Ethical Claims Research Articles

WILLIE JONKER SE TEOLOGIESE ETIEK

The theological ethics of Willie JonkerThe article deals with the South African Dutch Reformed theologian W.D. (Willie) Jonker’s (1929-2006) contribution to theological ethics. Three perspectives onhis ethics are developed, viz. foundational, methodological and substantive perspectives. The first relates to his idea that the foundation of ethics is the correlation between doctrine and life. Ethics is the outcome of the reconciliation in Christ as activated by the work of the Spirit, through which the totality of human life in the world is sanctified through the mediation of the life of the church. The second, methodological perspective deals with the relationship between ethics and hermeneutics. Here Jonker’s complex and original work on the grounding of ethical claims on Scripture is discussed, and much attention is paid to his appropriation of Calvin in this regard. The third, substantive perspective deals with an area where Jonker made a distinctly new contribution to theological ethics in Dutch Reformed orientated South Africa during apartheid, viz. the development of a social ethics. This aspect of his work was particularly inspirational for the development of a critical consciousness about apartheid in Dutch Reformed circles sionce the 1980’s. The article is concluded with a couple of critical and evaluative remarks.

The role of financial intermediaries in elite money laundering practices

Purpose – One of the most pervasive economic crimes in the world today is money laundering. It has been estimated that some $2 to $3.6 trillion of hot money is laundered through the financial market each year. Such huge amounts of money cannot be successfully laundered without the involvement of financial intermediaries (such as bankers and lawyers) who used their expertise to conceal and obscure illegal activity. However, broader accounts of the role of financial intermediaries in corrupt practices are relatively scarce. The purpose of this paper is to examine some predatory activities of financial intermediaries in facilitating money laundering practices in Nigeria.Design/methodology/approach – The paper locates the role of financial intermediaries within the sociological theory of profession to argue that these professionals facilitate money laundering despite their professional and ethical claims. The paper uses publicly available evidence to illuminate the role played by financial intermediaries in e...

Facing Ethics: Narrative and Recognition from George Eliot to Judith Butler

In The Burdens of Perfection, Andrew H. Miller suggests that we miss something very important about nineteenth-century fiction if we preemptively equate its ethical claims with a dusty moralism—as ...

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Narratives in teaching and research for justice and human rights

Throughout history individual and collective narratives have been used in struggles for justice. We draw on Sen’s theory of justice to examine the potential of narratives in teaching and researching for social justice. Human rights are presented as powerful ethical claims that can be critically examined by learners to consider their rights and responsibilities to others, at scales from the local to the global. One life history is used as an illustrative example to examine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 and its possible meanings for learners in China and globally. This article discusses the strengths and limitations of narratives as research and pedagogical tools in understanding justice, human rights and inequalities; in stimulating solidarity and our common humanity; and in enabling learners to explore their multiple identities. We conclude by making the case for human rights as principles for learning and living together in overlapping communities of fate.

Communicating Ethical Arguments to Organic Consumers: A Study Across Five European Countries

Additional ethical claims were tested with mock organic egg labels in five EU countries. The attitudes towards the advertising labels were assessed by multiple copy testing measures. A total of 156 individual responses were analysed. The study confirms the difficulty of conducting advertising research in a multicultural fram ework, and shows that additional local/ regional claims can reinforce the appeal of organic products .

Roots, Rites and Sites of Resistance: The Banality of Good

Whilst the condition of a damaged ethical life has received due scholarly attention to date, only rarely is resistance to it conceived as an actual possibility with the potential of real effects on a macro-social scale. This is not just a curious lacuna in the literature. To ignore or miss concrete possibilities or even instances of resistance is to reinforce the apparent naturalness and inevitability of structures of injustice. The aim of this edited collection is to help address this epistemological neglect, exploring the multiplicity of motives, presuppositions, sites, ways, and consequences of acts of resistance. As shown in the ensuing contributions, resistance can be recalcitrant or transformative in its aims, discursive or physical in its means, and local or generalized in its loci. If there is a single argument that can be distilled, it is that the emergence of progressive resistance entails the incessant rational critique of so-styled 'common sense' and prevalent ethical claims–a process which could be called 'the banality of good'.

Animating community supported agriculture in North East England: Striving for a ‘caring practice’

This paper draws on a case study of a new Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme in the north of England to draw attention to some of the ethical issues encountered when using a participatory action research approach to animating CSA. Both CSA and participatory action research have been associated with the concept of ‘caring practice’ and an ‘ethic of care’. CSAs can be conceptualised as attempts to engage with ethical issues in the food system. Action research is also a value laden approach. The case study illustrates how the complexities of conducting this type of research leads to many instances of having to make ethical choices and claims that these decisions are helpfully framed by Warren’s (1999) claim that these choices should aim to result in ‘care practices’. Similar dilemmas and choices will arise in other contexts and require situated negotiation and decision making. Focussing on caring practice may help to construct a rationale for consistent choices.

Old Questions in New Boxes: Mia Kirshner's I Live Here and the Problematics of Transnational Witnessing

Old Questions in New Boxes: Mia Kirshner's I Live Here and the Problematics of Transnational Witnessing Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg (bio) and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (bio) Symbolized in Amnesty International's candle illuminating the darkness, the rhetoric of exposure has long been a central trope of humanitarian discourse: the promise of revelation presumes that egregious violations are otherwise secret and that, in Thomas Keenan's words, "those agents whose behavior it wishes to affect—governments, armies, businesses, and militias—are exposed in some significant way to the force of public opinion, and that they are (psychically or emotionally) structured like individuals in a strong social or cultural context that renders them vulnerable to feelings of dishonor, embarrassment, disgrace, or ignominy." 1 Despite the implausibility of these conditions, as well as the dangers of oversaturation, "mass and especially the image-based media" have only accentuated the ostensible self-evidence of this approach. 2 The rhetoric of exposure posits a liberal subject as its addressee who is ready and willing to respond to humanitarian appeals constructed through an "aesthetics of suffering," particularly in the form of indignation-inducing shock or the representation of victims who are "deserving" of aid or assistance. 3 Such familiar humanitarian narratives comprise, as Lilie Chouliaraki writes, "rhetorical practices of transnational actors that engage with universal ethical claims, such as common humanity or global civil society, to mobilize action on human suffering." 4 In her recent scholarship, Chouliaraki traces the contemporary movement from these rhetorical practices to a new "post-humanitarian sensibility"—one she locates explicitly in mixed-media humanitarian appeals—that "breaks with [the emotional repertoire of] pity and privileges a short-term and low-intensity form of agency, which is no longer inspired by an intellectual agenda but momentarily engages us in practices of playful consumerism." 5 The humanitarian rhetorics she identifies at both poles, whether based on shared sentiment "in a moral economy of abundance, an economy where everyone can, in principle, feel for and act on distant suffering in an unrestricted manner" or appeals operating in an "economy of scarcity" and through the "individual judgment" of the consumer, pose particular challenges for a transnational feminist approach to gender-based rights violations. 6 We turn to a case study of the Canadian actress and self-styled activist Mia Kirshner's multimedia project I Live Here to illuminate both the contradictions and the potential embedded in its construction of transnational subjects and addressees, as well as to resist the collapse of "transnational" into a presumed universalism of either [End Page 233] capitalist or post-Enlightenment humanitarian sensibilities. Executed with support from Amnesty International and linked to a website featuring book sales, short videos, fan art, and descriptions of ongoing projects, I Live Here encourages consumption of its diverse texts "revealing secret lives" as a means of raising awareness and mobilizing public opinion against the violations it chronicles. 7 The project is presented in a whitewashed box which folds out to reveal one eighty-four-page "notebook" in each of its four pockets, each claiming to bear witness to the experiences of people living in a distinct region in the grip of a distinct human rights or humanitarian crisis. The goal of our inquiry into I Live Here is to further ongoing intellectual conversations about the potential for literary and cultural texts to ethically advance the emancipatory and progressive aspects of global human rights claims and cultures—and about the risks that they may instead remain aestheticized commodities, nourishing the neo-imperialist global capitalism that is so profoundly implicated in conditions enabling both civil and political rights violations and economic deprivations and abuses. In an essay on the "geopolitical rhetorics" of human rights responses to the global sex trade, Wendy Hesford examines the trope of exposure and argues that campaigns based on that trope "overlook the rhetorical-geopolitical dimensions of identity and identification practices produced by the contradictions of transnationality." 8 We extend Hesford's argument in order to decipher the transnational address of I Live Here at our particular historical moment. The text, which depicts women's vulnerability, sexual abuses, and sex work in Chechnya/Ingushetia, Burma, Ciudad Juárez, and Malawi, begins with the statement...

Geography and ethics

Discussions of ethics in recent human geography have been strongly inflected by readings of so-called ‘Continental Philosophy’. The ascendancy of this style of theorizing is marked by a tendency to stake ethical claims on ontological assertions, which effectively close down serious consideration of the problem of normativity in social science. Recent work on practical reason emerging from so-called ‘Analytical’ philosophy presents a series of challenges to how geographers approach the relationships between space, ethics, and power. This work revolves around attempts to displace long-standing dualisms between naturalism and normativity, by blurring boundaries between forms of action and knowledge which belong to a ‘space of causality’ and those that are placed in a ‘space of reasons’. The relevance of this blurring to geography is illustrated by reference to recent debates about the relationships between rationality and habit in unreflective action. Ongoing developments in this tradition of philosophy provide resources for strengthening a nascent strand of work on the geographies of practical reason that is evident in work on ethnomethodology, behaviour change, and geographies of action.

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

Biznes, kryzys, etyka. Zło gospodarcze jako przedmiot nazywania

Facing the economic crisis (began in 2007) managers and political leaders pay more attention to the postulate of socially responsible business. The axiological turn gives new possibilities to implement ethical standards in the sphere of economy. Alas, at the same time, this task evokes the following problems. Firstly, as social researchers, we need to know how to compose heterogeneous axiological systems (to join rules of ethics with the imperative of economic efficiency). Secondly, as market participants, we have to find the formula of mutual understanding (being seen as precondition of our ethical claims).

On the advantage and disadvantage of educational monitoring in a federal system

In Germany, monitoring of the education system (“Bildungsmonitoring”) has become an element of a comprehensive system of quality development and safeguarding standards. The German federal states commit themselves to a joint program of transparency by making the working conditions and achievement of educational institutions as well as effects of education policy visible to the general public. But this is not the specific historical peculiarity of the situation in a federal system. Rather, the outrageous development of the German community of federal states is the introduction of a new governance system in a concerted action since the 1990s. The contribution sketches at first some central features of monitoring of the education system and presents a critical analysis of its nature as systemic monitoring. The second part presents dilemmas that accompany the implementation of monitoring in a federal system. The last chapter discusses the problem if the normative demands that monitoring imposes on educational institutions opens up the expectation that the monitoring systems themselves are monitored with the same ethical claims: that they are integrated in an ethical concept of responsibility.

Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes in the Life of the Body Politic, Literature and Philosophy around 1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes in the Life of the Body Politic, Literature and Philosophy around 1800 Thomas L. Cooksey Diana K. Reese, Reproducing Enlightenment: Paradoxes in the Life of the Body Politic, Literature and Philosophy around 1800. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. vii + 183 pp. 1800 broadly marks a significant transition with regard to the concept of the human, emerging from the problematic relationship between the Enlightenment’s identity of the body as the “self-evident” object of the self and the contingencies of cultural and historical change, the relationship between being and being-intime. Who or what is the subject of rights and emancipation? The result is an uneasy tension between two bodies: the idealized human one and the particular, contingent, present one. For Diana K. Reese, this problematic at the heart of the Enlightenment project is particularly evident in the category of reproduction, both in the sense of biology and in the sense of cultural transmission: how do subjects seeking rights in an initial state of inequality “inherit” them? How does Enlightenment liberation grow? Drawing on a hint in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, she is concerned with the “reproduction of enlightenment,” which she characterizes as “a kind of alien birth” (6) in which the demythologizing project of the Enlightenment reproduces itself as myth. Reese explores this problematic of reproduction in relation to three texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, Ein Trauerspiel, the latter of which she juxtaposes with Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and with Schiller. Eschewing the conventional reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in terms of a Faustian quest of knowledge or man becoming god, Reese focuses on the paradoxes of man becoming man. In this she sees Shelley responding to the Enlightenment projects in the form of Rousseau’s declaration of the rights of man and to Kant’s conception of the moral agent as rational being. Frankenstein’s creation, frequently referred to by Shelley as his “daemon,” a being that falls between the categories of man and god, challenges what is implied by the term “human” and [End Page 322] the ethical claims associated with human rights. The complexities of Shelley’s position are most evident when framed in terms of reproduction. The creature is a rational being that is both outside of nature and yet the product of nature. In the problem of reproduction he challenges the usual self-evident notions of humanness. In this literary production, he is unique, yet by virtue of this uniqueness, universal, since he represents the only instance of his species. At the same time, in requesting a mate, he demands the right to reproduce, to form a community of his kind. On one hand, the creature represents the idealized human, an autonomous being claiming liberation, yet on the other a (would-be) citizen, demanding rights. Reese treats Kant’s Critique of Judgment as an important transitional work in which Kant struggles to negotiate the paradoxes of being in becoming. Kant argues that judgment is contingent on the temporality of the subject, even as judgment seeks to transcend time in the universal. For Kant this move in time toward universality is the basis for how beings understand and represent themselves. The result, again, is a problematic double body: the singular rational agent as an end-in-himself and the reproducing agent in history open to the possibilities of contingency. This open-endedness potentially subverts the possibility of any universality, thereby foreclosing self-comprehension. Reese compares this with modern poetics, specifically its propensity to undercut the claims of universality by opening the polyphony of language and the reproduction of meanings to the reader. Reese’s treatment of Kleist’s Penthesilea is her most stimulating chapter, drawing on the paradoxes foregrounded in her discussions of Shelley and Kant. The eponymous heroine resists the various attempts to conceptualize her. Her presence is given, but Kleist constantly subverts any representation of her in language or harmonization of her with nature. In this way Kleist destabilizes the universalizing goals of Weimar classicism. There nature existed as an idea that joined the ideal with the real...

Speaking for Oneself: Wittgenstein on Ethics

In the “Lecture on ethics”, Wittgenstein declares that ethical statements are essentially nonsense. He later told Friedrich Waismann that it is essential to “speak for oneself” on ethical matters. These comments might be taken to suggest that Wittgenstein shared an emotivist view of ethics—that one can only speak for oneself because there is no truth in ethics, only expressions of opinion (or emotions). I argue that this assimilation of Wittgenstein to emotivist thought is deeply misguided, and rests upon a serious misunderstanding of what is implied by the nonsensicality of ethical claims on Wittgenstein's view. I develop a reading of Wittgenstein's remarks in the “Lecture on ethics” on which ethical statements, despite their nonsensicality, reveal the perspective of the speaker. The purpose of ethical language is to elucidate a speaker's perspective. Such elucidations, and the perspectives they reveal, can be evaluated, criticized, and respected on principled grounds even if, as Wittgenstein insists, no ethical judgment can be (objectively) justified by any fact. I contrast Wittgenstein's comments on ethics with some comments made by Frank Ramsey (from the same period), which appear similar to Wittgenstein's remarks on value. Contra Ramsey's insistence that there is “nothing to discuss” about (or within) ethics, a proper understanding of Wittgenstein's views does not commit us to passing over ethics in silence.

The Narrow Application of Rawls in Business Ethics: A Political Conception of Both Stakeholder Theory and the Morality of Markets

This paper argues that Rawls’ principles of justice provide a normative foundation for stakeholder theory. The principles articulate (at an abstract level) citizens’ rights; these rights create interests across all aspects of society, including in the space of economic activity; and therefore, stakeholders – as citizens – have legitimate interests in the space of economic activity. This approach to stakeholder theory suggests a political interpretation of Boatright’s Moral Market approach, one that emphasizes the rights/place of citizens. And this approach to stakeholder theory – in terms of citizens – raises a further question, what rights and obligations do economic agents have, beyond those attached to their roles as citizens? Rawls would reject additional rights and obligations of this sort for two reasons, one tied to freedom and one tied to pluralism. Rawls’ work therefore presses us to re-conceptualize the place of ethical claims in the economic context.

Immoral authorities: crusades, jihād and just war rhetoric

This paper highlights the relevance of moral authority, and the role that egoistic ethical claims have in waging war. This is done, in view of the just war tradition, by drawing a parallel between the crusades in the ‘kingdom of heaven’ proclaimed in 1095, and the present Islamic jihād, as well as the Bush administration's declaration of a war on terror. It maintains that the role of self-legitimized leaders is crucial in shaping the order of the jus ad bellum criteria, in both Christian and Muslim societies, and that the indiscriminate usage of just war rhetoric proves to be a formidable weapon. Moral authority is described as a power resource, capable of capsizing the relevance of ethics, subjecting the interpretation of justice to declare war to the self-proclaimed authorities, and moving masses on the grounds of enthusiasm.

Designing Wonder: Complexity Made Simple or the Wii-Mote’s Galilean Edge

This article considers the Nintendo Wii console’s negotiation of tensions accruing in contemporary developments around “nice work,” “affective labor,” and “hyperindustrialism.” Learning and play have long been considered to “begin in wonder.” Observing that appliances made for us to “enjoy labor,” as one adversary in a recent Nintendo Wii title puts it, have a history, I show that hyperindustrial recreational appliances like the Wii design wonder for learning and play by deploying gestural-technical stylistics first prototyped in human-computer interaction design research. I apply ten stylistics of gestural interaction design to the Wii in order to articulate its differences from other interactive educational, recreational, and health devices. I conclude that the Wii increases bandwidth for player action with two distinct effects. First, it orients “wonder” as gestural-technical conduct, making an ethical claim to differentiate contemporary play and work, while, second, projecting an unprogrammed “signature effect” extended in a range of modifications by researchers and amateurs alike.

"No insignificant creature": Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn

Elisha Cohn, "'No insignificant creature': Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn" (pp. 494–520) This essay examines the limitations of ethically motivated representations of animals in Victorian realism. As many critics have argued, evolutionary theory's challenge to human supremacy had the potential to alter radically literature's focus on individual subjectivity and social ideals. In particular, the new relevance of animals to human life threatened to deflate the human moral ideals. The treatment of animals in Victorian literature is rarely interpreted as exploring evolution's radically anti-humanist implications. More often, animals are thought to function as objects of sympathy in a larger project of constructing middle-class subjectivity. As i argue, it is important to account for the relationship between the sympathetic and the anti-humanist representation of animals in Victorian works. The changing role of animals in Thomas Hardy's works highlights the disconnect between the radical implications that critics see in evolutionist thought and the way in which animals in Victorian writings are usually construed as objects of sympathy. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) places these two approaches in conversation by shifting emphasis from a destabilizing lyricism associated with human-animal affinity to a more distanced narrative stance associated with human autonomy, sympathy, responsibility, and critique. Examining how Hardy grounds his ethically motivated expectations of stable human agency after having seemingly dispensed with them suggests the need for a distinction between a lyrical, evolutionist aesthetic and an ethical aesthetic. This approach also offers insight into the enabling conditions—and limitations—shaping sympathetic agency in defense of animal lives. In examining the intersections between Hardy's work and recent approaches to theories of animality, particularly those based on Gilles Deleuze's concept of becoming-animal, Tess helps us to rethink the theory, to understand why ethical claims require boundaries between species, and on what basis these boundaries can be legitimated.

Remembering the Body: Eighteenth-Century Elocution and the Oral Tradition

Abstract: This article revisits eighteenth-century elocutionists Thomas Sheridan and John Walker by examining their work in two contexts: 1) classical imitation and oral reading traditions that engaged the body and emotions; and 2) early modern views of the faculties, particularly the faculties of the imagination and taste. These contexts, I argue, are essential to understanding the social and ethical claims the elocutionists made to support the revival of elocution and to understanding how they perceived their own practices.