This essay considers eighteenth-century Anglican thinker Joseph Butler's view of the role of natural emotions in moral reasoning and action. Emotions such as compassion and resentment are shown to play a positive role in the moral life by motivating action and by directing agents toward certain good objects—for example, relief of misery and justice. For Butler, moral virtue is present when these natural affections are kept in proper proportion by the "superior" principles of the moral life—conscience, self-love, and benevolence—which involve (...) the capacity for reasonable reflection. For contemporary thinkers, Butler's approach suggests that natural emotion should not be viewed as the enemy of moral reasoning; in fact, it challenges ethicists to pay attention to and account for the significant role of the emotions in the moral life. (shrink)

This essay considers eighteenth‐century Anglican thinker Joseph Butler's view of the role of natural emotions in moral reasoning and action. Emotions such as compassion and resentment are shown to play a positive role in the moral life by motivating action and by directing agents toward certain good objects—for example, relief of misery and justice. For Butler, moral virtue is present when these natural affections are kept in proper proportion by the “superior” principles of the moral life—conscience, self‐love, and benevolence—which involve (...) the capacity for reasonable reflection. For contemporary thinkers, Butler's approach suggests that natural emotion should not be viewed as the enemy of moral reasoning; in fact, it challenges ethicists to pay attention to and account for the significant role of the emotions in the moral life. (shrink)

This paper offers an assessment of the prospects for Christian engagement with public bioethical debates in a contemporary British context. One recent example, the debate provoked by proposed legislation for research involving human admixed embryos, is examined briefly. It is argued that this debate has some problematic features that are characteristic of public ethical debates in this context. Next, a proposal is offered as to how such bioethical questions may be approached from within a Christian theological tradition (specifically, a Reformed (...) Protestant tradition). This proposed approach makes use of four “diagnostic questions” to assess whether technological proposals and practices such as the creation of human admixed embryos can be consistent with the distinctive Christian narrative of creation, sin, salvation through Christ, and promised future hope. The final section offers some reflections on how Christians and churches might engage, on the basis of this theological approach, with public ethical debates such as the one about admixed embryos. (shrink)

In essays written throughout his career, Stanley Hauerwas has unfolded a Christian vision of the marriage bond and the presence of children that seeks insistently to place these seemingly natural bonds within the new family of God that is the church. I examine his understanding, aiming to appreciate the Christian vision displayed while also suggesting that his emphasis on the new thing God does in the church is sometimes allowed to absorb and thereby lose the distinctive significance of the created (...) bonds of marriage and family. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Stanley Hauerwas has not taken up many of the topics normally associated with virtue ethics, has explicitly distanced himself from the enterprise known as “virtue ethics,” and throughout his career has preferred other categories of analysis, ranging from character and agency to practices and liturgy, it is nevertheless clear that his work has had a deep and transformative impact on the recovery of virtue within Christian ethics, and that this impact has largely to do with the (...) ways in which his thought resists normalization. This essay traces the evolution of Hauerwas's reflections on virtue and the virtues over the course of his career, with special attention to how this has been bound up with an increasingly emphatic theological particularism that has remained ambivalent between what I term “comprehensive” versus “exclusive” particularism. I argue that it is important to distinguish between these, and suggest that grasping the destructive tendencies of “exclusive” particularism should cement our commitment to shouldering the responsibilities associated with comprehensive particularism. (shrink)

Following the revival of virtue theory, some moral theorists have argued that virtue ethics can provide the basis for a radical politics. Such a politics essentially departs from the liberal model of the moral agent as an autonomous reason-giver. It instead privileges an understanding of the agent as conditioned by her community, and in the case of social oppression and marginalization, communal virtues may become a vehicle for social change. This essay compares political appropriations of virtue theory by Christian theologian (...) Stanley Hauerwas and secular feminist thinkers Lisa Tessman and Margaret Urban Walker. Hauerwas and feminist theorists both embrace a kind of embodied vulnerability as a political virtue, arguing that it enables more genuine social recognition. The virtue feminist critique is more robust than Hauerwas's, however, insofar as it understands mutual recognition to involve acknowledgment of social difference and the concomitant pursuit of justice. (shrink)