00520--The Summary of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemingway

                   


  The Summary of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ 
                         
                                               by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), during his duty, was hit by an Austrian mortar in Italy and had to live in a Red-Cross hospital in Milan.  He fell in love with Agnes, who appears as the heroine in some Hemingway’s novels.  Then he decided to help the Republican in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.  He settled in Cuba and bought a small estate.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for his novel “The Old Man and the Sea”.  He committed suicide in 1961.

For Whom the Bell Toll’ was published in 1940.  When the Civil War broke out in Spain many intellectuals lent their support to the cause of the Spanish Republican Government.  Hemingway also volunteered.  This background of the Spanish Civil War is the locale of the novel. 

Robert Jordan, an American has joined the loyalist army during the Civil War, and he was asked to join the guerrilla bard in the mountain, near Segovia to blow up the strategic bridges.  He arrives at a cave, where the rebels are hiding, he finds them disorganized, and not keen to fight, as they have found a safe place, and the blowing of the bridge would jeopardise their security.  Jordan finds two characters for support, Pilar, the gypsy woman, and Anselmo, Pilar’s husband Pablo was a leader of the Republican.

Then in the cave, he found Maria and fell in love with her.  She is the daughter of the Republican Mayor, saw her parents killed and was raped by the Fascists.  Her close-cropped head is the symbol of her tortures.  She was rescued by the Band; her physical injuries were healed; but psychic would still torment her.  Pilar sends Maria to Jordan’s sleeping bag and their love-making heals her wounds.  Their intensity of love is unique because of mystic quality.

A fascist soldier comes and is shot dead by Jordan.  Pablo removes detonators from Jordan’s sack, and throws them  away in the stream.  However, Jordan succeeds in blowing the bridge, the army arrives and shoot at retreating guerrillas, Jordan’s horse is hit, he sustains a fractured thigh-bone. 

Maria has become a symbol of Spain for Jordan.  Despite her entreaties to run away, Jordan declines to go with the guerrillas.  In the end, Jordan s found lying on a slope with his machine-gun aimed at the Fascist leader.  Maria and the guerrilla band went away.

                                                            END
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00519--Ethical Theories/Terminology/Definitions

Ethical Theory/
Terminology
Definition
[Reference: The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy
NICHOLAS BUNNIN AND JIYUAN YU]

1.Pragmatism
Is the ethical theory which states that the meaning of a concept is determined by the experiential or practical consequences of its application.  [Charles Sanders Peirce and William James]
2.Hedonism
The belief that pleasure is the greatest good and highest aspiration of humankind.
3.Individualism
An approach to ethics, social science and political and social philosophy which emphasizes the importance of human individuals in contrast to the social wholes, such as families, classes or societies, to which they belong.
4.Altruism
The view that the well-being of others should have as much importance for us as the well-being of ourselves.
5.Consequentialism
Consequentialism holds that the value of an action is determined entirely by its consequences and thus proposes that ethical life should be forward looking, that is, concerned with maximizing the good and minimizing the bad consequences of actions. [G. E. M. Anscombe]
6.Utilitarianism
A major modern ethical theory which suggests that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by its utility, that is, the good (pleasant or happy) or bad (painful or evil) consequences it produces.
[Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, Sidgwick, and many others]
7.Libertarianism
A twentieth-century political and moral movement. It argues that no
intervention from state and government is necessary or justified. Free choice is supreme and all conflicts can be settled through the mechanism of the market. Its strong anarchist form insists that all government is illegitimate.

8.Moral absolutism

The view that there are certain objective moral principles which are eternally and universally true, no matter what consequences they bring about. These principles can never justifiably be violated or given up. Paradigms of such principles include “don’t lie,” “keep your promises,” and “don’t kill innocent people.” Moral absolutism is generally represented by various religious moral systems. Kantian deontology is closely associated with moral Absolutism.
[Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant and many others]

9.moral psychology

An essential part of ethics, especially contemporary virtue ethics, concerned with the structure and phenomenological analysis of those psychological phenomena that have great bearing on moral behavior or action. These phenomena include cognitive states such as deliberation and choice; emotional states such as love, mercy, satisfaction, guilt, remorse, and shame; and desires, character, and personality. Moral psychology aims to improve understanding of human motivation and also has a role in the philosophy of law.
10.Paternalism

Paternalism is derived from parental caring towards one’s children. In ethics it means interfering with another person’s liberty or freedom in
the belief that one is promoting the good of that person, or preventing harm from occurring to that person, even if one’s action provokes that person’s disagreement or protest. Paternalism is challenged by liberalism and is now often viewed as a violation of liberty, autonomy, and individual rights.
11.Sexism
The attitude holding that one’s own sex is superior to the other and leading in practice to limited respect for the rights, needs, and values of the other sex. The term is analogical to racism, which regards one’s own race as superior to others. Both sexism and racism are thought to be major social evils.
12.Social Darwinism

A theory resulting from the application of Darwinism to human society. By deducing norms of human conduct directly from evolutionary biology,
it attempted to deal with ethical, economic, and political problems on the assumption that society is a competitive arena and that the evolution of society fits the Darwinian paradigm in its most individualistic form. According to social Darwinism, the fittest climb to dominant social positions as a consequence of social selection, just as natural selection determines the survival of the fittest. Because on this view human possession of consciousness does not have any moral implications, social Darwinism held that social inequality and the exploitation of lower classes, suppressed races, and conquered nations by the stronger were morally acceptable.
13.Suicide

From Plato and Aristotle onward, there has been controversy whether suicide is morally justified. On one view, suicide should be morally prohibited on the grounds that life is divine, that suicide causes harm to one’s family and community, and that suicide is an offense to God who created life. In contrast, suicide is claimed to be a self-regarding act that lies outside the prohibition on harming others. It is claimed that without stronger objections, the right should be recognized to determine when to terminate one’s own life. Aquinas and Kant argued against suicide, while Hume argued in favor of tolerating it. These different attitudes lead to controversy whether we should intervene if somebody has the intention of committing suicide. If suicide is immoral, then we are obliged to prevent it. If suicide is morally justifiable, the intervention beyond advice will be paternalistic interference that violates the agent’s
rights. Suicide has been frequently discussed in contemporary applied ethics through its relations with the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
14.Telishment

A term proposed by John Rawls to indicate a crucial problem of the utilitarian view of punishment. Utilitarianism claims that punishment is justifiable only by reference to its probable consequences with regard to promoting public good or preventing crime, rather than because the wrongdoing itself merits punishment. Rawls suggests that we can imagine a situation in which the authority knows that a suspected criminal is innocent, but still imposes a harsh punishment on him because such an action can produce better social consequences. This practice should not be termed punishment, because the subject of suffering is not a wrongdoer. Rawls names it telishment. Telishment is intuitively wrong but seems to be justifiable according to the utilitarian view of punishment.
15.Trolley problem

Ethics An ethical problem put forward by Philippa Foot in her 1967 paper “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect.” Suppose that the only possible way to steer a runaway trolley is to move it from one track to another. One man is working on the first track, and five men are working on the other. Anyone working on the track the trolley enters will be killed. Most people would accept that the driver should steer the trolley to the track on which only one person is working because the death of five persons is worse than the death of one person. Now suppose that the trolley, left to itself, will enter the track on which five men are working and kill them. If you are a bystander who can change the course of the trolley, would it be morally required or morally permissible to interfere to switch the trolley to the other track, on which only one person would be killed? According to utilitarianism, you should switch the trolley. However, if you do not interfere, you have not done anything to make you responsible for the five deaths, while if you do interfere your act does make you responsible for one death. Your own integrity or moral rules about how to act might lead you to reject the utilitarian conclusion. The trolley problem touches on both the nature of morality and concrete moral perplexity. If the driver is right to steer the trolley onto the track with one person in order to save the lives of five persons, why is it wrong to execute an innocent man to stop a riot in which five innocent people will be killed? Or why is it morally wrong to save five patients who would die without transplants at the cost of killing one healthy man for his organs? In dealing with the trolley problem and
these related questions, some philosophers turn to the principle of double effect, according to which a moral distinction between the intended and unintended consequences of an action can help to decide when bad consequences of an action are acceptable.
16.Universalizability

The idea that moral judgments should be universalizable can be traced to the Golden Rule and Kant’s ethics. In the twentieth century it was elaborated by Hare and became a major thesis of his prescriptivism. The principle states that all moral judgments are universalizable in the sense that if it is right for a particular person A to do an action X, then it must likewise be right to do X for any person exactly like A, or like A in the relevant respects. Furthermore, if A is right in doing X in this situation, then it must be right for A to do X in other relevantly similar situations.


00518--The Categorical Imperative/Immanuel Kant


The Categorical Imperative
An imperative is a command, instruction or rule governing how one should act. An imperative is ‘categorical’ when it is exceptionless, that is, when it is binding on all rational agents, in all circumstances, at all times. Kant believed that what he called ‘the supreme principle of morality’ was just such a categorical imperative, and he provided a number of different formulations of it. The most important are:

1. Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
2. So act as to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, always at the same time as an end, never simply as a means.
3 So act as if you were always through your maxims a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.


The Categorical Imperative is, for Kant, an a priori, abstract law which governs the moral value of the maxims on which we act – maxims which, in turn, determine the moral value of those acts themselves. So an act is morally good if it is performed for the sake of a morally good maxim; and a maxim is morally good if it conforms to the Categorical Imperative.

00517--The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

                              

   The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

        Plays
              Summary
A Street Car Named Desire
Is concerned with the effect of hypocritical sophistication leading to perversion and abnormality.  Blanche the protagonist of the play suffers from sexual maladjustment on account of the deep intellectual pretensions of the deep South in America.  Sex takes the form of perversion. 
The Summer and Smoke
Deals with unsuccessful love affair.  Alma is the central character of the play whose sexual maladjustment arises from defective social and moral conditioning. Alma seeks love in spiritual form, John on the other hand is a sex profligate.  The play presents a conflict between passion and morality in which the force of passion is overwhelming and the hold of morality is shaken.  The play stresses that love and sex are inseparable.
The Rose Tattoo
Is concerned with a widow, who is leading a life of seclusion after the death of her husband.  The play points out that false air of morality is too weak a force to control or repress the force of sexual passion.  Sexuality suppressed reawakens with double force if and when the hold of morality gets weak.  Here force of sexual passion gains domination.
Kingdom of Earth
Presents a true picture of earthly kingdom where personal satisfaction is more important than anything else.  Spiritual satisfaction alone and effort to achieve it leads nowhere.  Chicken is the most articulate spokesman of sexual fulfilment.  To him sex  is the possible path, it is everything. 
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Dramatizes the feeling of loneliness of the members of a family imprisoned in the midst of untold richness by greed, envy and crippling self-deception.  It portrays the deterioration of a young aristocrat; because of some mysterious disgust for mendacity who wants the oblivion that will bring peace.  The characters Maggie and Brick are deeply troubled people.
Sweet Bird of Youth
Is concerned with the feeling of loneliness caused by disappointment and failure in life.  Chance Wayne and Princess Heavenly are the central characters of the play.  Boss Finely, the domineering father of the Princess stands in the way of their happiness.  But the only way through which she can forget her problems is through the act of love-making.  Love making is the only “dependable distraction”.
The Milk Train Does not Stop Here
Depicts the pain and misery of lonely, isolated and sex starved people who strive to escape painful life with the help of pills, drugs and morphine injections. 
Period of Adjustment
Williams pursues his old theories with regard to the problem of idealism in conflict with reality, of sex and love, of loneliness and crying need of communication, of age and hurt pride and malignant effect of money.  Williams sincerely desires to help people rid themselves of the puritan repressions that in his view accounted for so much in his own tormented history.


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