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This study is the most comprehensive account to date of modern treatments of the love commandment. Gene Outka examines the literature on agape from Nygren's Agape and Eros in 1930. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant writings are considered, including those of D'Arcy, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Tillich, and above all, Karl Barth. The first seven chapters focus on the principal treatments in the theological literature as they relate to major topics in ethical theory. The last chapter explores further the basic normative content (...) of agape and discusses some of the most characteristic problems. "The book is in my judgment the best recent work in religious ethics. Outka brings together analytic moral philosophy and theological ethics, providing a masterly survey of views and issues arising in the past forty years.... I can think of few books of interest to scholars in both philosophy and theology, but Outka's is one. Unlike some scholars who are at home in continental theology, Outka is also at home in secular analytic philosophy; he brings them together in a mutually illuminating way."--Donald Evans "Outka has mastered this vast literature on love, and has brought a critical and clarifying analysis to bear upon it. This is a most important book on a most important subject, and brings the whole discussion into a new phase."--John Macquarrie "The first thing to be said about Outka's book quite simply is that it is excellent; in fact, it is probably the very best available book about contemporary Christian ethical theory."--The Humanities Association Review. (shrink)

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This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral and political criteria invoked in human rights documents possess cross-cultural force, many modern and postmodern developments erode confidence in moral appeals that go beyond a local consensus or apply outside a particular community. Often the point of departure for discussion is the Enlightenment paradigm of (...) a common morality, in which it is assumed that certain unchanging beliefs inhere in the structure of human reason. Whereas some thinkers continue to defend this paradigm, others modify it in diverse ways without abandoning entirely the attempt to address a universal audience, and still others jettison virtually all of its distinguishing features. Exhibiting a range of positions Western participants take in these debates, this volume seeks to advance the substance of the debates themselves without prejudging the outcome. Rival assessments of the Enlightenment paradigm are offered from various philosophical and theological points of view. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Robert Merrihew Adams, Annette C. Baier, Alan Donagan, Margaret A. Farley, Alan Gewirth, David Little, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

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: The medical and clinical promise of stem cell research is widely heralded, but moral judgments about it collide. This article takes general stock of such judgments and offers one specific resolution. It canvasses a spectrum of value judgments on sources, complicity, adult stem cells, and public and private contexts. It then examines how debates about abortion and stem cell research converge and diverge. Finally, it proposes to extend the principle of "nothing is lost" to current debates. This extension links (...) historic discussions of the ethics of direct killing with unprecedented possibilities that in vitro fertilization procedures yield. A definite normative region to inhabit is located, within a larger range of rival value judgments. The creation of embryos for research purposes only should be resisted, yet research on "excess" embryos is permissible by virtue of an appeal to the "nothing is lost" principle. (shrink)

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Recent work on the ethics of love may be divided into norm-centered and affective-centered approaches. Norm-centered approaches, exemplified by Hallett and Outka, argue for either moral parity between self and other or for self-subordination; they regard self-love as legitimate within strict boundaries; and they sharply distinguish agape from other forms of love. Affective-centered approaches, exemplified by Vacek and Post, con- centrate on love for God as the central context for neighbor-love; they ac- cord a high status to friendship, marriage, and (...) other primary relationships; and they regard all forms of love as Christian in that they are transformed by grace and constitute cooperation with God. The re- maining agenda for both approaches is primarily theological, including especially the need to develop an extended application of the doctrines of creation and grace for the status of "special relations" in the ethics of love. (shrink)

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Recent discussions of religious, cultural, and/or moral diversity raise questions relevant to the descriptive and normative aims of students of religious ethics. In conversation with several illustrative works, the author takes up issues of terminology, explanations or classifications of types and origins of plurality and pluralism, the relations between pluralism as a normative theory and the aims of a liberal state, and the import of an emphasis on plurality or pluralism for the comparative study of religious ethics.

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The question of whether (and, within the believing communities, the agreement that) scripture is a source and canon for moral discernment and judgment must be distinguished from the question of what this source provides or how this canon functions as a norm.1.

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Jesus' teaching that there are two love commandments, that the commandment to love God is the "first and great" one, but that the second commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself is "like" the first, suggest that we should neither blend their features wholly together nor separate their features entirely. This paper supports the suggestion. It considers three central emphases in the Augustinian legacy that specify normative differences, normative ranking, and normative links between the commandments. The emphases are: "God-intoxication," "The (...) Predominance of the Double Love Commandment," and "A Good World Gone Wrong." Such consideration explains and defends the claim that a faithful life honors both differences and points of correspondence between God's action and our own. This study indicates that we can go wrong in distinctive ways, and that we should distinguish "relationality" and "reciprocity". The conclusions reached may inform exchanges with other religious traditions, above all "God-intoxicated" ones. This article was the Presidential Address, given at the annual meeting of the SCE in Vancouver, British Columbia on January 11, 2002. (shrink)

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A societal goal to which more and more people in the United States appear to be committed--at least officially--is the assurance of comprehensive health services for every person irrespective of income or geographic location. This paper offers one possible moral justification of the goal. It does so by attempting to apply various standard conceptions of social justice to considerations about health care and to reflect about the reasons why some of the conceptions seem more relevant than others. Several institutional implications (...) are also identified. (shrink)

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The complicated interplay between equality and individuality in Kierkegaard's writings is explored. He is interpreted as affirming the notions conjointly; they modify and constrain each other in ways that constitute a bonding between them. Kierkegaard's claims are compared briefly with positions taken by modern moral philosophers and with historical controversies within Christian theology. Finally, two general effects of the bonding are noted: his dual affirmation forbids lines of interpretation of each notion otherwise possible, and a distinctive appraisal is fostered of (...) the religious and ethical stakes we have in our involvements with one another. (shrink)

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Colin Grant ranges widely in his attempt to retrieve Anders Nygren 's depiction of agape, but the claims I examine here are that agape is distinctive, we should offer a theocentric account of it, Nygren 's altruism should be endorsed, and secular defenses of impartiality are not other-regarding enough. I accept and, reject, and deny that is our only alternative to. Neighbor-love and self-love are like and unlike each other, and the unlikenesses are of more than one kind.

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It is true that we draw nearer the key significance of Fear and Trembling if we supplement the now too standard readings of the text as an exploration of the moral force of divine commands, but to do that we need not resort to reading the work exclusively as a treatment of justification by faith. Kierkegaard presents Abraham as an exemplar whose faith is informed by, but not constricted by, the ethical and whose example has, and is meant to have, (...) normative force. (shrink)

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