Ping-Cheung Lo

Ritual as a Cardinal Category of Moral Reality: An Introduction

Ritual cements human life. It is not necessarily fully discursively apprehensible, as is traditional natural law or natural theology. Ritual engages prior to any conceptual thematization of its object and usually also transcends discursive statement. Ritual involves the synthesis of habit, image, symbol, movement, and emotion. It is therefore heuristic for a range of moral and religious insights. To be sure, as a central category of human existence, ritual is secondarily available for discursive appropriation. Yet, ritual is largely ignored in Western philosophical reflection. Hence, the importance of this volume: this book offers a philosophical assessment of the significance of ritual. First, this volume recognizes ritual’s pre- or non-discursive character, which nests virtue and directs moral action, so that ritual can be powerfully formative of both moral and immoral action. Second, this volume seeks to assess the roles ritual can play in the pursuit of virtue by those who recognize that the collective insight and wisdom of moral traditions can serve as a positive moral resource.

The Common Good

The common good is an essentially contested concept in contemporary moral and political discussions. Although the notion of the common good has a slightly antique air, especially in discussions in the North Atlantic, it has figured prominently in both the sophisticated theoretical accounts of moral and political theory in recent years and also in the popular arguments brought for particular political policies and for more general orientations toward policy. It has been at home both in the political arsenal of the left and the right. It has had special significance in ethical and political debates in modern and modernizing cultures. Broadly Aristotelian views about community, family, and the common good have played an important role in Western debates about the impact of modernizing trends on traditional intermediate institutions. Similarly, debates in East Asian cultures traditionally influenced by Confucian teachings have worried about these same influences. Both Aristotelianism in the West and Confucianism in the East have been to some extent pushed aside from the center of contemporary political debate, but both remain options frequently sought out by those uncomfortable with some of the more unsettling features of modern culture.

A Confucian Philosophy of Medicine and Some Implications

Two crucial topics in the philosophy of medicine are the philosophy of nature and philosophical anthropology. In this essay I engage the philosophy of nature by exploring Anne Fagot-Largeaults study of norms in nature as a way of articulating a Confucian philosophy of medicine. I defend the Confucian position as a moderate naturalism.

Secular Humanist Bioethics and Regenerative Medicine

As Daniel Callahan perceptively observed some 20 years ago, issues and dilemmas in bioethics might be new as a result of remarkable advances in biomedical science, but the moral questions they raise are “among the oldest that human beings have asked themselves” (Callahan, 2004, p. 278). Regenerative Medicine is a cutting edge medicine, devoted to the repair of damaged, diseased, or degenerative organs through bioengineering cells, tissues, and organs. The technologies are new and still developing, and so are the moral controversies, for example, therapeutic cloning, cultivation of human embryonic stem cells, and the destruction of human embryos.