"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.     

COMPARATIVE ETHICS, A COMMON MORALITY, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

This essay is a brief attempt to summarize and evaluate the contributions that Democracy and Tradition makes to the field of comparative ethics. It is argued that the potential impact of these contributions would be strengthened by engagement with the common morality already imbedded in international human rights norms.     

Filial ethics and judgments of filial behaviour in Taiwan and the United States

Parent-child relationships are fundamental human relationships in which specific norms govern proper parent-child interactions. Such norms, or filial ethics, have been observed in different cultures, including in the United States and Taiwan, but important differences may exist in how filial practices are viewed across cultures. From a traditional view of power as domination over others, if filial relationships are viewed to reflect power differentials between parents and children, actors who follow filial ethics should be viewed as less powerful than actors who do not follow filial ethics for maintaining or enhancing positive parent-child relationships. Alternatively, power can be conceptualized as the ability to meet one's needs (e.g., for communal care and trust), and actors who follow filial ethics should be viewed as more powerful and trustworthy than actors who do not follow filial ethics because they have the ability to maintain or enhance positive parent-child relationships. Based on a power-trust model, we compared American and Taiwanese perceptions of actors in an experiment using vignettes describing filial behaviours. We conducted a path analysis with a sample of 112 American and 74 Taiwanese participants to test the proposed relations. Results showed that both Taiwanese and Americans rated actors more favourably (i.e., as more powerful and trustworthy) when actors behaved according to filial ethics than when they did not. Some cross-cultural differences were also observed: Taiwanese attributed trust-traits to actors who performed filial practices to a larger degree than did Americans. We discuss implications for the implicit nature of filial relationships and conceptualization of power cross-culturally.     

伊斯兰经济伦理思想与阿拉伯国家的现代化

本文以《古兰经》和"圣训"中的有关内容为依据,从经济、伦理、宗教三者的关系为出发点,探讨伊斯兰经济伦理思想的内容及其特点;以现代化理论为依据,分析伊斯兰经济伦理思想与经济现代化的关系问题,其目的在于从经济伦理的视角,探寻阿拉伯国家在现代化道路上受挫的原因;寻求伊斯兰经济伦理思想与现代市场经济发展的契合点。本文认为,在现代化的经济背景下,伊斯兰经济伦理必须经过现代性的改革,才能再次为阿拉伯民族的振兴作出贡献。     

Freud's psychoanalysis: A moral cure

That psychoanalytical treatment in its classical Freudian sense is primarily a moral or ethical cure is not a very controversial claim. However, it is far from obvious how we are to understand precisely the moral character of psychoanalysis. It has frequently been proposed that this designation is valid because psychoanalysis strives neither to cure psychological symptoms pharmaceutically, nor to superficially modify the behaviour of the analysand, but to lead the analysand through an interpretive process during which he gradually gains knowledge of the unconscious motives that determine his behaviour, a process that might ideally liberate him to obtain, in relation to his inner desires, the status of a moral agent. There resides something appealing in these claims. But it is the author's belief that there is an even deeper moral dimension applying to psychoanalytical theory and praxis. Freudian psychoanalysis is a moral cure due to its way of thematizing psychological suffering as moral suffering. And this means that the moral subject – the being that can experience moral suffering – is not primarily something that the psychoanalytical treatment strives to realize, but rather the presupposition for the way in which psychoanalysis theorizes psychological problems as such.     

Freudian modalities of disbelief

This article can be characterized as a ‘rediscovery’ of a notion of psychoanalysis that had disappeared or had been confused by later operations. The authors explore a Freudian notion that has been unjustly misunderstood, especially because of the multiple ways in which ‘Unglaube’ – disbelief – has been translated. We shall establish the archaeology of this term in Freud by extracting its three significant modes. Firstly, paranoiac disbelief designates an unconscious process of the rejection of belief in the subject's first encounter with a sexual reality that is always traumatic. Secondly, the obsessional neurotic's disbelief, which we shall call ‘incredulity’, is a secondary, less radical refusal of belief, one that is different from its paranoiac counterpart. Finally, we shall envision a third – dialectical – type of disbelief, which Freud called ‘act of disbelief’ and which will enable us to approach the fundamental epistemic and ethical stakes for psychoanalysis.     

From the body: an exchange on scholarship and advocacy

Abstract

In this article, the authors draw from their own experiences working among religious congregations that minister to unauthorized immigrants in the new destinations in the U.S. to reflect on the relationship between scholarship and advocacy. They argue that because of the scholar's embodied condition, his/her location in networks of relations characterized by power differentials, scholarship will always involve a measure of advocacy, invariably containing judgments not only about what counts as legitimate and authoritative methods, arguments, and data for the religious-studies scholarly ‘community,’ but also about the place of the scholar and her/his scholarly community in the larger society. However, as their own experiences show, not all forms of advocacy are equal – they vary in their level of publicness, as well as the intensity and type of the engagement – and these various modalities carry potential payoffs and pitfalls. Thus, rather than trying to draw fixed, sharp, and ultimately untenable boundaries between scholarship and advocacy, the task is to develop a reflexive, pragmatic, and experimental attitude that can allow for these two dimensions of praxis to benefit from each other, animated by a critical approach and an emancipatory interest focused on the intractable problems and defining dilemmas of our age.     

EXAMINING THE BODHISATTVA'S BRAIN

Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain aims to introduce secular‐minded thinkers to Buddhist thought and motivate its acceptance by analytic philosophers. I argue that Flanagan provides a compelling caution against the hasty generalizations of recent “science of happiness” literature, which correlates happiness with Buddhism on the basis of certain neurological studies. I contend, however, that his positive account of Buddhist ethics is less persuasive. I question the level of engagement with Buddhist philosophical literature and challenge Flanagan's central claim, that a Buddhist version of eudaimonia is a common core conception shared by all Buddhists. I argue that this view is not only a rational reconstruction in need of argumentation but is in tension with competing Buddhist metaphysical theories of self, including the one Flanagan himself endorses.     

AFFECTED BY NATURE: A HERMENEUTICAL TRANSFORMATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

The value‐action gap poses a considerable challenge to normative environmental ethics. Because of the wide array of empirical research results that have become available in the fields of environmental psychology, education, and anthropology, ethicists are at present able to take into account insights on what effectively motivates proenvironmental behavior. The emotional aspect apparently forms a key element within a transformational process that leads to an internalization of nature within one's identity structure. We compare these findings with studies on environmental activists, which appear to a significantly lesser degree hampered by the value‐action gap, thereby attempting to understand what provides them with the drive to act more consistently on their moral attitudes. Hermeneutics is found to play a crucial role in the processes that lead to lasting and consistent motivation toward proenvironmental behavior. An empirically informed hermeneutical approach could therefore provide a promising impetus for contemporary environmental ethics.     

A PEIRCEAN RESPONSE TO THE EVOLUTIONARY DEBUNKING OF MORAL KNOWLEDGE

The evolutionary debunking argument advanced by Sharon Street, Michael Ruse, and Richard Joyce employs the logic of Paul Griffiths and John Wilkins to contend that humans cannot have knowledge of moral truths, since the evolutionary process that has produced our basic moral intuitions lacks causal connections to those (putative) truths. Yet this argument is self‐defeating, because its aim is the categorical, normative claim that we should suspend our moral beliefs in light of the discoveries about their non‐truth‐tracking origins, when it is precisely this claim that relies upon the normativity under attack. This article cites Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) to argue that such self‐defeat can be avoided by expanding upon the basic structure of the argument put forth by Griffiths and Wilkins, provided that one embraces a version of realism that corresponds with Peirce's doctrine of final causation. So construed, final causation reconciles real generals (including real moral values) with natural selection and undergirds further speculation of moral facts within values per se.