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Situational
Situational ethics or situation ethics takes into account ''only'' the particular context of an act when evaluating it ethically, rather than judging it only according to absolute moral standards. With the intent to have a fair basis for judgments or action, one looks to personal ideals of what is appropriate to guide them, rather than an unchanging universal code of conduct, such as Biblical law under divine command theory or the Kantian categorical imperative. Proponents of situational approaches to ethics include existentialist philosophers such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Specifically Christian forms of situational ethics placing love above all particular principles or rules were proposed in the first half of the twentieth century by liberal theologians Rudolf Bultmann, John A. T. Robinson, and Joseph Fletcher. These theologians point specifically to '' agapē'', or unconditional love, as the highest end. Other theologians who ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Fletcher
Joseph Francis Fletcher (April 10, 1905 – October 28, 1991) was an American professor who founded the theory of situational ethics in the 1960s. A pioneer in the field of bioethics. Fletcher was a leading academic proponent of the potential benefits of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics, and cloning. Ordained as an Episcopal priest, he later identified himself as an atheist. Early life and education Joseph F. Fletcher was born in Newark, New Jersey on April 10, 1905. He graduated from West Virginia University and later attended the Berkeley Divinity School and Yale University. Career Fletcher, a prolific academic, taught; participated in symposia; and completed ten books, and hundreds of articles, book reviews, and translations. He taught ''Christian Ethics'' at Episcopal Divinity School (established to train people for ordination in the American Episcopal Church), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at Harvard Divinity School from 1944 to 1970. He was the first pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethically
Ethics is the philosophy, philosophical study of Morality, moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates Normativity, normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics. Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion, treatment of animals, and Business ethics, business practices. Metaethics explores the underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to Duty, duties, like t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John A
Sir John Alexander Macdonald (10 or 11January 18156June 1891) was the first prime minister of Canada, serving from 1867 to 1873 and from 1878 until his death in 1891. He was the Fathers of Confederation, dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, and had a political career that spanned almost half a century. Macdonald was born in Scotland; when he was a boy his family immigrated to Kingston, Ontario, Kingston in the Province of Upper Canada (today in eastern Ontario). As a lawyer, he was involved in several high-profile cases and quickly became prominent in Kingston, which elected him in 1844 to the legislature of the Province of Canada. By 1857, he had become List of Joint Premiers of the Province of Canada, premier under the colony's unstable political system. In 1864, when no party proved capable of governing for long, he agreed to a proposal from his political rival, George Brown (Canadian politician), George Brown, that the parties unite in a Great Coalition to seek fede ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gospels
Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the second century AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus, culminating in his trial and death, and concluding with various reports of his post-resurrection appearances. The Gospels are commonly seen as literature that is based on oral traditions, Christian preaching, and Old Testament exegesis with the consensus being that they are a variation of Greco-Roman biography; similar to other ancient works such as Xenophon's ''Memoirs of Socrates''. They are meant to convince people that Jesus was a charismatic miracle-working holy man, providing examples for readers to emulate. As such, they present the Christian message of the second half of the first century AD, Modern biblical scholars are therefore ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jesus Christ
Jesus (AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the Jesus in Christianity, central figure of Christianity, the Major religious groups, world's largest religion. Most Christians consider Jesus to be the Incarnation (Christianity), incarnation of God the Son and awaited Messiah#Christianity, messiah, or Christ (title), Christ, a descendant from the Davidic line that is prophesied in the Old Testament. Virtually all modern scholars of classical antiquity, antiquity agree that Historicity of Jesus, Jesus existed historically. Accounts of Life of Jesus, Jesus's life are contained in the Gospels, especially the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament. Since the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment, Quest for the historical Jesus, academic research has yielded various views on the historical reliability of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethical Relativism
Moral relativism or ethical relativism (often reformulated as relativist ethics or relativist morality) is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist. ''Descriptive'' moral relativism holds that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, without passing any evaluative or normative judgments about this disagreement. ''Meta-ethical'' moral relativism holds that moral judgments contain an (implicit or explicit) indexical such that, to the extent they are truth-apt, their truth-value changes with context of use. ''Normative'' moral relativism holds that everyone ''ought'' to tolerate the behavior of others even when large disagreements about morality exist. Though often intertwined, these are distinct positions. Each can be held independently of the others. American philosopher Richard Rorty in particular h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proportionalism
Proportionalism is an ethical theory that lies between consequential theories and deontological theories. Consequential theories, like utilitarianism, say that an action is right or wrong, depending on the consequences it produces, but deontological theories, such as Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative, say that actions are either intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong. Proportionalist theories like rule utilitarianism, however, say that it is never right to go against a principle unless a proportionate reason would justify it. In the 1960s, proportionalism was a consequentialist attempt to develop natural law, a principally Roman Catholic teleological theory most strongly associated with the 13th-century scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas, but also found in Church Fathers such as Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, as well as early pagan schools of philosophy such as Stoicism. The moral guidelines set down by Roman Catholic magisterial teachings of Natura ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Utilitarianism
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea that underpins them all is, in some sense, to maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described ''utility'' as the capacity of actions or objects to produce benefits, such as pleasure, happiness, and good, or to prevent harm, such as pain and unhappiness, to those affected. Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, egalitarian util ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consequentialism
In moral philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act (including omission from acting) is one that will produce a good outcome. Consequentialism, along with eudaimonism, falls under the broader category of teleological ethics, a group of views which claim that the moral value of any act consists in its tendency to produce things of intrinsic value.Teleological Ethics " '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Tillich
Paul Johannes Tillich (; ; August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German and American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich taught at German universities before immigrating to the United States in 1933, where he taught at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago. For the general public, Tillich wrote the well-received ''The Courage to Be'' (1952) and ''Dynamics of Faith'' (1957). His major three-volume ''Systematic Theology'' (1951–1963) was for theologians; in many points it was an answer to existentialist critique of Christianity. Tillich's work attracted scholarship from other influential thinkers like Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, George Lindbeck, Erich Przywara, James Luther Adams, Cardinal Avery Dulles, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sallie McFague, Richard John Neuhaus, Davi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emil Brunner
Heinrich Emil Brunner (1889–1966) was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Along with Karl Barth, he is commonly associated with neo-orthodoxy or the dialectical theology movement. Biography Brunner was born on 23 December 1889 in Winterthur, in the Swiss canton of Zürich. He studied at the universities of Zurich and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in theology from Zurich in 1913, with a dissertation on ''The Symbolic Element in Religious Knowledge''. Brunner served as pastor from 1916 to 1924 in the mountain village of Obstalden in the Swiss canton of Glarus. In 1919–1920 he spent a year in the United States studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1921, Brunner published his ''Habilitationsschrift'' (a post-doctoral dissertation traditionally required in multiple countries in order to attain the position of a fully tenured professor) on ''Experience, Knowledge and Faith'' and in 1922 was appointed a ''Privatdozent'' at the University of Zurich. Soon after, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl Barth
Karl Barth (; ; – ) was a Swiss Reformed theologian. Barth is best known for his commentary '' The Epistle to the Romans'', his involvement in the Confessing Church, including his authorship (except for a single phrase) of the Barmen Declaration, and especially his unfinished multi-volume theological summa the '' Church Dogmatics'' (published between 1932 and 1967). Barth's influence expanded well beyond the academic realm to mainstream culture, leading him to be featured on the cover of ''Time'' on 20 April 1962. Like many Protestant theologians of his generation, Barth was educated in a liberal theology influenced by Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Schleiermacher and others. His pastoral career began in the rural Swiss town of Safenwil, where he was known as the "Red Pastor from Safenwil". There he became increasingly disillusioned with the liberal Christianity in which he had been trained. This led him to write the first edition of his ''The Epistle to the Romans'' (a. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
