The article proceeds from the basal fact that all ethical reflections are developped in a contexture which can be defined as socially constituted habituality; to this contexture are related the individuals, reflecting or not, by their social identity. Unfortunately most of the programms of ethics delete these relations by prefering a logifying approach to ethics which is not prepared to take into consideration the realm ofthose ambiguous interferences. By this means the prerequesites for performing ethical conduct, both are ignored and (...) contrasted, nota bene, darkly and dimly with ethical discernments. However, parts of the tradition of rhetorics can give a clue to both how to disentangle the universe of prerequesites and to operationalize them as constituents of ethical reflections. This is concerning our understanding of reason, too; all reason ist finite, not able to spread out itselfto pure reason but competent to thematize its attachment to historical habituality. The outlines of such an understanding of reason are to discover in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's »Ethik« to confront the fideistic tendencies of protestantism and disclaim a methaphysical determination of reason. (shrink)

In the context of the present debate on brain-death, the author explains how no criterion of death, which is valid once and for all, can be deduced from the Christian understanding of death and resurrection. Nevertheless, a number of anthropological criteria can be identified which could serve as a social-ethical orientation: The interaction of body and soul should not be understood monistically in the sense of a vitalistic or mechanistic concept of life. Institutions and individuals should allow for social comittment (...) and solidarity during the process of dying in order to work against cultural fragmentation and isolation. (shrink)