Cultural Ethics

This lecture on cultural ethics, which features dialogues with an AI, parallels my last lecture on political ethics. In it, I first consider the possibilities for modifying Heath’s Market Failures Approach to create a cultural failures approach (CFA) to the cultural ethics of striving for excellence in the arts, the sciences, and school. A future CFA that employs the four identities method I espouse (and that parallels the democratic failures approach/DFA proposed in the last lecture) would have the following three main elements: (1) a reasoned belief that competitive striving for success in the arts, the sciences, and school) is typically socially beneficial (cultural success); (2) a reasoned theory of cultural failures that identifies situations in which striving for success is socially detrimental; and (3) an upholding of ethically conservative and liberal principal and agent poles that help counter cultural failures. In the second part of the lecture, I apply the four-identities, “look to the plank in one’s own eye,” method of understanding business ethics to consider and evaluate my own life projects of trying to excel in art, in science, and in school as a student and then as a professor.