Rethinking the Value of Humanity
Rethinking the Value of Humanity

Author: Sarah Buss

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-01-24

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 019753936X

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To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity? The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to these questions. Some essays examine influential views in the history of Western philosophy. In others, philosophers currently working in ethics develop and defend their own views. Some essays appeal to distinctively human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest, or certain shared interests, or our natural sociability. The philosophers featured here disagree about whether the value of human beings depends on the value of anything else. They disagree about how reason and rationality relate to this value, and even about whether we can reason our way to discovering it. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human.

The Value of Humanity
The Value of Humanity

Author: L. Nandi Theunissen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-07

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0192568884

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L. Nandi Theunissen develops a non-Kantian account of the value of human beings. Against the Kantian tradition, in which humanity is absolutely valuable and unlike the value of anything else, Theunissen outlines a relational proposal according to which our value is continuous with the value of other valuable things. She takes the Socratic starting point that good is affecting, and more particularly, that good is a notion of benefit. If people are bearers of value, the proposal is that our value is no exception. Theunissen explores the possibility that our value is explained through reciprocal relations, or relations of interdependence, as when—as daughters, or teachers, or friends—we benefit others by being part or constitutive of relationships with them. She also investigates the possibility that we can be said to stand in a valuable relationship with ourselves. Ultimately, in The Value of Humanity, she proposes that people are of value because we are constituted in such a way that we can be good for ourselves in the sense that we are able to lead flourishing lives. Intuitively, a person matters because she matters to herself in a very particular sort of way; to appropriate a phrase, she is a being for whom her life can be an issue.

Rethinking the Human
Rethinking the Human

Author: J. Michelle Molina

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13:

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In this volume, world-class scholars from religious studies, the humanities, and the social sciences explore what it means to be human through a multiplicity of lives in time and place. These essays develop theories of aging and acceptance, ethics in caregiving, and the role of ritual in healing the divide between the human and the ideal.

From Enlightenment to Receptivity
From Enlightenment to Receptivity

Author: Michael Slote

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-11

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 019064964X

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This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us. Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others.

Rethinking the Value of Humanity
Rethinking the Value of Humanity

Author: Sarah Buss

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-01-17

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0197539386

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To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity? The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to these questions. Some essays examine influential views in the history of Western philosophy. In others, philosophers currently working in ethics develop and defend their own views. Some essays appeal to distinctively human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest, or certain shared interests, or our natural sociability. The philosophers featured here disagree about whether the value of human beings depends on the value of anything else. They disagree about how reason and rationality relate to this value, and even about whether we can reason our way to discovering it. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human.

Rethinking Life and Death
Rethinking Life and Death

Author: Peter Singer

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1996-04-15

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780312144012

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In a reassessment of the meaning of life and death, a noted philosopher offers a new definition for life that contrasts a world dependent on biological maintenance with one controlled by state-of-the-art medical technology.

Rethinking Human Nature
Rethinking Human Nature

Author: Malcolm Jeeves

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2011-02-23

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0802865577

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How do the many exciting recent scientific discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics and paleoanthropology challenge and complicate but also enrich and illuminate the traditional Christian portrait of human nature? In Rethinking Human Nature an international team of scientists, historians, philosophers, and theologians presents both the wisdom of the past and the cutting edge of present and developing scientific research to explore answers to this vital question. Their discussions examining our brains, our genes, our ancestors, our societies, and more will help us develop a more nuanced and complete understanding of what it really means to be human. Contributors: Evandro Agazzi, R. J. Berry, Alison S. Brooks, Franco Chiereghin, Felipe Fernandez, Graeme Finlay, Joel Green, Malcolm Jeeves, Jrgen Mittelstrass, David G. Myers, Janet Martin Soskice, Fernando Vidal

Rethinking Mill's Ethics
Rethinking Mill's Ethics

Author: Colin Heydt

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2006-06-08

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1847142923

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Discussion of John Stuart Mill's ethics has been dominated by concern with right and wrong action as determined by the principle of utility. Colin Heydt's book unearths the rich context of moral and socio-political debate that Mill did not have to make explicit to his Victorian readers, in order to enrich the philosophical analysis of his ethics and to show a famous and misunderstood moralist in a new light.

Rethinking the Curriculum
Rethinking the Curriculum

Author: Orlando Nang Kwok Ho

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-12-13

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9811089027

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This book is an inter-disciplinary endeavour. Encompassing education and basic research, it discusses the modular-curriculum embodied in The Epistle from educational, historical, sociolinguistic, anthropological, phenomenological, and non-sectarian perspectives. It shows the cross-boundary philosophical reasoning and pedagogic dimensions of St. Paul as a great teacher and thinker from the Jewish-and-Christian faith. In doing so, this book refocuses academia’s attention on the inevitable antimonic nature inherent in humans’ efforts to create systemic knowledge. Knowledge about the inner aesthetic and volitional-interpretative self – the immanent psychic “I” – and other philosophical aspects of the realm of the transcendental should be rescued from the deepening trends of secularity. Being strong, powerful, productive, and performative should not be taken as the indisputable and exclusive aim of education. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) do not constitute a sufficient basis for building a better humanity. Education via public curriculums ought to serve both the belly and the mind. Deliberative curricular recalibrations, with rationales for grace, are thus needed for a better future for humanity.... This book is relevant for anyone with a core fascination about truths, values, epistemologies, life, spirituality, and holistic human development. It can also be used as a textbook or a reference in a number of fields including counselling, psychology, translation, cultural studies, and theology.

What Is a Person?
What Is a Person?

Author: Christian Smith

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-09-15

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0226765938

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What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith here argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist’s quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society. Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration in critical realism and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity. Innovative, critical, and constructive, What Is a Person? offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good.