Unity in Diversity: A Theological Analysis of the War on Gender Identity

"In today’s society, gender identity is redefined. This identity is now disconnected from biological sex and redefined as a cultural phenomenon. The implications are diverse not only from an anthropological point of view but also from a moral stand. As gender becomes a fluid concept, the war between the traditional point of view and the revisionist/progressist one is inevitable. This research reviews how in the last centuries society moved from Theism to Post-Theism and from Post-Theism to Post-Humanism. These shifts reflect a tendency of moral change not only in terms of human identity but also of human sexuality. In this paper, it is argued that a moral dimension is vital for a definition of gender identity. The theological assessment of this topic starts the epistemic endeavor analyzing the biblical foundation of cisgender and sexual dimorphism. In the nature vs. nurture paradigm a thorough analysis of the biblical account of creation and fall of man, attest to the fact that, regardless of how man is born, God’s redemption outlines anthropology, hamartiology, and soteriology. At the practical social level, the struggle for unity in diversity varies from a desideratum to a utopian reality. Nevertheless, the concept of diversity cannot be emptied of its moral dimension. From the Biblical point of view, the solution to this war on sexual identity is redemption, while from the secular point of view the solution to this war is relativism."

The Moral Habitat

The Moral Habitat is a book in three parts that begins with an investigation of three understudied imperfect duties which together offer some important and challenging insights about moral requirements and moral agency: that our duties only make sense as a system; that actions can be morally wrong to do and yet not be impermissible; and that there are motive-dependent duties. In Part Two, these insights are used to launch a substantial reinterpretation of Kant’s ethics as a system of duties, juridical and ethical, perfect and imperfect, that can incorporate what we learn from imperfect duties and do much more. The system of duties provides the structure for what I call a moral habitat: a made environment, created by and for free and equal persons living together. It is a dynamic system, with duties from the juridical and ethical spheres shaping and being affected by each other, each level further interpreting the system’s core anti-subordination value initiated in Kant’s account of innate right. The structure of an imperfect duty is exhibited in a detailed account of the duty of beneficence, including its latitude of application and demandingness. Part Three takes up some implications and applications of the moral habitat idea. Its topics range from the adjustments to the system that would come with recognizing a human right to housing to meta-ethical issues about objectivity and our responsibility for moral change. The upshot is a transformative, holistic agent- and institution-centered, account of Kantian morality.

Incompleteness and Moral Change

This chapter argues that the objectivity and determinacy of moral requirement can be maintained even though the moral habitat system of duties is subject to progressive change and amendment. Like engineering or medicine, it has the structure of a practical science with fundamental laws and values and a deliberative pragmatics for absorbing new knowledge and taking on new tasks. There is no complete or ideal system of duties. A significant upshot of this is that individuals have an imperfect duty to be agents of moral change. They must attend to moral practices and give voice to faults they see. Responding explicitly to a region of concern can have due care priority over unilaterally making things better. It is part of the idea of the moral habitat project to expect moral change as an ongoing collective project of responsiveness to its defining set of moral values.

Tracking Value and Extending Duties

This chapter shows how both perfect and imperfect duties require both agents and institutions to take responsibility for tracking moral value across their respective contexts of right and duty. The casuistry that belongs to perfect duties is contrasted with the exercise of discretion essential to acting on an imperfect duty. A defense of juridical imperfect duties is offered. Citizens and officials of the state acting under the auspices of a juridical right or duty may need to exercise the kind of discretion that is the mark of an imperfect duty. Questions about moral change in the content and locus of duties are introduced.

Common Morality Principles in Biomedical Ethics: Responses to Critics

After briefly sketching common-morality principlism, as presented in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, this paper responds to two recent sets of challenges to this framework. The first challenge claims that medical ethics is autonomous and unique and thus not a form of, or justified or guided by, a common morality or by any external morality or moral theory. The second challenge denies that there is a common morality and insists that futile efforts to develop common-morality approaches to bioethics limit diversity and prevent needed moral change. This paper argues that these two critiques fundamentally fail because they significantly misunderstand their target and because their proposed alternatives have major deficiencies and encounter insurmountable problems.

The World Will Never Be the Same … But Will I Change? Anticipated Moral Change in Generation X Post-Corona Narratives

"In the “Letters from a Post-Corona Future” study, we asked participants to imagine a desirable world after the Corona crisis and their own place within it. In resulting narratives, any imagined that the future will not look like the past, but did they also imagine that their own moral orientation would change, that is, their stance towards what is a good human life, the norms and values deserving respect, and their moral behavior? To explore what we call “anticipated moral change”, we focused on Generation X participants (born between 1965 and 1980) since they may be sufficiently mature to have a settled moral orientation and feel concerned by the future, yet sufficiently adaptable to envision internal change. A total of 64 letters from 11 countries were examined. We used concepts from narrative ethics and futures studies to investigate whether anticipated moral change was present in the letters, and if so, in what direction. We identified six categories of anticipated moral change, from radical moral innovation to daily behavior change. We analyzed how these changes were depicted (e.g., metaphors, modals, idiomatic expressions, narrated futures), felt, justified or evaluated. Results consider the forward-looking moral self-perception of participants in terms of daily behavior, emotions, thoughts, self-advice, norms, values, ideals, images, and dreams, thus contribudting to a better understanding of prospective moral change in times of health crisis. We further conceptualized two important categories of change: the inclusion of personal change into collective moral change and renewed moral awareness. "

Moral Change

This chapter engages the question of how fictions can change the moral feelings of spectators. Fictions, of course, can activate and reinforce existing emotions. But given that function, how can they also change sentiments, especially moral sentiments? This chapter attempts to partially answer that question by explaining how imagery of the family can be a powerful rhetorical lever for altering affective commitments. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the movie Philadelphia are introduced as primary examples of this process.

WAHDAH ISLAMIYAH DALAM MEMBENTUK KARAKTER MASYARAKAT DI KOTA KENDARI

The purpose of this study is to examine and understand the forms, functions, values, moral change of the people of Kendari City after getting a character education provided by Wahdah Islamiyah. In this study, the data were obtained through structured observation and interviews of 12 administrator of Wahdah Islamiyah Kendari and 17 Kendari City resident who participated in character building in Wahdah Islamiyah of Kendari City, and conducted observations on matters relating to character building carried out by Wahdah Islamiyah towards the people of Kendari City. Furthermore, all research objects were analyzed qualitatively descriptive. The results showed that the character building carried out by Wahdah Islamiyah towards the people of Kendari City is a goal that was not contrary to the goal of character building launched by the Kendari City government towards its people. In order to increase the faith and piety of the people of Kendari City, the government has launched a program to liberate the illiteracy of the Qur'an and improve the morals of the people of Kendari City. In line with what was done by Wahdah Islamiyah who did the character building of the city of kendari by using several coaching approaches namely the mental and spiritual coaching approach, leadership, training, academic, competition, and amaliya. All of these approaches function to make the people of Kendari City have good character values and have strong in faith and devotion to Allah Subhanahu Wata’ala. The character values contained in the character building carried out by Wahdah Islamiyah towards the people of Kendari City are religious values, tolerance, discipline, hard work, honesty, respect for achievement, care for the environment, care for the social and responsibility. The values of the formation of these characters can be identified from the activities carried out by the people who participate in coaching in Wahdah Islamiyah as well as from their attitudes and behavior patterns after they get character development done by Wahdah Islamiyah in Kendari City.Keywords: Formation of character by Wahdah Islamiyah, form, function, and character values of the people of Kendari City.

Updating and Organizing Our Knowledge of Risk and Protective Factors for Lone-Actor Terrorism1

This chapter updates builds upon previous descriptive analyses of lone-actor terrorists, their behaviours, ideological backgrounds and degrees of ‘loneness’. It offers greater conceptual clarity, updated data and a more expansive set of variables from previous analyses. Individual vulnerability indicators examined here include potential indicators of cognitive susceptibility to moral change, and self-selection and social selection into radicalizing settings, notably membership of a social network containing one or more radicalized individual. We also examine exposure settings, attack-preparation behaviours and explore sub-set analyses of the data. The analyses informed by a Risk Analysis Framework which offers a multilevel, integrated meta-model of these events and allows for the synthesis of disparate findings. The analyses provide key insights into the behaviour of lone-actors, which could inform intelligence gathering and investigative practice, as such analyses already do in other crime prevention domains.