After this, nothing happened -- Ethics at the horizon -- Critique of abysmal reasoning.

Environmental changes can bear upon the environmental virtues, having effects not only on the conditions of their application but also altering the concepts themselves. I argue that impending radical changes in global climate will likely precipitate significant changes in the dominate world culture of consumerism and then consider how these changes could alter the moral landscape, particularly culturally thick conceptions of the environmental virtues. According to Jonathan Lear, as the last principal chief of the Crow Nation, Plenty Coups exhibited the (...) virtue of “radical hope,” a novel form of courage appropriate to a culture in crisis. I explore what radical hope may look like today, arguing how it should broadly affect our environmental character and that a framework for future environmental virtues will involve a diminished place for valuing naturalness as autonomy from human interference. (shrink)

Ethicists regularly turn to virtue in order to negotiate features of climate change that seem to overwhelm moral agency. Appeals to virtue in climate ethics differ by how they connect individual flourishing with collective responsibilities and by how they interpret Anthropocene relations. Differences between accounts of climate virtue help critique proposals to reframe global ecological problems in terms of resilience and planetary stewardship, the intelligibility of which depends on connecting what would be good for the species with what would be (...) good for an individual life. A pragmatic way of establishing that connection may need a strong role for respect of nature. (shrink)

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock provides a memorable description of what the future might hold for us in a world severely blighted by climate change. In this scenario the human population has been pushed to the high Northern latitudes: Meanwhile in the hot arid world survivors gather for the journey to the new Arctic centres of civilization; I see them in the desert as the dawn breaks and the sun throws its piercing gaze across the horizon at the (...) camp. The cool fresh night air lingers for a while and then, like smoke, dissipates as the heat takes charge. Their camel wakes, blinks and slowly rises on her haunches. The few remaining members of the tribe mount. She belches, and sets off on the long .. (shrink)

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top-down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom-up” intuitive (...) responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves. (shrink)

This essay examines Augustine’s notion that a person can transcend temporal “distention” by “extending” his soul to God by way of “intention”. Augustine conceived of intentio as an activity of the will that functions to connect the soul to beings and objects in the world. Augustine links his notion of “intention” to the activity of “extending oneself to God”. How do the soul’s “intention” and “extension” work together to combat temporal “distention”? Augustine suggests that Paul extended himself to God but (...) could not fully overcome distention. In his vision of God in Confessions 9, by contrast, Augustine transcends distention. Here, Augustine’s memory and self have been transcended as his soul “extends itself” to God “through intention.” Even in this state of self-transcendence, his intentio directs and connects his soul to God. (shrink)

Joy is an affective state that, unlike fear and grief, has a certain continuity with the anticipated affective dispositions of heavenly life: for those who long for the heavenly “life of felicity,” joy responds to the same object of love and contemplation, i.e., God, whether they are on earth or in heaven. But the mortal, finite believer encounters certain obstacles to full vision and to sustained contemplation in this earthly life. This fact reveals fundamental difficulties in tracing the continuity Augustine (...) posits in De ciuitate dei 14.9 across earthly and heavenly emotions, especially given the differences he also posits between earthly and heavenly states. This article examines how Augustine describes the affective qualities of believers’ earthly and heavenly joy and jubilation with particular attention to the continuities between their temporal and eternal expressions in both speech and song. I argue that, by transcending the temporally-spoken word, the non-verbal cry or song comes closest to matching the expression of heavenly joy as it responds to the God who surpasses utterance, and whose embrace fulfills understanding and elicits inexhaustible love and praise. (shrink)

St. Augustine's understanding of time is such that it makes time a problem not of physics nor of cosmology, although there are cosmological implications too, but of moral philosophy. And since moral philosophy, for Augustine, is inseparable from the problem of the ultimate destiny of the soul, his conception of time is a part of his conception of the religious life of man. Accordingly, I propose to summarize Augustine's theory of the nature of time in the first part of the (...) paper, treating it, so far as possible, as a separate topic of a theoretical nature. However, since the whole problem is a practical one in the Platonic sense, I propose, in the second part of the paper, to interpret this theory in Augustinian terms in an effort to show the significance of the whole question of time and eternity and limited being for Augustine's theory of man. This is an immense subject. Consequently, in order to impose some boundary upon it, I have restricted myself to the contrast of "the Unlimited" and "the Limited," "the Unchangeable" and "the Changeable" as a means of giving the interpretation a single accent. (shrink)

Georges Bataille agrees with numerous Christian mystics that there is ethical and religious value in meditating upon, and having ecstatic episodes in response to, imagery of violent death. For Christians, the crucified Christ is the focus of contemplative efforts. Bataille employs photographic imagery of a more-recent victim of torture and execution. In this essay, while engaging with Amy Hollywood's interpretation of Bataille in Sensible Ecstasy, I show that, unlike the Christian mystics who influence him, Bataille strives to divorce himself from (...) any moral authority external to the ecstatic episode itself. I argue that in his attempt to remove external authority he abandons the only resources that could possibly protect his mystical contemplation from engendering sadistic attitudes. (shrink)

In much environmentally concerned literature, there is a burgeoning concern for the status and sustainability of human hope. Within Christian circles, this attention has often taken the form of eschatological reflection. While there is important warrant for attention to eschatology in Christian examinations of hope, I claim that to move so quickly from hope to eschatology is to confuse a species of Christian hope for a definition of hope itself; as such, it is important for theological ethicists to examine hope (...) also from the experiential perspective of the human hoper. In particular, this is important today given the shortcomings of an eschatological focus in addressing anxieties arising due to the environmental crisis. Through examining hope as a fallible human activity, one can come to better understand hope's importance to human life, its profound ambiguity, and the potential threat that the environmental crisis poses to it. (shrink)

Augustine’s homiletical exhortations display a strong eschatological emphasis in his approach to cultivating rightly ordered emotions. According to critics such as Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum, and Thomas Dixon, this orientation risks denigrating the earthly life and its attendant emotions, while also promoting a crippling resignation to suffering. This article discusses Augustine’s eschatological frame for ordering the emotions through a focused treatment of en. Ps. 36 in conversation with Nussbaum’s critique in particular. In en. Ps. 36.1, Augustine deploys eschatological rhetoric to (...) discourage the believer’s envious response to a prosperous, profligate neighbor. This entails disposing the believer in weariness toward life’s temporal disparities and exhorting the believer to work in love to alleviate suffering with a view to heavenly flourishing. In this sense, a disposition of “world-weariness” works in concert with eschatological hope to rightly order both emotion and action in this present world. (shrink)

Why are some things spoken and other things sung? What effect does singing have on the hearer or the singer and especially on their affective and intellectual cognition? This essay, which was originally conceived and delivered as a lecture, asks why it was that Saint Augustine was so ambivalent about singing. It examines both his reasons and his tactics for avoiding singing as well as the ways and the contexts in which he can be shown to have positively embraced it. (...) It argues that both Augustine’s theological reflection and his practice included a role for spontaneous, non-verbal expression in singing, as well as for the more measured poetry of the psalms and hymns that, in Augustine’s day, had already become a part of the liturgy and of corporate worship. (shrink)

Five interpretations of Augustine's theory of time in Confessions XI are discussed. A distinction is made between the dimensionality, the sequentiality, and the unidirectionality of time; and various arguments are given for the thesis that Augustine regarded time as subjective in only the second and third senses. Then it is shown that for Augustine the heaven of heavens and the memory come as close as creatures can to a Godlike view of time--as extended but non-sequential .

Political liberals refuse that there are biophysical limits to human wealth accumulation. Coal fuelled the first liberal political economy — England’s — for 800 years before coal smoke was legally regulated in London. The English also have an enduring love for the diverse and scenic quality of their island nation, and a long history of commons governance that predates the acts of land theft which accompanied the emergence of political liberalism. By contrast the United States is a modern liberal polity (...) with little collective memory of commons. American political economists therefore refuse that commons can be collectively governed, or even that atmospheric pollution may be conceived as a problem of commons governance. The historically unsituated character of North American liberals — and liberalism more generally — also explains their inability adequately to describe moral connections between past, present and future generations implicated in anthropogenic climate change. The Christian account of the spiritual communion of saints remains a more powerful intergenerational narrative than political liberalism. As interpreted by Tolstoy, Gandhi and John Howard Yoder, true spiritual communion is characterised by the Christ-shaped refusal to render evil for evil. This refusal is an essential corrective to the realist and violent frame of international relations in which the international implications of climate change is conventionally conceived. (shrink)