• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.137
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• pp.57-79
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• 2016

The purpose of this paper is to explain MacIntyre's critique of moral pluralism of modern society and reveal the limits of his critique of liberalism. It is a distinctive feature of the social and cultural order that we inhabit that disagreements over central moral issues are peculiarly unsettleable. Debates concerned with the value of human life such as those over abortion and euthanasia, or about distributive justice and property rights, or about war and peace degenerate into confrontations of assertion and counter-assertion because the protagonists of rival positions invoke incommensurable forms of moral assertion against each other. We usually call this situation 'modern moral pluralism' and concede as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under free institution. But in After Virtue, MacIntyre vigorously criticizes modern moral pluralism. The main cause he took which brought about this state of affairs was the failure of 'the Enlightenment project'. According to MacIntyre, the Enlightenment project which has dominated philosophy for the past three hundred years promised a conception of rationality independent of historical and social context, and independent of any specific understanding of man's nature or purpose. But not only has that promise in fact been unfulfilled, the project is itself fundamentally flawed and the promise could never be fulfilled. In consequence, modern moral and political thought are in a state of disarray from which they can be rescued only if we revert to an Aristotelian paradigm, with its essential commitment, and construct an account of practical reason premised on that commitment. But one of the deepest difficulties with the argument of After Virtue is that the very extent of its critique of the modern world seems to cast doubt on the possibility of any realistic revival under the conditions of modernity of the Aristotelianism which MacIntyre advocates. Especially when we consider we are not only the characters found in our narratives but also we ourselves are the author of our own narratives. Moral pluralism is not seen as disaster but rather as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions.

• Korean Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.212-227
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• 2000

This study was designed to testify the reliability and validation on the Korean version of the Social Adaptation Self-rating Scale(SASS) which was developed from Bose et al. for the evaluation of social motivation and behavior of depressed patients in 1997. Interests for the social world, those of social functioning, of patients were involved in the addition of new measure of disturbance. And those were distinct from abnormalities of thought, mood and symptoms of patients with major depression. As the previous reports there were several evidences that treatments may be less likely to be effective if the system they act on is dysfunctional. Thus, a better social situation favoured better outcome. As a matter of fact, however, those reports were developed in the course of the evaluation of interpersonal therapy(IPT) and cognitive therapy. Accordingly the conversed question -whether pharmacological therapy with antidepressants can impact on social functioning in addition to addressing the core features of illness- has been addressed. To date, anyhow, it is accepted that enhancement of social functioning may be a therapeutic principle in its own right and illness rarely divorced from social context. In terms of those concepts the introduction of an assessment of social functioning into pharmacotherapeutic studies of depression has been welcomed and might be a potent instrument for evaluating the relative pharmacoeconomic benefits of different treatments. Despite of many scales which were applied for the evaluation of symptoms in the patients with depression, however, the scale for the evaluation of social functiong has not been introduced in Korea yet. Thus, this study was designed to introduce the concepts of social functioning in the patients with depression and to testify the reliability and validation on Korean version of SASS. This Korean version of SASS was submitted to a reliability and validation procedure based on the data from healthy general population survey in 291 individuals and 40 patients with major depression. Cronbach a was 0.790 in total subjects group and the correlation of test-retest was statistically significant(y=0.653, p<0.0l). Thus, the Korean version of SASS might be shown to be valid and reliable. The results of multivariate analyses allowed the identification of 3 principle factors(factor 1 = intersts in social activities, factor 2 = active interpersonal relationship, factor 3 = selfesteem) in normal group, however, it could be counted as only one factor in the depression group because nearly total items of SASS were involved in factor 1. In the view of these results, the Korean version of SASS may be useful additional tool for the evaluation of social functioning in depression.