Changing the date: Local councils, Australia Day and cultures of national commemoration

In recent years, a small but growing number of Australian local councils have emerged as major actors in the movement to change the date of Australia Day by electing to replace or cancel local events held on 26 January. This article draws on Lyn Spillman’s analysis of the 1988 Australia Bicentenary to make sense of these developments and their implications for cultures of national commemoration in Australia. For Spillman, the Bicentenary marked a shift towards a thinner conception of national identity which was intended to increase buy-in for Australia Day but risked fostering fragmentation. Arguing that local council actions to ‘Change the Date’ can be understood within these fragmentary dynamics, the article shows how the federal politicisation of Australia Day has seen these councils present local vernacular commemorations as preferable to official ones and promote an alternative moral vision of the place of Indigenous peoples in the nation.

Neither Sin nor Paradox

Chapter 3 demonstrates how the just war tradition can help warfighters navigate the moral complexities of combat without compromising deeply held normative commitments. Drawing on the classical imagination of C. S. Lewis, it drafts a portrait of the just warrior as a marbling of the characteristics of Venus and Mars—the personifications of love and war. Such a union of dispositions demonstrates the possibility of attending to both the necessity of war and the requirements of love without contradiction. The just war tradition is shown to be committed to both moral realism—the view that what is good in the world is determined by a moral order grounded in objective reality—and to a moral vision that is essentially eudaemonist, or deeply concerned with the promotion of human flourishing, including enemy flourishing. This leads to a theological examination of enemy love and to a distinction between moral and nonmoral evil.

Moral Intuition, Social Sin, and Moral Vision: Attending to the Unconscious Dimensions of Morality and Igniting the Moral Imagination

This paper argues that the unconscious dimensions of the moral life—for example, moral vision, moral imagination, and distorted consciousness—are some of the most urgent provinces of moral theology today. Historically, moral theology was concerned with moral quandaries and observable actions, and moral agents were understood to be rational, deliberate, self-aware decision makers. Cultures of sin, such as racism and sexual violence, require that moral theologians reconceive of moral agency. Confronting these unconscious dimensions of the moral life requires integrating research in disciplines such as science, sociology, history, and anthropology with Christian ethics, pushing the boundaries of what has traditionally been understood to be the domain of moral theology. As an example, this paper draws upon the mutually reinforcing theories of moral intuition, developed by social and moral psychologists, and recent theories of social sin in Christian ethics, arguing that attention to the unconscious province of the moral life is necessary for developing an accurate conception of moral agency and for future work in moral formation. This paper concludes with a modest proposal for how stories might enable awareness of our distorted consciousness.

Visions of the Common Good: Engelhardt’s Engagement with Catholic Social Teaching

In this paper, I confront Engelhardt’s views—conceptualized as a cohesive moral perspective grounded in a combination of secular and Christian moral requirements—on two fronts. First, I critique his view of the moral demands of justice within a secular pluralistic society by showing how Thomistic natural law theory provides a content-full theory of human flourishing that is rationally articulable and defensible as a canonical vision of the good, even if it is not universally recognized as such. Second, I defend the principles of Roman Catholic social teaching (RCST) against Engelhardt’s objection that it constitutes a watered-down version of the Christian moral vision which opens the door to intolerable moral compromises. While I acknowledge that Engelhardt’s criticism of RCST is well-grounded in certain abusive compromises that have been made by some Catholic healthcare institutions, I contend that such abuses are not endemic to RCST and avoidance of them is practically feasible in contemporary secular pluralistic societies. My primary aim is to show how continued dialogue between Engelhardtian libertarians and more communitarian-inclined RCST proponents may constructively yield a vision of healthcare allocation that ensures succor for the least advantaged within an authentically Christian social ethic.

IRIS MURDOCH ON MORAL VISION

Iris Murdoch (1919–99) was a philosopher and novelist who wrote extensively on the themes of love, goodness, religion, and morality. In this article, we explore her notion of ‘moral vision’; the idea that morality is not just about how we act and make choices, but how we see the world in a much broader sense.

Criticism Against Itself

A prominent strand of literary criticism today assumes that literature as literature is not significant enough to merit critical scrutiny. Instead of attending to the features that distinguish literature from everyday expression, this criticism values literature for its closeness to and reflection of life. Different as they might appear in their subject matter and approach, Character, The Disposition of Nature, and None Like Us share this “literature-as-life” orientation. In Character, Toril Moi, Rita Felski, and Amanda Anderson remind us of the pleasures of identification, embracing the layperson’s native inclination to consider “characters as objects of identification, sources of emotional response, or agents of moral vision and behavior” (4). Blending life writing with cultural criticism, Stephen Best uses his own narrative to attempt to rewrite the “‘traumatic model of black history’ in which the present is merely an endless, Oedipal repetition of slavery and Jim Crow” (6). Instead of the presence of an identity founded on this never-ending circuit of remembrance and despair, Best wants to dwell in impossibility, contradiction, paradox, and in-betweenness. Jennifer Wenzel’s study, The Disposition of Nature, blends paraphrases of literary representations of real-world environmental problems with references to political and cultural theories and to historical and journalistic accounts. In Wenzel’s case studies on such things as the story of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, the lifelikeness of literature engenders a meditative kind of outrage and skepticism. Given the fact that literary critics are no more expert in life than are their readers, the literature-as-life orientation shared by these authors leads to a kind of critical self-destruction.