After virtue, a study in moral theory

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics

/pdf/a-transformative-experience-2qy5qkmh8e.pdf

A Transformative Experience

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0012217300000445

How Can I Be Trusted? A Virtue Theory of Trustworthiness Nancy Nyquist Potter Feminist Constructions Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2002, viii + 193 pp., $70.00, $25.95 paper

Soren Kierkegaard advocates, in his Works of Love, a rigorous ideal of neighbor love. When one is confronted with this ideal of self-sacrifice and love for the enemy, one inevitably wonders whether such a life of neighbor love is livable. In this article, I ask (1) whether Kierkegaard indeed allows for limits on neighbor love, and (2) if neighbor love is limitless, whether there are, on his account, good reasons to live such a life. In elaborating these issues, I aim to show that Kierkegaard is unable to show that his conception of neighbor love is recognizably good, which implies, as I will make clear, that his ethic of neighbor love runs the risk of undermining itself.

Do I ever have a place in the sun? A critical perspective on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love

This paper explores the relation between metaethical reflection and value experience, and does so by focusing on robust realism. Robust realism is typically criticized for its ontological and epist...

The Reification of Value: Robust Realism and Alienation

In this article I develop a new perspective on Kierkegaard s ethics of becoming oneself, understanding this important theme from the subject of moral exemplarity. On the basis of a reading of The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity I show that Kierkegaard argues that one becomes oneself through imitating Christ. In doing this, I focus on the transition from philosophy to theology in Anti-Climacus ethics and make clear, first, how one can become oneself through the imitation of Christ; second, why one should imitate Christ; and third, what exactly should be imitated in the imitation of Christ.

Authenticity and imitation : on the role of moral exemplarity in Anti-Climacus' Ethics

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01916599.2020.1799555

Rob Compaijen

Papers

Do I ever have a place in the sun? A critical perspective on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love

The Reification of Value: Robust Realism and Alienation

Authenticity and imitation : on the role of moral exemplarity in Anti-Climacus' Ethics

Existentialists or mystics. Kierkegaard and Murdoch on imagination and fantasy in ethical life

Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, Williams, and the Internal Point of View