Western Ethics Research Articles

Debts of Gratitude in Cross‐Cultural Perspective: Confucian and Western Ethics

ABSTRACTThis article examines the contrasting conceptions of gratitude in Early Confucian and Western philosophy. It focuses on a key difference: the presence of the notion of ‘debts of gratitude’ in Western thought and its absence in Confucianism. We explore how this difference is rooted in contrasting ethical outlooks and values. Western philosophy often conceives of gratitude as a duty of reciprocation, furthering the values of social equality and individual autonomy. By contrast, Early Confucians viewed gratitude as proper acknowledgement that strengthens social relationships that are part of an ongoing collective project, spanning generations. This view reflects the importance of values such as community, harmony, and ritual propriety in Confucianism. Unlike the Western context, in the Early Confucian social world, there was no role for ‘debts of gratitude’ to play. There were no Confucian values that ‘debts of gratitude’ would help to realize, or would be responsive to, in the way that debts of gratitude further the values of equality and independence in the West. We conclude by noting that some Western philosophers express ideas about gratitude in collaborative contexts that align with Confucian ideas, suggesting some shared elements between Confucian and Western ethical outlooks.

From ontological to relational: A scoping review of conceptions of dignity invoked in deliberations on medically assisted death

BackgroundDignity is omnipresent in Western ethics, but it also provokes dissension and controversy. One of the most striking examples is the debate on medically assisted death, where dignity is invoked to support antagonistic positions. While some authors conclude that the concept is useless as an ethical reference, many others invite us to deepen our analysis from a multidimensional perspective, to enrich it and make it useful. This scoping study is intended to provide an overview of the different conceptions of dignity used in the assisted dying debate, to better grasp the multiple facets of the concept.MethodsThe Joanna Briggs Institute's JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis guided the scoping review. Key words were based on the researchers' expertise and were used to identify relevant literature in French and English. Eleven databases covering the last six decades were consulted. Initially, 2,071 references were found in the databases. After excluding duplicates, screening titles, abstracts, and full texts, and after a specific literature search on the concept of relational dignity, 156 papers were found to match the identified inclusion criteria.ResultsThe literature highlights the stark confrontation between two dominant conceptions of dignity: ontological and autonomist. However, a lesser-known conceptualization of dignity integrates these two perspectives, underlining the relational and social dimensions of dignity. As a result, dignity emerges as a dynamic, experiential, and dialogical concept, that modulates itself according to circumstances. This raises the possibility of breaking through the binary debate and questioning the current frameworks that define dignity.ConclusionsThis multidimensional conceptualization of dignity could lead to a more complete and nuanced understanding of the concept, as well as open richer normative horizons regarding the issue of medically assisted death.

EXPLORING MORAL DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICAL UNDERSTANDING IN CHILDREN WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES: A STUDY OF TEACHING ETHICS AND AKHLAQ IN SPECIAL NEEDS EDUCATION

This study investigates the moral development and comprehension of ethics and akhlaq (moral virtues) in children with learning disabilities, particularly focusing on the influence of educational practices and environmental interactions. Utilizing a sample of 15 primary schoolers from Sekolah Kebangsaan Pendidikan Khas Kuantan, aged 8 to 12 years, with disorders like autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyslexia, the study employs the Piagetian method, children evaluation, and teacher assessments to explore ethical understanding and behavior. The research integrates principles from Islamic teachings, Western ethics, and developmental psychology, particularly drawing on theories from Piaget, Vygotsky, Gardner, and Bandura. Findings reveal nuanced moral perceptions among the children, with their judgments in given scenarios reflecting a combination of autonomous morality and the age-related cognitive shift in understanding actions based on intentions and consequences. The study also highlights the effectiveness of creative and adaptive teaching methods, including psychomotor activities, in enhancing moral understanding in children with learning disabilities. Teacher evaluations indicate the impact of school curriculum and individualized teaching methods on instilling ethical values. Despite its limited sample size and challenges in maintaining a controlled environment, the study provides valuable insights into the moral development of children with learning difficulties, suggesting the need for tailored educational strategies and community involvement in moral education. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of ethical development in special needs education and underscores the importance of considering cognitive, social, and environmental factors in teaching ethics and akhlaq to children with learning disabilities.

Select Source Texts Study on Indian and Western Philosophy

Indian philosophical and Western philosophical texts help us to understand the ethical consciousness of the country. They also emphasis the universal way of life. Universal ethics promotes unity of existence, the divinity of human and harmony of creeds and religion. Human beings are endowed with intelligence using that they can live peacefully. Ethical system insists that human beings can live happily only by living in accordance with moral law which ensure the well-being of the entire humanity. The tradition of Indian ethical texts starting from The Upanisads and Hindu Dharma. The great traditions in western Ethics are highly influential and comparable to traditions in other parts of the world.

Karl Marx’s moral philosophy and critical views of Western morality

This article reflects on Karl Marx’s moral thought, and his critical views of (human) rights, Christianity, Kant, and utilitarianism, and what he considers an alternative. The question of whether we should still take his moral approach seriously in today’s context is also briefly addressed towards the end. This is done partly through the lens of American philosopher Vanessa Wills from The George Washington University, United States of America (US). More specifically, Marx’s view of materialism, human nature, morality, and labour are discussed, after which human nature and certain needs are addressed. This is followed by his view of alienation under capitalism, his arguments for communism, and morality as an objective, universal, and historical phenomenon.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article implies that we cannot afford to lose our grip (and consensus) on what morality is. By critical discussion and comparison of empirical scientific findings on the emergence and nature of morality across, among others, religious and philosophical traditions, we stand a chance to better understand morality and to cooperate more effectively in tackling and solving global challenges.

Western Ethics: Drawing Lessons for Zimbabwe's Contemporary Education

Western Ethics: Drawing Lessons for Zimbabwe's Contemporary Education

Tlacoqualli in Monequi "The Center Good"

Tlacoqualli in Monequi "The Center Good"

Making sense of digital health data: Negotiating epistemological tensions of everyday eating in Singapore

Engagements with personal digital data are growing in recent decades, as many digital technologies offer any interested user the opportunity to track their habits and practices. Yet, far from being objective and neutral conduits of knowledge, digital data is often politicised, invested with particular values, norms, and assumptions about human experiences. Digital health technologies, in particular, are often found to be coded through biomedical understandings of health and the individualism of Western ethics. Such politics of data knowledge inevitably has implications on the ways people in different socio-cultural contexts make sense of their health, bodies, and correspondingly, experience spaces of health through engagements with digital data. Drawing on diaries and diary-interviews with users of digital food-tracking devices in Singapore, this paper develops the idea of ‘epistemological tensions’ to theorise the socio-cultural differences in digital practices beyond the dominant focus on Anglo-American experiences. The findings suggest that people’s engagements with digital health technologies can be experienced as ‘glitchy’ and fraught with epistemological tensions, as they constantly position their healthy eating practices between algorithmic advice offered by these technologies, and the socio-cultural norms of health and eating that they subscribe to. In negotiating such tensions, people are also found to express agency that has spatial and temporal implications on their health practices. In sum, this paper underscores the importance of critically situating, instead of simply scrutinising, everyday geographies of datafication. Doing so can yield more contextually nuanced insight into the potential and limits of digital technologies in mediating health geographies in different social and cultural contexts.

Levinas on the Relationship between Pleasure and the Good

The article discusses the relationship between pleasure and the Good in Levinas’s ethics. Firstly, the paper points out that, for Levinas, pleasure and the Good are both essentially related to sensibility, except that pleasure is concerned with the self-affection of sensibility, and the Good is concerned with the hetero-affection of sensibility. The self-affection of pleasure and enjoyment enables the subject to locate and contract itself, and thus to establish an inner and separated self. Meanwhile, the Good is originated from the hetero-affection of the call of the transcendent Other, and is embodied in an involuntary suffering for the other’s suffering, weakness, and needs. Secondly, the paper argues that the relationship between pleasure and the Good is highly tensional. On the one hand, the Good does interrupt the egoism of life and its pleasure. On the other hand, pleasure actually constitutes a necessary condition for the Good, rather than something that must be rejected. The intersection of pleasure and the Good constitutes an insurmountable and irreducible tension within subjectivity. Finally, the paper places Levinas’s ethics in a dialogue with hedonism, virtue ethics, asceticism, and deontology, and regards Levinas’s ethics as a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between pleasure and the Good in the history of Western ethics.

The Malagasy Ideal of Fihavanana and Western Ethics

This essay explores various ethical dimensions of the important concept of fihavanana and its role in Malagasy ethics. As a first pass, we can say that fihavanana is a state of peace or harmony that people can achieve with others within their communities; it is modeled on the peace, harmony, solidarity, love, and closeness that is often seen in family ties. Understanding the role that fihavanana plays in the traditional ethics of the people of Madagascar does not come close to providing a complete picture of Malagasy ethics, but fihavanana is arguably the most crucial ethical concept for Malagasy. After using Malagasy proverbs (ohabolana) to sketch various ethical dimensions of fihavanana, these dimensions are compared to certain themes from Western ethics. The essay also comments on the state of fihavanana today in Madagascar and draws some lessons to be learned from this important ethical ideal. Directions for further research are sketched throughout the essay.

Analisis Kritik Murtadha Muthahhari Terhadap Konsep Etika Barat

This article contains a comprehensive analysis of Murtadha Mutahhari's critique of the Concept of Western Ethics. Some of the themes discussed in this article are examining the philosophical foundations of Murthada Mutahhari, Murthada Mutahhari's criticism of moral concepts, human rights, and Murthada's criticism of the concept of man in western ethics. To explore these important issues, this research uses library research and character studies. The findings in this study show that sexual ethics in Murtadha Mutahhari's view, that every act that leads humans to perfection is goodness. Second, that the concept of morality criticized by Murtadha Mutahhari is the theory of emotion which states that morality is love, and the theory of intuition which states that moral actions are the result of intuition commands.

The Existentialist Contradiction in David Foster Wallace: How Wallace’s Sociology Illuminates the Contradiction in Wallace’s Ethics

This essay argues that Wallace’s non-fiction presents a sociology that constitutes the foundation of Wallace’s literary project. By tracing the influences of Wallace’s sociology and by contrasting Wallace’s non-fictional works with those of Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Christopher Lasch, this essay provides a necessary contribution to an adequate critique of the foundation of Wallace’s literary ethics. Finally, the analysis proposes that an existentialist contradiction pervades Wallace’s work. This contradiction revolves around the problem of free will, and it characterizes a particularly strong wave of contemporary western ethics.

Doubts about Michael Slote’s Ethics of Empathy and its Responses

Throughout the history of western ethics, there has been a ceaseless debate between rationalism and sentimentalism. The two normative movements which born from the debate have caught our attention. The first one happened in the late 19th century, as represented by Kantian deontology and utilitarianism. Meanwhile, the other one is the revival movement of virtue ethics initiated by Hursthouse, MacIntyre, Michael Slote (Slote), and others, discussing the normativity and rationality of virtue ethics. During the second normative movement of virtue ethics, Slote proposed moral sentimentalism based on the ethics of empathy, which made him the focus on the academic attention. The doubts about the Ethics of Empathy constructed by Slote falls under three aspects, which are the concept of empathy, the process of empathy argumentation, and the reliability of using empathy ethics to answer Hume’s problem. Meticulous research on these doubts and Slote’s responses to them can help us to understand better on the construction of his ethical thoughts, their contributions, and limitations, which the author believes, is essential for the current development of moral sentimentalism.

Entrustment Ethics and Secularism: Taha Abdurrahman’s Perspective

With an ethical-centered philosophy, Taha Abdurrahman remains one of the most significant and sophisticated Arab philosophers of today. This review article seeks to elaborate on two of his recent books, which builds on and compliments his vision of philosophical independence,, particularly his ‘Entrustment Ethics’ (Al-ʾtimāniya). Throughout two volumes, he aims to construct an ethical philosophy on the foundation of faith, as an alternative to Western ethics. In Volume I Abdurrahman establishes his ethical philosophy that is grounded in what he conceives as three Quranic Covenants: Testimony, establishing man’s responsibility before God, Entrustment, establishing man’s duties and responsibilities on earth, and Transmission, introducing an ideal form of conduct through the role model of God’s Prophets and Messengers. The second volume projects Abdurrahman’s theory on Western established ethical theories and Western ethical and political thought in a broader sense, wherein he both illustrates and critiques theories proposed by thinkers, including, inter alia, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Merrihew Adams, Annette Baier, and John Rawls.

When I Was a Boy in Japan

Japanese children in the 1870s and 1880s were offspring of a centuries-old traditional order who faced a world suddenly dominated by foreign science and commerce. As a child in Meiji Japan, Sakae grew up among survivors of the shogunate and observed their samurai culture displaced by Western morals and practices. Meanwhile the traditional values of Japanese life still exerted a strong influence over his family and education and played a large part in shaping his experience, as recounted with charm and tenderness in this simple and reflective reminiscence. Sakae Shioya (1873–1961) attended Tokyo’s First Imperial College and came to the United States in 1901. He earned an M.A. degree from the University of Chicago in 1903 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1906, both in English. He translated works by contemporary Japanese writers, including Rohan Koda and Kenjiro Tokutomi. In addition to this childhood memoir published in 1906, his later works included Chushingura: An Exposition (1940).

Umjerenost u islamskoj i grčkoj tradiciji i etika vrline Kur'ana / Moderation in Greek and Islamic Traditions, and a Virtue Ethics of the Qur’an

This article looks at some of the salient analyses of the concept of wasaṭīyah (moderation) in the ancient Greek and the Islamic traditions and uses them to develop a contemporary view of the matter. Greek ethics played a huge role in shaping the ethical views of Muslim philosophers and theologians, and thus the article starts with an overview of the revival of contemporary western virtue ethics, in many ways an extension of Platonic-Aristotelian ethics, and then looks briefly at the place of moderation or temperance in Platonic-Aristotelian ethics. This sets the stage for an exposition of the position taken by Ibn Miskawayh and al-Ghazali, which is then used as a backdrop for suggesting a revival of the Qur’an’s virtue ethics. After outlining a basis for its virtue ethics, the Qur’anic view of the virtue of wasaṭīyah is discussed briefly and its position on this virtue’s nature in terms of the individual and the community is presented.

Consult Your Heart

In this article, I explore the authority of the heart (qalb) as a potential locus for the individual moral knowledge and normativity in Islamic ethics. To do so, I discuss the two ḥadīths that ostensibly suggest one’s “self” as a source of moral judgment. These ḥadīths raise renewed questions about the sources of moral judgment, the nature of moral judgment and the ethical capacity of the “self” (conscience)—“consult your heart and consult your self …”; “righteousness is good conduct, and sin is that which rankles in your chest and which you would hate for other people to look upon.” There are rich debates in the Islamic tradition on the place and authority of the bāṭin (inward) in generating moral knowledge, which correspond to contemporary discourses in Western ethics on the place of conscience in the moral formation of the individual. In this article, I argue that although Islamic legal tradition as a discipline has focused on qualified external actions of individuals and the ijtihād (independent legal reasoning) of mujtahids (jurists), it did not ignore the authority of the bāṭin for moral assessment and the ijtihād of common individuals. I propose that the inward dimension has always occupied an important space within the interdisciplinary field of Islamic ethics but has been overshadowed by the overarching theological disputes between the Muʿtazilīs and Ashʿarīs over the sources of knowledge. The article starts by exploring the relevant aḥādīth (reports) and their interpretation in ḥadīth commentaries, followed by an analysis of discussions in the fields of Islamic jurisprudence and Sufism.

О специфике обоснования морали в российской философской традиции

Some historians of Russian philosophical thought, relying on the fact that it focuses on moral issues, argue that the problem of justification of morality is as significant, as independent and as thoroughly developed in the Russian philosophical tradition as in Western ethics. Mean­while, an analysis of the main trends and most famous doctrines of Russian religious ethics of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows that justification of morality is present in them only implicitly, not as a solution of a separate theoretical problem. In this regard, the relevance of the analysis of Russian ethical-philosophical thought is to identify and reveal the reasons for this situation, as well as to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the op­tion of defending the moral good, which does not separate the problem of justification of morality from the philosophical search for the foundations of life. The purpose of the article also includes checking the hypothesis that the synthetic discursive strategy used by the leading representatives of the Russian philosophical tradition, relying simultaneously on rational and irrational (super-rational) grounds, provides a more complete moral development of a person than attempts to initiate his transformation on a purely religious basis or to use only rational arguments to prove to the moral skeptic the necessity of transformation into a moral person. Of greatest research interest in this context is Leo Tolstoy’s concept of “reasonable faith”.

Онтологические горизонты этического, или Насколько глубок кризис современной этики

The article analyzes the anomalies observed in various spheres of modern culture, which are interpreted as “ethical failures” and the rejection of the fundamental principles of Western ethics: the principle of justice, fidelity to a given word, stri­ving for the common good, etc. Taking into account the totality of these failures in the sense of “horizontal” and “vertical” prevalence, it is suggested that there are deep ontological changes that entail transformations in the field of ethics. This the­sis is substantiated by an analysis of the structure of an ethical act, which allows us to single out levels of “public” and “ontological” expertise in it, and to see in the ethical act itself a way of establishing “transcendent” (unobservable, absent in the empirical dimension) objects and layers of social reality. Ethics in this case is (by itself) a sphere of ontological creation, a way of establishing legitimate con­figurations, boundaries and goals of social action, including the social identity and subjectivity of individuals. The need to preserve one’s own self and the ability to act meaningfully is considered in the article as the ultimate basis of human social activity and a source of “ethical energy”, which, without external coercion, deter­mines a person to ethical action. Existential involvement in ontological and ethical action determines a close connection between ethics and metaphysics, which is traced in the article on the basis of the most important philosophical concepts and ethnographic material. It is concluded that the cultural transformations analyzed in the article are associated with the use of constructivist impact on the ontological intuitions of Western culture, which, however, do not affect its metaphysical core, and thus only threaten the peripheral layers of Western ontology.

Consult Your Heart

In this article, I explore the authority of the heart (qalb) as a potential locus for the individual moral knowledge and normativity in Islamic ethics. To do so, I discuss the two ḥadīths that ostensibly suggest one’s “self” as a source of moral judgment. These ḥadīths raise renewed questions about the sources of moral judgment, the nature of moral judgement and the ethical capacity of the “self” (conscience) –– “consult your heart and consult your self …”; “righteousness is good conduct, and sin is that which rankles in your chest and which you would hate for other people to look upon.”
 There are rich debates in the Islamic tradition on the place and authority of the bāṭin (inward) in generating moral knowledge, which correspond to contemporary discourses in Western ethics on the place of conscience in the moral formation of the individual. In this article, I argue that although Islamic legal tradition as a discipline has focused on qualified external actions of individuals and the ijtihād (independent legal reasoning) of mujtahids (jurists), it did not ignore the authority of the bāṭin for moral assessment and the ijtihād of common individuals. I propose that the inward dimension has always occupied an important space within the interdisciplinary field of Islamic ethics; but has been overshadowed by the overarching theological disputes between the Muʿtazilīs and Ashʿarīs over the sources of knowledge. 
 The article starts by exploring the relevant aḥādith (reports) and their interpretation in ḥadīth commentaries, followed by an analysis of discussions in the fields of Islamic jurisprudence and Sufism.
 Key words: akhlāq (ethics), ḥadīth, scriptural ethics, moral conscience, heart, self, moral judgemt, al-bāṭin, consult your heart, inspiration (ilhām), ratio legis, Sufīsm.