Emotivism in Contemporary Culture

My Ethics classes -- a staple course for me since grad school days -- generally start out with exploring some features the culture we inhabit and a few common obstacles or impediments to doing any serious work in Ethics.  So, we very quickly get into reading and discussing a few selections from the work of a contemporary proponent of (and convert to) Virtue Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre -- not a lot, certainly not as much as I'd like to, or as much as my students could use -- but if my aim is to cover enough material and moral theories over the course of an-always-too-short semester, we can't afford too much time to anyone (just for comparison, Bentham and Mill get 2 class sessions each, Plato, Kant, and Aquinas 3 sessions, and Aristotle lucks out with a total of 5). 

This time around, in addition to his essay "Plain Persons and Moral Theory," my students are studying chapters 2 and 3 of MacIntyre's landmark work, After Virtue. I've used the first piece because in it, he shows how moral theory connects up with our ordinary lives, decisions, and concerns.  He also provides an introduction to three moral standpoints commonly adopted in our culture and contrasts them to the sort of standpoint articulated by Virtue Ethics.  Many people in our culture do effectively operate more or less along the lines of Utilitarianism -- determining whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, depending on its consequences for those concerned -- or Deontology -- determining the morality by the conformity of actions or motives to rules and duties.  A third possibility is to hold that moral matters -- and our judgements about them -- really boil down to our subjective preferences, to our non-rational emotions, to "criterionless choice" -- that is, to Emotivism.

New Yorker: Wild Animals Don't Want to be Owned

The news earlier this month about Terry Thompson’s ill-fated decision to release the exotic, wild, and in many cases dangerous animals he had acquired — and then to kill himself — crossed my path in the same way as it did for so many others:  brief reports without much detail, announcing that among others, Lions and Bengal Tigers had been released near, and were now roaming into, an Ohio town.  Then more substantive follow-up reports and opinion pieces began to pop up, as the media swung to focus on the owner, the sheriff and deputies, the town’s residents, and the animals themselves.  One of the more interesting, and well-balanced pieces is by Susan Orlean.  She asks about the tragic situation the key question:

A small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers. How did it come to this? The blame should be doled out carefully. Very little of it should fall on the sheriff of Zanesville, who did what was probably the only thing he could do: give a kill order when darkness fell and Terry Thompson’s wild carnivores were still prowling around town

Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and Politics of Anger

A lot has been written and said recently comparing the two mass political movements essentially based in the politics of anger -- Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.  In fact, so much is currently out there that practically any site I could arbitrarily select to link to here would fit the bill -- so long as it mentions the two movements in some comparative manner.

James Sinclair, in Occupy Wall Street vs The Tea Party (where he also sets out one of the more interesting Venn diagrams overlapping the two groups) sets out, summarizes, and links up an excellently balanced set of comparisons.

The Myth of Closure: How is Emotional Closure Good?

Does the oft-invoked idea of attaining emotional closure really correspond to something genuinely good?  It is something necessary, something desirable, something towards which to counsel people, to move them by whatever appropriate means suggest themselves?  A recent Boston Globe interview with sociologist Nancy Burns raised a strong challenge to the all-too-common call for closure.
Burns’ view is that strictly speaking there really is no such thing as closure:

The idea of closure [is seen] as a new emotional state for explaining what we need and how we’re supposed to respond to trauma and loss. But closure is a rhetorical concept, a made-up term  … .Closure is not something that we can simply find or something we need. It’s a frame used to explain how we should respond to loss.