Their treatment of such human rights political participation, freedom of conscience, and religious toleration demonstrate, Oh says, that Islam should have a ...

In this response to Johnson, Oh reaffirms the scholarly vision of Kelsay and Twiss, elaborates upon Muslim perspectives on human rights, and questions the emphasis on violent humanitarian interventions as part of the Responsibility to Protect mandate. Oh suggests that, in light of the historical relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim states and the aftermath of the second Iraq War, more consideration be given to the rebuilding of Muslim-majority societies. Oh also highlights the concept of duty as a religiously based ideal (...) to which governments of Muslim nations ought to be held. (shrink)

A dialogical approach to understanding Islamic ethics rejects objectivist methods in favor of a conversational model in which participants accept each other as rational moral agents. Hans-Georg Gadamer asserts the importance of agreement upon a subject matter through conversation as a means to gaining insight into other persons and cultures, and Jürgen Habermas stresses the importance of fairness in dialogue. Using human rights as a subject matter for engaging in dialogue with Islamic scholars, Muslim perspectives on issues such as democracy, (...) toleration, and freedom of conscience emerge. A capabilities approach to human rights, such as that developed by Martha Nussbaum, enables the coexistence of multiple religious ethical visions while insisting upon the need to protect and nurture essential human abilities. (shrink)

Common experiences of mothering offer profound critiques of maternal ethical norms found in both Christianity and Islam. The familiar responsibilities of caring for children, assumed by the majority of Christian and Muslim women, provide the basis for reassessing sacrificial and selfless love, protesting unjust religious and political systems, and dismantling romanticized notions of childcare. As a distinctive category of women's experience, motherhood may offer valuable perspectives necessary for remedying injustices that afflict mothers and children in particular, as well as for (...) developing cross-cultural understandings of justice in general. (shrink)

ANALYZED THROUGH THE WORK OF FEMINIST AND QUEER THEORIST JUDITH Butler, anthropologist Saba Mahmood, and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, motherhood complicates theories of performativity that separate sex from gender and that equate women's agency with progressive politics. Motherhood should be understood as performative, that is, entailing self-reflective agency but not entirely separable from women's bodies. While motherhood may be manipulated to support patriarchal institutions, experiences of motherhood also inspire fresh interpretations and critiques of anthropocentric Christian theology and Muslim religious texts. Given (...) the political dimensions of motherhood, the appearance of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin as prominent politicians attests to the variety of performativity and the need to protect women's agency. (shrink)

What is Religious Ethics? An Introduction is an accessible and informative overview to major themes and methods in religious ethics. This short and lively book demonstrates the relevance and importance of ethics based in religious traditions and describes how scholars of religious ethics think through moral problems. Combining an issues-based approach with a model of studying ethics religion-by-religion, this volume examines pressing topics through a variety of belief systems - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism - while also (...) importantly spotlighting indigenous communities. Engaging case studies invite readers to consider the role of religions with regard to issues such as: CRISPR Vegetarianism Nuclear weapons Women's leadership Reparations for slavery What is Religious Ethics? is a reliable and easily digestible introduction to the field. With chronologically structured chapters, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and interviews with scholars of religious ethics, this is an ideal guide to those approaching the study of religious ethics for the first time. (shrink)

Sumner B. (Barney) Twiss, who died in 2023, was for ten years a General Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE). He was a frequent contributor of articles, a member of the JRE Editorial Board, and a member of the journal's Board of Trustees. In this article, colleagues and students reflect on some of his many contributions, not only to the JRE but to the broader discursive fields of comparative religious ethics and human rights.

Irene Oh affirms that religious freedom, faith, and reason, as David Hollenbach suggests, are subject matters that offer promising platforms for interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims. The need for cross-cultural understanding is imperative especially given the current political climate, in which world leaders can easily exacerbate existing tensions through the misapplication of such terms. Sohail H. Hashmi addresses the need to discuss women's rights as part of a larger discussion on human rights in Islam. Oh concurs and notes (...) that Sayyid Qutb's remarks on women in the United States serve as a starting point for clarifying women's agency in Islam. (shrink)

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID‐19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.

The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th‐century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These (...) essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies. (shrink)

This collaborative companion piece, written as a postscript to the three preceding essays, highlights four themes in comparative religious ethics that emerge through our focus on sex and gender: language, embodiment, justice, and critique.

This review of Irene Oh's The Rights of God focuses on women's rights in Islamic theory and practice. Oh suggests that religious establishments, and the texts they disseminate, often press believers to recognize and reject social problems, such as racial and gender discrimination. Islamic scholars and texts have played a more ambiguous role in efforts to recognize women's rights within Muslim states. Modernist intellectuals have used Islamic texts to support the advancement of women's rights, but members of the more (...) conservative religious establishment have typically curbed or rejected these efforts. Muslim women themselves have established various responses to the question of Islam's compatibility with women's rights. While some embrace the value and compatibility of both, others reject the propriety of either Western conceptions of rights, or the Islamic tradition, as harmful for women. Muslim reformers and feminists have much to learn from comparative studies with other faith communities that have undergone similar struggles and transformations. (shrink)

In what follows, I will argue that racist ideology should be understood in terms of racist social norms that constitute certain incentive structures. To this end, I will motivate my position by exa...

Introduction: Time and the shared world -- The "subject" of inquiry -- Mineness and the practical first-person -- Being and otherness: Sartre's critique -- Heideggerian aprioricity and the categories of being -- The temporality of care -- Fursorge: acknowledging the other Dasein -- Authenticity, inauthenticity, and the extremes of Fursorge -- Conclusion.

Die vorliegende Studie versteht die Grundlegung der Ethik als Grundlagenforschung, die nur im losen Verhältnis zur Angewandten Ethik steht. Damit überschreitet dieser Ansatz die Alternative deduktiver und induktiver Ethik-Ansätze. Das Ziel diese Buches liegt demgegenüber in der Verständigung über ethische Grundlagen, die unabhängig von ihrer Anwendung Geltung verdienen. Dabei stellt sich heraus, das der Gottesbegriff auch in nachmetaphysischen Zeiten wieder als ethischer Grundbegriff aufgefasst werden muss. Das unhintergehbare theologische Element der Grundlegung besteht darin, dass ethischen Gehalten (Inhalte, Werte, Normgehalte usw.) (...) kategorial zu unterscheiden ist. Auf ihn nehmen Menschen Bezug, wenn sie von Gott reden. Das Buch ist eine pluralismusfähige theologische Argumentation für den allgemeinen ethischen Diskurs." --back cover. (shrink)

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

For the first time, the reader can have a synoptic view of the reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, East and West, in a multicultural perspective. All the major themes of Pythagoreanism are addressed, from mathematics, number philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and religious thought.

This book offers a major reassessment of Peter Abelard's modal logic and theory of modalities, presenting them as far more uniform and consistent than was until now recognized. Irene Binini offers new ways of connecting Abelard's modal views with other parts of his logic, semantics, metaphysics and theology. Further, the work also provides a comprehensive study of the logical context in which Abelard's theories originated and developed, by presenting fresh evidence about many 11th- and 12th-century sources that are still (...) unpublished. This analysis sheds new light on the relations between Abelard and ancient authors such as Aristotle, Boethius, and Priscian, as well as between Abelard and his contemporaries, such as Anselm of Canterbury, William of Champeaux, Joscelin of Soissons, and Alberic of Paris. (shrink)

A fascinating account of exemplarity in the context of deconstruction.

The automatic prediction of court case judgments using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing is challenged by the variety of norms and regulations, the inherent complexity of the forensic language, and the length of legal judgments. Although state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on large-scale datasets, the underlying model reasoning is not transparent to the legal expert. This paper jointly addresses court judgment prediction and explanation by not only predicting the judgment but also providing legal experts (...) with sentence-based explanations. To boost the performance of both tasks we leverage a legal named entity recognition step, which automatically annotates documents with meaningful domain-specific entity tags and masks the corresponding fine-grained descriptions. In such a way, transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models can attend to in-domain entity-related information in the inference process while neglecting irrelevant details. Furthermore, the explainer can boost the relevance of entity-enriched sentences while limiting the diffusion of potentially sensitive information. We also explore the use of in-context learning and lightweight fine-tuning to tailor LLMs to the legal language style and the downstream prediction and explanation tasks. The results obtained on a benchmark dataset from the Indian judicial system show the superior performance of entity-aware approaches to both judgment prediction and explanation. (shrink)

El sistema penitenciario de Ecuador enfrenta una crisis estructural de proporciones preocupantes. Esta investigación se centra en analizar las diversas causas que han precipitado esta situación, con el objetivo de determinar la responsabilidad del Estado ecuatoriano en esta crisis. Se examina específicamente si el Estado cumple adecuadamente con su obligación de rehabilitar a los condenados y reintegrarlos a la sociedad tras el cumplimiento de sus penas. Se evidencia una ausencia significativa de programas efectivos de reinserción para las Personas Privadas de (...) Libertad (PPL), lo que directamente contribuye a la crisis carcelaria actúa. El propósito de este estudio es analizar críticamente la situación del sistema penitenciario ecuatoriano, identificando las deficiencias en los programas de rehabilitación y reinserción social ofrecidos a las PPL. Se busca determinar si el Estado es el principal responsable de la crisis carcelaria mediante el análisis de diversas fuentes bibliográficas y la evaluación de su cumplimiento de las obligaciones legales y humanitarias hacia este grupo vulnerable. Se llevó a cabo una investigación cualitativa, donde se analizaron diversas fuentes bibliográficas especializadas para abordar el problema del sistema penitenciario en Ecuador. Se examinaron informes gubernamentales, estudios académicos y documentos legales pertinentes para comprender a fondo las causas subyacentes de la crisis carcelaria. Esta metodología permitió una evaluación exhaustiva de las deficiencias institucionales y la falta de programas de rehabilitación adecuados para las PPL en el país. Los resultados de la investigación revelan una serie de factores que contribuyen a la crisis carcelaria en Ecuador. Entre ellos se destacan el hacinamiento, la sobrepoblación, el debilitamiento institucional, el tráfico de drogas y armas, entre otros. Se evidencia que el Estado no cumple adecuadamente con su obligación de rehabilitar a los condenados y reintegrarlos a la sociedad, lo que agrava la situación y hace más miserable la vida de las PPL dentro de los centros de reclusión. Este estudio confirma que el Estado ecuatoriano es el principal responsable de la crisis carcelaria existente en el país. La falta de programas efectivos de rehabilitación y reinserción social para las PPL, junto con otras deficiencias institucionales, ha exacerbado la situación. Es imperativo que el Estado tome medidas urgentes y efectivas para abordar estas deficiencias y garantizar el respeto de los derechos humanos y la dignidad de las personas privadas de libertad en Ecuador. (shrink)

Gerechtigkeit wird oft durch Gleichheit bestimmt. Um Gleichheit herzustellen, muss verglichen werden. Durch beliebige Vergleiche aber kann jedes gerecht erscheinendes Verhältnis in Ungerechtigkeit kippen. Dieser Widerspruch muss in einer Gerechtigkeitskonzeption gelöst werden. Das Buch entwickelt in Auseinandersetzung mit Aristoteles, Rawls und Sen ein Gerechtigkeitskriterium gleicher Berücksichtigung aller in einem gemeinsamen Raum der Anwesenheit. Dabei wird der Begriff der Anwesenheit religionsphilosophisch bestimmt. An diesem Kriterium werden vier ökonomische Klassiker auf ihre wirtschaftsethischen Grundlagen überprüft (Smith, Marx, Friedman, Piketty). Auch ohne zu vergleichen, (...) lassen sich die Verteilungsprobleme wirtschaftlicher Güter und Lasten identifizieren und gerecht lösen"-- Back cover. (shrink)

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine offers a new interpretation of the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's political dialogues--the Republic, Laws, and Timaeus--informed by Deleuze's film theory and Irigaray's psychoanalytic feminism. Irene Han reads Plato against the grain in order to close the gap between the vitalists and Plato, instead of magnifying their differences. Han explores the ambivalence that the vitalist tradition, Irigaray, and Derrida have towards Platonism. The application of Deleuzian and Irigarayan concepts to the (...) ancient texts produces a new reading of Plato, focusing on the centrality and importance of motion, change, sensuality, and becoming to Platonic philosophy and, thereby, reinterprets Platonic philosophy in the direction of Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: as feminist rather than masculinist, and as mimetic. It therefore prioritizes Heraclitean principles of movement and flux over Form, the feminine over masculine, and materiality, feeling, or sensation over abstraction and universal essence. Han's exploration illustrates how, in Plato's thought, the feminine maps itself onto the plane of phenomena--a plane associated with vitalist themes such as motion, tactility, and change (metabolē). Platonic metaphysics is recontextualized by illustrating how Being expresses itself through processes of (feminine) becoming. With this reformulation, the resulting account of Platonic Being destabilizes any purported Platonic dualism. (shrink)

This article aims to investigate Alain Locke and Richard Rorty’s accounts of cultural pluralism. First, I argue that Rorty’s anti-foundationalism and Locke’s critique of absolutes are similar with respect to the nature of value. I then explain their respective conceptions of culture and cultural pluralism. Finally, I argue that their fundamental differences with each other in regards to culture and cultural pluralism lie in their differing theories of value. Whereas Rorty’s nominalist understanding of value only finds the relativity and contingency (...) of culture and value, Locke’s functionalist theory of value allows for the objectivity and universality of culture and value. To make these differences explicit, I introduce a distinction between value content and value process. If my reading of Locke and Rorty’s accounts of cultural pluralism is convincing, then we can find a more robust view of tolerance in Locke’s version of cultural pluralism than in Rorty’s. -/- . (shrink)

For a few decades now, debates around the effects of 'new public measures' in education have pointed to how the emphasis on increased accountability and high stakes testing has led to some worrying phenomena, thus changing teachers' practices and roles. These include narrowing of the curriculum, gaming and teaching to the test. This chapter discusses these kinds of knowledge and abilities as fundamentally depending on our understanding of the role of teachers within an educational system and in relation to educational (...) aims. The particular standpoint from which it tackles these issues revolves around asking whether the notion of autonomy is significant to teachers' roles and activities, and hence bears on our conception of teaching expertise. The chapter argues that the notion of autonomy is problematic: it conflates rather different psychological, phenomenological and normative elements. The discussion in the chapter culminates in an analysis of current policy arrangements in England. (shrink)

Die Kirche ist eine Anerkennungsgemeinschaft. Ihr theologisches Wesen ist politisch. Im Anschluss an Axel Honneth kann in ihr ein Vorrang des Rechts vor Liebe und Solidarität begründet werden. Mit Dietrich Bonhoeffer kann die Anerkennungstheorie Honneths für die Kirche weiterentwickelt werden.

By putting existential phenomenology into conversation with virtue ethics, this book offers a new interpretation of human flourishing. It rejects characterizations of flourishing as either a private subjective state or an objective worldly status, arguing that flourishing is rather a successfully negotiated self-world fit – a condition involving both the essential dependence of the self upon the world and others, and the lived normative responsiveness of the agent striving to be in the world well. A central argument of the book (...) is that there is an irreducible normative plurality arising from the different practical perspectives we can adopt – the first, second, and third-person stances – all of which make different kinds of normative claim that we understand ourselves as having reason to meet. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these normative domains achieved in such a way that success in one domain does not compromise success in another. Existential Flourishing provides a correspondingly transformed interpretation of the virtues as solutions to various existential problems we face in responding to these normative domains. The book also addresses traditional problems in virtue ethics and analyzes the structure of four virtues in detail: justice, patience, modesty, and courage. (shrink)

Der glänzende Siegeszug der spekulativen Dialektik Hegels kann darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass seine Behandlung der modernen Tragödie auf eine völlig neue und eigenständige Dimension verweist. Hegel hat seine systematische Philosophie entwickelt, um die durch die klassische Tragödie aufgeworfene Problematik zu überwinden. Jedoch ist seine nachtragische Philosophie nicht in der Lage, die moderne Tragödie zu begreifen. Dies ist nicht darauf zurückzuführen, dass das vernünftige Selbstbewusstsein in einem aporetischen Widerspruch befangen ist, da dieser Widerspruch, der in der klassischen Tragödie ausgedrückt ist, durch Hegels (...) spekulative Dialektik "aufgehoben" wird. Vielmehr liegt der Grund darin, dass das, was durch diese systematisierende Dialektik nicht immanent wird, keine adäquate Form findet. (shrink)

Recent attempts to explain why modesty should be considered a virtue have failed. A more adequate account is that modesty involves understanding how far one's accomplishments ought to be taken as definitive of one's value. Modest people communicate this self-understanding through behaviour motivated by the desire to ensure that their accomplishments do not cause pain to others. This virtuous mode of self-awareness involves recognizing that one is both defined by social standards of success and irreducible to these assessments. Modest agents (...) do not think themselves ‘better’ than others, but recognize that they rank higher on the particular social standard in question. They thus both avoid causing pain and serve as exemplars of virtuous self-responsibility. (shrink)