Jason Harvey

Philosophical clarity is not simply a matter of style; it affects the quality of the thinking and writing and so the level of intellectual rigor. Achieving maximum clarity requires both intellectual and perceptual skills. The intellectual grasp of what philosophical clarity involves motivates writing with greater clarity. The perceptual skill of seeing exactly what we have written enables such improvement to occur. This paper explains a technique used in graduate-level courses to move both sets of skills, which in turn typically changes the students’ approach to writing and moves their written presentation skills quite dramatically.

Philosophical clarity is not simply a matter of style; it affects the quality of the thinking and writing and so the level of intellectual rigor. Achieving maximum clarity requires both intellectual and perceptual skills. The intellectual grasp of what philosophical clarity involves motivates writing with greater clarity. The perceptual skill of seeing exactly what we have written enables such improvement to occur. This paper explains a technique used in graduate-level courses to move both sets of skills, which in turn typically changes the students’ approach to writing and moves their written presentation skills quite dramatically.

I examine some common trends in ‘conflict management skills’, particularly those focused on practical results, and argue that they involve some moral problems, like the reliance on offensive stereotypes, the censorship of moral language, the promotion of distorted relationships, and sometimes the suppression of basic rights and obligations that constitute non–consequentialist moral constraints on human interactions (including dispute resolution). Since these approaches now appear in educational institutions, they are sending dangerous messages to those least able to critically assess them, messages that denigrate the language, reflection, and interactions on which the moral life depends, thus undermining the possibility of moral education in the most fundamental sense of the phrase.

I examine some common trends in ‘conflict management skills’, particularly those focused on practical results, and argue that they involve some moral problems, like the reliance on offensive stereotypes, the censorship of moral language, the promotion of distorted relationships, and sometimes the suppression of basic rights and obligations that constitute non–consequentialist moral constraints on human interactions (including dispute resolution). Since these approaches now appear in educational institutions, they are sending dangerous messages to those least able to critically assess them, messages that denigrate the language, reflection, and interactions on which the moral life depends, thus undermining the possibility of moral education in the most fundamental sense of the phrase.