Rawls on Human Rights: A Review Essay

In this essay, I first evaluate the conceptual analysis of human rights by Wilfried Hinsch and Markus Stepanians. Next I criticize Allen Buchanan’s claim that Rawls did not address basic human interests/capabilities theories of human nature. I argue Buchanan is doubly mistaken when he claims that John Rawls sought to avoid such theories because they are comprehensive doctrines. Then I evaluate David Reidy’s defense of Rawls, while questioning his efforts to show how Rawls’s list of human rights could be expanded. Finally, I accept James Nickel’s argument that Rawls has tied human rights too closely to intervention on their behalf. However, I reject his, and by implication Rawls’s, refusal to accept a two-tiered approach to human rights.     

BUDDHIST ETHICS: A Review Essay

I argue that three recent studies (Imagining the Life Course, by Nancy Eberhardt; Sensory Biographies, by Robert Desjarlais; and How to Behave, by Anne Hansen) advance the field of Buddhist Ethics in the direction of the empirical study of morality. I situate their work within a larger context of moral anthropology, that is, the study of human nature in its limits and capacities for moral agency. Each of these books offers a finely grained account of particular and local Buddhist ways of interpreting human life and morality, and each explores complex conceptions of moral agency. I suggest that these three studies share similar interests in moral psychology, the human being across time, the intersubjective dimensions of moral experience, and what life within a karmic framework looks like. I propose that their contributions offer some of the most refreshing and interesting work generated in Buddhist ethics in the last decade.     

Suicide and suicidology in the Soviet Union

This study was conducted in order to obtain information on suicide in the Soviet Union, an important subject for which we have no scientific literature. Studies of attempted suicide in Soviet psychiatric journals were analyzed. This information was supplemented by interviews with Soviet psychiatrists now living abroad. The results of this inquiry show that suicide is a subject that clearly has become of increasing concern in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, in spite of the absence of essential statistical data on mortality, there is evidence indicating that the rate of Soviet suicide may be rising in certain parts of the country. Finally, growing concern about suicide has led to expanded prevention programs and to a new emphasis on social and psychological etiological explanations. In particular, the role of the Soviet family in crisis has been emphasized as a major influence in understanding the causes of suicidal attempts.     

How Sin Works: A Review Essay

Levinas's ethics of other-centered service has been criticized at the theoretical level for failing to offer a conception of moral agency adequate to ground its imperative and at the practical level for encouraging self- hatred. Levinas's explicit resistance to the incorporation of the phrase as yourself in the Judaeo-Christian love command might seem to validate the critics' complaints. The author argues, on the contrary, that Levinas does offer a strong and compelling conception of moral agency and that his ethics, properly understood, does not entail self-abnegation. Levinas's attempt to counter excessive and manipulative self-concern and self-inflation by insisting on the dependent and situational position of the self has been wrongly overinterpreted as an abandonment of the self and its just claims. The author seeks to establish a more balanced understanding by focusing attention on the ethics of welcome, on Levinas's distinctive conception of passivity, and on the role of the third in all human relations.     

Contemporary Black Theology: A Review Essay

Books reviewed in this article:
Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation
Dwight N. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over; Slave Religion and Black Theology
Dwight N. Hopkins, Heart and Head: Black Theology–Past, Present, and Future     

Social psychology in the Soviet Union

Following the evolution of Soviet social psychology is rewarding not only in itself but also for the light it throws on current events and trends in contemporary Soviet philosophy in general.     

Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics: A Review Essay

Though others have surveyed the different methods in comparative religious ethics, relatively little attention has been given to different approaches to pedagogy (exceptions include Lovin and Reynolds; Juergensmeyer; Twiss). The field of comparative religious ethics has now reached a level of maturity so that there are a variety of ways such courses can be taught. In this review I consider the approaches to comparative religious ethics found in four recent texts by Jacob Neusner, Darrell Fasching and Dell deChant, Regina Wolfe and Christine Gudorf, and Sumner Twiss and Bruce Grelle. In the essay I note the strengths and weaknesses of each text, with special attention given to how the texts might work in the classroom. I then argue that the different texts reflect different understandings of the goal of teaching comparative religious ethics, and I make these goals explicit in order to help teachers decide how they might approach the teaching in this growing field.