In this revision of a seminal work, O'Donovan describes the shape of a Christian moral theology which has wide implications for creation, history, knowledge, freedom, and authority--his purpose being to outline a system of theological ethics and to describe the nature of the moral response within redeemed creation: acts of surrender, obedience, and love.

Leading political theologian Oliver O'Donovan here takes a fresh look at some traditional moral arguments about war. Modern Christians differ widely on this issue. A few hold that absolute pacifism is the only viable Christian position, others subscribe in various ways to concepts of 'just war' developed out of a Western tradition that arose from the legacies of Augustine and Aquinas, while others still adopt more pragmatically realist postures. Professor O'Donovan re-examines questions of contemporary urgency including the use of biological (...) and nuclear weapons, military intervention, economic sanctions, war crimes trials and the roles of the Geneva Convention, international conventions and the UN. His enquiry opens with a challenging dedication to the new Archbishop of Canterbury and proceeds to shed new light on vital topics with which the Archbishop and others will be very directly engaged. It should be read by anyone concerned with the ethics of warfare. (shrink)

The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the ethical problems that needed to be addressed urgently within public policy were unprecedented and required high‐bandwidth two‐way transfer of insights between academic bioethics and policy. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which do not have a National Ethics Committee, faced particular challenges in how to facilitate this. This paper takes as a case study the brief career of the (...) Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) for the NHS Covid‐19 App, which shows both the difficulty and the political complexity of policy‐relevant bioethics in a pandemic and how this was exacerbated by the transience and informality of the structures through which ethics advice was delivered. It analyses how and why, after EAB's demise, the Westminster government increasingly sought to either take its ethics advice in private or to evade ethical scrutiny of its policies altogether. In reflecting on EAB, and these later ethics advice contexts, the article provides a novel framework for analysing ethics advice within democracies, defining four idealised stances: the pure ethicist, the advocate, the ethics arbiter and the critical friend. (shrink)

Individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) display diverse deficits in social, cognitive and behavioral functioning. To date, there has been mixed findings on the profile of executive function deficits for high-functioning adults (IQ >70) with ASD. A conceptual distinction is commonly made between “cold” and “hot” executive functions. Cold executive functions refer to mechanistic higher-order cognitive operations (e.g., working memory), whereas hot executive functions entail cognitive abilities supported by emotional awareness and social perception (e.g., social cognition). This study aimed to (...) determine the independence of deficits in hot and cold executive functions for high-functioning adults with ASD. Forty-two adults with ASD (64% male, aged 18-66 years) and 40 age and gender matched controls were administered The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT; emotion recognition and social inference), Letter Number Sequencing (working memory) and Hayling Sentence Completion Test (response initiation and suppression). Between-group analyses identified that the ASD group performed significantly worse than matched controls on all measures of cold and hot executive functions (d =.54-1.5). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that the ASD sample performed more poorly on emotion recognition and social inference tasks than matched controls after controlling for cold executive functions and employment status. The findings also indicated that the ability to recognise emotions and make social inferences was supported by working memory and response initiation and suppression processes. Overall, this study supports the distinction between hot and cold executive function impairments for adults with ASD. Moreover, it advances understanding of higher-order impairments underlying social interaction difficulties for this population which, in turn, may assist with diagnosis and inform intervention programs. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals who feel psychologically safe believe it is safe to take interpersonal risks such as voicing concerns, asking questions and giving feedback. Psychological safety is a complex phenomenon which is influenced by organizational, team and individual level factors. However, it has primarily been assessed as a team-level phenomenon. This study focused on understanding healthcare professionals' individual experiences of psychological safety. We aim to gain a fuller understanding of the influence team leaders, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics have on individuals' (...) psychological safety and their decisions to engage in voice or silence behavior. Thirty-four interviews were conducted with healthcare professionals from across five teams working within an acute, suburban hospital. Hybrid inductive-deductive thematic analysis focused on identifying themes which captured the complexities of individuals' varied experiences of psychological safety. The themes identified were: “Personal Characteristics,” “Past Experiences,” “Individual Perceptions of Being Valued,” and “Judged Appropriateness of Issues/Concerns.” These themes are explored within the context of motivating and inhibiting factors associated with the influence of leadership, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics on experiences of psychological safety and voice behavior. These results extend existing theoretical frameworks guiding our understanding of psychological safety by accounting for the variation in individuals' experiences and studying these significant influences on voice behavior. Important considerations for the development of interventions to enhance psychological safety are discussed. (shrink)

The historical problem about the origins of the language of rights derives its importance from the conceptual problem: of "two fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice," which is basic? Is justice unitary or plural? This in turn opens up a problem about the moral status of human nature. A narrative of the origins of "rights" is an account of how and when a plural concept of justice comes to the fore, and will be based on the occurrence of definite (...) speech-forms—the occurrence of the plural noun in the sense of "legal properties." The history of this development is currently held to begin with the twelfth-century canonists. Later significant thresholds may be found in the fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Wolterstorff's attempt to find the implicit recognition of rights in the Scriptures depends very heavily on what he takes to be implied rather than on what is stated, and at best can establish a pre- history of rights-language. (shrink)

Intersectionality, the attempt to bring theories on race, gender, disability and sexuality together, has existed for decades as a theoretical framework. The essays in this volume explore how intersectionality can be applied to modern philosophy, as well as looking at other disciplines.

Self, World, and Time takes up the question of the form and matter of Christian ethics as an intellectual discipline. What is it about? How does Christian ethics relate to the humanities, especially philosophy, theology, and behavioral studies? How does its shape correspond to the shape of practical reason? In what way does it participate in the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Oliver O'Donovan discusses ethics with self, world, and time as foundation poles of moral reasoning, and with (...) faith, love, and hope as the virtues anchoring the moral life. Blending biblical, historico-theological, and contemporary ideas in its comprehensive survey, Self, World, and Time is an exploratory study that adds significantly to O'Donovan's previous theoretical reflections on Christian ethics. (shrink)

Oliver O'Donovan's Ethics as Theology project began withSelf, World, and Time, an "induction" into Christian ethics as ordered reflection on moral thinking within the life of faith. Volume 2, Finding and Seeking, shifted the focus to the movement of moral thought from a first consciousness of agency to the time that determines the moment of decision. In this third and final volume of his magnum opus, O'Donovan turns his attention to the forward horizon with which moral thinking must engage. Moral (...) experience, he argues, is necessarily two-directional, looking both back at responsibility and forward at aims. The Pauline triad of theological virtues (faith, love, and hope) describes a form of responsibility, and its climax in the sovereignty of love opens the way to a definitive teleology. Entering into Restoffers O'Donovan's mature reflections on questions that have engaged him throughout his career and provides a synoptic view of many of his main themes.". (shrink)

A collection of essays with themes in human rights and legal history, spanning several centuries, containing a tribute to one of the most remarkable jurists of our time. Linked by an historical and contextual approach, these essays add to knowledge of legal history and human rights and provide a reference point for future research.

Throughout his life Karl Rahner wrote on saints in the church, both official (canonized) and unofficial. This essay first considers his major essays from the conciliar period, focusing on the question why and how we can existentially venerate the saints and drawing on his theology of God as Holy Mystery, Christ as redeeming Mediator between humanity and God, and the unity of the love of God and of the neighbor. A second section recalls earlier writings such as “The Church of (...) Sinners’ (1947) and “The Church of the Saints” (1955) that anticipated his mature position. Later developments in his thought are then considered, with special attention to his fuller use of the concept of solidarity in its ontological and theological depth. Finally Rahner’s original diagnosis of the relationship of believers to their saints is tested against more recent developments in devotion to the saints. (shrink)

Throughout his life Karl Rahner wrote on saints in the church, both official (canonized) and unofficial. This essay first considers his major essays from the conciliar period, focusing on the question why and how we can existentially venerate the saints and drawing on his theology of God as Holy Mystery, Christ as redeeming Mediator between humanity and God, and the unity of the love of God and of the neighbor. A second section recalls earlier writings such as “The Church of (...) Sinners’ (1947) and “The Church of the Saints” (1955) that anticipated his mature position. Later developments in his thought are then considered, with special attention to his fuller use of the concept of solidarity in its ontological and theological depth. Finally Rahner’s original diagnosis of the relationship of believers to their saints is tested against more recent developments in devotion to the saints. (shrink)

The Lord's Prayer is at the centre of the Sermon on the Mount in a section on restraint in religious performance. The flanking sections treat of the opposition of lower and higher law, and of simplicity of agency, themes reflected in the central section in the opposition of public and secret. The Lord's Prayer inducts the worshipper into the elementary relations of the universe: the Father, the source of intelligible governance of the universe; the community of human beings created to (...) live and act within the world; the temptation which is the final test of the enterprise of human living. (shrink)

Conn O'Donovan looks back on McShane's early years and influences.

An examination and defence of the concept of personality, long central to Western moral culture but now increasingly under attack. Robert Spaemann tackles urgent practical questions, such as our treatment of the severely disabled human and the moral status of intelligent non-human animals.

PATRICK O'DONOVAN AND LAURA RASCAROLI Introduction: Cosmopolitanism between Spaces and Practices Cosmopolitan Spaces You are standing in the Pantheon in ...

The object of Theological Ethics as presented by Hans Ulrich is immediately the content of the experience of God; reflectively it is God himself turned towards us; doubly reflected on, it is the inversion of our understanding of the good or conversion. The concept of an object may be traced to the discussion of the sciences from Schleiermacher to Barth. Three questions are put to it: (i) Does it assimilate the study too much to descriptive reason, as opposed to practical (...) reason? (ii) Does it narrow the study's range of interests so as to exclude the created world? (iii) Does it result in an idealised `creaturely man', wholly determined by his end and dissociated from the empirical man who may confront us as a neighbour? (shrink)