Value and Vulnerability

Description

Value and Vulnerability brings together scholars of many religions—including Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam, and Humanism—to identify and examine conceptions and interpretations of dignity within different religious and philosophical perspectives and their applications to contemporary issues of conflict, such as gendered, religious, and racial violence, immigration, ecology, and religious peacemaking. Value and Vulnerability also includes response chapters that clarify and refine these interpretations from interfaith perspectives. Through this volume, Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild offer recommendations for advancing the conversation about dignity within and among traditions and for addressing urgent global issues and threats to dignity. Together, Petrusek, Rothchild, and the contributors create a comparative framework constituted by seven questions: What sources justify dignity’s existence, nature, and purpose? What is the relationship between the divine and human dignity? What is the relationship between dignity and the human body? Is dignity vulnerable or invulnerable to moral harm? Is dignity inherent or attained? Is dignity universal and equal? Is dignity practical? Through its systematic, comparative, interdisciplinary, and practical dimensions, Value and Vulnerability fills in the gaps in contemporary theological, philosophical, and ethical discourses on dignity.

Contributors: Matthew R. Petrusek, Jonathan Rothchild, Darlene Fozard Weaver, Kristin Scheible, Karen B. Enriquez, Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, Christopher Key Chapple, David P. Gushee, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Zeki Saritoprak, William Schweiker, Hille Haker, Nicholas Denysenko, Terrence L. Johnson, William O’Neill, Victor Carmona, Dawn Nothwehr, OSF, and Ellen Ott Marshall.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la religion
• Comparative Religion
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Protestantism
• Catholicism
• Buddhism
• Orthodoxy
• Secularism
• Judaism
• Hinduism
• Ethics
• Religion
• Islam

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 25 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268106683
• Langue: English

Extrait

Value and Vulnerability
VALUE AND
VULNERABILITY
An Interfaith Dialogue on Human Dignity
EDITED BY
Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937031
ISBN: 978-0-268-10665-2 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10667-6 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10668-3 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
M.P.: To Maria Nieves, Mateo, Solana, and Julieta
J.R.: To Charlotte, Theo, and Max
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild PART I Traditions Introduction to Part I one Dignity: A Catholic Perspective Darlene Fozard Weaver two Dignity: A Buddhist Perspective Kristin Scheible three Catholic and Buddhist Perspectives on Dignity: A Response Karen B. Enriquez four Dignity: A Jewish Perspective Elliot N. Dorff and Daniel Nevins five Dignity: A Hindu Perspective Christopher Key Chapple six Jewish and Hindu Perspectives on Dignity: Responses Christopher Key Chapple and Elliot N. Dorff seven Dignity: A Protestant Perspective David P. Gushee eight Dignity: An Orthodox Perspective Aristotle Papanikolaou nine Protestant and Orthodox Perspectives on Dignity: A Response Matthew R. Petrusek ten Dignity: An Islamic Perspective Zeki Saritoprak eleven Dignity: A Humanist Perspective William Schweiker twelve Islamic and Humanist Perspectives on Dignity: A Response Jonathan Rothchild PART II Case Studies Introduction to Part II thirteen Dignity and Conflict: Gendered Violence Hille Haker fourteen Dignity and Conflict: Religious Violence Nicholas Denysenko fifteen Dignity and Conflict: Racial Violence Terrence L. Johnson sixteen Dignity and Conflict: Criminal Justice William O’Neill seventeen Dignity and Conflict: Immigration Victor Carmona eighteen Dignity and Conflict: Ecology Dawn M. Nothwehr, OSF nineteen Dignity and Conflict: Religious Peacebuilding Ellen Ott Marshall Afterword Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild List of Contributors Index
Acknowledgments
This volume was made possible through collaboration of contributors, editors, and the University of Notre Dame Press. The editors are grateful to the contributors for their nuanced arguments and responsiveness to deadlines and to members of the press, particularly Stephen Little, acquisitions editor, for their professionalism and stewardship of the project. Comments from the three anonymous external reviewers helped clarify the structure and flow of the volume. We also wish to thank the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University and the Dean’s Office of Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts for their financial support. Thanks also to colleagues in the Theological Studies Department at LMU for their collegiality and intellectual community.
INTRODUCTION
Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild
The word “dignity” is frequently invoked in courtrooms, hospital rooms, places of worship, and on battlefields. Laws are designed to protect and promote dignity in terms of prohibitions, such as against torture and genocide, and in terms of positive freedoms, such as the right to work and to exercise conscience. There may be general consensus about the importance of dignity as a basis for modern human rights, but the complexities of individual, communal, institutional, and global contexts and competing and conflicting goods, values, and interests often problematize straightforward implementation of policies and practices rooted in human dignity. Dimensions of power, oppressive social structures (social sin), and various forms of injustice further exacerbate violations of human rights, which are necessary for the full realization of human dignity. In the face of dehumanizing systems and forces, can theological, philosophical, and legal frameworks provide conceptual clarity regarding universally accepted meanings of dignity and encourage practical strategies that address contexts and lived experiences of diminished dignity?
In response to these issues, contemporary scholarship on human dignity has appeared to reach two firm, if problematic, conclusions: (1) the appeal to dignity as a foundational moral principle is widespread in moral discourse in a vast number of fields (e.g., law, medicine, education, politics) and on numerous issues (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, torture, immigration, marriage equality), and it does not show any signs of abating; (2) there is nothing close to a widespread consensus on how to define dignity or on what specific actions dignity prohibits or requires. Like “equality,” “freedom,” or “fairness,” “dignity” appears to be one of those ideas that most everybody agrees on until someone starts making claims about what it might mean and asserts it as a warrant for specific ethical judgments.

The fact that advocates on both sides of hotly contested issues frequently draw on dignity in order to demonstrate the error, if not moral depravity, of the opposing side—as we see, for example, in debates on assisted suicide, abortion, and, more recently, religious freedom—raises the question of whether dignity has any fixed meaning at all. Add to this the complexity of the philosophical and theological disagreement lying beneath the different conceptions of dignity and the question becomes even sharper: Is dignity destined to fail as a coherent and useful moral principle? Is there any unity to dignity’s diversity beyond an appeal to the same word? Or, as Christopher McCrudden, editor of Understanding Human Dignity , has put it, “Are we all singing from the same hymn sheet when we use the concept of human dignity, and is it a problem if we are not?” 1
Given dignity’s prevalence in theological and secular discourse and the many contexts in which it appears as the basis for moral judgment, these questions have more than theoretical importance. If dignity is going to continue to function as more than an evocative but otherwise vacuously malleable principle in contemporary moral discourse, more work needs to be done both to identify and analyze dignity’s meaning in different religious and secular traditions, and to demonstrate how these meanings can help address concrete moral problems. Despite a growing scholarly interest in the definition and application of dignity, 2 this interpretive, comparative, and normative work on the problem of human worth still stands as one of the most important tasks in contemporary ethics. And it is precisely this task to which this book seeks to make a fresh contribution.
The collection of essays in this volume approaches the question of dignity from three interrelated perspectives: systematically, comparatively, and practically. First, the chapters in part I offer a sustained and nuanced conceptual examination of the definition of dignity from diverse religious and philosophical traditions. We have already noted that there has been some important theological and philosophical work on defining dignity recently. However, despite the growing prevalence of dignity in popular and academic discourses, scholarly literature on the topic has still not sufficiently examined dignity’s normative meaning and its grounding from a systematic perspective, especially in relation to these kinds of fundamental questions: What is dignity and on what grounds do humans possess it? Does dignity require being ontologically grounded in the transcendent in order to provide a coherent explanation for its existence? What, if anything, is unique about dignity? Is it universal and equal? Is it inherent or attained? Can it be lost or diminished, that is, is it vulnerable to harm? Epistemologically, how can one know that humans have dignity, particularly if one seeks to make appeals to sacred texts to establish its existence and moral relevance? Part I addresses these and related questions from the perspectives of eight distinct traditions: Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and humanism.
Second, and related, the book places these perspectives in constructive comparison. In addition to its systematic analysis of dignity, part I also provides responses that critically analyze two traditions from a different viewpoint, highlighting similarities, differences, and points of interest and concern (so, for example, there is a Catholic response to the chapters on Judaism and Orthodoxy; Jewish and Hindu responses to each other’s chapters, etc.). These responses seek to expand and deepen each tradition’s respective conception of dignity while also serving the mutually illuminating purpose of demonstrating where there is—and is not—substantive agreement or overlapping consensus. The respective systematic conceptions of dignity thus do not stand in isolation; placed in constructive comparison, they provide a framework for interreligious and ecumenical conversation on the normative understanding and application of dignity.
Third, the book demonstrates how dignity can be applied in practice in different contexts, particularly in situations of conflict broadly defined. In part I, many chapters identify central themes and also differing strands of thought within a tradition shaped by contexts and conflicts of interpretations. These chapters conclude by reflecting on the ways that understandings of dignity can be applied to contested contemporary moral issues. Moreover, part II provides a more sustained case study analysis of the role dignity can and should play in adjudicating diverse situations of conflict, including gendered violence, religiously based disputes, race and racism, immigration, peacebuilding, ecology, and criminal justice.