Competing with Text

The diminished role of the hero affected even the star-driven narratives of Hollywood, in which stories of failure, disappointment, isolation, or moral compromise assumed a new prominence in the wake of World War II. The increasing artistry associated with directing correlated with storytelling that relied less on compelling expressivity and more on allowing the viewer to be intrigued rather than deliberately enlightened. The film auteur offers a parallel to the original print designer, the peintre-graveur of the Renaissance, both of them involved during the entire process, from ideation to realization.

‘An intensive study of – feet!’ in two films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot

In Shoes (1916), Lois Weber re-examines the relationship between shoes and social mobility. Far from guiding the working-class protagonist’s progress, a pair of worn boots trap her into a moral compromise, which destroys her hope of future advancement, either romantically or socially. Weber’s investigation into wage inequality, the rights of women and the influence of consumer culture via footwear continues in The Blot (1921), which revisits the same plot in a lower middle-class milieu and expands on the theme. Here, shoes are again a danger to women, but also an indicator of genteel distress and a cheap, impractical commodity, good only for profiteering rather than practicality.

Mandelstam's Worlds

Rightly appreciated as a ‘poet’s poet’, Mandelstam has been habitually read as a repository of learned allusion. Yet as Seamus Heaney observed, his work is ‘as firmly rooted in both an historical and cultural context as real as Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Waste Land’. Great lyric poets offer a cross-section of their times, and Mandelstam’s poems represent the worlds of politics, history, art, and ideas about intimacy and creativity. The interconnections between these domains and Mandelstam’s writings are the subject of this book, showing how engaged the poet was with the history, social movements, political ideology, and aesthetics of his time. The importance of the book also lies in showing how literature, no less than history and philosophy, enables readers to confront the huge upheaval in outlook that can be demanded of us; thinking with poetry is to think through the moral compromise and tension felt by individuals in public and private contexts, and to create out of art experience in itself. The book further innovates by integrating a new, comprehensive discussion of the Voronezh Notebooks, one of the supreme achievements of Russian poetry. Mandelstam’s controversial political poetry has been virtually a taboo topic (despite sporadic attempts at assessment). This book considers the full political dimension of works that explore the role of the poet as a figure positioned within society but outside the state, caught between an ideal of creative independence and a devotion to the original, ameliorative ideals of the revolution.

Abortion and Ectogenesis: Moral Compromise

The contemporary philosophical literature on abortion primarily revolves around three seemingly intractable debates, concerning the (1) moral status of the fetus, (2) scope of women’s rights and (3) moral relevance of the killing/letting die distinction. The possibility of ectogenesis—technology that would allow a fetus to develop outside of a gestational mother’s womb—presents a unique opportunity for moral compromise. Here, I argue those opposed to abortion have a prima facie moral obligation to pursue ectogenesis technology and provide ectogenesis for disconnected fetuses as part of a moral compromise.

Ethics as Design and Its Two Distinctive Methods

The new conception of rationality as non-formal reason is completed by an explanation of how design in engineering can be brought to the design of practical problems in ethics, from which the notion of ethics as design for flourishing is developed. The conventional notions of balancing and specification in applied ethics are rejected and replaced by two methods that use non-formal reason: fully engaged moral compromise and wide reflective equilibrium. A case depicts a disagreement between a nurse and a doctor in an intensive care unit that is resolved by a compromise that emanates from a process of deliberation among the staff. Reflective equilibrium was widely adopted into moral philosophy, and it quickly expanded into wide reflective equilibrium. Here it is further enhanced by adding the three features of liberation, extension, and enrichment. The upshot of these developments is a completed initial account of non-formal rationality with four resources, two specific methods, and a shift from principles to values.

How moral disagreement may ground principled moral compromise

In an influential article, Simon C. May forcefully argued that, properly understood, there can never be principled reasons for moral compromise (May, 2005). While there may be pragmatic reasons for compromising that involve, for instance, concern for political expediency or for stability, there are properly speaking no principled reasons to compromise. My aim in the article is to show how principled moral compromise in the context of moral disagreements over policy options is possible. I argue that when we disagree, principled reasons favoring compromises or compromising can assume a more significant part of what makes a position all things considered best, and in this way disagreement can ground moral compromise.