Jul 18, · Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism) 1 day ago · We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow blogger.com more 1 day ago · Tips for outlining an essay tables and figures in a research paper, essay on responsibility towards family, guru nanak dev ji essay in punjabi 10 lines: write an essay about a famous arab writer that you admire exemplification essay topic
MacIntyre | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Founders believed that a well-informed electorate preserves our fragile democracy and benefits American society as a whole. Almost everyone praises education, but consensus dissolves over who should pay for it, virtue essay. This dilemma runs deep in our history, back to the founders who led the American Revolution and designed a more participatory form of government, known as a republic, virtue essay. They declared that Americans needed more and better education to preserve their state and national republics from relapsing into tyranny.
A governor of Virginia, William H. Those founders worried that their 13 state republics, loosely tied in a new union, were vulnerable to internal divisions and external manipulation. They lived in a dangerous world dominated by empires virtue essay kingdoms run by monarchs and aristocrats who inherited and guarded their wealth and power, virtue essay.
In European history, virtue essay republics had been short-lived and usually small: cantons or city-states such as Pisa and Florence. How then could an immense and growing union of diverse states sustain a form of government that had always failed in the past? The American political experiments seemed especially threatened by contentions over balancing power between the states and the nation and between the regions: North and South, East and West.
In addition to the North-South division that would nearly destroy the union during the s, 18th-century Americans feared a violent split between the old states east of the Appalachians and the new settlements emerging in the vast watershed of the Mississippi River. Lacking virtue essay strong national identity, the people of identified with their states and distrusted outsiders. Poorly educated voters might also elect reckless demagogues who would appeal to class resentments and promote the violent redistribution of wealth.
In such a nightmare scenario, virtue essay, a military despot—an American Caesar—ultimately would seize power and restore order at the expense of free government. Philip and Alexander are examples of this in Greece—Caesar in Rome … and ten thousand others.
Republican political theory of the day held that empires and monarchies could thrive without an educated populace. Indeed, kings and nobles could better dominate and dazzle virtue essay ignorant and credulous. But republics depended on a broad electorate of common men, who, to keep their new rights, had to protect them with attentive care.
If everyone merely pursued his private interest, a republic would succumb to the perverse synergy of demagogues and tyrants, virtue essay. To override the selfishness assumed to be innately human, people had to be taught the value of virtue. Schools needed to produce well-informed protectors of republican government. They also needed enough education to distinguish virtue essay from treacherous candidates for office—lest the republics succumb to those reckless demagogues or would-be aristocrats.
Reformers wanted more and better schools to endow young Americans with the cultural resources needed to protect the common good. Elsewhere in the new nation, virtue essay, the grammar schools were few and reliant virtue essay private tuition. Throughout virtue essay states, the children of wealthy families could learn Latin, advanced mathematics, and some science by going on to private academies.
Colleges were even more expensive and exclusive. Neither women nor African Americans were permitted to attend, and few young white men could afford to. Invirtue essay, the United States had only 18 colleges. The largest, Yale, had students that year. Collectively, just 1, students attended college: fewer than one percent of adolescent males in the country. A third of adults could not read or write, virtue essay. Wealthy planters dominated virtue essay counties that constituted the new state.
Loath to pay higher taxes to educate common whites, the gentry preferred to hire tutors to prepare their sons for private colleges in another state or in Britain. Jefferson regarded the county elites as self-perpetuating cabals of unworthy virtue essay, so he sought a more meritocratic and public educational system.
Despite having inherited both wealth and slaves, Jefferson considered himself a natural rather than an artificial aristocrat because, he asserted, his commitment to serve common men proved his superior virtue. Through education, people could learn to think as active democrats, forsaking the passive deference that had elected old-style aristocrats to govern. Jefferson wanted to weaken the old Virginia elite by broadening educational access for ordinary folk. He favored taxing the rich to educate the poor as essential for the common good, virtue essay.
This it is the business of the state to effect, virtue essay, and on a general plan. Invirtue essay, Jefferson proposed a radical educational system meant to transform Virginia along republican lines. The best boys but no girls would advance to county academies, where the rich would pay tuition but the best poor boy from each hundred school would earn a charity scholarship.
In turn, the finest charity graduate from each academy would merit a college scholarship. Although Jefferson disliked slavery, he did not expend any political capital to challenge it in his home state, and he rebuffed a Quaker abolitionist who proposed to raise charitable funds to educate slaves. Jefferson warned that schooling could only deepen the unhappiness of the enslaved with their lot. County leaders balked at taxing themselves to educate the poor. I mean, public spirit.
Jefferson was half-right to blame county oligarchs, but it was state legislators who had passed the buck to the counties rather than raise state taxes to fund public education, virtue essay. And those legislators answered to voters who also did not like paying taxes. Here then was the rub, virtue essay. Visionary leaders insisted that preserving a republic required improving the common people by an increased virtue essay in education.
But a republic depended on common voters who lacked schooling and often balked at paying for it, preferring to spend their money on consumer goods, virtue essay. As farmers, they also wanted to keep their children at work on the farm. To justify their preferences, they invoked a populist distrust of the educated. Common voters in the southern states often did not regard education as essential to preserving their republic. In old age, virtue essay, after retiring as president of the United States, Jefferson sought to revive at least half of his educational program in Virginia.
During the virtue essay s, the state expected a windfall in federal money to reimburse Virginia for damages and expenditures during the recently concluded War virtue essay The state also reaped new funds by chartering bank and canal corporations. Virtue essay enhanced revenue sufficed to fund a new state university or a broad system of local, public schools for common people—but not both.
He reasoned that the new university would train a natural aristocracy for Virginia, and during the next generation, virtue essay, the graduates would he hoped belatedly create the public system of common schools. By compromising his full vision for education, Jefferson unwittingly delayed the creation of educational opportunity for most Virginians for half a century.
A different model of reform emerged in the northern states, where slavery was vanishing and society sustained a virtue essay middle class. In the North, the educational reformers included Jedediah Peck of Otsego County in upstate New York. During the s, Peck was a self-educated farmer, carpenter, and preacher among fellow settlers who had migrated from New England, virtue essay. Ambitious and resourceful, he won a seat in the state legislature by expressing the resentments and aspirations of his common neighbors, virtue essay, who felt insulted by the condescension of the wealthy lawyers and landlords who ran the county and state governments.
Peck promoted social mobility and equality by demanding state funding for a new system of public education. In the legislature, he kept pushing for appropriations for common country schools, virtue essay, and inNew York became the first state outside New England to adopt a comprehensive system for educating all children in grammar schools.
Such public systems gradually spread throughout the middle-Atlantic and midwestern states during the s and s but not in the South, which had none until after the Civil War. The conviction that freedom required education flourished only where slavery had been disavowed. Northerners paid for the expansion of educational opportunity with their tax dollars because they anticipated economic benefits. The growth of colleges and universities followed, accelerating over virtue essay generations, particularly in the North.
Byabout 16, Americans attended colleges, most of them small and religiously oriented. Forty years later, the United States had more than 85, students in institutions of higher learning, which included some new, larger, virtue essay, and secular state universities. The percentage of young adults attending college had doubled from but still accounted for just two percent of the people in that age group.
The 20th century brought the greatest leap forward, from four percent of young adults in to nearly 50 percent by The United States now leads the world in the proportion of college graduates. The growth reflected an economic transformation as most Americans moved away from agriculture into industry, government bureaucracies, or commercial services. Corporate managers, professionals, and bureaucrats needed the training and certification of a college education to land and keep a good job. Until the s, voters supported increased investment in education as a political priority.
In the process of that expansion, education gradually became redefined as an economic good, virtue essay, virtue essay than a political one. The proponents of higher education promised economic growth, not political virtue, as the prime goal.
It became quaint at best to raise an alarm about demagogues and aristocrats as the dangerous consequence of an ignorant electorate. Many students valued economic and social mobility over the responsibilities of civic leadership, virtue essay. And only a political fool would seek virtue in an electorate bombarded by advertising that urged Americans to keep score of winners and losers by the consumer goods that they could buy and display.
Today, we have more boots, virtue essay, bonnets, and brandy than ever before and are now expected to pursue our self-interest as voters much as we do as consumers. The shift to an economic justification for education has led to its redefinition as a private, virtue essay, individual benefit instead of a public good.
In the wake of the Second World War, the GI Bill funded students on a vast scale, allowing them to pursue any major, including those that did not lead immediately to a particular job, enabling them to exercise a choice denied to current students by the financial exigencies of high costs and mounting debts. Today, we justify that constraint on their choices by assuming that the individual student is the primary beneficiary of education and that its value is best measured in dollars subsequently earned.
Indeed, it now sounds fuzzy and naïve to speak of any other benefits of higher education, such as knowledge for its own sake, increased happiness, virtue essay, an enhanced appreciation of art, or a deeper understanding of human nature and society. Along the way, we also have shunted into the background the collective, social rewards of education: the ways in which we all, including those who do not attend college, benefit from better writers and thinkers, technological advances, expanded markets, and lower crime rates.
These critics associate public education with a demonized concept of all government, even state and local, as undemocratic. In the process, legislators disproportionately reduce funding for schools in the poorest districts with the greatest numbers of immigrants and people of color.
We have come to think and virtue essay of education as primarily economic rather than political and individual rather than social in its rewards. As a consequence, growing numbers of voters care only virtue essay the education of their own children. These conceptual and rhetorical shifts lead legislators to wonder why taxpayers should pay for the education of others—particularly those of poorer means, different culture, or darker color.
If only the individual, rather than society as a whole, virtue essay from education, let the student bear the cost of it: virtue essay runs the new reasoning. During every recession, state governments make budget cuts, and public colleges and universities become the tempting, soft targets, virtue essay.
That temptation grows when states feel pinched by rising costs for Medicaid and prisons places stuffed with the poorly educated, virtue essay. By reducing public support for colleges and universities, legislators and governors induce them to increase the tuition and fees that students pay.
A recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that since the recession, states have reduced spending on public higher education by virtue essay percent per student.
How Virtue Depends on the Soul - Nicomachean Ethics Book 1 Ch 13
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Jul 18, · Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism) Virtue ethics (also aretaic ethics, from Greek ἀρετή []) is a class of normative ethical theories which treat the concept of moral virtue as central to ethics. Virtue ethics is usually contrasted with two other major approaches in normative ethics, consequentialism and deontology, which make the goodness of outcomes of an action (consequentialism) and the concept of moral duty 1 day ago · Essay on the topic importance of discipline in students life, costco admissions essay essay on 23 march pakistan day in urdu Loyalty virtue essay, case study of ibs. My favourite game cricket essay pdf transitions for personal essays, essay on mango tree in english for class 5 argument essay for middle school
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