Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s _The Ethical Demand_ is the most original influential Danish contribution to moral philosophy in this century. This is the first time that the complete text has been available in English translation. Originally published in 1956, it has again become the subject of widespread interest in Europe, now read in the context of the whole of Løgstrup’s work. _The Ethical Demand_ marks a break not only with utilitarianism and with Kantianism but also with Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism (...) and with all forms of subjectivism. Yet Løgstrup’s project is not destructive. Rather, it is a presentation of an alternative understanding of interpersonal life. The ethical demand presupposes that all interaction between human beings involves a basic trust. Its content cannot be derived from any rule. For Løgstrup, there is not Christian morality and secular morality. There is only human morality. _The Ethical Demand _is of the highest relevance to contemporary debate, especially around those issues raised by Levinas. It will exert a steadily increasing influence both in theology and philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract: Is Knud Eiler Løgstrup's conception of the ethical demand as deeply incompatible with the central theses of 20th century French Thomistic moral philosophy as it seems to be? Discussion of this question requires attention to both the Lutheran and the phenomenological background of Løgstrup's thought; a consideration of the Danish and French social contexts in which the claims of the two moral philosophies were developed; and an enquiry into how far aspects of each are complementary to rather (...) than in conflict with the other. An historical explanation for the genesis of the kind of normativity without norms defended by both Løgstrup and Levinas is proposed. (shrink)

Abstract:Is Knud Eiler Løgstrup's conception of the ethical demand as deeply incompatible with the central theses of 20th century French Thomistic moral philosophy as it seems to be? Discussion of this question requires attention to both the Lutheran and the phenomenological background of Løgstrup's thought; a consideration of the Danish and French social contexts in which the claims of the two moral philosophies were developed; and an enquiry into how far aspects of each are complementary to rather than (...) in conflict with the other. An historical explanation for the genesis of the kind of normativity without norms defended by both Løgstrup and Levinas is proposed. (shrink)

Considering recent failed attempts to derive an ethical theory from Georg Lukács’s original formulation of reification, this paper offers an alternative more rooted in Lukács’s theory as a whole. By analyzing his critique of the empty Ought in Kant and Fichte, followed by his advocacy of substantial, materially-grounded Oughts in his late Ontology, I suggest that we can nevertheless find latent possibilities for grounding such values even in his theory of reification. Drawing on recent interpretations of Lukács that emphasize (...) his debt to Neo-Kantianism, Husserl et al, I argue that one of Lukács’s central critiques of reification is precisely its expulsion of substantial values from formal social relationships. This implies, I suggest, a structural demand to reincorporate such values within relations, so that they might reach valid form; I conclude with some suggestions on the ethical demands this might entail. (shrink)

Investment Management makes heavy ethical demands which are not an optional add‐on, but part of the job of being a financial agent and fiduciary. The author is founder and President of Skandia Fonds, the Norwegian mutual funds management company affiliated with Skandia Group which pioneered the concept of green mutual funds in Norway. This paper was delivered at the Sixth Annual Conference of the European Business Ethics Network, held in Oslo last month. Its views are those of the author, (...) and do not necessarily represent his company's policy. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman’s entire body of work has been dedicated to exploring sociological issues. However, problems of moral philosophy have come to play an increasingly crucial role for his understanding of social life in later works. In particular, the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s moral philosophy has shaped Bauman’s thinking. Løgstrup argued that there is an unconditional imperative in the ethical demand to take care of the Other, and this imperative cannot be superseded, rationalized, calculated, or strategically managed. Bauman (...) is right in telling us that the personal ethics is the point of departure for a moral judgement. In this context it is very relevant to integrate Levinas’ and Løgstrup’s considerations. However, this perspective cannot stand alone. It is necessary to move forward to a form of Habermasian communicative ethics that can transmit the substantial moral judgement from a spontaneous communal perspective to a pragmatic societal perspective expressed in political terms. In other words, both perspectives are essential: on the one hand Bauman’s, Levinas’ and Løgstrup’s substantial phenomenological perspective, on the other hand Habermas’ pragmatic communicative perspective. Therefore, it would be more fruitful to consider these two perspectives as complementary instead of as in opposition, as is mostly done. They are both needed. (shrink)

Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905-1981) was a Danish philosopher and theologian of profound significance who deserves to be much better known among anglophone philosoph.

The Danish theologian-philosopher K. E. Løgstrup is second in reputation in his homeland only to Søren Kierkegaard. He is best known outside Europe for his _The Ethical Demand_, first published in Danish in 1956 and published in an expanded English translation in 1997. _Beyond the Ethical Demand_ contains excerpts, translated into English for the first time, from the numerous books and essays Løgstrup continued to write throughout his life. In the first essay, he engages the critical response to (...) _The Ethical Demand,_ clarifying, elaborating, or defending his original positions. In the next three essays, he extends his contention that human ethics “demands” that we are concerned for the other by introducing the crucial concept of “sovereign expressions of life.” Like Levinas, Løgstrup saw in the phenomenon of “the other” the ground for his ethics. In his later works he developed this concept of “the sovereign expressions of life,” spontaneous phenomena such as trust, mercy, and sincerity that are inherently other-regarding. The last two essays connect his ethics with political life. Interest in Løgstrup in the English-speaking academic community continues to grow, and these important original sources will be essential tools for scholars exploring the further implications of his ethics and phenomenology. “K. E. Løgstrup’s work undoubtedly made in his time an original contribution to the field of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. This translation makes extracts from his later publications on moral philosophy accessible to an English-speaking audience. I am again impressed by the depth of his ideas, which are certainly not outdated and still relevant for contemporary debates in moral philosophy.” —_Bert Musschenga, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam _ “Making a large part of Knud Løgstrup’s legacy accessible to the English-speaking public is an event of enormous cultural, philosophical and political importance—and we are all in debt to his disciple, Kies van Kooten Niekerk, and the University Press of Notre Dame, for making it happen. Løgstrup, alongside few other giants of 20th Century ethical thought, like Emmanuel Levinas or Hans Jonas, anticipated and articulated all the major challenges and urgent tasks with which the coming century is likely to confront the moral self. Our ethical discourse was all the poorer so far for being barred access to his findings and proposition. This will no longer be the case.” —_Zygmunt Bauman, emeritus, University of Leeds_ “The publication of an English translation of Knut Eljert Løgstrup's later works in ethics provides a wider readership with the opportunity to better understand his important contribution to ethics in the second half of the last century. With his notion of the _Sovereign Expressions of Life_ Løgstrup articulates his rejection of moral atomism that has become influential in recent times. The introduction and annotation by Kees van Kooten Niekerk are very helpful to see how Løgstrup's thought developed beyond _The Ethical Demand.” —__Hans S. Reinders, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam_. (shrink)

Ten new essays critique the practice of armed humanitarian intervention, whereby one state sends its armed forces into another to protect citizens against major human rights abuses. The contributors examine a range of concerns, for instance about potential adverse effects and about ulterior motives.

This collection of essays by leading international philosophers considers central themes in the ethics of Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). Løgstrup was a Lutheran theologian much influenced by phenomenology and by strong currents in Danish culture, to which he himself made important contributions. The essays in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life are divided into four sections. The first section deals predominantly with Løgstrup’s relation to Kant and, through Kant, the system of morality in (...) general. The second section focuses on how Løgstrup stands in connection with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas. The third section considers issues in the development of Løgstrup’s ethics and how it relates to other aspects of his thought. The final section covers certain central themes in Løgstrup’s position, particularly his claims about trust and the unfulfillability of the ethical demand. The volume includes a previously untranslated early essay by Løgstrup, “The Anthropology of Kant’s Ethics,” which defines some of his basic ethical ideas in opposition to Kant’s. The book will appeal to philosophers and theologians with an interest in ethics and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Based on a reading of K. E. Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand and Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, the paper aims to show that it is respectively through trust and love, hospitality and friendship that the two thinkers envisage humans as being capable of realising unfulfillable and impossible ethical demands. It will be argued that they develop their ethical thinking along similar lines, yet, even when they come closest to each other conceptually, a difference in their phenomenological (...) analysis of the I and the other remains, which it is paramount to keep in mind in order to assess what they may contribute to each other’s thinking. (shrink)

Critics of Levinas reject the notion that the abstract face of the other can ground ethics and generate specific responsibilities. To the contrary, I argue that the face does ground a practical and pragmatic ethics. Drawing on Levinas' phenomenological analyses of the enjoying subject, I show that the face communicates an imperative to the subject that obligates her or him to repair the concrete context of action in which the subject encounters the other. My elucidation takes very seriously the notion (...) that the face speaks and the face is a body. When coupled with a pragmatic account of communication, Levinas gives us a robust elucidation of the phenomenological and pragmatic dimensions of ethical responsibility. Key Words: embodiment • ethics • face • Emmanuel Levinas • phenomenology • pragmatics • responsibility. (shrink)

The decision of some online news platforms to eliminate comment sections is both understandable and frustrating. It is understandable as one does not have to read far into comment sections to see d...

This article analyses the conflicting professional ethical demands imposed on judges to, on the one hand, faithfully apply the existing law of the land and, on the other hand, do justice in the face of urgent global challenges such as ensuring an equal access to life-saving medicines. After establishing the precise nature of the professional ethical duties of judges (as opposed to those of lawyers) and noting the tensions they face when the duty of applying the law prevents (...) them from complying with the duty of delivering material justice in the domain of access to medicines, the article then analyses the way this issue plays out in Latin America, a región where judicially-mandated access to medicines has been common. The article concludes by arguing that the Latin American experience suggests that judges around the world should take seriously the need to find a balance between their duty of deference towards public health authorities in this domain (when this is mandated by legislation), and the duty to do justice to individuals who cannot afford live-saving medicines. (shrink)

Background Among the myriad voices advocating diverging ideas of what general practice ought to be, none seem to adequately capture its ethical core. There is a paucity of attempts to integrate moral theory with empirical accounts of the embodied moral knowledge of GPs in order to inform a general normative theory of good general practice. In this article, we present an empirically grounded model of the professional morality of GPs, and discuss its implications in relation to ethical theories (...) to see whether it might be sustainable as a general practice ethic. Methods We observed and interviewed sixteen GPs and GP residents working in health care centres in four Swedish regions between 2015–2017. In keeping with Straussian Grounded Theory, sampling was initially purposeful and later theoretically guided, and data generation, analysis and theoretical integration proceeded in parallel. The focal concept of this article was refined through multidimensional property supplementation. Results The voice of the profession is one of four concepts in our emerging theory that attempt to capture various motives that affect GPs’ everyday moral decisionmaking. It reflects how GPs appreciate the situation by passing three professional–moral judgments: Shall I see what is before me, or take a bird’s-eye view? Shall I intervene, or stay my hand? And do I need to speak up, or should I rather shut up? By thus framing the problem, the GP narrows down the range of considerations, allowing them to focus on its morally most pertinent aspects. This process is best understood as a way of heeding Løgstrup’s ethical demand. Refracted through the lens of the GP’s professional understanding of life, the ethical demand gives rise to specific moral imperatives that may stand in opposition to the express wishes of the other, social norms, or the GP’s self-interest. Conclusions The voice of the profession makes sense of how GPs frame problematic situations in moral terms. It is coherent enough to be sustainable as a general practice ethic, and might be helpful in explaining why ethical decisions that GPs intuitively understand as justified, but for which social support is lacking, can nevertheless be legitimate. (shrink)

Abstract2020 saw the rapid onset of a global pandemic caused by the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus. For healthcare systems worldwide, the pandemic called upon quick organization ensuring treatment and containment measures for the new virus disease. Nurses were seen as constituting a vital instrumental professional component in this study. Due to the pandemic's unpredictable and potentially dangerous nature, nurses have faced unprecedented risks and challenges. Based on interviews and free text comment from a survey, this study explores how ethical challenges related (...) to “being a nurse” during the COVID‐19 pandemic was experienced and understood by Danish hospital‐based nurses. Departing from anthropologist Jarett Zigon's notion of moral breakdown, the study demonstrates how the rapid onset of the pandemic constitutes a moral breakdown raising ethical demands for nurses. Analytically we identify three different ethical demands experienced by the nurses. These ethical demands are Nursing and societal ethical demands, Nursing and personal ethical demands, and Nursing and conflicting ethical demands. These demands represent not only very different understandings of ethical demands but also different understandings of ethical acts that are seen as necessary to respond to these demands. (shrink)

Traditionally animal ethics has criticised the anthropocentric worldview according to which humans differ categorically from the rest of the nature in some morally relevant way. It has claimed that even though there are differences, there are also crucial similarities between humans and animals that make it impossible to draw a categorical distinction between humans who are morally valuable and animals which are not. This argument, according to which animals and humans share common characteristics that lead to moral value, is at (...) the heart of animal ethics. Lately the emphasis on similarity has been under attack. It has been claimed that the search for similarity is itself part of anthropocentric morality, since only those like us are valuable. It also has been claimed that true respect for animals comes from recognising their difference and 'otherness', not from seeing similarities. This paper analyses the new 'other animal ethics' by critically examining its basis and consequences. The conclusion is that despite the fact that other animal ethics is right in demanding respect also for difference, it remains both vague and contradictory in its theoretical basis, and leads to undesirable consequences from the perspective of animal welfare. (shrink)

Building on work by Steve Darwall, I argue that standard virtue ethical accounts of moral motivation are defective because they don't include accounts of social morality. I then propose a virtue ethical account of social morality, and respond to one of Darwall's core objections to the coherence of any such (non-Kantian) account.

This article examines the ethical thought of the prominent French philosopher, Alain Badiou. His work is placed in the context of discussions of the sources of normativity in relation to Kant and Levinas and then the central category of the event in Badiou's work is critically discussed. The article claims that Badiou's talk of truth in relation to event is misplaced and argues that there is a residual heroism behind Badiou's political thinking.

Where does the impetus towards ethical theory come from? What drives humans to make values explicit, consistent, and discursively justifiable? This paper situates the demand for ethical theory in human life by identifying the practical needs that give rise to it. Such a practical derivation puts the demand in its place: while finding a home for it in the public decision-making of modern societies, it also imposes limitations on the demand by presenting it as scalable (...) and context-sensitive. This differentiates strong forms of the demand calling for theory from weaker forms calling for less, and contexts where it has a place from contexts where it is out of place. In light of this, subjecting personal deliberation to the demand turns out to involve a trade-off. (shrink)

Despite the increasing interest in clinical ethics, ethics consultation as a professional service is still rare in Europe. In this paper I refer to examples in the United States. In Germany, university hospitals and medical faculties are still hesitant about establishing yet another “committee”. One of the reasons for this hesitation lies in the ignorance that exists here about how to provide medical ethics services; another reason is that medical ethics itself is not yet institutionalised at many German universities. The (...) most important obstacle, however, may be that medical ethics has not yet demonstrated its relevance to the needs of those caring for patients. The Centre for Ethics and Law, Freiburg, has therefore taken a different approach from that offered elsewhere: clinical ethics consultation is offered on demand, the consultation being available to clinician(s) in different forms. This paper describes our experiences with this approach; practical issues are illustrated by a case study. (shrink)

How much does ethics demand of us? On what authority does it demand it? How does what ethics demand relate to other requirements, such as those of prudence, law, and social convention? Does ethics really demand anything at all? Questions of this sort lie at the heart of the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Logstrup, and in particular his key text The Ethical Demand. In The Radical Demand in Logstrup's (...) Ethics, Robert Stern offers a full account of that text, and situates Logstrup's distinctive position in relation to Kant, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Darwall and Luther. For Logstrup, the ethical situation is primarily one in which the fate of the other person is placed in your hands, where it is then your responsibility to do what is best for them. The demand therefore does not come from the other person as such, as what they ask you to do may be different from what you should do. It is also not laid down by social rules, nor by God or by any formal principle of practical reason, such as Kant's principle of universalizability. Rather, it comes from what is required to care for the other, and the directive power of their needs in the situation. Logstrup therefore rejects accounts of ethical obligation based on the commands of God, or on abstract principles governing practical reason, or on social norms; instead he develops a different picture, at the basis of which is our interdependence, which he argues gives his ethics a grounding in the nature of life itself. (shrink)

BackgroundThe expectation of pandemic-induced severe resource shortages has prompted authorities to draft and update frameworks to guide clinical decision-making and patient triage. While these documents differ in scope, they share a utilitarian focus on the maximization of benefit. This utilitarian view necessarily marginalizes certain groups, in particular individuals with increased medical needs.Main bodyHere, we posit that engagement with the disability critique demands that we broaden our understandings of justice and fairness in clinical decision-making and patient triage. We propose the capabilities (...) theory, which recognizes that justice requires a range of positive capabilities/freedoms conducive to the achievement of meaningful life goals, as a means to do so. Informed by a disability rights critique of the clinical response to the pandemic, we offer direction for the construction of future clinical triage protocols which will avoid ableist biases by incorporating a broader apprehension of what it means to be human.ConclusionThe clinical pandemic response, codified across triage protocols, should embrace a form of justice which incorporates a vision of pluralistic human capabilities and a valuing of positive freedoms. (shrink)

The common belief that the epistemic credentials of ethics are quite questionable, and therefore in need of special justification, is an illusion made possible by the logical gap between reason and belief. This gap manifests itself sometimes even outside ethics. In ethics its manifestations are common, because of the practical nature of ethics. The attempt to cover it up takes the form of exorbitant demands for justification and often leads to espousing noncognitivism.

The common belief that the epistemic credentials of ethics are quite questionable, and therefore in need of special justification, is an illusion made possible by the logical gap between reason and belief. This gap manifests itself sometimes even outside ethics. In ethics its manifestations are common, because of the practical nature of ethics. The attempt to cover it up takes the form of exorbitant demands for justification and often leads to espousing noncognitivism.

Morality is demanding; this is a platitude. It is thus no surprise when we find that moral theories too, when we look into what they require, turn out to be demanding. However, there is at least one moral theory – consequentialism – that is said to be beset by this demandingness problem. This calls for an explanation: Why only consequentialism? This then leads to related questions: What is the demandingness problematic about? What exactly does it claim? Finally, there is the (...) question of what we do if we accept that there is a demandingness problem for consequentialism: How can consequentialists respond? The present chapter sets out to answer these questions (or at least point to how they could be answered). (shrink)