The Mysteries of the Moral Universe

This study seeks to identify two principles in Jurgen Habermas's discourse, namely Indonesian universal political ethics and Indonesian discourse political ethics. Done by implementing a qualitative description approach with the type of literature study. Data consists of documents that include books, journals, and relevant research results. The collected data will then be understood, recorded, and phrased and then analyzed by actualizing Habermas's discourse theory which contains (Universal Ethics) and (Discourse Ethics). So that conclusions can be drawn. This study states that in universal ethics, the formulation and implementation of the principles of universal political ethics Indonesia uses the philosophy of Pancasila because it is identified as the basis of the state and ideology of the Indonesian nation. Thus, all legal doctrines and legal political mechanisms in Indonesia need to contain the values contained in Pancasila. Meanwhile, discourse ethics states that the ethical principles of Indonesian discourse are carried out with the mechanism of the concept of democracy which focuses on a discourse in a public space. Therefore, the moral principles of ethics only need to be applied in the realm of legal systems and politics (Universal Ethics) not in the realm of democracy (Discourse Ethics). Because discourse upholds the principle of freedom, there is no intervention and does not require moral verification by all participants like universal ethics.

Part I: The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Community 1. The Catholic Ethic and The Protestant Ethic2. The Hidden Ethic Part II: Pillars of the Catholic Ethic 3.Work and the Catholic Ethic: What Work Means4. Money and the Catholic Ethic: What Money Buys5. Family and the Catholic Ethic: All in the Family6. Fault-Forgiveness and the Catholic Ethic: I'm OK, You're OK7. Otherworldliness and the Catholic Ethic: Where Change and Achievement Can Really Matter8. Structural Features of the Catholic Ethic Part III: A Cultural and Structural History of the Catholic Ethic and Community Helping 9. A Social Values Perspective on the Catholic Ethic and Community Helping10. A Social Structural Perspective on the Catholic Ethic and Community Helping Part IV: Expressions of the Catholic Ethic: Public Policy Opinion in Contemporary America 11. Let the Numbers Do the Talking. Part V: The Long View: Past, Present, and Future12. Applications of the Catholic Ethic Concept: Schematics and Prismatics13. The Catholic Ethic: Questions and Conclusions

ABSTRACTDuring the summer of 2006, over four hundred Catholic ethicists from around the world gathered for four days in Padua, Italy. About sixty of the conference papers have become available in two edited collections, Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church: The Plenary Papers from the First Cross‐cultural Conference on Catholic Theological Ethics, and Applied Ethics in a World Church: The Padua Conference. As the conference was marked by a distinctive and creative tension—between the diversity which characterized the nationalities and cultural identities of the participants, on the one hand, and the commonness of their religious heritage, on the other—these essays can tell us much about contemporary Catholic ethics in its response to global pluralism. The following develops four reflections. First, the conference papers pursue a style of scholarship that is at once critically creative and ecclesially rooted. Second, the conference raises new concerns about the importance that Christian formation must have in a pluralist world. Third, the participants affirm and defend the ultimate universality of moral goods while also arguing that these goods are expressed and embodied in unavoidably particular ways. Finally, the most important contribution that Catholic ethics can make to public conversations about issues of common concern is through its articulation and defense of key human values.

The article examines the metaphysical and ontological sections of digital ethics in connection with the expansion of the virtual and information topos, the development of computer technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), which characterizes the modern stage of development of the information society. The article identifies that digital ethics, as part of information ethics, reflects changes in morality or moral universality as an element of cultural universality. The paper shows that the ontological and metaphysical matrices of universals in relation to their embeddedness in the being of culture are determined by the value content with the scope of concepts, principles, norms typical of cultural consciousness and historical reality. The author considers moral and cultural universals from the point of view of dialectics of reality (ideal) and reality (factual), which makes it possible to determine the peculiarities of changes in the moral universal in the cluster of digital ethics, the peculiarities of its value normativity in the conditions of incorporeal, contactless communication of the subject with an inanimate object, i.e. AI. The article emphasizes the importance of digital ethics in education.

Globalization has churned up in its wake a reevaluation of standards in numerous enterprises, including journalism. The search for a universal journalism ethic, however, has often ended with the attempt to import traditional and underlying Western "free press" values, such as objectivity and an adversarial platform, forged in Enlightenment philosophy. This belief of the universal portability of Western values is reflected in the mixed results of several professional initiatives in the early and mid-1990s designed to both install and instill a First Amendment-based free press system in the newly independent former states of the Soviet Union. Scholars admonish that modernization through globalization is not Westernization and warn of the futility of attempting to fit indigenous values into a procrustean bed of Western economic or political design. Multiple models of citizen-press-government relationships grow legitimately out of indigenous value systems and are endurable within the forces of globalization. This does not mean the search for a universal journalism ethic should be abandoned to the morass of cultural relativism, but rather that a new starting point should be found and new focal points enumerated. Globalization has produced several major paradigm shifts in world societies, not the least of which is increasing degrees of autonomy of both the individual and the citizenry to encourage a wider participation in both the governing and economic process. This suggests that a new focal point of journalism ethics should be empowerment-the degree to which a society's journalism is designed to empower the citizenry for its own betterment rather than the degree to which it creates a passive audience of consumerism. In this study, I advance an ethic of empowerment that can both reflect the changes of globalization and respect indigenous value systems. I also argue that a principal structural measurement of this global ethic should be the degree of autonomy the journalist enjoys, within legal, cultural, and professional limits.

Foreword. Introduction: Conflicting Values in American Society. THE PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC ETHICS IN CONTEXT. Religion as a Basis of Cultural Values: The Protestant and Catholic Ethics. A Closer Look at Protestant Ethic. FACETS OF THE CATHOLIC ETHIC. Attitudes Toward Work and Money. An Emphasis on Family, Community, and Mercy. This World and the Next in the Catholic Ethic. THE CATHOLIC ETHIC AND THE CULTURE OF SHARING. The Tradition of Sharing. The Institutional Church and Theology. THE CATHOLIC ETHIC AND SOCIETY. Conceptions of Self and Society. Looking Ahead.

Disagreement over the legitimacy of direct sterilization continues within Catholic moral debate, with painful and at times confusing ramifications for Catholic healthcare systems. This paper argues that the medical profession should be construed as a key moral authority in this debate, on two grounds. First, the recent revival of neo-Aristotelianism in moral philosophy as applied to medical ethics has brought out the inherently moral dimensions of the history and current practice of medicine. Second, this recognition can be linked to Catholic morality through Vatican II's affirmation of the legitimate autonomy of culture, including the sciences. A partial precedent for understanding the moral authority of medicine can be found in the recent history of Catholic medical morality, and we further argue that a full contemporary recognition of that authority would weigh against an absolute prohibition of direct sterilizations. Institutionally, we propose the allowance of direct sterilizations in cases where the clinically perceived biomedical good of the patient is at stake.

Catholic chaplains and clinicians who exercise their vocations in contexts wherein physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia (PAS-E) are legal may need to confront the difficult question of whether or not their presence in proximity to these acts and the processes that govern them is consistent with Catholic ethics. Debate on this question to date has focused on complicit presence and scandal. Drawing on Catholic theological ethics and the vision for end-of-life care espoused in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s recent letter, Samaritanus Bonus, I argue that some forms of presence in proximity to PAS-E are ethically justifiable. Core to this argument are the three elements of moral action: intention, object, and circumstance, alongside efforts to mitigate the risk of scandal informed by the teaching of Aquinas.

This introduction provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Catholic ethics in the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), an event widely considered crucial to the reconciliation of the Catholic Church and the modern world. Andrew Kim investigates Catholic responses to questions of moral theology in all four principal areas: Catholic social teaching, natural law, virtue ethics, and bioethics. In addition to discussing contemporary controversies surrounding abortion, contraception, labor rights, exploitation of the poor, and just war theory, he explores the historical sources of the Catholic worldview. Beginning with the moral vision revealed through the person of Jesus Christ and continuing with elaborations on this vision from figures such as Augustine and Aquinas, this volume elucidates the continuity of the Catholic moral tradition. Its balance of complexity and accessibility makes it an ideal resource for both students of theology and general readers.

A historical bias toward cultural relativism has led to a general unwillingness by anthropologists to deal with questions of human rights. A descriptive science, anthropology is concerned with the various lifeways of humans, eschewing value judgements. Thus, anthropologists face something of a dilemma in developing a concept of universal morality. Some attention has been given to possible moral universals, such as the incest taboo and strictures on in-group assault and homicide. While these moral precepts approach universality, incest and homicide receive positive sanction in specific situations in societies. Likewise, while rape, for example, is one of the most heavily sanctioned crimes cross-culturally (Brown, 1952), institutionalized rape is not uncommon as a punitive or ritual cultural practice (Webster, 1979).

In his stimulating paper, Christopher Gill explicitly asks us to consider three main questions in connection with two passages (Origen, Against Celsus 7.51 and Cicero, On Duties 1.107-121): (1) Are the two passages, one based on Chrysippus and the other on Panaetius, concerned with moral particularism? (2) Are the two passages concerned with the relation between moral particularism and moral universalism? (3) Is it, in fact, anachronistic to go searching for such things in the texts? To consider these questions, we first need a better understanding of what 'moral particularism' and 'moral universalism' might mean, and for this it will be helpful to give a brief and rough sketch of one popular version of the history of Western ethical thought since the late eighteenth century, a version based on the framework of universalism and particularism. Keywords: Christopher Gill; Cicero; Origen; Stoic Philosophy

After distinguishing two different meanings of the notion of a 'morality internal to medicine' and considering a hypothetical case of a society that relied on its surgeons to 'eunuchize' priest/cantors to permit them to play an important religious/cultural role, this paper examines three reasons why morality cannot be derived from reflection on the ends of the practice of medicine: (1) there exist many medical roles and these have different ends or purposes, (2) even within any given medical role, there exists multiple, sometimes conflicting ends, and, most critically, (3) the ends of any practice such as medicine must come from outside the practice, that is, from the basic ends or purposes of human living. The paper concludes by considering whether these ends external to medicine are universally part of the moral reality or whether they are socially constructed. The paper argues that, even if various cultural accounts of the common, universal morality are 'socially constructed,' they may, nevertheless, be reflections, however, imperfect, of a more universal common morality that should be thought of as real. Therefore, the morality of medicine must come from a more fundamental morality external to medicine. That external morality will be socially constructed, but may nevertheless reflect an underlying common morality.

In this chapter, Sevilla engages the following questions: Is global ethics a matter of universal norms independent of historical and cultural specificity? Or is ethics a matter of local moralities? First, this chapter examines of the localizing aspect of Watsuji Tetsuro’s Ethics. It then proceeds to his view of the debate between universal morality and national morals in his earlier essays. Through this, Sevilla clarifies Watsuji’s own unique approach to how universality and particularity might be unified, and how this is applied in global ethics. Finally, Sevilla analyzes the contemporary debates on global ethics (or global justice), focusing on the issue of moral relativism and universalism, and suggesting how Watsuji might contribute to a new way of approaching these discourses.

This paper analyzes the political, philosophical, societal, legal, educational, biological, psychological and technological reasons why there is an urgent need for basic intercultural and interfaith ethics in the world and whether it is possible to formulate a valid code of such ethics. It is shown that universal ethics could be founded on natural law, which can be understood in both religious and secular ways. Alternatively, universal ethics could be based on a single supreme principle that is independent of worldview and culture: human dignity. In accordance with these concepts, a minimalist and normative code of essential, self-evident universal ethical principles and norms is proposed. The implementation of universal ethics in society is a long-term political task that could be achieved by including universal ethics in the compulsory school curriculum of all countries and in the UNESCO agenda of Global Citizen Education.

The topic of this symposium pertains to how a Catholic should approach the purported distinction between ancient and modern political thought. What is implicit in this distinction is a concern with the modern (or postmodern) world in which we live—somewhere along the line, we have strayed from the better political thought and practice of an earlier age. A foundational premise for my paper is an observation that moral relativism, rooted in a rejection of immutable universal moral principles, is what is most problematic in our modern times. Whether or not a rejection of the immutability of universal moral principles is advocated by the modern thinkers, our contemporary politics, law, and morality (and much of contemporary political thought) reject some of these principles. Thus, any discussion regarding ancient and modern political thought should include a sound understanding of the natural moral law. The most notable advocate of a divide between the ancient and modern political thinkers is Leo Strauss, who, in Natural Right and History,1 proposes a return to the natural right/law of the ancients to counter both the natural rights of the moderns and historical relativism.2 Accompanying this advocacy for a return is Strauss’s critique of Thomistic natural law as it pertains to universal moral principles.3 From a traditional natural law perspective there are universal moral principles which suffer no exception—that is, applicable to all, at all times, and in all circumstances. These principles primarily (but not exclusively) concern specific actions which are known as intrinsically evil actions— actions which are always evil regardless of the intention of the one choosing or the circumstances surrounding the choice (VS, #52, 80-82). For Catholics, the foundations of any political community must (at least) rest upon the universal moral truths of the natural law (Evangelium Vitae, #70-71, VS, #95-96, 112-113).4 Without them, society descends into tyranny and/or totalitarianism (EV, #70; VS, #101). It is worthwhile to explore Strauss’s understanding of natural right to see whether or not his treatment of natural right/law in relation to the ancient/modern distinction is of help to Catholics. I will argue that Strauss’s desire to combat historical relativism by returning to ancient natural right includes a rejection of universal moral principles, and therefore the Catholic, who must assent to the natural moral law teaching, can not fully embrace this particular return.