Responsibility and the Moral Subject

For Barth, responsibility is the characteristic feature of the human being as the hearer of God’s command. In its address to human beings, God’s command constitutes them as subjects who are answerable to it. Jesus Christ is the one to whom the command of God is addressed and who answers it; as such, he is the responsible subject on behalf of and in the place of other human beings. Yet in taking responsibility for other human beings in this way, God also makes them responsible—for being in their conduct those for whom God has taken responsibility. Insofar as God has taken responsibility for our responsibility, Barth rejects the tendency of modern responsibility to presume that everything is up to us. Yet insofar as God also makes us responsible, and thereby constitutes us as subjects, Barth retains another key feature of modern responsibility, which is its urgency. While answerability or accountability is the key aspect of responsibility, Barth also leaves room for the imputability of actions to agents and the liability of persons for the effects of their actions. One problem with Barth’s account of responsibility is that his insistence that we are constituted as responsible from outside ourselves, by God’s command, he leaves unclear how it is truly we who are responsible. Another problem is that if we are made responsible by the responsibility Jesus Christ has taken for us, it appears that only Christians know themselves to be responsible.

The Actor Analogy in Off. 1: A Platonic-Aristotelian Perspective for a Topic of Stoic Use

There has been much discussion about the origin of the actor analogy in Off. 1.107-115. Some scholars have considered that we are facing a theory of personality and even a proposal that would point towards the definition of a moral subject in Cicero’s work. Without discussing the Stoic origin of the analogy, this work argues that Cicero would take in De officiis a Stoic topic transforming it into a Platonic-Aristotelian sense. Thus, the interpretation according to which the first book of Cicero’s last philosophical work would have a profound academic and peripatetic influence is defended.

Physician’s Code of Ethics: Education of Dignity

Education is a part of the educational process that forms a person’s ability to feel dignity in himself and in others. Such a skill is of particular importance to the healthcare professional, whose vocation requires sensitivity to the patient. In a state of disease, a person acutely experiences a “loss of dignity”. So, one of the tasks of a physician is to see the dignity of his patient, to recognize its regions that are injured, and to pay proper respect to the inviolable core of the dignity. The author of the article provides guidelines for such a distinction. She researches the types of dignity, identifies the most important of them, and demonstrates situations in medical practice in which this distinction is relevant. The author understands dignity as a multifaceted phenomenon which corresponds to the inviolable value of the human person, virtue, the status of a moral subject. Such multifacetedness is reflected in attempts to typologize dignity. The article presents the concepts of distinguishing types of dignity proposed by L. R. Kass (basic dignity of human being and full dignity of being human), V. Kniazevich (ontological and existential aspects), A. Rodziński (dignity of personality, personal dignity and dignity of the person), D. P. Sulmasy (attributed, inflorescent and intrinsic dignity). The disease, especially the serious one, is a test of dignity. The author, however, argues, that the basic layer of dignity remains inviolable even in states that do not correspond to the status of a rational being. It is claimed that the disease injures less significant layers of dignity. The physician’s vocation, therefore, is to recognize these injured aspects and to demonstrate to the patient the fact that his basic, intrinsic, ontological dignity cannot be lost under any circumstances. Educating future physicians to be able to distinguish between all aspects of dignity should be an important part of the educational process in medical schools.

Conceptions of happiness: philosophical and evolutionary considerations

This paper offers a critical analysis of the conclusions of the most recent research in the field of social psychology and positive psychology, with a special focus on Jonathan Haidt’s conclusions published in his acclaimed book The Happiness Hypothesis (2006). Various factors contributing to subjective feelings of happiness are considered and assessed on the background of what modern research has come to call a ‘divided self,’ reflecting the dynamic and often conflicting relationship between the human rational ego and his/her emotions and internal (often subconscious) drives. While our individual genetic predispositions have a substantial impact on the way we feel and act, intentional mind-focusing techniques, proper types of psychotherapy or spiritual counselling, and adequate medicine (e.g., Prozac) have a measurable influence on human character development, subjective wellbeing, and feelings of happiness. This paper claims that it might be difficult to answer the question of what constitutes happiness and how one achieves it without answering first the question of meaning in a twofold manner: first, giving adequate consideration to life’s meaning from within, i.e., from the perspective of the personal/moral subject; and second, considering the wider context of the person’s subjective consideration in asking the question ‘what is the meaning of life’ in general. To attempt to answer this second question, one needs to delve into deeper philosophical/spiritual waters.