Moral Discernment Research Articles

Rationality in the Qur'an: Integrating Reason and Revelation for Contemporary Islamic Education

Scholars explore the concept of rationality from various angles, often associating it with thinking that transcends divine considerations. In these debates, some academics have positioned themselves against the Quran, questioning its consistency with rational thought—however, many scholars argue that the Quran addresses subjects metaphysically, harmonizing reason and revelation. A detailed examination reveals numerous verses advocating reasoning, critical thinking, and empirical analysis. These verses invite believers to reflect on natural phenomena, historical events, and ethical dilemmas, underscoring the Quran's emphasis on intellectual engagement and moral discernment. This paper elucidates the Quran's nuanced approach to rationality by analyzing over five dozen Quranic verses that directly or indirectly discuss the nature and application of reason. Using Islamic research methodologies, it highlights the balance between reason and spirituality, showing that rational thinking is integral to Quranic teachings. This study addresses skeptical or misleading criticisms, affirming that the Quran integrates reason and revelation to offer a comprehensive intellectual and spiritual development framework. Future research should examine how Quranic rationality informs contemporary Islamic thought and practice, especially concerning modern scientific and ethical challenges. Comparative studies between Quranic perspectives on rationality and other philosophical or religious traditions are also recommended to foster interfaith and intercultural understanding.

EXPLORING COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE WISDOM IN C. S. LEWIS' CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: INSIGHTS INTO THOUGHT AND EMOTION

This qualitative study offers a comprehensive exploration of the complex wisdom embodied by Aslan, the central figure in C.S. Lewis's celebrated work, The Chronicles of Narnia. Grounded in Sternberg’s balance theory of wisdom, this research investigates both the cognitive and affective dimensions of Aslan's wisdom. Employing Creswell's thematic analysis approach, we closely examine Aslan's character to reveal a range of attributes that underpin his wisdom. Findings indicate that Aslan’s cognitive wisdom encompasses a profound understanding, strategic foresight, empathy, moral discernment, and a balanced response to adversity. These elements underscore his deep insight and the capacity to navigate complex moral landscapes. Moreover, his affective wisdom emerges through his compassion, bravery, and moral leadership, as he guides Narnia’s inhabitants. Through his actions, speech, and interactions, Aslan exemplifies an understanding of emotions, human connection, and the transformative impact of love and forgiveness. This study contributes to a deeper appreciation of wisdom as portrayed in literary narratives, illustrating how Aslan’s character models an integrated, multifaceted concept of wisdom.

Psychometric Test for Medical Consultancy System

Abstract: Preliminary investigations delve into the possibility of employing chatbots in psychiatric therapy to aid behavior modification through assessments and chatbot interventions. Nevertheless, these platforms overlook the mental conditions of users, neglecting interviews, continuous surveillance, or ethical factors. We propose that enhancing emotion detection could boost user contentment among individuals seeking mental health assistance. Our suggestion encompasses an interactive psychiatric counseling service employing sophisticated natural language comprehension and multimodal emotion detection. This method permits ongoing and delicate observation of emotional fluctuations. Moreover, an instance-oriented reaction model, integrating moral discernment, facilitates suitable clinical reactions in psychiatric consultations.

Complicating Conversations: English Anglican Perspectives on Abortion

The question at the heart of the matter of abortion is who has the moral authority to decide whether, and under what circumstances, it is ethically justifiable for an abortion to be carried out. Public moral discourse about abortion rests moral authority in one of two poles—either legislators and/or medical professionals or the pregnant person. This article attempts to complicate this discourse through the English Anglican approach of moral discernment through conversation via the work of Rowan Williams. We offer an exploration of this approach whilst retaining first-person authority before turning to relational models of understanding pregnancy to demonstrate the potential of such a mode of moral discernment. Finally, we turn to Catherine Keller to articulate a vision of bodies as always in dialogue in order to argue that moral discernment through conversation might be particularly ontologically suitable for human beings.

Power, Possibility, and Personal Agency: What Should Ethics Know of Sin?

One striking feature of apocalyptic readings of Paul—and the Protestant dogmatics that follows after such a Paulinism—is the ‘widescreen’ portrayal of Sin as Power. This account stresses the ‘three-agent drama’ of salvation and the bondage of human persons to anti-God forces. It resists moralising interpretations of human sins in favour of a starker moral cosmology. In this way, it seems to leave ‘ethics’ and ‘freedom’ in suspension. Contrast the approach of the moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan. Here, sin is a case study in the difference of perspectives between dogmatics and ethics. Dogmatics, ‘making sin exceedingly sinful, quickly resorts to apocalyptic largeness of scale’. Ethics is concerned instead with ‘possible’ sins. It describes sin in phenomenological rather than ultimate terms—something to be avoided in the next moment of free agency. This article distils the theological commitments each intends to secure, observes what each risks, and seeks to determine what is at stake. It draws them together in a synthetic moral ontology, but also looks further, to an integrative account that can inform moral discernment. To this end, the final section observes how subsequent work in Pauline studies converges with discussions about structural sin in Catholic social thought.

The Secularisation of Conscience: A Natural Law Critique

The modern conception of a ‘secular conscience’ is at one time, both paradoxical and reductive. This phenomenon is attributable to two main factors. In the formal sense, the problem stems from a facile or partial invocation of the term, a result of the fragmentation of its multiple referents. In a substantive sense, the loss of conscience’s explanatory power is a direct result of removing moral structures that underpin traditional formulations of the concept. Historically, conscience has been a necessary component of moral epistemologies. As the innate mechanism for moral discernment, conscience existed as a core part of practical reasoning. In this backdrop, one of secularism’s most profound implications has been to shift conscience’s emphasis away from notions of ‘higher responsibility’ to ‘individual authenticity’. To make sense of this shift, the present article begins by considering the process of ‘secularisation’. Harold Berman defines ‘secularisation’ as the steady displacement of existing normative foundations. The article goes on to trace the etymological development of conscience as a concept and its historical link to moral agency. An examination of traditional normative structures follows, as represented by two seminal accounts of conscience in Western natural law tradition, namely those of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. Notwithstanding the variations in emphases due to denominational differences, both these natural law accounts offer a coherent normative outlook, adequate to sustain an integrated concept of conscience. The article ultimately seeks to critique the explanatory potential of modern accounts of conscience by exposing the ontological predicates of secular-rational modalities from the natural law perspective.

Ethical Issues in Near-Future Socially Supportive Smart Assistants for Older Adults

This paper considers novel ethical issues pertaining to near-future artificial intelligence (AI) systems that seek to support, maintain, or enhance the capabilities of older adults as they age and experience cognitive decline. In particular, we focus on smart assistants (SAs) that would seek to provide proactive assistance and mediate social interactions between users and other members of their social or support networks. Such systems would potentially have significant utility for users and their caregivers if they could reduce the cognitive load for tasks that help older adults maintain their autonomy and independence. However, proactively supporting even simple tasks, such as providing the user with a summary of a meeting or a conversation, would require a future SA to engage with ethical aspects of human interactions which computational systems currently have difficulty identifying, tracking, and navigating. If SAs fail to perceive ethically relevant aspects of social interactions, the resulting deficit in moral discernment would threaten important aspects of user autonomy and well-being. After describing the dynamic that generates these ethical challenges, we note how simple strategies for prompting user oversight of such systems might also undermine their utility. We conclude by considering how near-future SAs could exacerbate current worries about privacy, commodification of users, trust calibration and injustice.

Against the Anglican ‘Conscience’: The Analytical Tool from Churches and Moral Discernment Applied to the Discussions About Homosexuality at the Lambeth Conferences 1978–2022

Abstract In the recently published document Churches and Moral Discernment the Faith and Order Commission of the wcc offers an analytical tool for moral discernment processes and introduces the concept of the ‘conscience’ of the Church. Applying this tool to the moral discernment processes in the Anglican Communion leading up to the 1998 Lambeth Conference and its Resolution I.10 ‘Human Sexuality’ indicates that the moral discernment processes did not reflect the Anglican ‘conscience’, i.e. the inherited understanding of moral norms and authority. This led to the Resolution being divisive rather than uniting. The success of the 2022 Lambeth Conference in mending these division needs to be followed up by the commencement of a renewed discernment process. But it is also possible that the Anglican ‘conscience’ has changed in parts of the Communion, which would pose new challenges for the instruments of communion.

Passion, Reasons and the Virtues as Perfecting Habits

According to the spontaneity view of the role of the passions in moral deliberation, Aquinas holds that virtuous passions play an active role in moral deliberation, prior to the formation of moral judgement and choice. This article offers a qualified defense of this view. Qualified, because critics of this view are right to point out that Aquinas is generally suspicious of the passions, and he is careful to delimit the role that they can plan in processes of moral deliberation and choice. A defense, nonetheless, because Aquinas does give a positive role to virtuous passions in the early stages of moral discernment and deliberation, prior to judgement. Furthermore, Aquinas has strong reasons to defend something like the spontaneity view, given his overall view of the virtues as perfections of the powers they inform. That in itself does not necessarily mean that he does defend the spontaneity view, but it does suggest that we can develop such a defense out of what he does say, in such a way as to extend and clarify central elements of his moral theory.

Nathan S. French. A Theocentric Interpretation of :הדעת טוב ורע The Knowledge of Good and Evil as the Knowledge for Administering Reward and Punishment

Nathan S. French. <i>A Theocentric Interpretation of :הדעת טוב ורע The Knowledge of Good and Evil as the Knowledge for Administering Reward and Punishment</i>

Learning to Deal with Disagreement on Ethical Issues

AbstractThis article deals with a new study document, Churches and Moral Discernment: Facilitating Dialogue to Build Koinonia, adopted by the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches in 2021. This document addresses basic issues of moral discernment in ecumenical relations and seeks to spell out how churches can deal constructively with disagreement on ethical issues. Such disagreement can lead to tensions that threaten division within churches and can become a burden in ecumenical cooperation between churches. Underlying the specific ethical questions and the complexity of church relations is often the question of the place and self‐understanding of churches in their specific society at a specific time. Thus, it is a question about dealing with the historicity of the public witness of the churches and their reference and relationship to the world. This touches not only on fundamental questions of ethics, but also on the understanding of the church and of ecumenism.

Luke Timothy Johnson. Interpreting Paul. Volume 2 of The Canonical Paul.

This is the second in Johnson’s two-volume treatment of Paul and his letters, following up on Constructing Paul (2020), which covered matters of introduction to the study of Paul. In this sequel, Johnson demonstrates how his approach operates when applied to specific letters. The volume contains 23 discrete studies, 13 of which were previously published, along with a brief introduction, conclusion, bibliography and indexes (authors, subjects, and sources). Each study focuses on a particular canonical Pauline, or cluster, with the result that every canonical letter except Philemon is covered at least once. That said, this is not a systematic treatment of Paul’s letters or theology, but a selection of Johnson’s work showing a master exegete and pastoral teacher at work “interpreting Paul.” Rather than review the table of contents (which readers can easily find online), I will highlight a few central and recurring elements of this collection.As might be expected in such a collection, new ground is not being plowed, but important paths are being showcased. Thus, Johnson’s well-known advocacy for the full 13-letter Pauline canon, and rejection of the “authentic” or “disputed” distinction, makes repeated appearance. What becomes clear is the exegetical, theological, and practical payoff of such an approach. For those of us trained to minimize or ignore these “disputed” letters, Johnson provides a rich buffet when they are allowed into the discussion. Thus, in one of the new essays, Johnson unfolds Paul’s cosmic and “utopian” ecclesiology in Ephesians.Also making repeated appearance, and showing how central it is for Johnson’s reconstruction, is the “politics of perfection,” laid out clearly in the reprinted “Ritual Imprinting” essay on Galatians/Colossians and in the new essay on “Mystery and Metaphor in Colossians.” The demand for Gentile circumcision is driven less by Jewish Torah concerns (“Judaizing” traditionally and in the New Perspective); rather it is part of a broad quest for perfection seen in mysteries, Hellenistic religiosity and in Hellenistic Judaism. Circumcision is being urged as another ritual step for Gentiles, taking them further on this quest than their initial baptism and faith in Christ have secured. The driving issue is not “becoming Jewish” but “becoming perfect.”A deconstructive thread also runs throughout the essays. The less-enamored might call this iconoclastic or idiosyncratic, but Johnson is out to break the “long academic captivity” of the church, and reclaim the Bible as the church’s book. Thus, academic discussions are not permitted to set the agenda. This gives to Johnson’s essays a freshness and first-hand engagement with the texts themselves, often leading the reader to think, “now why didn’t I see that?” As one who also teaches budding pastors and theologians, I found this equally dangerous and promising. The promise is the delight of reengagement with Scripture itself. The danger, of course, is that without Johnson’s obvious mastery of the academic discussion, the student too easily takes pride in “new” discoveries that are neither new nor helpful.The other thread worth highlighting is Johnson’s attention to the living voice of Scripture. The Bible is not merely an ancient text on which we can apply textual, historical, rhetorical and other critical methods (though Johnson regularly shows the continued importance of these skills). Paul’s letters speak to current issues. For example, Johnson focuses numerous times, and across a variety of letters, on phronēsis or habitual dispositions of moral discernment. This he opposes to heteronomy, or reliance on law. (On a critical note, Johnson’s contrast of moral discernment versus rule-keeping struck me as tending toward caricature of ancient Judaism’s use of Torah.) Paul’s guidance on how to apply holiness, edification, and discernment to specific questions can then be made fruitful for guiding congregations today in discovering how to address issues of race, sexuality, consumerism, and so on. Johnson demonstrates how one might go about this in his new essays on 1 Thessalonians and Titus.In such a wide-ranging collection there is much more that I have not covered, both that which may irritate and that which may delight. I can imagine this volume, or individual essays from it, being used profitably to guide seminarians and advanced undergraduate students in the responsible interpretation and pastoral use of Paul’s letters.

The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

<i>The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century</i>. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

The Resurrection and Unborn Beings: The Seeds of a Materialist Emergence Proposal

This article looks at how two apparently unrelated issues—the afterlife and reproductive loss—turn out to be interrelated in complex theological and ethical ways. Eschatology is important to address, because how one thinks about resurrected bodies in the afterlife has implications for how one treats bodies that procreate in this life. Rethinking the notion of personhood lies at the heart of clarifying the nature of the resurrection. This article presents a theological anthropology that draws from the recent philosophical theory known as emergence. This theory allows us to conceptualize the resurrection of the “spiritual body” as a divinely initiated organic process that begins from a “bare seed” at death (1 Cor 15:44, 37). I hope to demonstrate that an emergence model of the resurrection both speaks to those grieving reproductive loss and also avoids eclipsing women’s exercise of moral discernment in reproductive matters.

Facilitating Dialogue to Build koinonia: A Study Document on Churches and Moral Discernment by the Faith and Order Commission

Abstract Current tensions within and between churches often result from disagreements over moral issues. The WCC Commission on Faith and Order took up the task to assist the churches in finding a way to deepen mutual understanding leading to dialogue. It published the 2021 study document Churches and Moral Discernment: Facilitating Dialogue to Build koinonia. In this contribution, the author provides insights into the background of and process leading to the study document and explains its content.

Les choix moraux du psychopathe sous le prisme de la théorie de l’identité morale

Les choix moraux du psychopathe sous le prisme de la théorie de l’identité morale

The Catholic Moral Tradition, Conscience, and the Practice of Medicine

Abstract One contested moral commitment shared by the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Nurses Association (ANA) has to do with the place of conscience in the practice of medicine. These organizations, each in their own way, urge their respective members to engage in careful moral discernment regarding their professional life, and they assert the existence of an obligation on the part of others to respect the conscientious objections of healthcare professionals and to accommodate objecting individuals. Yet despite the value that these organizations place on conscience and objector rights, these organizations do not offer elaborate philosophical defenses of their positions. This shortcoming is exposed by the light of contemporary philosophical challenges to conscience-friendly policies. What such challenges demand is a philosophical defense of these organizations’ moral commitments and corresponding policy recommendations. The point of this article is to indicate how the Catholic philosophical tradition’s account of the nature and importance of conscience can philosophically underwrite these organizations’ conscience-related principles and practices. It can be seen, then, that the Catholic tradition is far from inimical to the contemporary practice of medicine and that, on the contrary, this tradition offers philosophically serious grounds on which to rest (and from which to defend) some of the most morally significant values and guidelines endorsed by these contemporary health-professional organizations and their members.

Reading Samaritanus bonus in Light of Magisterial Teaching and Recent Papal Writings

On July 14, 2020, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued Samaritanus bonus (The Good Samaritan), beckoning the human family to take the Good Samaritan as the ideal in the care of all persons in critical and terminal phases of their lives. The import of this letter is understood best as seen through three prisms: (1) Fratelli tutti, the encyclical of Pope Francis signed at Assisi on October 3, 2020; (2) the Declaration on Euthanasia issued by the CDF in 1980; and (3) “the remarkable progressive development of biomedical technologies [which] has exponentially enlarged the clinical proficiency of diagnostic medicine in patient care and treatment [which] call for growth in moral discernment to avoid an unbalanced and dehumanizing use of the technologies especially in the critical or terminal stages of human life” (CDF, Declaration on Euthanasia, intro)

From Quandary Cases to Ordinary Life: New Opportunities to Connect Social Ethics and Health Care Ethics

In Christian bioethics, the call for a greater integration of social ethics and medical ethics is a popular refrain, yet lasting progress toward this goal has been elusive, in part due to the traditional emphasis on quandary cases in medical ethics. This article develops an alternative approach to moral discernment in health care, employing a theological interpretation of solidarity to promote greater social consciousness in ordinary health care decision making. This shifts the ethical analysis from abstract scenarios to everyday choices, elevating the moral significance of seemingly mundane concerns like antibiotic use and diet and exercise.

Mental Illness and Moral Discernment: A Clinical Psychiatric Perspective

As a contribution to a wider discussion on moral discernment in theological anthropology, this paper seeks to answer the question “What is the impact of mental illness on an individual’s ability to make moral decisions?” Written from a clinical psychiatric perspective, it considers recent contributions from psychology, neuropsychology and imaging technology. It notes that the popular conception that mental illness necessarily robs an individual of moral responsibility is largely unfounded. Most people who suffer from mental health problems do not lose the capacity to make moral decisions, and mental illness on its own rarely explains anti-social or criminal behaviour. Moreover, the assumptions of some scientists, that recent developments in neuropsychology and brain imaging suggest biological determinism, must be treated with caution.