Religion and Relationality in Punk: Musicking and Ordinary Ethics

Engaging with Christopher Small’s notion of musicking and Veena Das and Michael Lambek’s notion of ordinary ethics, this article analyzes research on religion in punk from religion studies, sociology, and theology to offer a (self) critique of the representation of religious belief and relationships in punk. Focusing on the presence of evangelical Christianity in contemporary punk, and emphasizing relationships as central to the activity of musicking, this article draws attention to exclusions and essentializations in research in this field. Focusing on the ordinary ethics enacted through punk musicking, rather than the normative ethics located in sometimes polemical punk statements and scholarship, it is argued that a more accurate understanding of the place of religion in punk becomes apparent by focusing on quotidian relational practices.

The Archangel Delusion. Descriptive Ethics and Its Role in the Education of Ethicists

The role of ethicists is to provide a genuine ethical theory to help non-ethicists interpret and solve moral dilemmas, to define what is right or wrong, and, finally, to clarify moral values. Therefore, ethicists are taught to address morality with rational procedures, to set aside their moral intuitions and emotions. Sometimes, professional ethicists are prone to falling into the archangel delusion – the belief that they are beyond the influence of their own emotions. This can lead to ousting moral intuitions from the space of ethical reflection, thus making ethicists unaware of them. They may treat intuitive beliefs about morality as an expression of primal moral feelings. The main question pursued in this article, is how those feelings may influence moral theories, which should be developed by professional ethicists. Ethicists may provide an ethical theory which is merely a rationalisation and justification for their own suppressed moral emotions, rather than the effect of genuine, rational moral reasoning. To help ethicists cope with this delusion, a model of cooperation between descriptive and normative ethics is proposed. Ethicists should therefore use the research tools of descriptive ethics to determine their own intuitions, and the moral emotions in which these intuitions are grounded. --------------- Received: 09/06/2021. Reviewed: 23/07/2021. Accepted: 13/08/2021.

Rationalizing (Vernünfteln)

Kant was a keen psychological observer and theorist of the forms, mechanisms and sources of self-deception. In this Element, the author discusses the role of rationalizing/Vernünfteln for Kant's moral psychology, normative ethics and philosophical methodology. By drawing on the full breadth of examples of rationalizing Kant discusses, the author shows how rationalizing can extend to general features of morality and corrupt rational agents thoroughly (albeit not completely and not irreversibly). Furthermore, the author explains the often-overlooked roles common human reason, empirical practical reason and even pure practical reason play for rationalizing. Kant is aware that rationality is a double-edged sword; reason is the source of morality and of our dignity, but it also enables us to seemingly justify moral transgressions to ourselves, and it creates an interest in this justification in the first place. Finally, this Element discusses whether Kant's ethical theory itself can be criticised as a product of rationalizing.

Yoruba-Chinese Ethical Intersectionality: Towards a Community of Shared Future in Afro-Asian Diasporic Spaces

Diasporic communities, as geographies of national cultures abroad, are central to cultural hybridity as new cultures emerge when migrants intersect with their host communities. They have also been construed by national governments as informal trajectories for continuities of economic and diplomatic relations. This study examines the cultural intersectionality of the Yoruba and Chinese diasporic communities by situating the points of convergence for normative ethics within the Yoruba – Chinese sociocultural experiences as cross-cultural templates for diasporic spaces serving to consolidate official national partnerships. The study explores case studies from performances of the Chinese Ru tradition, founded on three basic virtues of ren, yi and li, and juxtaposes them with Yoruba ethical equivalents of ṣ’ènìyàn (humaneness), òdodo (righteousness) and ìwà-ètọ́ ̣(propriety) as prerequisites for qualifying as omo ̣ lúàbí ̣ . The study contends that these ethical codes, retained in diasporic communities through family traditions, music and theatre, are viable templates for smooth Nigeria-China relations in building the proposed community of shared future within the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Allen Ginsberg’s Jeremiad

“Howl” continues to capture popular and academic imaginations. This article explores the categorical fault lines between modernist and postmodernist epistemologies as they are applied to Ginsberg’s poetic project. Reframing “religion” in postmodern terms, this article argues that even dominative categories and processes might be refashioned and deployed in the service of emancipatory and (counter)normative ethics and politics.

Challenging Good-For Monism

‘Challenging Good-For Monism’ takes on the good-for monist, who maintains that both value dualism and Mooreanism get things wrong. For the good-for monist there is one fundamental final value, and it is final goodness-for. The first challenge to this kind of monism concerns value aggregation. It is showed why value dualism has an advantage over good-for monism when dualism explains why we should favour what common sense dictates in certain cases involving aggregation. A second challenge concerns good-for monism’s understanding of certain thick value concepts. The argument here is simple, but it nonetheless requires some unravelling. The point is that to be appropriately analysed, certain thick value concepts require impersonal goodness or at least impersonal normativity. Finally, the chapter considers whether good-for monism is able to avoid some of its problems by endorsing a popular subjectivist strategy for analysing good-for. This strategy fails, however. To conclude, good-for monism fails to provide us the tools with which to understand a common response to core issues in normative ethics. It also bars us from making some evaluations involving thick evaluative terms, which, in principle, we should be able to endorse or reject on substantive grounds.

Ethical Theories as Methods of Ethics

This chapter presents a new argument for thinking of traditional ethical theories not as criteria of rightness and wrongness, but rather as methods that can be used in first-order moral inquiry. It begins from outlining how ethical theories such as consequentialism and contractualism are flexible frameworks in which different versions of these theories can be formulated to correspond to different first-order ethical views. This chapter then argues that, as a result, the traditional ethical theories cannot be evaluated in terms of their truth or correctness. Instead, it suggests that these theories should be understood as providing different kinds of ways of thinking about difficult moral problems. Finally, the chapter recommends a certain kind of an attitude of pragmatic pluralism as something that should guide our theory choice in normative ethics—it may well be that different moral problems are better approached through different ethical theories.

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 11

This series aims to provide, on an annual basis, some of the best contemporary work in the field of normative ethical theory. Each volume features new chapters that contribute to an understanding of a wide range of issues and positions in normative ethical theory, and represents a sampling of recent developments in this field. This 11th volume brings together 13 new essays that collectively cover a range of fundamental topics in the field, including moral conscientiousness and moral wrongness; impartiality and the boundaries of morality; moral testimony; Kant’s categorical imperative; and ethical theories as methods of ethics.