FORGETTING AND THE TASK OF SEEING: Ordinary Oblivion,Plato, and Ethics

The gaps, fissures, and lapses of attention in a life—what I call “ordinary oblivions”—are fertile fragilities that present a compelling source for ethics. Plato, not Aristotle, is the ancient philosopher specially poised to speak to this feature of human life. Drawing upon poet C. K. Williams's idea that forgetting is a “looking away” that makes possible “beginning again,” I present a Platonic approach to ethics as an alternative to Aristotelian or virtue ethics. Plato's Phaedrus is a key source text for this alternate picture; from it I suggest how we might construe Iris Murdoch's “task of seeing” in terms of the engagement with written form. Poetry is a central locale for such engagement, and thus suggests a kind of ethical praxis that arises from the theoretical emphases of my examination of forgetting, the unmoored self, remade other‐regard, and sacred sources.     

Organizing Muslim Virtue: Community Organizing,Comparative Religious Ethics,and the South African Muslim Struggle Against Apartheid

While offering valuable comparative insights into models of the self and ethical formation across religious traditions, studies of virtue ethics have been critiqued for putting forward accounts which are elite-focused. Some comparative ethicists have pointed to work in religious ethics and political theology on faith-based community organizing as offering compelling case studies of non-elite ethical formation. I seek to add to this literature by performing an analysis of the theories and practices of ethical formation in the South African Muslim anti-apartheid grassroots organization known as the “Call of Islam.” The “Call of Islam” emphasized a liberation-oriented praxis and active solidarity with non-Muslim organizations for the purposes of protesting apartheid and employed a range of social practices including study circles (halaqat) and political funeral processions to prepare and equip its members for such work. As such, it not only sheds light on non-elite ethical formation, but in its cultivation of the habits and dispositions of democratic solidarity, it also serves as an Islamic example of broad-based community organizing.     

The Seminal Contribution of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein to the Development of Modern Jewish Medical Ethics

The purpose of this essay is to show how, on a wide variety of issues, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein broke new ground with the established Orthodox rabbinic consensus and blazed a new trail in Jewish medical ethics. Rabbi Feinstein took power away from the rabbis and let patients decide their treatment, he opened the door for a Jewish approach to palliative care, he supported the use of new technologies to aid in reproduction, he endorsed altruistic living organ donation and recognized brain death (thus laying the groundwork for Orthodox Jewish acceptance of heart transplantation), he downplayed the value of social worth in triage decisions, and was a fierce defender of the rights of the fetus. I develop broader theological principles from Rabbi Feinstein's ethical positions and compare them to those of his Jewish and Christian contemporaries.     

Confucian Co-creative Ethics: Self and Family

A general account of the Confucian self as either collectivist or relational requires careful examination. This article begins with the major textual resources of the Confucian tradition and then compares this idea of moral expansion with Deweyan ideas of the self and community. By parsing key Confucian terms that comprise the meaning of “being together” and “mutual association,” the author argues that Confucian selves and individuals are fundamentally contextually creative. By comparing the Confucian idea of family with the Deweyan notion of community, the author further supports his argument that the Confucian self is always co-creative with others. Despite the fact that Confucian ethics has long been considered either a kind of virtue ethics or a kind of role ethics, the author argues that Confucian ethics is better viewed as a kind of co-creative ethics, which stems from an ethical theory concerning the co-creative self and other.     

"NOT ETHICS, NOT ETHICS ALONE, BUT THE HOLY"

While much has been written about Levinas's conception of ethics, very little has been said about the connection between ethics and holiness in his work. Yet, throughout much of his corpus, Levinas consistently links the two. The first part of my article addresses the important distinction that Levinas establishes between the sacred (le sacré) and holiness (la sainteté). According to Levinas, several influential thinkers conflate these two categories. Holiness, Levinas suggests, represents a kind of antidote to the sacred. The second part examines the various ways that holiness is manifest in ethicality. The key, I suggest, for properly understanding the link between ethical regard and sanctification revolves around an appreciation of Levinas's frequent appeal to the notion of straightforwardness (droiture). For Levinas, the complex relations that bind the self, Other, and God, involve essential conditions of rectitude and uprightness.     

Essays: RELIGIOUS MEDICAL ETHICS: A Study of the Rulings of Rabbi Waldenberg

This article seeks to examine how religious ideas that are not the focus of a particular halakhic question become the crux of the ruling, thereby molding it and dictating its bias. We will attempt to demonstrate this through a study of Jewish medical ethics, based on some of the rulings of one of the greatest halakhic decisors of the previous generation: Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Waldenberg (1915–2006). Rabbi Waldenberg molds his rulings on the basis of a religious principle asserting that the legitimacy of any medical procedure is qualified and limited. Rabbi Waldenberg rejects certain accepted medical practices, including plastic surgery, in vitro fertilization, and organ transplants. Even if these procedures are regarded by other halakhic decisors as being legitimate, for Rabbi Waldenberg they are ethically and religiously improper, and therefore they are halakhically forbidden.     

The Use of Codified Law in the Rabbinic Courts of Frankfurt am Main on the Eve of the Enlightenment

During the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, rabbinic scholars of law in Franco-German communities had an at best ambivalent attitude toward the codification of Jewish law. Even Rabbi Joseph Caro’s Shul?an ˋArukh, first printed in Venice in 1565, was not well received by all. While students of the law from the lower ranks seem to have embraced the code, many leading rabbis—particularly those in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Poland—rejected it. In the course of the mid-seventeenth century, attitudes shifted, and Shul?an ˋArukh became the place for commentaries and learned discussions of the law. By the eighteenth century, rabbinic courts were using Shul?an ˋArukh as the basis of their legal decision making. This is confirmed, at least for Frankfurt am Main, through an examination of the legal diary of Rabbi Nathan Maas (d. 1794). In his diary, Maas not only summarized cases that he heard but also sometimes offered rationales for the court’s decisions. These précis make constant reference to Shul?an ˋArukh and its commentaries while never entering into an analysis of talmudic sources. This cannot have been because of a lack of ability, for Maas and his colleagues on the Frankfurt court were well-known scholars who published talmudic commentaries of substance. The use of a code, even by such authorities, may have been for utilitarian reasons, that is, to speed up the judicial process.     

BUDDHISM,FREE WILL,AND PUNISHMENT: TAKING BUDDHIST ETHICS SERIOUSLY

In recent decades, there has been growing interest among philosophers in what the various Buddhist traditions have said, can say, and should say, in response to the traditional problem of free will. This article investigates the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and the historical problem of free will. It begins by critically examining Rick Repetti's Buddhism, Meditation, and Free Will (2019), in which he argues for a conception of “agentless agency” and defends a view he calls “Buddhist soft compatibilism.” It then turns to a more wide-ranging discussion of Buddhism and free will—one that foregrounds Buddhist ethics and takes seriously what the various Buddhist traditions have said about desert, punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and moral anger. The article aims to show that, not only is Buddhism best conceived as endorsing a kind of free will skepticism, Buddhist ethics can provide a helpful guide to living without basic desert moral responsibility and free will.     

Introduction to the Special Issue “Phenomenological Studies in Multidimensional Views”

How should Scheler’s critique of Kant’s ethics be interpreted? This paper focuses on two aspects of Scheler’s critique of Kant’s ethics: 1) the problem of “formalism” in Kant’s ethics, and 2) the problem of the “ethics of autonomy” and “ethics of heteronomy.” Generally speaking, Scheler’s project has a “modern” starting point; that is to say, his work starts with the rejection or critique of Kant and Aristotle. Most essentially, Scheler’s “material ethics of values” (ethics of person) must stay autonomous. Following Kant, Scheler takes Aristotle’s theory as an “ethics of heteronomy,” and then competes with Kant within the “ethics of autonomy” and further develops his own “ethics of personal autonomy.”     

Kierkegaard on Imitation and Ethics: Toward a Secular Project?

This essay demonstrates the prominence of imitation in Kierkegaard’s ethics. I move beyond his idea of authentic existence modeled on Christ and explore the secular dimension of Kierkegaard’s insights about human nature and imitation. I start with presenting imitation as key to understanding the ethical dimension of the relationship between the universal and individual aspects of the human self in Kierkegaard. I then show that Kierkegaard’s moral concepts of “primitivity” and “comparison” are a response to his sociological and psychological observations about imitation from an ethical point of view. In the final section of this paper, I briefly engage Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “ethics of individuality” and Gabriel Tarde’s “laws of imitation” to explore Kierkegaard’s consideration of ethics and imitation as situated within the context of a broader conversation on imitation.     

Between Embodied Subjects and Objects: Narrative Somaesthetics

Michel Foucault's ethics of embodiment, focusing upon care of the self, has motivated feminist scholars to pursue promising models of embodied resistance to disciplinary normalization. Cressida Heyes, in particular, has advocated that these projects adopt practices of “somaesthetics,” following a program of body consciousness developed by Richard Shusterman. In exploring Shusterman's somaesthetics proposal, I find that it does not account for the subjective challenges of resisting normalization. Based on narrative theories of subjectivity, the role narrative plays in normalization, and a commitment to developing concrete, feminist practices of embodied ethics, I develop a model of “narrative somaesthetics” based on an updated consciousness‐raising model that emphasizes group heterogeneity and narrative conflict that deals with these challenges. Through an analysis of interviews with self‐identified femme lesbians and a “female to femme” transition support group featured in the documentary film, FtF: Female to Femme, I argue that narrative somaesthetics enables the analytical, genealogical work required to identify and weaken normalization's constraints on embodied feminist ethics.     

Michel Foucault and the “care of the self” approach to the Buddhist dharma

In line with a particular form of analysis as developed by Michel Foucault, this article proposes to elucidate a particular way of understanding Buddhist monastic culture as detailed in the rules concerning behaviour (the Vinaya), which may be called the “care of the self approach”. To develop this argument, the article first describes the nature of the Vinaya as a “training scheme” rather than a system of prohibitions or rules. Second, it examines the nature of confession or what is called “truth telling”. Third, it examines the nature of transgression of the Vinaya rules. Fourth, I examine the Vinaya and the role of ethics. Lastly, it is shown how these approaches to monastic Buddhism deal with the nature of the transformation of desire to construct what may be seen as a form of “ethical technology” or alternatively as a “transgressive technology”.     

CREATED CO-CREATOR IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHURCH AND ETHICS

Abstract Philip Hefner's work on created co‐creator is presented for consideration as a contemporary theological anthropology. Its reception within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America falls into three main lines, which are reviewed here because they are suggestive of its potential impact on Christian thinking. This review raises two major questions and leads to a critique. The first question is whether created co‐creator should be replaced by another term for the sake of more clearly encapsulating the ideas represented in Hefner's work. The second question concerns the moral “payoff” of created co‐creator. Such questions lead to the critique that Hefner's corpus gives insufficient attention to responsibility as integral to freedom and that it lacks a theory of obligation. I then sketch the amenability and benefit of linking created co‐creator with “responsibility ethics,” exemplified by the work of Hans Jonas.     

“THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF EXPERTS”: IN DEFENSE OF THE “ELITES” OF THE SCIENCE‐AND‐RELIGION DEBATE

This article takes a critical stance on John H. Evans's 2018 book, Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science. Highlighting the significance of the book for the science‐and‐religion debate, particularly the book's emphasis on moral questions over knowledge claims revealed in social‐scientific studies of the American public, I also suggest that the distinction between the “elites” of the academic science‐and‐religion field and the religious “public” is insufficiently drawn. I argue that various nuances should be taken into account concerning the portrayal of “elites,” nuances which potentially change the way that “conflict” between science and religion is envisaged, as well as the function of the field. Similarly, I examine the ways in which the book construes science and religion as distinct knowledge systems, and I suggest that, from a theological perspective—relevant for much academic activity in science and religion—there is value in seeing science and religion in terms of a single knowledge system. This perspective may not address the public's interest in moral questions directly—important as they are—but nevertheless it fulfils the academic function of advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and self‐understanding.     

Reflective,Critical, and Reconstructing Contemporary Chinese Ethics

Contemporary Chinese ethics faces two theoretical tasks: expansion in breadth and exploration in depth. The former refers to the opening of the problem area, and the latter refers to the deepening of ethics itself. To get out of the dilemma that academic results in the area are abundant in quantity but low in quality, contemporary Chinese ethics should expand and deepen in the three dimensions, namely, “no longer,” “being” and “not yet.” Within the framework of “no longer,” efforts should be made to deepen the studies of the history of moral concept and practice, and the ethics of culture from the perspective of genetics; with regard to the perspective of “being,” the ethical reflection on public crisis, system and Lnstitutional ethics, the dilemma of virtue theory and normative theory, and the conflicts and generalization between different moral paradigms will become the difficulties that require in-depth analysis and demonstration. As for the contemporary Chinese ethics towards “not yet,” attention must be paid to the duality of modern technology, the origin of human ethics based on building a community with a shared future for mankind and the moral philosophy that goes deep into people’s minds. To complete the above theoretical tasks, one must have judgment, thinking, and willingness, which can only be cultivated in the experience and thinking of “practical” life.     

The Balance Between Providing Support,Prolonging Suffering,and Promoting Death: Ethical Issues Surrounding Psychological Treatment of a Terminally Ill Client

The concept of moral identity based on virtue ethics has become an issue of considerable import in explaining moral behavior. This attempt to offer adequate explanations of the full range of morally relevant human behavior inevitably provokes boundary issues between ethics and moral psychology. In terms of the relationship between the two disciplines, some argue for “naturalized (or psychologized) morality,” whereas, on the other hand, others insist on “moralized psychology.” This article investigates the relationship between virtue ethics and moral identity based on previous research on the relationship between ethics and moral psychology. This article especially attempts to show that meaningful links between the two concepts possible by using theoretical frameworks constructed by the most influential philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Lakatos.