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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Ethics & moral philosophy
Jeff Morgan argues that both Immanuel Kant and Soren Kierkegaard
think of conscience as an individual's moral self-awareness before
God, specifically before the claim God makes on each person. This
innovative reading corrects prevailing views that both figures,
especially Kant, lay the groundwork for the autonomous individual
of modern life - that is, the atomistic individual who is
accountable chiefly to themselves as their own lawmaker. This book
first challenges the dismissal of conscience in 20th-century
Christian ethics, often in favour of an emphasis on corporate life
and corporate self-understanding. Morgan shows that this dismissal
is based on a misinterpretation of Immanuel Kant's practical
philosophy and moral theology, and of Soren Kierkegaard's second
authorship. He does this with refreshing discussions of Stanley
Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, and other major figures. Morgan instead
situates Kant and Kierkegaard within a broad trajectory in
Christian thought in which an individual's moral self-awareness
before God, as distinct from moral self-awareness before a
community, is an essential feature of the Christian moral life.
Jobymon Skaria, an Indian St Thomas Christian Scholar, offers a
critique of Indian Christian theology and suggests that
constructive dialogues between Biblical and dissenting Dalit voices
- such as Chokhamela, Karmamela, Ravidas, Kabir, Nandanar and
Narayana Guru - could set right the imbalance within Dalit
theology, and could establish dialogical partnerships between Dalit
Theologians, non-Dalit Christians and Syrian Christians. Drawing on
Biblical and socio-historical resources, this book examines a
radical, yet overlooked aspect of Dalit cultural and religious
history which would empower the Dalits in their everyday
existences.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right has long been recognized as the only
systematic alternative to the dominant social contract tradition in
modern political philosophy. Dean Moyar here takes on the difficult
task of reading and representing Hegel's view of justice with the
same kind of intuitive appeal that has made social contract theory,
with its voluntary consent and assignment of rights and privileges,
such an attractive model. Moyar argues that Hegelian justice
depends on a proper understanding of Hegel's theory of value and on
the model of life through which the overall conception of value,
the Good, is operationalized. Closely examining key episodes in
Phenomenology of Spirit and the entire Philosophy of Right, Moyar
shows how Hegel develops his account of justice through an
inferentialist method whereby the content of right unfolds into
increasingly thick normative structures. He asserts that the theory
of value that Hegel develops in tandem with the account of right
relies on a productive unity of self-consciousness and life, of
pure thinking and the natural drives. Moyar argues that Hegel's
expressive account of the free will enables him to theorize rights
not simply as abstract claims, but rather as realizations of value
in social contexts of mutual recognition. Moyar shows that Hegel's
account of justice is a living system of institutions centered on a
close relation of the economic and political spheres and on an
understanding of the law as developing through practices of public
reason. Moyar defends Hegel's metaphysics of the State as an
account of the sovereignty of the Good, and he shows why Hegel
thought that philosophy needs to offer an account of world history
and reformed religion to buttress the modern social order.
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