[Xmca-l] Re: Appeal for help

[David H Kirshner]

Andy,

Oskar Schindler comes to mind as one who underwent a moral transition owing to cultural circumstances. 
His early life trajectory was as an opportunist, flattering, bribing, and ingratiating himself with representatives of the power structure, spying for the Nazis against Czechoslovakia, and then moving to Krakow to profiteer from the impending war. Later, he used his treasure and put himself at risk to save Jews from the Holocaust (in 1944 he was held in prison for about a week on suspicion that he was attempting to improve the conditions of his Jewish workers).

The challenge, in terms of analyzing this transition in terms of a "project," is that the project was internal; his immediate social milieu was the Nazis and their collaborators. 

David

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2016 12:38 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Appeal for help

Comrade and friends, I need some help.

I am setting about developing a new approach to virtue ethics. Virtues are everywhere taken to be deep-seated attributes of a person's character; my aim is to make the starting point instead from virtues defined as deep-seated attributes of a project, which you can take to mean "social context" or "system of activity" if you wish. I don't need advice about issues and problems of ethics, but it is in in the nature of virtue ethics that it always has strong implications for psychology as well as social theory, to the extent that I think I can make a great deal of progress by calling on psychological data.

Can people point me to research(ers) about how a person's character changes with social context (e.g. home/work), any evidence of the well-known phenomenon in which a person promoted above the ability suffers a moral degeneration; any suitable and reliable data about the differing character (not just preferences or cognition, but virtues) of people from one culture or another? or similar information about changes in a person's character following their emigration to another country?

URLs appreciated, or whole books, I don't have access to a university library or JSTOR.

Thanks

Andy

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Andy Blunden
http://home.mira.net/~andy
http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making