Word: utilitarianism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year. He adores his mother and fears his irritable father. He changes schools. He develops a nascent interest in girls and feels ashamed of himself for doing so. The outbreak of World War I is noted on the first page; the armistice is mentioned on page 153. Transitions are utilitarian in the extreme: "Once more the school vacation had begun, once again it was summer, the early summer of 1919. Warm, but not so stifling as that August afternoon...
...BEGINNING WAS THE BEEP -- simple, utilitarian and sufficient to alert a computer user that his machine had been turned on or that a floppy disk had failed. Then came the Macintosh, with its built-in sound chips and an onscreen control panel that enabled Mac enthusiasts to replace the beep with a boing, a clink-clank or a monkey's chirp. Finally, last spring Microsoft put sound- control software in the latest version of its Windows program, extending the power to customize a computer's noises to the 90 million owners of IBM PCs and compatible machines...
...other hand, a regulation only serves to centralize the trade off between pollution and bigger cars. Given recent events around the globe, we should be well aware that central planning is inferior to individual choice (on both utilitarian and moral grounds...
Modernist celebration of (highlight now) the vernacular is another theme that crops up repeatedly in The Art of Celebration. Gerald Murphy's "Razor" (1924), for instance, is a "signal work in the evolution of a self-conscious American vernacular art," a celebration of "small technological advances and the utilitarian elegance of industrial design." After High Modernism has run its course, Appel points to the resurrection of the vernacular in the wake...
MORAL VALUES, of course, need not be religious values. We can avoid making the individual person into a mere cog in the bureaucratic or economic machine by valuing the person for the person, as a Kantian end, not a utilitarian means. More and more often, however, this valuation is disappearing from our society...