Narrative in Buddhist Ethics

This chapter explores the central role of narratives in the articulation of Buddhist ethics. Discussion includes casuistic narratives, and the way that they aid in moral decision making, including providing rationales and examples, both clear cut and not, illuminating the impact of interconnected human relationships and circumstances, and creating greater psychological impact through analysis of specific cases. Also discussed are the way that stories yield moral insight through their focus on developing deeper ways of seeing. Several narratives are addressed in detail, including that of Kisagotami, Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, and a collection of stories from the Mahāvagga and the Avadānaśataka.

Moral or Ethical Experts? The Role of Bioethicists in a Democratic Society

"It is often believed that if bioethicists are to play the role of experts, the nature of their expertise must be explained and the authority of their advice justified. This presentation will be a moderate challenge to this view. It will be contended that the nature of bioethical expertise and the source of bioethicists’ authority depends on the kind of advice that is expected from them. If one expects a moral advice, i.e. a self-standing instruction about what to do in a given situation, it is indeed hardly possible to identify a moral expert in a rational way, and so to take their advice as authoritative. If, however, the counsel sought is to be an ethical advice, that is, a recommendation guided by a particular normative context, bioethicists can be sufficiently good experts and their instructions can enjoy a significant authority. Since bioethics is a field of research and social practice which developed in a democratic society, the bioethicist’s advice presupposes the normative framework of the values and ideals of democracy such as mutual recognition and respect, liberty and equality. Accordingly, although a bioethicist is not to be expected to be a moral expert (this role belongs, for example, to spiritual or religious leaders), she can be an ethical expert, who – on the ground of her knowledge of the values and ideals of a democratic society, ethical theory and, among other things, social theory and law – can offer a reliable advice which addresses a particular problem. The expert status of a bioethicist and the authority of her advice derives crucially from the values and ideals of a democratic society and her ethical knowledge, rather than from a moral insight into a realm of context-independent values. "

A Moral Insight into the Culture of Baby Farming and Harvesting for Ritual Sacrifices in Nigeria

Human ritual sacrifices are one of the cultural practices that are undertaken in Nigeria and in many West African countries. While such ritual sacrifices are utilized for different purposes, this paper, however, focuses on baby farming for the purpose of human child ritual sacrifice for community and individual utilizations. Recruiting women for the sole purpose of using them for procreation is exploitative as such young women are usually in dire economic situations. Baby farmers identify the economic vulnerabilities of such women and make them offers they cannot refuse. In like manner, helpless children who are harvested from the farms and who suffer gruesome deaths must be considered as the greatest victims in baby farming and harvesting arrangements. The paper stresses the need for stricter government vigilance and community sensitization to the horror of killing babies for sacrifice.

This is the story of life on Earth

The story of Earth’s biosphere is looked at in the round, with a view to understanding correctly terminology such as ‘survival of the fittest’, and getting sound metaphors to underpin our understanding of genetics and natural selection. There is no need to pick Machiavellian metaphors when other less loaded ones will do. The evolutionary process has proved to be creative; it involves a rather lovely use of humble materials to improvise new structures and thus gain access to deeper and richer forms of existence. It is an open-handed process; its random element is a positive promoter of its freedom. Within this same process is the pain and tragedy of all life. None of this denies the truths of arithmetic or engineering; neither does it deny the truths of moral insight and social existence. Our meaning before God and each other is worked out within this tapestry.

John Locke, Edward Stillingfleet and the Quarrel over Consensus

Philosophical antagonism and dispute — by no means confined to the early modern period — nonetheless enjoyed a moment of particular ferment as new methods and orientations on questions of epistemology and ethics developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke played a key part in them with controversies initiated by the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). This essay develops a wider typology of modes of philosophical quarrelling by focusing on a key debate — the issue of whether human nature came pre-endowed with innate ideas and principles, resulting in a moral consensus across mankind, or remained, on the contrary, dependent on reason to achieve moral insight, and, in practice, divided by diverse and irreconcilable cultural practices as a result of the force of custom and the limited purchase of reason. The essay ultimately concludes on the idea that we should not only attend to the genealogy of disputes but also to the morphology of disputation as a practice.

Madness and Magic: Shakespeare's Macbeth

Clearing away all assumptions of familiarity with Shakespeare's play, this essay examines Macbeth with penetrating clarity and passionate understanding. Structure, plot, and dark magic are interwoven as McGuinness follows the brutal ascent to power of Macbeth and his wife, paralleling this with the subsequently terrifying moral and personal disintegration of their marriage and their souls. The achievement of Macbeth in form, intricacy, internal coherence, and moral insight is poetically revealed.

Perfection Perfected

Hebrews evinces the linked exegetical aporiae of, on the one hand, tension between the asserted perfection of the believer and exhortations to further perfection and, on the other, a similar tension between Christ’s exalted, preexistent nature and claims about his need for further perfection during his earthly life. The paper proposes the Stoic figure of the “self-eluding sage” as a helpful contextual analogue for explaining the indicative-imperative problem in Hebrews. Originally a product of early epistemological debates among Hellenistic philosophical schools, the “self-eluding sage” (διαλεληθὼς σοφός) was deployed by Philo and Plutarch in Roman-era debates on the nature of moral progress. Terminological and structural similarities between discussions of the Stoic figure and discussions of progress in Hebrews (especially 5:14-6:3) help contextualize the speech’s concern for moral insight and improvement within a general Roman-era focus on moral progress toward filling communal roles.