Where the ethical action is

It is common to think of medical and ethical modes of thought as different in kind. In such terms, some clinical situations are made more complicated by an additional ethical component. Against this picture, we propose that medical and ethical modes of thought are not different in kind, but merely different aspects of what it means to be human. We further propose that clinicians are uniquely positioned to synthesise these two aspects without prior knowledge of philosophical ethics.

Facts and Values

This chapter introduces the first of the four main subjects of the book, Philippa Foot, as well as sketching the philosophical outlook against which all four would argue in later years. A young Foot, recently returned to Oxford, confronts for the first time the horrors of the Nazi regime, through a newsreel exposing conditions in the concentration camps. For Foot, this moment encapsulated a major failing of philosophical ethics in the mid-twentieth century: its inability to grapple with real evil. The contemporary philosophy against which Foot and her friends would revolt depended on a background picture, the “billiard-ball” picture of the universe as nothing but inert, value-free matter. A fact–value dichotomy was grounded in this picture, positing that no ethical propositions can validly derive from fact statements; these together led to what Lipscomb calls the “Dawkins sublime”—the Romantic view that adults must bravely face this harsh and denuded world.

Philosophy

David Conan Wolfsdorf has done a great service in putting together the thirty chapters (only a handful by women) that make up the new collection Early Greek Ethics. As he notes, ethical thinking prior to Socrates has generally been neglected or, in some cases, simply denied. Wolfsdorf's classification of ‘early’ as the ‘formative period’ (late sixth to early fourth centuries bce) prior to Plato's and Aristotle's major ethical works allows him to bring together a rich and diverse group of individuals and topics. He himself acknowledges that different people will feel different kinds of lack within the collection, but he is explicit that its aim is to be ‘quite’, rather than entirely, comprehensive. He is also clear that his aim is to focus on Greek ‘philosophical ethics’ (as he understands it) rather than the sort of significant ethical thinking we might think can be found in Greek tragedy, for example.

Morality from Compassion

According to Arthur Schopenhauer, compassion is the basis of morality. He sees concern for justice as a negative form of compassion, directed at not harming anyone, as opposed to the more far-reaching, positive form of benefiting. He thinks a higher degree of compassion involves realizing that the spatio-temporal separation of individuals is illusory and that in reality they are all identical. Such compassion is impartial and all-encompassing. Compassion is suited to be the centre of morality because its object are negative feelings, and only these are real. Contrary to these Schopenhauerian claims, it is here argued that compassion must be supplemented with attitudes like sympathy and benevolence because positive feelings exist alongside negative feelings; that a concern for justice, though morally essential, is independent of these attitudes which are based on empathy; that these attitudes involve not identifying oneself with others, but taking personal identity as insignificant in empathically imagining how others feel. Schopenhauer is, however, right that, though these attitudes are spontaneously partial, this can be corrected. His morality is also interesting in raising the question rarely discussed in philosophical ethics of how moral virtue relates to ascetic self-renunciation. Both of these ideals are highly demanding, but the book ends by arguing that this is no objection to their validity.

Interpretation of affects: Spinozist approach to the issue of human emotionality

This paper deals with the possibilities of using the ethical considerations of Baruch Spinoza in a psychotherapeutic context. I begin the interpretation by defining the basic features of Spinoza’s ethics and their connection with the whole of his philosophical system. The core of the study is the interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of affectivity and especially his concept of the transformation of passive affects into active, and what role philosophical knowledge plays in this transformation. The third part of the study then tries to show how selected points of Spinoza’s introduced ideas can be useful for psychotherapeutic work. As much as the connection between philosophical ethics and psychotherapy seems obvious to many non-experts, most professionals on both sides are vehemently opposed to it. I believe that Spinoza’s thinking is an example of how the boundaries of these disciplines can be meaningfully bridged.

Müneccimbaşı Ahmed Dede’s Thoughts on Ethics: Synthesizing Peripatetic Philosophy and Sufi Thought in Ishrāqī Wisdom

This article analyzes the chapter on ethics from Müneccimbaşı Ahmed Dede’s (d.1702) commentary Sharḥ al-Akhlāq al-‘Aḍuḍ, a practical philosophy of ethics, household management, and politics. Müneccimbaşı lived from the mid-17th to the beginning of the 18 th century in the Ottoman period. Firstly, considering the period in which Müneccimbaşı’s commentary was written, it can be seen as a renewal and adjustment of the old tradition in terms of moral/practical philosophy. However, in the context of philosophical ethics, the commentary aimed to renew and update the ancient philosophy not as a separation of methods but within the framework of expanding the area of integrated methods. The second aim expressed the problematic of combining peripatetic philosophy’s virtue theory with the method of purification and abstraction from physical, bodily pleasure and other things through mujāhada [spiritual struggle] and riyāḍa [asceticism] in Sufi thought in order to see and know the essence of the absolute lights, which is the purpose of Ishrāqī wisdom. Accordingly, virtue theory involves having the temperaments and behaviors arising from the powers of desire and anger from the human soul become mediocre and moderate in terms of quantity and quality through wisdom.

Concluding Reflection

This chapter discusses issues which arose in this period and remain important for philosophical ethics today. The deepest of these is the contest between individualism and holism which was traced in the French Revolution and then in Hegel (Section 1). This fundamental ethical divide interacts with the metaphysics of freedom (Sections 2 and 4) and is shaped by the philosophical crisis of religion (Section 3). Section 5 turns to the ethics of freedom, and Section 6 to its politics, which centres on the relation between democracy and liberalism. Reflection on these topics must take account of the impact of modernism (Section 7), and of the epistemological effects of democracy (Section 8). A concluding reassessment is proposed by contrasting the syntheses of Hegel and Mill (Section 9), and returning in Section 10 to ask: what, then, are the foundations of ethics?

Ethics in the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment

Philosophical ethics in Britain was (and is) at least as much a contribution to as a reaction against the naturalism of the Enlightenment. This chapter examines Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham. Like Kant, Hamann, and Jacobi, Reid responds to Humean scepticism. But unlike their response, his is entirely naturalistic. Its strengths and weaknesses are examined. Ethics in Scotland was strongly sentimentalist. It culminated in Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments, a naturalistic account of the epistemology of evaluative and practical normativity that bases it on a phenomenology of the sentiments. It remains a contender against German accounts of will and reason. In England the most important development was the growth of utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham was by far its most influential exponent. The third section of this chapter examines the principle of utility and considers what Bentham meant by his rejection of natural rights.

Dialogical Memory and Immemorial Poetics: The Ethical Imperatives of Holocaust Literature

Drawing from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethics and Paul Celan’s dialogical poetics, this article interrogates the impossible memorial and ethical demands that literary responses to the Holocaust place upon their readers. While Levinas reveals our position as summoned to radical responsibility, Celan shows us how that responsibility plays out in the form of ethical reading. By attending to the imperative commands found in Celan’s longest poem, “Engführung”, this article demonstrates how Holocaust literature memorializes the Shoah through an invocation of Levinasian ethics and the concept of the immemorial—that which exceeds memory. Following the discussion of Levinas, Celan, and “Engführung”, I turn to Primo Levi’s “Shema”, a paradigmatic text that likewise directly challenges us, calling us into question as readers during the moment of reading and demanding an attentiveness to the text that proves beyond our ability to deliver. Throughout, I aim to show how dialogical memory enables us to better comprehend the ethical burden we encounter in the literary texts of the Holocaust.

Biocultural theory and the problem of human editing

The transition from an irregular understanding of nature as a given to the regulatory concepts of human development is one of the central philosophical and socio-humanitarian issues in the development of not only biotechnologies, but also society as a whole. In the theory of philosophy of biomedicine, the discussion is structured as the positioning of various problematic approaches, modeled using the principles of bioethics and philosophical ethics, taking into account the actual experience of the application and social perception of biomedical technologies. The status of problematic approaches is determined not only by philosophical ethics, but also by the willingness of society to accept something new as its own future. At the same time, accepting the future is impossible without rooting the future in the past - the beliefs and expectations that legitimize the future. The correlation of such concepts as the authentic autonomy of J. Habermas and the expansion of utilitarianism into the problems of editing the human genome, the conflict associated with challenges requiring collective moral action, and the rigidity of traditional moral mechanisms lead to the search for such a sociobiological language that would be formed from competitively coexisting old, traditional, and new, bioengineering, concepts of human development. The idea of biocultural theory as a form of connection between culture and biological foundation is associated with the work of A. Buchanan and R. Powell, who propose a systemic definition of biocultural theory as a mutual biological and cultural transformation of a person. Biocultural theory is aimed at shaping such a philosophical horizon, where the body, not only carnal, such as organs, but also personal - the awareness of its own bioidentity, becomes open and understandable due to the expansion of the connection between biology and culture, but at the same time acquires problems that becomes the subject of philosophy and ethics, since now a person, comprehended as a body, receives a variability that is no longer associated exclusively with culture. The goal of the article is to show that editing a person is not so much a traditionally understood risk as a transformation of the understanding of the cultural and biological conditions for the formation of his bioidentity.