Do Christian and secular moralities exclude one another?

The objective of the article was to critique two cognitive strategies used by both proponents of Christian and secular moralities to justify an exclusionary relationship between them, thus contributing to the conflict between them. They are the cognitive strategies of foundationalism and incompatibilism. The objective was also to resume a critical discussion of these two strategies in Wentzel van Huyssteen’s publications. The method followed was, first, to provide a historical reconstruction of the relationship between Christian faith and the secular and, second, a critical analysis of Richard Dawkins’ foundationalist view of secular morality and Stanley Hauerwas’ incompatibilist view of Christian morality. Findings were that influential views of a positive relationship between Christian faith and secular morality are found in history, and that the foundationalist view of Dawkins and the incompatibilist view of Hauerwas are both untenable and contextually inappropriate. This led to the conclusion that there is no justification for the view that Christian morality and secular moralities necessarily exclude one another. The remaining challenge to find an alternative approach that would allow for a more positive relationship between these two moralities and provide guidance on adaptations they need to make was also identified.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The Christian ethical research undertaken in the article drew on research findings in the fields of Christian Ethics, Church History, philosophy, evolutionary ethics and psychology. Research results present Christian and philosophical ethics with the challenge to find an acceptable alternative for the problematic foundationalist and incompatibilist approaches.

Ethics and humanities education in the era of global processes

The article shows the importance of teaching ethics for the development of humanitarian education, as well as reveals the problematic issues of contemporary ethical knowledge. The authors consider the issue of the influence of digital technologies on remote communication of people, analyzing in this regard the network communications. It is shown that they correspond to morality, in which the communication of people is supposed to be unlimited by formal institutions, and is characterized by a broad discourse. The used methodology is based on the ethics of discourse, works on virtue ethics, modern brain research, neurophilosophy, and evolutionary ethics. Besides, the authors show the importance of virtue ethics and demonstrate that neurophilosophy and evolutionary ethics are unable to explain the entire variety of human behavior, in particular, to explain why a person is able to set himself supertasks. The article analyzes the development specifics of global processes that often cause the transformation of moral behavior motives. The novelty of the research consists in demonstrating the combination of ethical (humanitarian) and natural science knowledge, which corresponds to the development stage of contemporary science, which is characterized as post-nonclassical.