Fundamental Issues in Christian Ethics
Fundamental issues raised in defining Christian ethics, delineating its sources and methods, developing normative theories, and analyzing processes of moral decision-making.
Outcomes: A deep level of understanding and of critical thinking with respect to the subject matter of the course.
Fundamental issues raised in defining Christian ethics, delineating its sources and methods, developing normative theories, and analyzing processes of moral decision-making.
Outcomes: A deep level of understanding and of critical thinking with respect to the subject matter of the course.
Restricted to Graduate School students.
The theory of moral identity and moral agency points to the self-constitution of the subject of morality, the agent who develops a particular (moral) identity that is associated with one¿s character and dispositions to act, one¿s commitments, one¿s values and conscience, and more generally, one¿s life-story as lived experience and narrated story in which one gives an account of oneself.
This first-person perspective may be a challenge for any top-down normative approach to ethics because the singular, unique self is as much a body that is disciplined as it is an embodied moral agent that is a source of resistance to pathological (and pathologizing) social norms.
In the emphasis on freedom and autonomy, the vulnerability of moral agents is sometimes overlooked or repressed ¿ especially in the Western liberal tradition. Yet in the Christian context, selfhood is grounded in the ¿given-ness¿ of human existence in the relation and relatedness between God and humans. Here, moral identity merges with a spiritual-religious identity, reflected in multiple narratives of religious experiences and autobiographies.
The course will examine moral identity and moral vulnerable agency through the lens of Christian ethics of self-formation and hermeneutical ethics, with view on newer literature from psychology, sociology, philosophy. It will serve as a foundational approach to Christian ethics that contributes to the tradition of self-formation, conversion, and virtue ethics.
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