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Responsibility - Presentation Slides

The document discusses various aspects of responsibility within Christian ethics, emphasizing individual, communal, and divine responsibilities. It explores concepts such as agency, authenticity, and the ethical implications of relationships with others and God. Key thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Levinas are referenced to illustrate the complexity of ethical responsibility in relation to self and others.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
9 views11 pages

Responsibility - Presentation Slides

The document discusses various aspects of responsibility within Christian ethics, emphasizing individual, communal, and divine responsibilities. It explores concepts such as agency, authenticity, and the ethical implications of relationships with others and God. Key thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Levinas are referenced to illustrate the complexity of ethical responsibility in relation to self and others.

Uploaded by

jaysonp
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 11

10/2/2019

ch. 9
Principles of Christian Continental
Ethics Ethics
[THST 605]

1 2

Ethics & Responsibility We have encountered


Responsibility different kinds of
responsibility in the
course so far.

3 4

We have explored different aspects


Responsibility

of responsibility in the course so


far:
• Individualistt Ethics: response
Responsibility?
to the needs of the individual
• Utilitarianism: response to the
needs of the community
• Kant: response to the dignity of
others
• Natural Law: responding to the
purposes of human life

5 6

1
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1.

Responsibility
Fundamental
Responsibility as “being able to
concepts respond,” being response-able.
of the traditional
account of Responsibility as capacity for agency
predicated on the idea of freedom.
responsibility

7 8

“God, who wills to glorify “…He desires from us an


himself and to impart himself, active and spontaneous
wills humanity to be a creature response in our creation. He
who responds to his call of who creates through the
love with a grateful, Word, who as Spirit creates in
responsive love. God wills to freedom, wills to have a reflex
possess humanity as a free which is more than a reflex: a
being. God wills a creature, free spiritual act. Only thus
which is not only, like other can his love really impart itself
creatures, a mere object of his as love. Only an I can answer
will; as if it were a reflector of a Thou. Only a self which is
his glory as creator… self-determining can freely
answer God.” [55-56]

9 10

Agency:
Freedom, volition,
imagination, decision,
projection, orientation,
discernment,…

11 12

2
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2.

Responsibility
One speaks of “being responsible for
one’s actions,” an expression which
mobilizes the sense of accountability
as authorship over one’s actions and
over oneself (“being responsible for
oneself ”). [Raffoul]

13 14

“Responsibility would seem… to Responsibility 3.


One also speaks of “being
be central to any quest for self-
responsible for the consequences of
understanding. We understand
one’s actions,” which implies that one
ourselves as persons to the
is looking toward the future of the
extent that we and others can
act, and that there can be a
assign some identity to ourselves
responsibility to the future and not
as actors. A world without
only toward the past.
responsibility would be a world
without agents, a world of sheer
events and happenings.” [15]

15 17

Responsibility:
1. Self
2. Others
3. God
1. Responsibility
to Self

18 19

3
10/2/2019

Responsibility as “the realization of


Responsibility
oneself.” In this connection,
responsibility is matter of
authenticity.

“Being true to oneself,” “having


courage,” “not following the crowd,”
“striving against non-being” as in
loosing oneself in technology, busyness,
etc., and so on.

20 21

1844-1900
Master/Slave Morality

22 23

Affirmation of life (and beauty) in the face of


tragedy (and ugliness)!
In other words, morality is a
codified expression of one’s failure In other words, live authentically, truthfully,
to take responsibility for one’s life and courageously!
and the process of self-creation.

Morality = alienation

24 25

4
10/2/2019

“Nietzsche pictures authentic existence as an


Authenticity in Nietzsche: a human being fully
ongoing project of self-formation governed
alive, facing life squarely, courageously facing
solely by such aesthetic ideals as coherence,
adversity, finding beauty in ugliness.
unity, cohesiveness and style.” [Guignon, 68]

26 27

‘We want to be the poets of our life.”


(GS, parag. 299)

Michel Foucault [1926-1984]


28 29

 Like FN, MF proposes an the aesthetics of


existence in the face of such absence of self-
knowledge.
 Since the goal of self-styling is not to arrive at
the knowledge of ourselves, as such “ourselves”
is not to be had in the sense of discovering
some “true” self. “The three elements of my morality are: [first] the
refusal to accept what is proposed to us as self-
 Subjectivity, is something that always contains evident; second, the need to analyze and to know
an after-the-fact character, something that is (savoir), because we can do nothing without
constructed through practices of self-care. reflection as well as knowledge (connaissance), this is
the principle of curiosity;…

30 31

5
10/2/2019

Key Ideas

… and third, the principle of innovation, that is to


say, not being inspired by a pre-existing program,
looking for what has not yet been thought,
imagined, or known in elements of our reflection
and the way we act. So, refusal, curiosity,
innovation.”
Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self, 127.

32 33

2. Responsibility
to Others

34 35

“People are all around us, “So the shape of our living is largely
but they are also inside us. created by our relationships with
Each of us has a people… To ask ‘Who am I?’ leads
‘community of the heart’ straight to the other people who are part
made up of those people of me. Is there any layer of self where
who are most important for there are no others? We find ourselves
us. Of all the sources of partly by remembering those who are the
overwhelming, people are most deeply woven into us and by
the most significant… A big continuing to relate to them. An
part of our inner life is taken experienced psychotherapist told me that
up with people, and they a great deal of his work is to do with the
loom large in our memories, quality of the ‘community’ that clients
fantasies and hopes… carry around inside them.” [29, 31]

36 37

6
10/2/2019

Human life finds its  Bonhoeffer interprets the


meaningfulness in image of God as imago
relationships. The self relationis, an image of
finds meaning, in all relationship;
of its possible shades,  Freedom is
as it relates to intersubjective.
something or  Given that the human
someone else. person is constituted by
the ethical I-You relation,
I-Thou vs. I-it this establishes the image
relationships of God as an intrinsically
ethical concept.

38 39

40 41

EMMANUEL LEVINAS [1906-1995]

42 43

7
10/2/2019

Ethics as the “first How can I experience the


philosophy” irreducibility of the singularity
of the other without making
The stress on the them part of my world, a world
alterity, the face of Levinas describes as essentially
the other. violent?

“Do not harm or


violate me!”

44 45

…Ethics has its source not in


the will or freedom, but in the
demand of the other who
“For Levinas… ethics begins not impels me to account for my
with the self but with the actions, even in my refusal to
experience of the other. It is not do so. Whatever moral codes
I who decides to be ethical, I might or might fail to live
rather I am forced to be ethical by, and whatever moral
despite my wishes or decisions I have to make,
intentions…. have their source in this
ethical reversal.” [2-3]

46 47

“The freedom of the other is their


Levinas argues that a true freedom from me, from the
encounter with the other is an tyranny of concepts and categories
encounter with that which that annul difference, plurality and
cannot be conceptualized or singularity. This is the difference
categorized. ‘If one could between the other and a thing.
possess, grasp, and know the Things disappear in their function.
other, it would not be other’ I do not see the door I walk
(Levinas 1987: 90). It is an through to enter a room unless it is
encounter with an ineffable and unexpectedly locked, but the other
radical exteriority is other to the extent they resist
both my use and comprehension.

48 49

8
10/2/2019

…The other is neither a thing


present to me nor something I
handle. If the thing resists me then “It is not that I initially
it does so by its uselessness. It comprehend the other in such
escapes any finality I might impose a manner that I see that they
on it. I can find no place for it in my are like me (or not like me), or
world. The other is foreign not that I understand the other in
because I cannot place them, but terms of my own projects, but
because they speak. The nudity of that I respond before I
the face is not the same as the comprehend or understand.”
bareness of a thing whose concept [Williams, 9]
or use I do not know, for it speaks
to me." [36-37]

50 51

Levinas against
empathy as the
3. Responsibility
foundation for ethics.
to God

52 53

Søren Kierkegaard
[1813-1855] D. Bonhoeffer
54 55

9
10/2/2019

“Christ
the
What Are the Elements
Center”
of Responsibility DB?
56 57

The concept of
abstraction is found
throughout Abstraction:
Bonhoeffer’s work.  Metaphysics/ethics [SC]
 Human ontology (i.e. Heidegger)
apart from revelation
 Self from community
 Morality apart from God
 God apart from revelation

58 59

…Trying to understand reality


without the Real One means
living in an abstraction, which
those who live responsibly must
always avoid; it means living
detached from reality and
vacillating endlessly between the
1. Responsibility to (Jesus) extremes of a servile attitude
2. Imperative to respond toward the status quo and
rebellion against it.” [261-262]
3. Capacity to respond

60 61

10
10/2/2019

Who is Jesus Christ for us today?

62 63

Principles of Christian
Ethics
[THST 605]

64

11

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