Gregory B. Sadler's Blog: Gregory B. Sadler on Medium, page 55

Conan the Barbarian, Mark II

Spoiler Alert -- tongue in cheek, because for reasons I will soon set out, what I'll inevitably reveal about the plot and events of the new Conan movie are unlikely to ruin anyone's movie-going or -watching experience.  But on the off-chance that someone hasn't yet seen the movie who has been hankering to do so, and would be shocked or disappointed to learn what occurs in the face of dangers braved by Conan and his compatriots. . . well, they'll want to stop reading here, or at the break just...

Self-Promotion: How Much is Too Much? (part 2 of 3)

Several weeks ago, in an earlier piece, I brought Aristotle to bear on a question which arose in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, The Art and Science of Academic Self-Promotion. There are some real issues there -- not just matters of etiquette or prudential career moves, but genuine moral issues, comprising matters wider in scope than just the decidedly not (for anyone who has actually worked there) ivory-clean towers of academia.  We inhabit a society in which we routinely have to comp...

Diamonds, Rust, and Nostalgia

A little over a week ago, my wife-to-be and I roadtripped out to Reading, Pennsylvania for the second concert we have made it to together so far.  My rather decidedly unacademic, surprising (to my colleagues and students) love for Heavy Metal -- I've written a bit about this previously on Orexis Dianoētikē -- for the straight-out hard-edged metal I grew up with and in during the late 70s and all the 80s -- overdriven bass, melodic but achingly distorted riffs, drum and bass fills, guitar solo...

Motive, Moral Discourse, and Conflict in the Song of Ice and Fire

I've been rather lax in posting on Virtue Ethics Digest of late, a factor principally of slogging through the end of semester and the holiday break, continuing to produce online and handout content for my classes this semester, and following up on contacts made after a set of three conference presentations all within a month of each other.  I've yet to follow-up my post on Madoff and Happiness, and there's plenty other posts on the docket, some of them half-written or -developed, others only ...

Self-Promotion: How Much is Too Much? (part 1 of 3)

A thought-provoking piece by the equally provocatively self-titled Lesboprof in the Chronicle of Higher Education today raised but did not resolve a question, one particularly intended for academics -- but by extension, others as well --to what degree ought one engage in self-promotion?  How much -- and how precisely -- ought one to bring to or even impress upon the attention of others one's own accomplishments, successes, projects, qualities?  She doesn't provide a hard-and-fast answer, writ...

Bernie Madoff, Happy at Last? (part 1 of 2)

It has been several years since the Bernie Madoff story first broke, gradually  exposing more and more portions of a financial investing scam perpetrated for years, a genuine Ponzi scheme, whereby investors were bilked put of quite literally billions of dollars, which were then used to maintain the appearance of high financial yields for investors earlier in, higher up in the pyramid.   It became a more and more desperate juggling act, bound to bust eventually, but only after the sheer...

Lessons From the Ethics in Business Education Workshop (part 2 of 2)

Back at Fayetteville State University last spring, I developed and delivered a workshop for faculty of the School of Business and Economics, titled Best Practices for Addressing Challenges in Teaching Ethics.  It was the third of a set of workshops I provided as part of the Ethics in Business Education Project, a collaboration between philosophers -- brought in as subject-matter experts in Ethics -- and business educators, the main goal being improvement of teaching and assessment of Ethics i...

How Do We Get It Wrong? Four Ways Aristotle Addresses

In the piece I started yesterday, I promised to talk about how and why a contemporary virtue ethicist and a classic virtue ethicist distinguish different types of moral failure from each other.  Discussing the contemporary, Alasdair MacIntyre, I placed more focus on the why — the reasons we ought to be concerned not only whether we've done wrong, but to what degree, for what reasons — and what we learn about ourselves in the process, including how — like a bus that has left the road for...

How Do We Get It Wrong? Let Us Count The Ways

One of the important aspects of a genuine Virtue Ethics approach that does not get as much discussion or examination — and often isn't taught in Ethics courses — is determining what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons one has gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.  All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices — which, to be sure, is good, a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life than those...

Back from the Conference Season: Notes from POD

It's a tad flip, ad hoc, made up on the spot, just for this occasion, for me to joke about now having made it through the "conference season," as if I've been out on the road, hitting place after place, speaking, meeting people, then moving on to the next location, the next audience. There are some people who do live like that, on the circuit, spending less time at their home base with their core of friends and family than they do at a string of scattered stops -- but I'm not actually one of ...