressing emotional aspects of moral functioning in professional ethics education. It offers practical evidence-based suggestions on how to incorporate the promotion of empathic development into the everyday teaching of professional ethics.

Shame, Gender Violence, and Ethics: Terrors of Injustice draws from contemporary, concrete atrocities against women and marginalized communities to re-conceptualize moral shame and to set moral shame apart from dimensions of subordination, humiliation, and disgrace. The interdisciplinary collection starts with a contribution from a Yazidi-survivor of genocidal and sexual violence, whose case brings together core themes: gender, ethnic and religious identity, and violence and shame. Further accounts of shame and gendered violence in this collection take the reader to other and equally disturbing accounts of lesser-known atrocities from around the world. Although shame is sometimes posited as an inevitable companion to human life, editors Lenart Škof and Shé M. Hawke situate the discussion in the theoretical landscape of shame, and the contributors challenge this concept through fields as diverse as law, journalism, activism, philosophy, theology, ecofeminism, and gender and cultural studies. Their discussion of gendered shame makes room for it to be both a negative and a redemptive concept. Combining junior and senior scholarship, this collection examines power relations in the cycle of shame and violence.

Kristen Hessler argues that philosophy can best contribute to understanding human rights by exploring the full range of their use in practice. Her approach emphasizes how human rights activism and adjudication can both reveal and dismantle unjust social hierarchies. The result is an innovative vision of interdisciplinary human rights scholarship.

Moral Emotions and Human Interdependence in Character Education challenges contemporary mainstream approaches to character education predicated on individualism, ‘essential virtues’ and generic ‘character skills’. This book synthesizes perspectives from phenomenology, psychology, cultural sociology and policy studies into a unique theoretical framework to reveal how ideas from positive psychology, emotional intelligence and Aristotelian virtues have found their way into the classroom. The idealized, self-reliant, resilient, atomized individual at the core of current character education is rejected as one-dimensional. Instead this book argues for an alternative, more complex pedagogy of interdependence that promotes students’ well-being by connecting them to the lives of others. This book is an essential read for academics, researchers, postgraduate students and school teachers interested in character education and social and emotional learning.

First published in 1999. Megan Boler combines cultural history with ethical and multicultural analyses to explore how emotions have been disciplined, suppressed, or ignored at all levels of education and in educational theory. FEELING POWER charts the philosophies and practices developed over the last century to control social conflicts arising from gen­der, class, and race. The book traces the development of progressive pedagogies from civil rights and feminist movements to Boler's own recent studies of emo­tional intelligence and emotional literacy. Drawing on the formulation of emotion as knowledge within feminist, psychobiological, and post structuralist theo­ries, Boler develops a unique theory of emotion missing from contemporary educa­tional discourses.