{"title":"Moral Agency in the Reproductive Marketplace: Social Egg Freezing in the United States","authors":"Emma McDonald","doi":"10.1111/jore.12412","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12412","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>More and more women are turning to egg freezing as a strategy for managing conflicting timelines related to professional goals and family formation aspirations. Drawing on critical realism, this article argues that vicious aspects of the reproductive marketplace and the workplace along with cultural ideals of motherhood and the nuclear family incentivize agents to freeze their eggs. While individual egg freezers help contribute to the maintenance of structures and cultures that perpetuate inequalities related to class, race, and gender and hinder the flourishing of all women, ethical analysis should critique the structural and cultural forces that make egg freezing an attractive option for women balancing procreation and professional pursuits.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47685374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Political vs. the Theological: The Scope of Secularity in Arendtian Forgiveness","authors":"Shinkyu Lee","doi":"10.1111/jore.12414","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12414","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The conventional interpretation of Hannah Arendt's accounts of forgiveness considers them secularistic. The secular features of her thinking that resist grounding the act of forgiving in divine criteria offer a good corrective to religious forgiveness that fosters depoliticization. Arendt's vision of free politics, however, calls for much more nuance and complexity regarding the secular and the religious in realizing forgiveness for transitional politics than the secularist rendition of her thinking allows. After identifying an area of ambiguity in Arendt's thoughts that invites further investigation of religious forgiveness, this study seeks to relieve her misgivings about religion's role in politics by engaging with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology, which emphasizes worldliness and altruism in religious faith. Through constructive engagements with both thinkers, the article presents a balanced Arendtian position that is neither solely secularist nor complacent about religion in politics.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jore.12414","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46956811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Caste and Devotion: A Casteless Framework for (Some) Forms of Hindu Devotionalism","authors":"Akshay Gupta","doi":"10.1111/jore.12416","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12416","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The caste system has caused widespread oppression within Hinduism. In this paper, I analyze the <i>Bhagavad Gītā</i> (c. 500 BCE–200 CE) and the <i>Bhāgavata Purāṇa</i> (c. 9th century CE), two highly influential Hindu sacred texts, to understand how they conceptualize the relationship between caste and devotion (<i>bhakti</i>). I argue that there is a societal framework that does not maintain the caste system but which is consistent with these texts' soteriological vision and can be implemented in lieu of such a system. This framework demonstrates that for certain forms of Hindu religiosity, caste is not essential to uphold from a scriptural perspective. Given this framework, the caste system can be challenged and interrogated to a significant extent and alternative societal frameworks can be proposed. I also consider and respond to objections to the framework I put forth.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jore.12416","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45847720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Idolatry and Time: Capitalism and Money in Twenty-First-Century Christian Economic Theology","authors":"Samuel Hayim Brody","doi":"10.1111/jore.12410","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12410","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Christian economic theology is distinguished from Christian social ethics by its methodological reflection on the emergence, formation, and proper boundaries of the economic sphere, as well as transcendental reflection on the conditions of possibility of economic science. In practice, this often amounts to anxiety about the authority of Christianity in the economic sphere, as well as about the extent to which Christianity can be held responsible for the system of impersonal economic domination known as capitalism. This review essay draws upon three recent works on or about Christian economic theology, and argues that this genre's anxiety about Christian authority manifests in the ways that it draws temporal boundaries between ancient, medieval, and modern economies. Ultimately, its ambivalence about economy itself is traceable to Aristotle's understanding of money as containing two natures, one defined by quality (use value) and the other by quantity (exchange value). Christianity here becomes a cipher for quality.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41934809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ideal and Mandatory Moral Norms","authors":"Thomas Finegan","doi":"10.1111/jore.12411","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12411","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>“Ideals” are often invoked in contemporary theological discussion of moral norms, especially but not exclusively regarding norms of marriage/sex ethics. Seemingly absent from the discussion, however, is focused critical analysis of the distinction between ideal and mandatory normativity. Attempting to address this oversight, the following paper begins by highlighting a serious inconsistency between recent Catholic magisterial documents. It is proposed that the inconsistency is largely due to understanding the respective norms—relating to marriage and euthanasia—in divergent ways: per the very different orders of ideal and mandatory normativity. After a philosophical clarification of the distinguishing features of ideal and mandatory normativity, one particularly indebted to the work of Joseph Raz, the paper illustrates how divergence between them operates to create the aforementioned magisterial inconsistency. This inconsistency is paralleled by neglect of—and consequent incoherence around—the ideal-mandatory norm distinction within wider moral theology. The last section considers how the distinction bears upon and helps illuminate the relationship between principles, rules, and rules' exceptions.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48796209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Managing New Technology When Effective Control is Lost: Facing Hard Choices With CRISPR","authors":"Joel Andrew Zimbelman","doi":"10.1111/jore.12406","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12406","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This paper seeks to expand our appreciation of the gene editing tool, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9), its function, its benefits and risks, and the challenges of regulating its use. I frame CRISPR's emergence and its current use in the context of 150 years of formal exploration of heredity and genetics. I describe CRISPR's structure and explain how it functions as a useful engineering tool. The contemporary international and domestic regulatory environment governing human genetic interventions is reviewed and shown to be increasingly ineffective in its ability to restrain, guide, and optimize the emerging use of CRISPR. Several reasons for this lack of consensus are discussed. In conclusion, I suggest a number of public policy recommendations that might allow us to simultaneously embrace our most important moral values and manage the inevitable power CRISPR will come to have in our lives.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48287303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genome Editing and Relational Autonomy","authors":"Aline Kalbian","doi":"10.1111/jore.12405","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12405","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Developed in the past two decades, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9) technique offers greater accessibility and efficiency in editing genes. Its immediate success has transformed medical research and treatment in productive ways, but has also left questions about ethical consequences in its wake. These are questions familiar to bioethical inquiry. How do we balance short-term and long-term benefits and risks? How do we promote just and equitable access to new medical interventions? How do we protect respect for individual autonomy? These questions require a balance between protecting individuals' liberties and the good of the communities in which they live. In this essay, I am interested in how the principle of respect for autonomy can be interpreted in light of CRISPR-Cas9. I argue that a relational autonomy framework forges a middle ground between the need to respect individual freedom to pursue genetic treatments and the need to acknowledge the networks of dependence that define our moral worlds. I identify three thematic areas that relational autonomy brings into greater focus: the importance of trust, the acknowledgment of vulnerability/dependence, and the promotion of justice. Autonomy understood relationally allows us to see individual freedom as tethered to communal well-being.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48070033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Ethics of Unseen Consequences: Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav's Sefer Ha-Middot","authors":"Shaul Magid","doi":"10.1111/jore.12408","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12408","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This essay is a close examination of one of Nahman of Bratslav's early and largely unexamined texts, <i>Sefer ha-Middot</i>. The question it addresses is whether one can call this a study of “ethics” or, in Jewish nomenclature, <i>musar</i>, a work that seeks to cultivate human behaviors and describe ethical formation. In addition, it asks whether <i>Sefer ha-Middot</i> can be called a text of “virtue ethics” given its focus on virtues and their enactment. The essay argues that Nahman's peculiar metaphysical notion that all mitzvot are inextricably intertwined prevents any analysis of behavioral causality severing his “ethics” from any Aristotelian or Kantian tradition and brings him closer to Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of ethics as tied to traditional norms. And even with MacIntyre, the comparison is quite limited. Discussing “faith,” the “<i>zaddik</i>,” and “money,” the essay explores Nahman's view of how these and other virtues are cultivated and achieved.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45200251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Encountering Beauty, Enacting Self-Love: Toward an Ethic of Black Self-Regard","authors":"Clifton L. Granby","doi":"10.1111/jore.12401","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12401","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article focuses on the relationship between evaluations of beauty and the ethics of living well. Separating these ideas typically involves understating how racism and patriarchy shape wider cultural and aesthetic sensibilities. I counter this tendency by foregrounding the precarity of vulnerable black children and the importance of self-love in their efforts to flourish. My strategy involves placing Toni Morrison in conversation with Alexander Nehamas and Harry Frankfurt, philosophers who have carefully engaged the topics of beauty and love. By situating aesthetic judgment within ongoing practices of social formation and political contestation, I reveal the importance of linking beauty with practices of self-regard while also detailing my criticisms of thinkers who downplay their significance. The effect is to position Morrison as an instructive guide for scholars interested in aesthetics, ethics, and politics.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41619396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Virtue of Mortality","authors":"Andrew Flescher","doi":"10.1111/jore.12403","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12403","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>As technology's frontiers advance, we acquire the capacity to alleviate the aspects of suffering and sorrow that are caused by our genetic programming, while also inviting unwelcome side consequences. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a bacterial defense system with genome editing capabilities, is now being implemented to startling results. It is being used to correct for harmful mutations by permanently altering genes, promising to eliminate defects in whole species. Advantages notwithstanding, and apart from insufficiently considered dangers precipitated by the well-intended technology, there are other moral issues to consider. What does existence look like in which humans become resistant to experiencing genetic defects? We can welcome medical innovation's reduction of undue hardship, but is there a threshold past which a permanently improved version of us makes us ineligible to participate in the human condition? This essay offers a theological and Aristotelian critique of using CRISPR for extensive human gene editing, arguing that it is our imperfections, including susceptibility to disease, decline due to aging, and the ephemerality of joy, which make us human.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43039184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}