Mercy Triumphs over Judgement: Intrusive or Enabling Mercy?

This chapter engages in a philosophical and theological critique of thinkers who construe justice and mercy as contradictory norms. It develops a theological account of restorative justice in which mercy is understood as the ‘operative condition’ enabling the pursuit of justice beyond mere retribution. It elaborates this through an account of the moral anthropology inherent in Christian accounts of penance which understand moral agency as a time-bound pursuit of character-formation. Justice is pursued not in meting out a measure of proportionate hard-treatment, but in the merciful gift of the ‘penitential time’ which may enable reform of character and action. It ends with a tentative account of sanctification, desire and desistence and suggests these aspects of theological anthropology might inform a critique of the criminogenic machine of consumerism.

Rising from the ordinary: Virtue, the justice motif and moral change

Justice understood as a practical principle and virtue has remained an understudied subject in the anthropology of morality. Moral anthropology has explored the moral or ethical as a space of freedom and creativity, whereas justice has often been associated with rule-following or even the law. In contrast, my paper explores justice as a virtue whose social dynamic can initiate moral change in ordinary life. This virtue, as I understand it, comprises not only a disposition to conform to established norms but also a capacity to reformulate these in the pursuit of social justice. My ethnography of Chinese peasant lawyers’ moral agency suggests that their understanding of justice as an essentially social, rule-governed and outcome-oriented virtue can grant new insights into the dynamics of moral innovation that arise in ordinary life. The peasant lawyers of rural northern China pursue moral change through combining moral reasoning about justice with principled action for justice and the provision of benefits for victims of injustice. It is the concern with the consequences of principled action that distinguishes justice as a social virtue from the other virtues, and the justice motif from alternative drivers of social change.

Character in Kant’s Moral Psychology: Responding to the Situationist Challenge

In recent years, several philosophers have used “situationist” findings in social psychology to criticize character-based ethical theories. After showing how these criticisms apply, prima facie, to Kant’s moral theory, I lay out a Kantian response to them. Kant admits the empirical reality of situation-dependence in human actions but articulates a conception of “ought implies can” that vindicates his character-based moral theory in the face of rarity of character. Moreover, he provides an interpretive framework for the situation-dependence of human motivation in terms of humans’ “propensity to evil.” He also provides a framework for highlighting empirical bases for moral hope, a framework that makes it possible to see lack of character as something human beings can overcome. And he outlines a “moral anthropology” that develops something akin to what Mark Alfano calls “moral technologies,” but in Kant’s case, these technologies focus on cultivating character as such rather than merely good behavioral outcomes.

Catholic Moral Anthropology

This chapter concerns Catholic moral anthropology. After beginning by emphasizing the centrality of the teaching that human beings are created in the image of God, the chapter shows that human beings, as a union of soul and body, are ordered towards beatitude, towards a true freedom that imitates and participates in divine freedom. The status of being in the image of God is a gift to all persons: even the most seriously intellectually disabled persons still bear this image in its fullness. The architecture of the moral life is then considered, by examining the passions and importance of an educated conscience. The chapter ends by showing that Catholic moral anthropology emphasizes the communal nature of the moral life.