The Ethics Of Heaven: The Concept Of Heaven In Ethical Thought

1990 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Battle
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Simon Robertson

Nietzsche is one of the most subversive ethical thinkers of the Western canon. This book offers a critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance for contemporary moral philosophy. It develops a charitable but critical reading of his thought, pushing some claims and arguments as far as seems fruitful while rejecting others. But it also uses Nietzsche in dialogue with, so to contribute to, a range of long-standing issues within normative ethics, metaethics, value theory, practical reason, and moral psychology. The book is divided into three principal parts. Part I examines Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that it raises well-motivated challenges to morality’s normative authority and value: his error theory about morality’s categoricity is in a better position than many contemporary versions; and his critique of moral values has bite even against undemanding moral theories, with significant implications not just for rarefied excellent types but also us. Part II turns to moral psychology, attributing to Nietzsche and defending a sentimentalist explanation of action and motivation. Part III considers his non-moral perfectionism, developing models of value and practical normativity that avoid difficulties facing many contemporary accounts and that may therefore be of wider interest. The discussion concludes by considering Nietzsche’s broader significance: as well as calling into question many of moral philosophy’s deepest assumptions, he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Hause

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, increasingly sophisticated ethical thought made its way out of the theology texts and into pastoral guides and sermons, making it possible for a greater number of ethically informed lay people to share pastoral responsibility. One exercise of this responsibility was fraternal correction, through which a person, motivated by charity, rebukes a neighbor for his or her wrongdoing. This essay argues that the practice of fraternal correction is in fact a sort of blaming, since it includes a judgment of blameworthiness and opprobrium for the offender’s bad choice, moral address directed to the offender, the demand for a response, and holding the offender accountable. However, in contrast to other forms of blame, the source of the offender’s accountability to the corrector in fraternal correction is the social system created by the exercise of mercy.


Dialogue ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-794
Author(s):  
George Di Giovanni

It is a curious feature of Hegelian studies in English that its practitioners seem incapable of tackling their subject without first disclaiming any adherence to the more metaphysical side of Hegel's thought, be it called “speculative metaphysics,” “dialectical logic” or whatever. I say “curious” because I doubt that the same scholars would feel obliged to enter an equivalent disclaimer at the head of a study on, say, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza or even Newton—even though all of these classics have a metaphysical side at least as abstruse as any of Hegel's worse romantic excesses. Hegel himself, if he could witness the practice, would be flattered by it. He would not see it as an indication that “the problems of [his] logic remain alien and artificial to us in ways that the problems of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy do not” (p. 5) but, on the contrary, as a hidden acknowledgement that, whether for good or bad, his philosophy is still alive, still so close to our culture that we instinctively feel the need of exorcizing it ritually, like a demon capable of frightening us.


1959 ◽  
Vol 9 (37) ◽  
pp. 309
Author(s):  
John R. Silber
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Steven Torrente ◽  
Harry D. Gould

After a long dormancy in the modern era, virtue-based ethical thought has once again become a subject of serious consideration and debate in the field of philosophy. The normative orientation of most International Political Theory, however, still comes primarily from principles-based (deontological) or outcome-based (consequentialist) ethical systems. Virtue ethics differs from focus deontological and consequentialist ethics by emphasizing character, context, and way of life, rather than rule-governed action. This chapter reviews the emergence of contemporary virtue ethics as a challenge to overly abstract, language-based analysis of moral concepts, and its development into a broad and nuanced ethical theory. It then connects virtue ethics to the capabilities approach to human development, which is similarly focused.


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