2013, Vol., No.40

Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.54

pISSN : 1598-4230 / eISSN : 2586-7601
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ihss

Korea ranks 32nd out of the 34 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of the ‘happiness index’ which is the national empowerment index. As of year 2010, Korea shows 31.2 suicide rates per 100,000 people, which ranks among the highest in the OECD member countries (12.8 on average). These facts indicate the urgent need for preparing social measures to mental health problems of the Koreans. Taking this problematic issue into consideration, the present manuscript examines the improvement of mental health literacy of the Koreans from the perspectives of positive psychology. Mental health literacy denotes knowledge and beliefs on mental health which are helpful for recognition, management, or prevention of mental disorders. Positive psychology is a scientific study of positive experiences and traits of individuals, where positive institutions of a society increases the quality of life and prevents illnesses. Based on the results from the Adult Development Study at Harvard University, the present manuscript investigates psychological factors relevant to mental health, and suggests measures to improve mental health literacy.

One of the deep-rooted problems in ethics is the nature of morality. In general this debate was purely philosophical in the history of ethics. But, recently, there have been attempts to solve the problems through the aid of science. Since E. O. Wilson showed the will to integrate ethics into sociobiology, this study makes interesting progresses. The scholar who played the leading role for this kind of study was M. Ruse. He was a philosopher who tried to fulfill Wilson's will. But as he was not an ethical specialist, his works faced many issues. Since then, many scholars tried to make better ethical theories by uniting merits and demerits of Ruse's theory. Through these efforts, the explanation for the mechanism of moral judgment is becoming more sophisticated all the time. Also, the discussion of field which he was focused on is becoming popular. In this essay, I tried to signpost a way to solve the meta ethical arguments which concern the nature of morality with these theories. Nevertheless, due to the lack of time, I could not deal with the topic sufficiently. This essay is a kind of a tentative plan, thus, many parts of the arguments should be further reinforced.

Even 20 years later after the rapid reunification, few Germans would agree that the state of unity has been actually been achieved. Many Germans regret that German unification took place without enough consultation of political issues, benefitting from a more consensus based decision-making process. The main purpose of this research is to examine what Germans have learned by trial and error as this article details why they had not referred to the merits of consensus democracy that probably might let structural transitions be made from unification to integration at a lower price and what constitutional values and wishes have lacked in the reunification process, from the political, economic, and cultural perspectives. The most important goal of the German reunification was to create the equal living conditions for all citizen with equal rights in the east and west. Equal civil rights means that all citizens have equal access to all political processes and comprehensive social ones. However, the journey to achieve genuine social integration has taken longer than expected because the attempts to achieve the independent and equal participation in many parts of social institutions faced a lot of resistance. In reality, equal opportunities have not been legally guaranteed for East Germans, and thus there exist differences in the living conditions of the East and West German residents. That has become the major barrier to social integration since the reunification of the East and West Germany. Considering the fact that one of the typical characteristics of German political culture was the ideology of ‘legal state’(‘Rechtsstaat’ in German), the belief of ‘legal state’ itself - the belief that state founded on the rule of law automatically guarantees civil rights - must be a fallacy with German characteristics.