Emotional action and communication are integral to the development of morality, here conceptualized as our concerns for the well-being of other people and the ability to act on those concerns. Focusing on the second year of life, this article suggests a number of ways in which young children’s emotions and caregivers’ emotional communication contribute to early forms of helping, empathy, and learning about prohibitions. We argue for distinguishing between moral issues and other normative issues also in the study of early (...) moral development, for considering a wider range of emotional phenomena than the “moral emotions” most commonly studied, and for paying more attention to how specific characteristics of early emotional interactions facilitate children’s development of a concern for others. (shrink)

C. S. Lewis' article addresses a critically important issue on which Howard Ahmanson comments. Professor Oliver O'Donovan addresses the same issue in a sermon in Christ Church Oxford on Trinity Sunday 1997. We publish the three articles together in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan and invite correspondence on the issues at stake. Eds.

A critical and detailed introduction to Kant's philosophy, with particular reference to the Critique of Pure Reason. Since Broad's death there have been many publications on Kant but Broad's 1978 book still finds a definite place between the very general surveys and the more specialised commentaries. He offers a characteristically clear, judicious and direct account of Kant's work; his criticisms are acute and sympathetic, reminding us forcefully that 'Kant's mistakes are usually more important than other people's correctitudes'. C.D. Broad was (...) Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge from 1933 to 1953, and this book is based on his undergraduate lectures on Kant. Broad died in 1971 and Dr Lewy has since edited the book for publication. (shrink)

This essay argues that retrieving insights from the ancient Stoic philosophers for Christian ethics is much more difficult than is often assumed and, further, that the "ethics of retrieval" is itself something worth prolonged reflection. The central problem is that in their ancient sense both Christianity and Stoicism are practically dense patterns of reasoning and mutually incompatible forms of life. Coming to see this clearly requires the realization that the encounter between Stoicism and Christianity is a conflict of lived traditions. (...) Precisely because we cannot simply extract Stoic insights from the lives in which they belong, the task of determining how Stoicism is useful for Christianity is exceptionally challenging. Indeed, doing justice to the Stoics has more to do with facing an alternative to Christianity than it does with appropriating insights for our own use. These points are developed in conversation with Elizabeth Agnew Cochran's recent article on the Stoic influence upon Jonathan Edwards. This essay is a response to C. Kavin Rowe's critique of my 2011 argument that certain dimensions of Roman Stoic ethics are at work in Jonathan Edwards's moral thought. Rowe raises questions about the act of selectively retrieving ideas from a philosophical tradition to support constructive work in another tradition. I argue for the importance of acknowledging how Christian thought has been shaped by what Jeffrey Stout describes as moral bricolage, the selective retrieval of ideas from various traditions, and I contend that this bricolage can continue to be a fruitful means through which Christian ethics engages external traditions. Moreover, the importance of Stoicism's retrieval in early modern philosophy makes the work of eighteenth-century theologians such as Edwards a particularly valuable resource for exploring the plausibility of Christian engagement with the Stoics. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences that emphasizes the meaningfulness of human action. This tradition doubts or even negates the possibility of causal explanations of human action precisely on the basis that human actions have meaning. This paper provides an argument in favour of methodological naturalism in the social sciences. It grants the main argument of the Interpretivists, i.e. that human actions are meaningful, but it shows how a transformation of a “nexus of meaning” (...) into a “causal nexus” can take place, proposing the “successful transformation argument”. Based on previous work presented in my Naturalistic Hermeneutics, Cambridge University Press, 2005 the paper discusses four approaches that describe the “nexus of meaning” connected with a human action based on the motives, the intentions, the reasons, and the rationality of the action respectively. From the standpoint of eachapproach a causal nexus can arise, namely, if the respective motives, intentions, reasons, or the human rationality that are manifest in the different nexuses of meaning exhibit certain invariances. These approaches can be formulated as theories, which explain human action every time that the nexuses of meaning – described with the diverse conceptual apparatuses – can be transformed into causal nexuses. It is shown that explanations based on motives, intentions, reasons, or rationality are possible, as are explanations of human action based on, at least in principle, an unlimited number of other theories. (shrink)

Recent interest in ethical pluralism derives from Isaiah Berlin's reflections on the writings of Vico and Herder and their opposition to the views of the Enlightenment. I begin with two quotations from Berlin: It is not relativism. Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand … the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space. They may find these values unacceptable, but if they open their (...) minds sufficiently they can grasp how one might be a full human being, with whom one could communicate, and at the same time live in the light of values widely different from one's own, but which nevertheless one can see to be values, ends of life, by the realisation of which men could be fulfilled. (shrink)

A biblically informed guidebook for Christians facing difficult health care decisions, from the making of life (infertility, organ donation, cloning) and taking of life (abortion, euthanasia) to the technologically driven faking of life (genetic engineering, etc.).

This paper discusses the nature of liberty from the point of view of value. Liberty is the highest value for liberals. The root of this liberal view is their particular conception of self. Rawls says 'the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it.' This is also the Kantian view of the self: the self is prior to its socially given roles and relationships. Therefore, no end is exempt from possible revision by the self. There is nothing (...) wrong with this basic idea. In fact, all theories agree on free choice of life plan or self-determination. But they disagree about what package of rights and resources best enables people to pursue their own conceptions of the good. However, the liberal view of liberty is based on a metaphysically reasoned idealism. This results in a conception of liberty that is absolute, supreme, and has infinite value compared with other things. Communitarians have several arguments against the liberal view. I consider the following two points to be of utmost import: The liberal view of the self is empty; The liberal view ignores our embeddedness in communal practices. My reasoning is not exactly that of the communitarians. I view 'emptiness' as freedom associated with the substance of an action, which has a value that does not lie in itself. (shrink)