Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift was born in 1667. He has been called the greatest satirist in the English language. We are all familiar with hisGulliver's Travels. A Modest Proposal has been acclaimed as the outstanding short satire in English. Swift merged a career as churchman with that of a satirist and political journalist. He spent much of his life in Ireland and England, but after he was installed as Dean of St. Patricks Cathedral in Dublin in 1713 he more and more began to write about conditions in Ireland.A Modest Proposal is from this period. It combines a rational tone and a concern for the betterment of all with an unsavory solution to the problems of Ireland's poor children. Swift's satire can be so sharp and unyielding that he was variously judged to be insane, to have a disorder of the intellect, to be a hater of humanity. Mental failings in his later years encouraged his critics. Today the power of his satire is undiminished, but that does not prevent us from enjoying his humor or from admiring his humanity. In our own time, when so many children seem to be “eaten up” by the conditions of their lives,A Modest Proposal is as powerful a denunciation as it was in 1720.

Disclosure: a modest proposal

Jonathan Swift wrote perceptively about the emerging commercial society in Britain in the early eighteenth century. His particular focus was on the financial revolution and its implications for economic and political stability as well as for shifts of power between the landed and commercial classes. Following his return to Ireland Swift’s focus shifted to the developmental problems of his native country. In several pamphlets he advocated consumption of domestic products, challenged existing political structures and made trenchant criticisms of absenteeism and other dysfunctional aspects of the land tenure system. Swift’s politico-economic concerns are fully reflected in his best known work, Gulliver’s Travels but his most pointed criticism of the emerging commercial system is contained in A Modest Proposal. Written in the form of an economic pamphlet, A Modest Proposal is ostensibly designed to address the problem of poverty in Ireland. In addition to its implicit criticism of economic policy in Ireland, the pamphlet challenges the separation of economics and morality as evidenced in the writings of William Petty and Bernard Mandeville. Swift parodies Petty’s political arithmetic but it is suggested here that he also had in his sights the consequentialist reasoning present in the work of both authors but explicitly so in Mandeville.

In this review article, we develop the case for the decriminalisation of drug possession in the UK by describing our ‘modest proposal’ to repeal the relevant sections of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and its advantages. We defend this proposal against possible critiques from both conservative and radical positions. On the conservative side, these criticisms include that it would increase drug use and harm and that it would be illegal under international law. From the more radical position, we anticipate the criticisms that decriminalisation of possession would leave the harm associated with illegal drug supply to continue, that it would leave in place restrictions on the rights to use drugs, that it would forego the possible tax income from a legally regulated market, and that the drug laws would continue to act as tools of social control. In response, we argue that decriminalisation offers a feasible first step towards reducing the harm of drug control which would not increase drug-related harm.

The chapter explains the threefold aspiration of the book as an academic, societal, and diplomatic project. It introduces the three interwoven themes of international law arising in the German-Italian saga: state immunity, reparation for serious human rights violations committed during World War II, and the interplay between international and domestic law, notably the role of courts therein. The chapter proposes an approach of ‘ordered pluralism’ to coordinate this interplay, and finally tables a ‘modest proposal’ for a way out of the current impasse.

Career Education at the College Level: A Modest Proposal

Ed Gettier showed that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge.1 Not all epistemologists these days will agree that justified true belief is necessary for knowledge but I hope that most will agree with the following more modest proposal: at least one minimally sufficient condition for knowledge has justified true belief as a necessary part. At any rate, I will assume that this is so in what follows. The problem of the fourth condition (also widely and appropriately known as the Gettier problem) can then be stated as follows: What must be added to justified true belief to make a minimally sufficient condition for knowledge? Of course, we want a minimally sufficient condition that is non-trivial, informative.

For years scholars have been required to pay photography and permission fees associated with their monographs and journal articles, although publishers' guidelines state this requirement in different ways. The scholar's responsibility for securing images has been made clear in nonpartisan sources like The Chicago Manual of Style for twenty years: “The author is responsible for any fees charged by grantors of permission to reproduce, unless other arrangements are made, in writing, with the publisher” (13th ed., 4.55; 14th ed., 4.70). Though there are variations and exceptions, by and large publishers have successfully off-loaded this expense.

The wrong way to conduct an Easter egg hunt is to tell the kid where every egg is hidden. That's no fun; the kid is robbed of joy. The other wrong (no fun) way is to let the kid wander in circles, fruitlessly searching and never finding while the adult-in-charge abdicates supervising responsibility. The kid is robbed of a self-concept as a capable, powerful being.Psychotherapy is the orderly process of recovering or uncovering the personal power in each of us. When therapists, answering their own needs and anxieties, over-conduct the process by making decisions for, subtly controlling direction, or thinking for, clients are invited into a rebellious and/or over-compliant response which robs them of perception of both power and joy.However, conducted as a mutual partnership, the therapist peaceful within, the client freed to use his or her own wit, will, and creativity, psychotherapy becomes an event of discovering power and joy, in short, an Easter egg hunt.

Generally acceptable principles for financial amortization: a modest proposal

A Modest Proposal

In response to Mark D. White's Kantian critique of my article A Modest Proposal: Accounting for the Virtuousness of Modesty, I argue that invoking Kant's notions of dignity and respect in order to provide an egalitarian account of modesty brings with it conceptual commitments that are not always easy to reconcile with the moral phenomenology of that virtue. In light of this I question White's claim that a Kantian account of modesty offers a better explanation than the existential phenomenological approach that I endorse.

A modest proposal regarding the orphan child of academic surgery—teaching

Decoupling a modestly construed Narrative Self Shaping Hypothesis (or NSSH) from Strong Narrativism this paper attempts to motivate devoting our intellectual energies to the former. Section one briefly introduces the notions of self-shaping and rehearses reasons for thinking that self-shaping, in a suitably tame form, is, at least to some extent, simply unavoidable for reflective beings. It is against this background that the basic commitments of a modest Narrative Self-Shaping Hypothesis (or NSSH) are articulated. Section two identifies a foundational commitment—the central tenet—of all Strong Narrativist proposals, those that posit a necessary link between narrative self-shaping and narrative self-experience. As will be shown, in the hands of Strong Narrativists the latter notion is unpacked in stronger or weaker ways by appeal to the notion of implicit Narrativizing. Section three reminds the reader of Strawson’s (2004a) challenge to Strong Narrativism. It is revealed that Strawson’s objections are most effective if they target Strong Narrativism’s central tenet construed as a phenomenological revelation about what is necessary for self-experience and not merely the psychological Narrativity thesis, construed as an empirical hypothesis about typical Narrativizing proclivities. Having set the stage, section four critically examines two different strategies, pursued by Rudd (2012) and Schechtman (2007) respectively, for escaping the horns Strawson’s dilemma poses for Strong Narrativism. In the end both strategies invoke the notion of implicit Narrativizing at a crucial juncture. Section five reveals that a substantive proposal about what implicit Narrativizing might be is lacking, hence we have no reason to believe that it actually occurs. It is concluded that, as things stand, Strong Narrativism has no way of avoiding the horns of Strawson’s dilemma. Brief concluding remarks in the final section are a reminder why, despite their modesty, softer versions of the NSSH—when coupled with a developmental proposal about the narrative basis of our folk psychological competence—are non-trivial and worthy of further development and investigation.

ABSTRACTRacism is still a scourge of our time. Those who find themselves at the centre of this onslaught carry in their hearts and minds centuries of debilitating prejudice, recognising that their own experience of discrimination is simply another stage in its unfolding history and the ongoing social structure which underpins it. Carrying such weight is bound to have a deleterious effect on their personal lives and determines their responses to any discrimination felt and perceived. Reconciliation is required to heal the wounds inflicted by such false representation. I suggest that the Desert Christians offered insights into this matter and offered remedies for reconciliation, all of which constituted a stable base for self-renewal and a solid foundation in the struggle for social justice. Like twentieth-century liberation theologians, reading scripture encouraged them to be confident about finding ways, both personal and social, to be freed from oppression and anger and to support others who desired the same. Perhaps victims of racist abuse and hatred might look to both phenomena in finding possible ways forward for their predicament.