Search

Avishai Margalit's The Decent Society (1996) is a contribution to a relatively new tradition of books about concrete ethical topics that march resolutely off in the opposite direction from the [...]

Contemporary content-neutral accounts of free agency overlook the role of self-worth as a prerequisite for freedom. Examples such as a modified version of the movie 'Gaslighting,' as well as shame and slavery, suggest that agents need to have a sense of their own normative competence as a condition of freedom. This condition demonstrates that free agency has a social dimension that is missing from standard content-neutral theories, which consider only restrictions on control of behavior or the ability to regulate the will.

Ideas and theories from social psychology are often put to practical use. Sometimes these borrowed concepts and theories are carefully implemented, sometimes they are not. Education is a practical area where social psychology is often applied, sometimes without much care. As an example of the problem, this article examines how educators used self-esteem to justify bilingual education programs for language minority students and whether this application of social psychology is warranted. We find that the postulated effect of bilingual educations on self-esteem does not occur. Also, self-esteem research and theory are misapplied in attempting to justify bilingual education with respect to its supposed effects on self-esteem. Finally, we raise the question of what responsibility the field of social psychology has to correct misapplication of theory and concepts.

I begin with a puzzle: analysis of moral choice during the Holocaust locates the drive toward morality not in traditional explanations--such as religion, duty or reason--but in identity. This empirical anomaly suggests a gap in the literature on ethics. I thus developed a theory explaining morality through identity, focusing on the human capacity for intersubjective communication and the need to distinguish boundaries via categorization. Psychological studies on self-esteem and the need for consistent behavior and linguistic and psycho-analytic work on categorization suggest people do categorize and that such categorization is a universal of human nature. Once people create categories, furthermore, they feel they must accord equal treatment to all members within that class. This suggests the drive toward morality emanates in human psychology and that we must honor the humanity of others in order to claim it in ourselves.

Whereas traditionally self-love was considered a moral evil, Rousseau contended that some self-love is benign - and not only benign, but morally necessary and even praiseworthy. The following article offers an interpretation of Rousseau's criteria for distinguishing between good self-love and bad. The distinction between good and bad self-love is neither as simple as many readers think - it does not correspond exactly to the distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre - nor as blurry as many others think. It is, rather, both subtle and coherent. And it might well prove useful in our current efforts to inculcate pride and self-esteem without encouraging complacency or exploitation, efforts which themselves owe much to Rousseau's influence., In recent years we have witnessed a considerable revaluation of self-love. Traditionally, self-love has been viewed as a moral evil. Today, however, one often speaks of at least some self-love [...]