A Moral Language for Our Time? Human Rights and Christianity in Historical Perspective

On 3 October 2020 Pope Francis issued his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Signed in the symbolic location of Assisi, home of St Francis, the encyclical represented the pope's response to the fears and anxieties wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the burning injustices of racism, global inequality and climate change. The encyclical explicitly invoked human rights, criticising the ways in which, ‘in practice, human rights are not equal for all’. As nations and societies succumb to ‘disenchantment and disappointment’, ‘the temptation to build a culture of walls’ to keep out the ‘other’ grows ever greater. The antidote, Francis insisted, is a ‘culture of encounter’ in which it is again possible to ‘rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters who orbit around us’. Priority, too, must be given to ‘the dignity of the poor’ and ‘respect for the natural environment,’ rather than the privileges of the affluent to continue to amass wealth at all costs. Only then – by aligning human rights with the global common good – can rights become truly universal.

John Rawls and Oxford Philosophy

Scholarship historicizing John Rawls has put paid to the view that his work was without precedent. This article sets out to find out why, then, A Theory of Justice stirred such philosophical excitement, even among British philosophers in a position to recognize its antecedents. I advance the view that his work is helpfully understood as fulfilling the promise of the “naturalist” revival in ethics begun at Oxford by Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. After briefly surveying the development of analytic philosophy, I argue that Rawls's contribution was to reconceive ethics so that it was an investigation neither of an independent ethical reality nor of the logic of moral language. Rather, it was concerned with a class of facts about ourselves. Rawls's practice of ethics adopts as its central focus the ongoing human practice of justification. I place Rawls's turn from religious faith to justification between persons alongside similar shifts in Plato's Euthyphro and in the biographies of Kant and Sidgwick. I try to show the distinctiveness of Rawls's focus by contrasting his search for human self-understanding with the project of R. M. Hare, his most prominent non-naturalist critic, who charged Rawls with offering an inadequate account of the authority of ethics.

Moral prescriptions and lawful actions: interpretation of Aristotle arguments in Hare’s meta-ethics

The paper interprets the arguments of Aristotle, which characterize his ethical theory and had a significant impact on the moral theory of R. Hare. The author reveals the conceptual foundations of R. Hare's understanding of the nature of moral prescriptions and the ways of their expression in the moral language, and the controversial issues of his interpretation of the content of moral principles and other ethical concepts. The author comes to the conclusion that R. Hare's reinterpretation of the grounds for committing ethically significant actions leads him to formulate moral imperatives in the context of the method of linguistic analysis, which brings ethical theory to the meta-level.

The South African Folle volo: Dante's Ulysses reinvented

The figure of Ulysses haunts the pages of Dante’s Commedia, embodying a tension between past and present, and the potential and dangers inherent in any attempt at transformation. In this chapter I focus on four creative pieces by young South African students for whom Dante’s Ulysses becomes a rich and suggestive symbol. Despite their overt differences in approach, I argue that these pieces are all connected by a creative response to Dante, translating and conversing with his Ulysses from their personal and political perspectives. They are notable for their paradoxical approach to Dante’s hero, as they attempt to fashion new identities, to break free of the destructive influence of South Africa’s past, and to develop a more authentic, moral language.

Urban Infrastructure and the Problem of Moral Praise

Most components of urban infrastructure remain hidden. Due to this condition, we do not think about them in a way that pays attention to the full scope of moral possibilities. For instance, when such topics are forced from the periphery of our thinking to the forefront of our minds, it is usually in terms of figuring out who to blame when they fail to function properly. In turn, one could argue that we only care to talk about an action’s moral status that pertains to infrastructure when it becomes a hazard. While this point deserves examination, the more significant issue is that we lack the moral language required to have conversations about moral praise regarding public works. The purpose of this paper, then, is to flesh out how to discuss morality and infrastructure regarding moral praise.

Moral-Language Use by U.S. Political Elites

We used a distributed-language model to examine the moral language employed by U.S. political elites. In Study 1, we analyzed 687,360 Twitter messages (tweets) posted by accounts belonging to Democratic and Republican members of Congress from 2016 to 2018. In Study 2, we analyzed 2,630,688 speeches given on the floor of the House and Senate from 1981 to 2017. We found that partisan differences in moral-language use shifted over time as the parties gained or lost political power. Overall, lower political power was associated with greater use of moral language for both Democrats and Republicans. On Twitter, Democrats used more moral language in the period after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. In Congressional transcripts, both Democrats and Republicans used more of most kinds of moral language when they were in the minority.