Due: 1/29/16 - Exile, Commandments, and Divine Counsel

1.Exodus 19-20, as Moses is given the commandments: "Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine..."

Discussion Questions

"In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai." Consider the timing or the context for the giving of God's message, the commandments. Having been delivered from bondage in Egypt, a tribe of people find themselves in the wilderness of the Sinai desert, yet to establish their community. The commandments indeed come at a pivotal time. They provide ethical structure and establish a set of practices that define the spiritual covenant animating the relationship of a people with their divine authority. Are they sufficient basis for the establishment of a society?

What resemblances do the injunctions and strictures outlined in these passages bear to our own laws and codes today?

Are there fundamental differences in the tone or import between the Old and New Testament? If there are, what might this mean for the ethic imperatives that are articulated in these two moments?

"The Sermon on the Mount" according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_Mount

Tidy summary of the themes of the books of the bible - http://www.biblestory.com/resources/poems/ps.php?sid=622

Great site on religion and ethics - http://pages.stolaf.edu/ein/disciplines/religious-ethics/

Existentialism

Due: 2/5/16

"Radical Freedom," excerpts from the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre

Attached Files:

o Sartre.pdf (1,008.865 KB)

This edition gives a really nice introduction and, as you will see, useful highlights throughout.

Discussion questions

The editors of the 12th edition of Great Traditions in Ethics, from which this excerpt was taken, offer interesting questions following the selections from Sartre. A few are worth considering as you digest this challenging reading, including Questions 3, 7, 9 and 10:

"What would be Sartre's defense of nontheistic existentialist ethics against the implications of Dostoevski's maxim 'If God does not exist, everything is permitted?'" Clearly "everything" is not permitted, but what are the ties that bind ensuring order and preserving humanity (in the humanist sense of Sartre's affirmation)?

"When Sartre speaks of our being responsible for the choices we make, is he using the term 'responsible' in an ordinary sense or in a special sense? Discuss." Is this notion of "responsibility" possessed of the same compulsion as the law that had been formerly, as we saw in last week's readings, underpinned by the authority of divine command?

"What are the chief characteristics of humans as moral beings in Sartre's view?" This question, I think in part, asks us to consider Sartre's assertion that in every action humans create "an image of man as...he ought to be." Condemnation and anguish follow in Sartre's view, apparently...

"What problems of social morality are posed by the radical subjectivity of existential ethics? Is the solution proposed by Sartre adequate to ensure social order?"

A note on Job

I won't be assigning a reading from the Book of Job, as originally planned. For those morbidly interested, however, see this short summary by the Bible Hub online: http://biblehub.com/summary/job/1.htm.

Of interest, too, is the psychoanalyst Carl Jung's treatment of the story's moral, mythological, and psychological energies, Answer to Job (1952). (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_to_Job.)