On Affectionate Respect in Gender Justice: An Inquiry into the Cultural Abuse of Sex

Phallogocentrism as cultural abuse of sex is a difficult issue that has been addressed by many modem Western feminist philosophers.By comparing their insights with those deriving from Chinese Confucianism and Daoism,I propose the concept of "affectionate respect" as an intellectual counterbalance to phallogocentrism.In this essay,I have discussed certain arbitrary fallacies based on masculine predominance and spotlighted the merits of being female in balancing emotion and reason,justice and fairness,and institutionally-biased powers and the human rights of innate dignity.To achieve gender justice and equality before God and under Heaven must be logically and morally extended to law and politics.     

Young clients' narratives of the purpose and outcome of counselling

This study explores how adolescent clients construct the purpose and outcome of counselling. A narrative analysis was performed on interviews with 22 clients (aged 16–18) who had used a school-based counselling service. The aim was to identify the purpose and outcomes that participants attributed to their counselling experience. The analysis identified four narrative forms that young clients used to describe counselling. These included ‘transformative’, ‘supportive’, ‘pragmatic’ and ‘disappointed’ narratives. Each narrative form constructed a different purpose and outcome for counselling. Engaging with clients' narratives about the purpose and intended outcome of counselling may allow counsellors to better match their expectations and approach to fit with their young client or to work with them to co-construct more flexible narratives that support helpful outcomes.     

Human rights and religious education in the contentious context of conflict-troubled societies: perspectives from human rights education

This article explores some of the tensions that are created from the entanglement of religion and human rights and offers a possible response to these tensions in the context of religious education in conflict-troubled societies. It is suggested that a historicised and politicised approach in religious education in conjunction with human rights education perspectives can promote three important aims: taking power relations between peoples, societies and cultures as sources of problematising the meaning(s) and consequences of both religion and human rights; developing a teaching and learning process in and through which the emphasis is not on identification with religious or cultural identity, but rather a process through which new and productive ways of relationality with the ‘other’ are developed; and, encouraging students to interrogate moralistic discourses of religion or human rights that often prevent the enactment of friendship, compassion and shared fate.     

Respect for People's Rights and Dignity

Summary

This article examines the nature and application of aspirational General Principle E (Respect for Peoples' Rights and Dignity) of the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (American Psychological Association [APA], 2002) and similar principles in other mental health professional ethics codes. Issues about aspirational versus enforceable standards are reviewed. Case examples and illustrations of the principle are provided.     

Organizing Race

Faith‐based community organizing is receiving an increasing amount of attention from scholars of religious ethics. This essay is motivated by the worry that accounts of such organizing depend on a problematic embrace of multiculturalism, an embrace characteristic of our neoliberal era. Like the powers that they purport to challenge, organizing efforts often embrace difference (racial, gender, and religious) only when it is carefully managed. This is being challenged by theological accounts of organizing that take the religious dimension of such efforts seriously, as well as by feminist critiques of community organizing. This essay probes how race might be taken just as seriously by religious ethicists who study community organizing. Drawing on the civil rights movement's legacy of faith‐based community mobilization as well as traditions of Black theological reflection, this essay challenges the easy embrace of multi‐racial coalitions in faith‐based organizing.     

Creaturely Solidarity

This essay examines several recent contributions to the growing literature on animal ethics from Christian perspectives. I categorize the four books under review in one of three ways depending on the scholars' methodological points of departure: (1) a reconstruction of the place of other animals in Christian history through a selective retrieval of texts and practices; (2) an identification of a key Christian ethical principle; and (3) a reconsideration of foundational doctrines of systematic theology. On the premise that social ethicists are interested in not only understanding the world, but also changing it, I observe that these authors have offered different answers to the following three questions: (1) whether the theoretical basis for reform is ultimately grounded upon notions of human sameness or difference with other animals; (2) whether scholar‐activists should emphasize logic over passion or values over interests (or vice versa) in their calls for transformation; and (3) whether moral motivation for their targeted audiences is best served by reliance upon secular argumentation and interdisciplinary research or upon the distinctive claims of revelation and other tradition‐specific norms. I conclude by offering my own thoughts about which approaches might prove more effective than others.     

NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF'S JUSTICE: RIGHTS AND WRONGS: AN INTRODUCTION

This introduction sets the stage for four papers on Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs , written by Harold Attridge, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bernstein, and myself. In his book, Wolterstorff defends an account of human rights. The first section of this introduction distinguishes Wolterstorff's account of rights from the alternative account of rights against which he contends. The alternative account draws much of its power from a historical narrative according to which theory and politics supplanted earlier ways of thinking about justice. The second section sketches that narrative and Wolterstorff's counter-narrative. The third section draws together the main points of Wolterstorff's own account.     

THE LANGUAGE OF RIGHTS AND CONCEPTUAL HISTORY

The historical problem about the origins of the language of rights derives its importance from the conceptual problem: of “two fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice,” which is basic? Is justice unitary or plural? This in turn opens up a problem about the moral status of human nature. A narrative of the origins of “rights” is an account of how and when a plural concept of justice comes to the fore, and will be based on the occurrence of definite speech‐forms—the occurrence of the plural noun in the sense of “legal properties.” The history of this development is currently held to begin with the twelfth‐century canonists. Later significant thresholds may be found in the fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Wolterstorff's attempt to find the implicit recognition of rights in the Scriptures depends very heavily on what he takes to be implied rather than on what is stated, and at best can establish a pre‐history of rights‐language.     

JUSTICE AS INHERENT RIGHTS: A RESPONSE TO MY COMMENTATORS

The critical comments by my fellow symposiasts on my book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs , have provided me with the opportunity to clarify parts of my argument and to correct some misunderstandings; they have also helped me see more clearly than I did before the import of some parts of my argument. In his comments, Paul Weithman points out features of the right order conception of justice that I had not noticed. They have also prodded me to clarify in what way rights are trumps; and both his comments and Bernstein's have prodded me to clarify certain aspects of the theistic account of human rights that I offered. Attridge's comments lead me to see that I was perhaps over-zealous in emphasizing the objective aspects of the semantic range of dikaiosunê as used in the New Testament and downplaying the subjective aspects. And O'Donovan's comments have provided me with the opportunity to make clear that my account of rights is not an immunities account that presupposes nominalism, and to emphasize the ways in which it is not an asocial individualistic account.