Jill Hernandez

In the health care professions, the meaning of—and implications for—‘dignity’ and ‘value’ are progressively more important, as scholars and practitioners increasingly have to make value judgments when making care decisions. This paper looks at the various arguments for competing sources of human value that medical professionals can consider—human rights, autonomy, and a higher-order moral value—and settles upon a foundational model that is related to the Kantian model that is popular within the medical community: human value is foundational; human dignity, autonomy, and rights derive from the relational quality of human dignity. Moral dignity is expressed though the relationships we cultivate, the communal ends we pursue, and the rights we enjoy. Correlatively, human dignity is inseparable from its ground, and the relationship between these two is best represented for Kant in the humanities formulation. The foundational model of dignity ensures that human value is non-circularly derived, but is ultimately tied to expressions of individual human dignity that comes from the dignity of morality. Linking Kant’s dignity of humanity to the dignity of morality affords a unique and efficacious response to the discussion of human value. In one sense, dignity is amplificatory, since its worth is inextricable with that of autonomy and the rights afforded to the autonomous. But that isn’t to say that the worth of dignity is merely amplificatory. Rather, human dignity indicates the absolute inner value found in each individual in virtue of being human. That inner worth engenders certain universal rights—derivable from the dignity and fundamental rational appeal of morality—just as it provides for the possibility for a community of beings to seek to live the moral life

The idea of ‘hope’ has received significant attention in the political sphere recently. But is hope just wishful thinking, or can it be something more than a political catch-phrase? This book argues that hope can be understood existentially, or on the basis of what it means to be human. Under this conception of hope, given to us by Gabriel Marcel, hope is not optimism, but the creation of ways for us to flourish. War, poverty and an absolute reliance on technology are real-life evils that can suffocate hope. Marcel’s thought provides a way to overcome these negative experiences. An ethics of hope can function as an alternative to isolation, dread, and anguish offered by most existentialists. This book presents Marcel’s existentialism as a convincing, relevant moral theory; founded on the creation of hope, interwoven with the individual’s response to the death of God. Jill Hernandez argues that today’s reader of Marcel can resonate with his belief that the experience of pain can be transcended through a philosophy of hope and an escape from materialism.

Since the 2004 publication of his book The Good in the Right, Robert Audi has been at the forefront of the current resurgence of interest in intuitionism – the idea that human beings have an intuitive sense of right and wrong – in ethics. The New Intuitionism brings together some of the world’s most important contemporary writers from such diverse fields as metaethics, epistemology and moral psychology to explore the latest implications of, and challenges to, Audi’s work. The book also includes an opening chapter that surveys the development of contemporary intuitionism and a conclusion that lays the ground for future developments and debates both written by Audi himself, making this an essential survey of this important school of ethical thought for anyone working in the field.

This paper explores the relationship between the problem of evil and a kenotic view of the Atonement evidenced not just by feminist theologians, but by analytic philosophers of religion. I will argue that, although kenosis provides an interesting story about the ability of Christ to partake in human suffering, it faces debilitating problems for understanding divine concurrence with evil in the world. Most significantly, I will argue that the potential tensions between divine justice and divine love can be loosened by looking at ‘redemptive accounts’ of theodicy in the scholarship of women writing in the early modern period in philosophy, particularly Mary Hays , and Catharine Macaulay . Their work collectively confirms the problem of concrete evil and yet offers a unique theodicy grounded in the saving power of the Atonement and restorative power of Christian service. Their arguments are all the more compelling for having been written in response to egregious civil rights abuses and rampant domestic violence of their day. If the Atonement is the divinely-ordained method for gaining insight into the redemptive power of divine grace, then rather than speculating about the metaphysical nature of the divine, this paper will question how we can understand divine perfection in light of evil in the world, especially if the Atonement of Christ involves kenosis