Ethics Lost in Modernity

Ethics Lost in Modernity PDF Author: Matthew Vest
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666747181
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics turns to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a guide to understand the immense success—yet great danger—of bioethics. Matthew Vest traces the story of bioethics since its inception in the late 1960s as a way to uncover a number of hidden assumptions within modern ethics that relies upon scientific theorizing as the fundamental way of thinking. Autonomy and utilitarianism, in particular, are two nearly unquestioned goals of scientific theorizing that are easily accessible, but at what cost? Vest argues that such an ethics enacts a thin moral calculation that runs the risk of enslaving ethics to scientism. Far from the depth of religious ethos and practices of virtue, modern ethics is lost amidst thin ethical theories, enacting a language game that instrumentalizes ethics in service of technological, bureaucratic, and professional end goals. He proposes that true moral living is far from anti–science, but rather is envisioned best when ethics and science are balanced with keen insights from ancient sacred cosmology.

Ethics Lost in Modernity

Ethics Lost in Modernity PDF Author: Matthew Vest
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666747181
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book

Book Description
Ethics Lost in Modernity: Reflections on Wittgenstein and Bioethics turns to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a guide to understand the immense success—yet great danger—of bioethics. Matthew Vest traces the story of bioethics since its inception in the late 1960s as a way to uncover a number of hidden assumptions within modern ethics that relies upon scientific theorizing as the fundamental way of thinking. Autonomy and utilitarianism, in particular, are two nearly unquestioned goals of scientific theorizing that are easily accessible, but at what cost? Vest argues that such an ethics enacts a thin moral calculation that runs the risk of enslaving ethics to scientism. Far from the depth of religious ethos and practices of virtue, modern ethics is lost amidst thin ethical theories, enacting a language game that instrumentalizes ethics in service of technological, bureaucratic, and professional end goals. He proposes that true moral living is far from anti–science, but rather is envisioned best when ethics and science are balanced with keen insights from ancient sacred cosmology.

Moral Blindness

Moral Blindness PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566962X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one’s ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases. The distinctive kind of moral blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world – a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms of gossip, in our ‘hurried life’ where attention rarely has time to settle on any issue of importance, we are at serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the plight of the other. Only celebrities or media stars can expect to be noticed in a society stuffed with sensational, valueless information. This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the most profound changes that are silently shaping the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid-modern world.

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity PDF Author: Jill Kraye
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402030010
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Over the past twenty years the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era has received increasing attention from experts in the history of philosophy. In part, this new interest arises from claims, made in literature aimed at a less specialist readership, that this transition was responsible for the subsequent philosophical and theological problems of the Enlightenment. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and theologians like John Milbank display a certain nostalgia for the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas and, consequently, evaluate the period from 1300 to 1700 in rather negative terms. Other historians of philosophy writing for the general public, such as Charles Taylor, take a more positive view of the Reformation but nevertheless conclude that modernity has been shaped by 1 conflicts which stem from early modern times. Ethics and moral thought occupy a central place in these theories. It is assumed that we have lost something – the concept of virtue, for instance, or the source of common morality. Yet those who put forward such notions do not treat the history of ethics in detail. From the historian’s perspective, their far-reaching theoretical assumptions are based on a quite small body of textual evidence. In reality, there was a rich variety of approaches to moral thinking and ethical theories during the period from 1400 to 1600.

The Ethics of Modernity

The Ethics of Modernity PDF Author: Richard Münch
Publisher: Legacies of Social Thought Series
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Based on intensive, long-term study, this comparative book traces the role of ethics in the formation of modernity in four Western nations (the US, Britain, France, and Germany). M nch's analysis spans several centuries of historical and political development. While ethics has played a clear role in the West's transition to modernity, he shows that its role has varied substantially and that it has influenced the development of each nation's political and social institutions. The book begins with an assessment of the ethics of the West in contrast with the East. M nch then looks at the formation of the ethics of modernity from ancient Judaism to ascetic Protestantism and modern secularized culture. The Ethics of Modernity builds a systematic reconstruction of the ethical formation of modernity in its different stages and variations, concluding with current globalization trends.

The Ethics of Modernism

The Ethics of Modernism PDF Author: Lee Oser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113946289X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
What was the ethical perspective of modernist literature? How did Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett represent ethical issues and develop their moral ideas? Lee Oser argues that thinking about human nature restores a perspective on modernist literature that has been lost. He offers detailed discussions of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics to illuminate close readings of major modernist texts. For Oser, the reception of Aristotle is crucial to the modernist moral project, which he defines as the effort to transform human nature through the use of art. Exploring the origins of that project, its success in modernism, its critical heirs, and its possible future, The Ethics of Modernism brings a fresh perspective on modernist literature and its interaction with ethical strands of philosophy. It offers many new insights to scholars of twentieth-century literature as well as intellectual historians.

The Morals of Modernity

The Morals of Modernity PDF Author: Charles Larmore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521497725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Arguing against recent attempts to return to the virtue-centered perspective of ancient Greek ethics, these essays explore the problem of the relation between moral philosophy and modernity by studying the differences between ancient and modern ethics.

Postmodern Ethics

Postmodern Ethics PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631186939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Zygmunt Bauman's powerful and persuasive study of the postmodern perspective on ethics is particularly welcome. For Bauman the great issues of ethics have lost none of their topicality: they simply need to be seen, and dealt with, in a wholly new way. Our era, he suggests, may actually represent a dawning, rather than a twilight, for ethics.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316820246
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.

The Ethics of Subjectivity

The Ethics of Subjectivity PDF Author: E. Imafidon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137472421
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Through the works of key figures in ethics since modernity this book charts a shift from dominant fixated, objective moral systems and the dependence on moral authorities such as God, nature and state to universal, formal, fallible, individualistic and/or vulnerable moral systems that ensue from the modern subject's exercise of reason and freedom.

Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments: A Stone Reader

Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments: A Stone Reader PDF Author: Peter Catapano
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631492993
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
From the editors of the widely influential The Stone Reader comes the most thorough and engaging guide to modern ethical thought available. Since 2010, The Stone— an enormously popular column in the New York Times— has interpreted and reinterpreted age-old inquires that speak to our contemporary condition. Having done for modern ethics what The Stone Reader did for modern philosophy, this portable volume features an assortment of essays culled from the archives of an online Times series that has attracted millions of readers through accessible examinations of longstanding topics like consciousness, religious belief, and morality. Presenting the most thorough and accessible guide to modern ethical thought available, New York Times editor Peter Catapano and best-selling philosopher Simon Critchley curate a fascinating culture of debate and deliberation that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. From questions of gun control and drone warfare to the morals of vegetarianism and marriage, this book emancipates ethics from the province of ivory-tower classrooms to become a centerpiece of discussions for years to come.