In this essay, I introduce Ikkyū Sōjun’s amoralism under the heading of negative ethics. I do so in the light of contemporary accounts of what some have called “Zen ethics.” Pushing away from such readings, the essay raises the issue of authority in Zen, whether it is construed as the authority of the dharma, the sangha, or the Buddha. Turning to the poetry of Ikkyū, I demonstrate that any such construing misses themark. As an alternative, I offer a reading of (...) Ikkyū that takes meta-ethics as its starting point. I read Ikkyū’s amoralism as a particular form of negative ethics. This point is drawn out further with an examination of the reversibility of seeming opposites. (shrink)

In this article, we distinguish between three approaches to ethics in school, each giving an interpretation of the expression ‘ethics in school’: the descriptive facts about ethics approach, roughly consisting of teaching empirical facts about moral matters to students; the moral fostering approach, consisting of mediating a set of given values to students; and the philosophical ethics (PE) approach, consisting of critically discussing and evaluating moral issues with students. Thereafter, three influential arguments for why there ought to be ethics in (...) school are discussed, and each argument is interpreted given each approach to ethics in school, respectively. Thereby, we evaluate which interpretation of ‘ethics in school’ produces the strongest arguments, and thus, which approach is best supported by these arguments. The conclusion is that there ought to be PE in school. (shrink)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991.