Theological Ethics, Moral Philosophy, and Natural Law

The article deals with the relationship between theological ethics and moral philosophy. The former is seen as a theoretical reflection on Christian ethics, the latter as one on secular ethics. The main questions asked are: (1) Is there one and only one pre-theoretical knowledge about acting rightly? (2) Does philosophy provide us with the theoretical framework for understanding both Christian and secular ethics? Both questions are answered in the negative. In the course of argument, four positions are presented: theological ‘unificationism’, philosophical ‘unificationism’, theological ‘separationism’ and Lutheran ‘dualism’. It is argued that the latter position is most convincing. It is dual in the sense of being both a theory of Christian ethics and of including a recognition of natural law. Hence, it unites a particularistic and a universalistic point of view. In the last section a reformulation of the Lutheran position is attempted in making use of the ethical theory of Knud E. Løgstrup's The Ethical Demand.     

SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE: “AMALGAM” NARRATIVES OF POLISH NATURAL SCIENTISTS

This article deals with phenomena occurring at the interface of the existential, the religious, and scientific inquiry. On the basis of in‐depth interviews with Polish physicists and biologists, I examine the role that science and religion play in their narrative of the meaning of the Universe and human life. I show that the narratives about meaning have a system‐related (“amalgam") character that is associated with responses to adjacent metaphysical questions, including those based on scientific knowledge. I reconstruct the typical amalgam questions of Polish scientists and come to a conclusion about the stability of religious and nonreligious amalgams in this group. Critically referring to the thesis concerning the secularizing impact of science, I conclude that science by itself does not have a destructive effect on Polish scientists’ confidence that life and the Universe are meaningful, but is rather an exacerbating factor of the existing worldview system.     

Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez on Religious Authority and Cause for Justified War: The Centrality of Religious War in the Christian Just War Tradition

Contrary to the received understanding that Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez ruled out religious war by grounding just cause in natural law, they supported a robust view of papal authority for war when necessary for the defense of the church against heretics, schismatics, and pagans as well as for the spread of Christianity and Christendom throughout the world. They believed that religious wars were in accord with natural law as a means to its fulfillment in Christianity, as a justification for the defense of the church as the one true faith, and as a moral obligation to provide all of humanity with the opportunity to receive Christian truth and grace. The neo‐Thomists' vigorous support for religious war was in the mainstream of the Christian just war tradition from the time of the wars against pagans in the early middle ages through their own time. This finding and the continuation into the modern era of sanctified patriotism stemming from the mixing of church and state especially during war that began in early Middle Ages, along with the historic roots of the recently prominent presumption against war, argue for a more complex understanding of the normative Christian just war tradition than that found among supporters of the classic interpretation of that tradition.     

THE MODERN INVENTION OF “SCIENCE‐AND‐RELIGION”: WHAT FOLLOWS?

I am grateful to the four reviewers of The Territories of Science and Religion for their careful and insightful readings of the book, and their kind words about it. They all got the central arguments pretty much right, and thus any critical comments are not the result of fundamental misunderstandings. While there are some common themes in the assessments, each reviewer, happily, has offered a distinct perspective on the book. For this reason I will deal with their comments in turn, but with a focus throughout on a generally expressed concern about the broader implications of the book's historical analysis, and what positive or concrete proposals might follow from it.     

Resilience in Scientific Research: Understanding How Natural Product Research Rebounded in an Adverse Situation

The recent declining rate in the discovery of new drugs has made natural product (NP) research—the traditional method of using living organisms to acquire drug candidates—regain its importance, despite the fact that it was once regarded as an obsolete method in the face of the exalted expectations about emerging new approaches since the 1990s. The concept of ‘resilience’ in scientific research provides a clue for understanding the dynamism of this rebound in research. Four elements may be highlighted in the context of microbial NP research in Japan: first, ‘institutional precondition’ is essential in the sense that the research must be rooted in an institutional complex involving academia, drug companies, and national policies. Second, the dual nature of the ‘attack from rival innovations’ including semiotic labeling and technical advances is examined. Third, four approaches to NP research are observed as responses to such challenges: (1) reevaluating the naturalness of NPs; (2) adopting various technical elements from their rivals; (3) shifting the emphasis from the practical pursuit of drug candidates to biological research using bioprobes; and (4) examining the uneven degree of resilience between academia and industry. Fourth and finally, NPs are viewed as an icon of cultural practice. This view may eventually open the door to questions about the meaning of ‘tradition’ in the context of general contemporary scientific research.     

The lottery of life and moral desert: An empirical investigation

As John Rawls makes clear in A Theory of Justice, there is a popular and influential strand of political thought for which brute luck – that is, being lucky (or unlucky) in the so-called “lottery of life” – ought to have no place in a theory of distributive justice. Yet the debate about luck, desert, and fairness in contemporary political philosophy has recently been rekindled by a handful of philosophers who claim that desert should play a bigger role in theories of distributive justice. In the present paper, we present the results of our attempts to fill in some of the missing empirical details of this debate. Our findings provide some preliminary evidence that, contrary to what most contemporary political philosophers have assumed, people are not as worried by natural luck as previously thought. Instead, people’s worries seem to be focused exclusively on inequalities generated by social luck.     

EXTINCTION,NATURAL EVIL,AND THE COSMIC CROSS

Did the God of the Bible create a Darwinian world in which violence and suffering (disvalue) are the means by which the good (value) is realized? This is Christopher Southgate's insightful and dramatic formulation of the theodicy problem. In addressing this problem, the Exeter theologian rightly invokes the Theology of the Cross in its second manifestation, that is, we learn from the cross of Jesus Christ that God is present to nonhuman as well as human victims of predation and extinction. God co‐suffers with creatures in their despair, abandonment, physical suffering, and death. What I will add with more force than Southgate is this: the Easter resurrection is a prolepsis of the eschatological new creation, and it is God's new creation which retroactively determines past creation. Although this does not eliminate the theodicy question, it lessens its moral sting.     

Motivating Hume's natural virtues

Many commentators propose that Hume thinks that we are not or should not be motivated to perform naturally virtuous actions from moral sentiments. I take issue with this interpretation in this paper, arguing that Hume fully incorporates the moral sentiments into his understanding of how human beings act when it comes to the natural virtues and that he does not see the moral sentiments as a problematic kind of motivation that threatens or weakens the virtuous status of the action.