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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Introduction: Comparative Ethics And The Crucible Of War, G. Scott Davis
Introduction: Comparative Ethics And The Crucible Of War, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Michael Howard takes the title of his recent essay, The Invention of Peace, from the nineteenth-century jurist and historian of comparative law Henry Maine, who wrote that "war appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modem invention."' We moderns tend to assume that the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were aberrant eruptions marring the peaceful status quo, but the opposite better describes the long view. Outside the Garden of Eden, human communities have always been involved in political conflict and that conflict has regularly escalated to the use of lethal force, both …
Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis
Introduction To John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, which first appeared in three installments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861, was intended as a defense of the notorious doctrine identified with the liberal reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and with the author's father, James Mill (1773-1836). The defense was successful. While "the principle of utility, or as Bentham has latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle," may have scandalized Victorian England, Mill's Utilitarianism became one of the defining documents of modern British and American liberalism. It is impossible to appreciate contemporary social and political life without coming to grips with utilitarianism.
Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis
Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
When Principia Ethica appeared, in 1903, it became something of a sacred text for the Cambridge-educated elites-Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes-who, along with Virginia Woolf, would form the core of the Bloomsbury Group. In a letter of October 11, 1903, Strachey confesses to Moore that he is "carried away" by Principia, which inaugurates, for him, "the beginning of the Age of Reason." Moore's critique of convention, his caustic dismissal of his philosophical predecessors, and the relentless rigor of his method promised a revolution in morality commensurate with the modernist transformation of art and literature. Principia Ethica shifted …
Wittgenstein And The Recovery Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis
Wittgenstein And The Recovery Of Virtue, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Modern, scientific, man doesn't see miracles, only odd phenomena that call out for more thorough study. Ethics, like the miraculous, doesn't defy scientific explanation; it just doesn't exist. In what follows I hope to do two things., On the one hand, I want to embrace Wittgenstein's rejection of ethics as theory, in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge about the world. On the other, I hope to suggest that this rejection opens up conceptual space for understanding ethics as a critical human enterprise.
Mencius And Early Chinese Thought, By Kwong-Loi Shun (Book Review), Jane Geaney
Mencius And Early Chinese Thought, By Kwong-Loi Shun (Book Review), Jane Geaney
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Although "ethics" does not appear in the title, Kwong-Loi Shun's Mencius and Early Chinese Thought is an analysis of ethics in the Mencius. Shun's goal is to "further our understanding of the Confucian perspective on the ethical life" (p. 8). His painstakingly careful presentation of passages of Mencian ethics certainly achieves this aim.
Humanist Ethics And Political Justice: Soto, Sepúlveda, And The "Affair Of The Indies", G. Scott Davis
Humanist Ethics And Political Justice: Soto, Sepúlveda, And The "Affair Of The Indies", G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
In the debate over Spanish treatment of the natives of the New World, both sides regularly invoked Aristotle on natural slaves. This paper argues that the interpretation of the Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto displays a greater understanding of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition of justice than that of Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, the Spanish Humanist. The paper goes on to argue that it is the humanist tradition itself that disposes Sepúlveda to misconstrue Aristotle and the tradition of political justice.
Tradition And Truth In Christian Ethics: John Yoder And The Bases Of Biblical Realism, G. Scott Davis
Tradition And Truth In Christian Ethics: John Yoder And The Bases Of Biblical Realism, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Reflecting on the state of theological ethics in 1981, James Gustafson wrote that "the radical Christian ethics of Yoder mark a substantive position for which there are many sound defenses; to opt against it is to opt against some fundamental claims of traditional Christianity." This, however, comes fast on the heels of Gustafson's remark that, despite its historical, biblical, sociological, and moral warrants, "I note Yoder's option here because it is the one most dramatically different from the option I shall pursue.'' The attentive outsider, unaccustomed to the ways of Christian ethics, is likely to wonder what, with all those …
Interpretations Of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, And The Just War Tradition (Book Review), G. Scott Davis
Interpretations Of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, And The Just War Tradition (Book Review), G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
Review of the book, Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just War Tradition, by Richard B. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.