A Quote by John Kleinig
My view of ethics and of its priority is connected to my view that we are fundamentally relational beings - both the product of human interactions, as well as committed as part of the expression of our own humanity to various social involvements. I see ethics as having two places in the maintenance of these relational activities - first as providing the basic coinage of our interactions qua humans and second as mediating the various roles we assume as humans.
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Human beings are social animals; we devote a significant portion of our brain just to dealing with interactions with other humans.
In a world where your interactions with humans are solely about rating one to five, two things happen: One is all humanity is lost in the name of fake pleasantries and also there's no nuance to that system. There's no room for complex interactions that are rich and meaningful.
I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.
We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.
I see ethical considerations as having a certain priority in our interactions - passing judgment on our political and legal processes.
It has been an obsession of human beings to create a hierarchy that places the human species on top and lumps all the "other animals" together beneath us. The resulting "speciesism" allows us to look upon animals as less deserving of all manner of rights and considerations than humans. To support this lower status, humans have argued that animals act instinctually; don't have souls; don't feel physical pain like we do; and lack self-consciousness, cognitive intelligence, emotional feelings, morality, and ethics.
I'm hoping to know and teach a Gospel that is true to Scripture - and the Gospel that I see in the Bible is COSMIC (big enough to redeem all of Creation) and RELATIONAL (getting at the root of the Fall - the loss of our relational capacities).
I see loyalty - roughly perseverance in relational commitments despite the cost of such perseverance - as an important human value/virtue. Think of it as a kind of relational glue.
The gospel changes how we view and work with others in a way that both humanizes our interactions with them and empowers them to work well.
Conversely, conservatives assume that humans are fundamentally lazy and prone to immorality. In this view, the entitlement system coddles and rewards laziness. This cynicism spills over into their view of government and government 'bureaucrats.' It also spills over into their political tactics.
We women often gauge our own self-worth by the quality of our interactions with our lovers. And often these interactions are interpreted for, described for, processed by our women friends. Relationships are the conduits through which flows our connection with each other.
The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.
The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.
Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative.
Love is the grounding of our existence as humans and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings.
All humans are storytellers with their own unique point of view. When we understand this, we no longer feel the need to impose our story on others or to defend what we believe. Instead we see all of us as artists with the right to create our own art.
