The Future of Ethics

There are many works seeking to apply the moral teachings of religious traditions to environmental problems. Some are keen to show the members of a tradition how and why they should care about nature; others seem more interested in proving that a particular tradition is sufficiently green. Willis Jenkins' The Future of Ethics does neither of these. Rather the environmental and social problems facing the world today, from climate change to radical inequality, are presented as truly overwhelming, beyond the competence of any tradition's moral resources. They are problems, which due to their scale and structure, threaten our capacity as humans to take responsibility for our cumulative actions; they threaten the very possibility of ethics. But rather than abandon our traditions when they are found to be inadequate to the challenges before us, Jenkins asks what can be constructively done with them, and how we might use them to develop the capacity over time to respond to such wicked problems. He presents a vision of ethics as a critical involvement in the creative reform of our religious traditions, in order to build practices that enable us to bear responsibility for our relations to each other, the world and the future.

Creativity · Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Political science · Social responsibility · Social science · Sociology · Sustainability · Ecology · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics