ETHICS OF BEWILDERMENT

An ethics of bewilderment, which differs dramatically from the more familiar ethics of ease, is best understood through poetic presentations. Using examples drawn from Chinese and Western sources—notably Du Fu and Dante—this inquiry treats bewilderment as both an emotion and a virtue. Both these forms of bewilderment involve an acknowledgment of how minimal is the ethical confidence we have, given the feelings we have and the judgments we must make, but they also extend in productive ways the implications of that acknowledgment.     

VARIETIES OF VIRTUE ETHICS

The revival of virtue ethics over the last thirty-five years has produced a bewildering diversity of theories, which on the face of it seem united only by their opposition to various features of more familiar Kantian and Utilitarian ethical theories. In this paper I present a systematic account of the main positive features of virtue ethics, by articulating the common ground shared by its different varieties. I do so not to offer a fresh defence of virtue ethics, but rather to provide a conceptual map that locates its main claims and arguments in relation to those of rival theories, and identifies its distinctive contribution to contemporary ethics. I set out six specific claims which are made by all forms of virtue ethics, and I explain how these claims distinguish the theory from recent character-based forms of Kantian ethics and Utilitarianism. I then use this framework to briefly survey two main strands of virtue ethics which have been developed in the literature.¹     

THE ETHICS OF LAND RESTITUTION

Many indigenous communities were dispossessed of their land during the period of colonial rule. This long process resulted in forced demographic removals and perennial poverty. Nowadays these communities, especially Third World groups, seek redress of this situation through legal processes of land restitution. This process is met by resistance from landowners in these countries, the colonial powers of old, as well as from big corporations that benefited from the dispossession. The investigation undertaken in this article addresses the ethics of land reform from a Christian ethical perspective. The policy of land restitution in South Africa is used as a case study, but the results of this research are also applicable to other parts of the world where land restitution is considered. The article first evaluates the biblical teachings of land and land reform and their implications for modern ethics. In the light of these issues, the article addresses the question of whether land ownership can be considered as a fundamental human right. The article also focuses on the legality of expropriation and dispossession of land for the purposes of restitution. Moreover, guidelines for fair and legal restitution within the context of Christian ethics and legal philosophical principles are proposed.     

TWO NEGLECTED CLASSICS OF COMPARATIVE ETHICS

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison.     

GENETICS AND THE ETHICS OF COMMUNITY

At times decisions are made in the field of genetics that are presented as if the ethical debates have been adequately treated and so all moral considerations have been addressed, when the truth is very different. Nor is it always easy or desirable to separate the ethical, legal and social questions posed by new developments. The impact of developments in genetic science upon communities is one field of enquiry that envelops each of these areas. This paper explores the impact of genetics upon communities through focusing, in particular, upon certain developments in reproductive science. After introducing core issues and technologies, it discusses particular ethical concerns in relation to the ‘shadow’ of eugenics over such developments, before exploring the role of legislative debates and procedures in transforming social attitudes, values and hence norms. It then turns to consider debates concerning the ‘quality of life ethic’ now prevalent in healthcare, and moves on to discuss the issue of genetic discrimination – focusing, in particular, upon discrimination against disabled persons as a representative instance of the actual ethical and social/communitarian implications of the foregoing. It ends by highlighting the need to discern the ways in which the ethics of genetics is presently shaped and practised in order to discern better the particular social and communitarian implications of certain technological advances.     

THE EVOLUTIONARY BASIS OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS

Abstract. I propose that religious ethical traditions can be understood as cultural expressions of underlying evolutionary processes. I begin with a discussion of evolutionary theories of morality, specifically kin selection and reciprocal altruism, and then discuss some recent work on the evolution of religion, setting out those features of religion that prepare it to take on a moral function in society. Having established the theoretical framework for the thesis, I turn to a close reading of early Jewish and Christian ethical teachings, as found in the Bible, in order to set out preliminary support for the proposal. My goal is to argue for the plausibility of the thesis and to indicate how, if correct, it provides new insight into Judeo‐Christian moral traditions and into the phenomenon of religious violence. Such an approach to religious ethics has important metaethical implications. In the last section I consider issues such as the foundation of ethics and the possibilities and limitations of a secular ethics.