Confronting Kant and Kierkegaard

2019 ◽  
pp. 202-247
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The Right ◽  
Ethical Demand

This chapter considers in more detail how it is that the kind of natural law approach embodied in Løgstrup’s ‘ontological ethics’ puts him at odds with both Kant and Kierkegaard, and leads him to convict them of formalism. Løgstrup’s claim is that by failing to adopt his approach, neither Kant nor Kierkegaard can do justice to the ethical demand, as they see it as deriving from the authority of a commander. The difficulty is that such authority is ‘content-independent’ in H. L. A. Hart’s sense, making the reason to act that one has been commanded, rather than the vulnerability of the other person, which in these situations should be the right reason on which to act. If Løgstrup is correct, it is argued that his critique also has significant implications against contemporary attempts to ground ethical obligation in the authority of practical reason and divine command respectively.

Encountering Levinas

2019 ◽  
pp. 248-287
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
To Come ◽  
Ethical Demand

This chapter relates Løgstrup’s work to the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas. It begins by focusing on similarities between them (§9.1), which might then suggest ways in which each can be used to come to the aid of the other on certain shared difficulties (§9.2). But then certain significant divergences are uncovered (§9.3), which also opens up the possibility of a critical dialogue between Løgstrup and Levinas on certain fundamental issues and questions (§9.4). It is argued that at the basis of this divergence is Løgstrup’s natural law approach to the problem of normativity, and thus to the ethical demand, which puts him at odds with Levinas’s suggestion that this normativity arises from the authority of the other as a commander.

The Ethical Demand and the Failure of Love

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
Ethical Demand

This chapter covers Chapters 7 to 9 of The Ethical Demand. In these chapters, Løgstrup considers how it is that the demand enters our life as a demand, which happens when natural love fails, and we therefore come to feel under some obligation to do what we would have done, had we loved the other person properly. The demand is thus characterized as unfulfillable, as once it arises, we have already failed to love and so to respond to the other in the right way. Nonetheless, Løgstrup argues, we cannot use this unfulfillability to claim that the demand no longer applies to us, as the failure to love is our fault, while any goodness must be attributed to life and not ourselves. This failure is reflected in the many and various ways which we find to wriggle out of facing up to the demand and what it requires of us.

Sacrifice in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

1975 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Fleming Crocker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Essential Nature ◽  
Fear And Trembling ◽  
Right Relationship ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

In Kierkegaard's hands the story of Abraham and Isaac is clearly a story about the relationship between the life of sacrifice and the religious life. By leading us on to deeper and deeper levels of sacrifice, he aims to make us grasp the essential nature of faith and, with it, the right relationship between the individual and God. He does this by means of a dialectic involving Abraham's response to God in contrast to (1) the other possible responses he might have made, and (2) Kierkegaard's own response to what he believed was the divine command to break his engagement to Regina Olsen.

scholarly journals The Problem of Moral Progress and Stoic Cosmopolitanism

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Alexander A. Sanzhenakov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Level Structure ◽  
Qualitative Difference ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Qualitative Changes

The article is devoted to showing the connection between the moral progress and the cos­mopolitanism of the Stoic. Since the early Stoics considered the right reason (ὀρθὸς λόγος) as one of the basic conditions for the unification of gods and humankind into a single com­munity (κοσμόπολις), anyone who intends to join to this community must develop his or her reason to the highest level. It means that the cosmopolitan must be morally perfect, which implies that he or she has successfully completed the process of moral progress. However, the concept of moral progress in Stoicism (especially in the early one) is prob­lematic because the Stoics denied a qualitative difference between vicious people and be­lieved that all bad deeds are equal. The author of the article tries to remove this contradic­tion by introducing a two-level structure of moral progress, in which the gradation of moral development and qualitative changes in the moral character of the subject are spaced. The cosmopolitanism of the Stoics and their ideas about moral progress are united not only by the concept of «right reason», but also by their doctrine of «oikeiôsis», which implies the development of natural inclinations to the highest principles of morality. Finally, the inter­dependence of moral progress and the cosmopolitanism is demonstrated by their evolution with the development of the Stoic school. This evolution is expressed in the fact that, on the one hand, the Stoics perfected the tools for moral development, which paved a clearer path to the cosmopolis, and on the other hand, they reduced the requirements for the citi­zens of the cosmopolis, which also led to the growth of the community of gods and people.

The Radical Demand in Løgstrup's Ethics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Stephen Darwall ◽  
Ethical Demand

This book focuses on the ethics of the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup (1905–81), and in particular on his key text The Ethical Demand (1956). The first part of the book provides a commentary on The Ethical Demand. The second part contains chapters on Løgstrup as a natural law theorist; his critique of Kant and Kierkegaard; his relation to Levinas; the difference between his position and the second-person ethics of Stephen Darwall; and the role of Luther in Løgstrup’s thinking. Overall, it is argued that Løgstrup rejects accounts of ethical obligation based on the commands of God, or on abstract principles governing practical reason, or on social norms; instead he develops a different picture, at the basis of which is our interdependence, which he argues gives his ethics a grounding in the nature of life itself. The book claims that Løgstrup offers a distinctive and attractive account of our moral obligation to others, which fits into the natural law tradition.

Utilitarianism and the Noble Art

Philosophy ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 63 (243) ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Radford
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Positive Difference ◽  
Moral Rightness ◽  
Wrong Thing ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
Wrong Reason ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

Utilitarianism tells us that actions are morally right and good if and to the extent that they add to human happiness or diminish human unhappiness. And—or, perhaps, therefore—it also tells us that the best action a person can perform is that which of all the possible actions open to him is the one which makes the greatest positive difference to human happiness. Moreover, as everyone will also remember, utilitarianism further tries to tell us, perhaps intending it as a corollary of that first, main claim, that the motive for an action has nothing to do with its moral rightness or goodness. (This, of course, is just a philosopher's excessive and incorrect way of making the platitudinous point that one may do the wrong thing for the right reason and the right thing for the wrong reason.) But even if, as utilitarians, we accepted the dubious corollary, it would not follow, as many have thought, that utilitarians have no moral interest in motives. For unless, absurdly, a utilitarian believed either that there was never more than a fortuitous connection between on the one hand what we intended to do and on the other what we did and the consequences of what we did, or that, if there were such connections, we could not know of them, he must believe, as a moralist, that the best motive a person can have for performing an action is likely to be the desire to produce the happiest result. Indeed, utilitarians ought to be morally committed, it would seem, to trying to find out as much as they can about the consequences of our actions, e.g. what connections exist, if any, between how we raise children and what sort of adults they grow up to be.

Is the Institution of Private Property Part of the Natural Law? Ius gentium and ius naturale in Aquinas’s Account of the Right to “Steal” When in Urgent Need

2018 ◽  
Vol 92 ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
Francis Feingold ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The Other ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Human Use ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Ius Gentium

Is the institution of private property part of the natural law? Leo XIII seems to say simply that it is, and many modern Catholic thinkers have followed suit. Aquinas presents a more nuanced view. On the one hand, he denies that the institution of private property is “natural” in the strict sense—unlike the ordering of physical goods to general human use. On the other hand, he maintains that private property does belong to the ius gentium, which is founded directly upon natural law in the strict sense. I argue that this relegation of private property to the ius gentium is necessary in order for Aquinas to coherently maintain that it is licit to “steal” when in dire need, but that this relegation nonetheless does not deprive private property of the kind of “natural” character which Leo XIII ascribes to it.

Normativity as Natural Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-201
Author(s):  
Robert Stern
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Divine Command ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Ethical Demand

This chapter argues that Løgstrup’s position on the question of moral obligation is closest to a natural law outlook, not only in The Ethical Demand but also in later works when he speaks of his ‘ontological ethics’ and ‘the sovereign expressions of life’ (§7.1). Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim that Løgstrup is not a natural law theorist (§7.2), and also Stephen Darwall’s claim that in this earlier work Løgstrup was a divine command theorist (§7.3), are both considered and rejected. The next section argues that the natural law theory Løgstrup adopted is non-theistic rather than theistic (§7.4). Finally, this account of Løgstrup as a natural law theorist is connected to subsequent chapters, where it will be suggested that this approach underpins his critique of Kant and Kierkegaard, as well as setting him at odds with Levinas and Darwall (§7.5).

scholarly journals «Natural Law and Natural Rights» and the Negation of the Objective Priority of Speculative Truth

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-133
Author(s):  
Steven Long
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reason ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eternal Truth ◽  
Practical Object

This essay explores the nature and implications of John Finnis’s express negation in his work Natural Law and Natural Rights of the objective primacy of speculative truth with respect to the derivation of practical reason and agency. The essay observes two senses of the speculative/practical distinction. One sense concerns whether the object known is a contingent matter ordered to an end or whether it concerns a universal, necessary, or eternal truth. The other sense concerns the mode of the knowledge itself: whether its end is simply knowledge, or whether the end is the good of an operation. Because prior to desire and intention all knowledge is speculative in its mode, and this knowledge is absolutely necessary for knowledge that is practical in its mode; and because knowledge that is practical in its mode is absolutely prior to knowledge that is practical merely in that it concerns a practical object – because without knowledge practical in its mode there will never be such knowledge that is practical in its object – it follows that practical reasoning is derivative of knowledge that is speculative in its mode. Implications of Finnis’s error – about teleology, common good, and God – are considered.

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