Abstract
The first title given us for this conference was “Does Medical Ethics Need a Basis in Theological Ethics?” or “… Theological Ethics as a Foundation?” Whether under that head or under Alasdair MacIntyre’s more limited title, I want first to indicate what a proper theologian should never attempt to demonstrate about the bearing of religion or theology on sorts of human activity other than the religious (or in particular on medical practice).
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Notes
Commentary, 2, no. 4 (October 1946), p. 316.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 134n.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1944), pp. 119–20.
See W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 43ff, for an account of the conservative principle: an hypothesis proposed for our belief “may have to conflict with some of our previous beliefs; but the fewer the better.”
Religion and the Modern Mind (New York: Lippincott, 1960), pp. 90, 94, 107, 109.
For example, “the terrible gulfs of time which have elapsed since God made himself manifest in the world chill our minds and numb our hearts. This train of thought, of course, is not logic. But logic has little to do with human thinking” (p. 98).
C. S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temorum.” Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge. Walter Hopper, ed., Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 7.
Lessing, Werke (Maltzahn’s ed.) X, p. 53.
Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Scientific Postscript (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 97.
R. M. Hare, “The Simple Believer,” in Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr., eds., Religion and Morality (Garden City, N.Y.: Dou-bleday Anchor Book, 1973), pp. 393–427.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1956), p. 782–96.
Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative (London: The Lutterworth Press, 1932), pp. 53
pp. 55.
William K. Frankena, “On Saying the Ethical Thing,” Presidential address delivered before the Sixty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 5–7, 1966. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1965–6 (Yellow Springs, Ohio: The Antioch Press, 1966), 39, pp. 21–42.
Ibid., p. 22.
Donald Evans, The Language of Self-Involvement (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 254.
Frankena, “On Saying the Ethical Thing,” p. 23.
Evans, The Language of Self-Involvement, p. 77. The reader’s attention should be directed to the fact that, in the text above, this point and this point alone is used in elucidating the nature of a religious ethics. Here I am not concerned with other aspects of the performative language school of ethics as developed by Austin and Evans.
Frankena, “On Saying the Ethical Thing,” p. 25.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., p. 33.
Ibid., p. 25.
John Lemmon: “Moral Dilemmas,” in Ian T. Ramsey, ed., Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (New York and London: The Macmillan Co., 1966), p. 264.
Helen Oppenheimer, “Moral Choice and Divine Authority,” in Ian T. Ramsey, ed., op. cit., p. 231.
See Frankena, “On Saying the Ethical Thing,” p. 26.
See Evans, The Language of Self-Involvement, p. 129; and the entire section on “Onlooks,” pp. 124ff.
Frankena, “On Saying the Ethical Thing,” pp. 37, 39. As for the claim that, among the rivalry of normative metaethics, the Christian outlook and consequent ethical onlook may in some sense be true for all men, the reader might ponder Frankena’s remark on p. 41: “At any rate, so long as the case against the absolutist claim is not better established than it is, we may still make that claim; it may take some temerity, but it is not unreasonable. As for me and my house, therefore, we will continue to serve the Lord—or, as others may prefer to say, the Ideal Observer.”
N. Fotion, “Master Speech Acts” (unpublished paper).
In L. A. Selby-Biggs, British Moralists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897,) I, pp. 403ff.
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
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Ramsey, P. (1981). Kant’s Moral Theology or A Religious Ethics?. In: Callahan, D., Engelhardt, H.T. (eds) The Roots of Ethics. The Hastings Center Series in Ethics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3303-6_7
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