William Schweiker

Accounting for ourselves: Accounting practice and the discourse of ethics

Abstract This essay is a hermeneutical and ethical examination of the activity of giving an account as basic to understanding the moral dimension of accounting practice and research. The author argues that this discursive act is one in which the identity of agents is displayed as intersubjective and constituted by fiduciary relations through time. The essay seeks to show that by rendering an identity so conceived, accounting practice opens corporate forces to ethical evaluation regarding wider human purposes. Thus the essay raises to reflection the activity basic to accounting itself. In doing so, it unfolds the structure and significance of this activity for moral identity.

THE RHETORIC AND RATIONALITY OF ACCOUNTING RESEARCH.

Abstract This essay suggests the value of a rhetorical understanding of accounting research practice. Rhetoric reminds us that despite the methodological differences across various accounting research communities, there is a ubiquity to argument in scholarly practice. No matter what kinds of questions accounting researchers address, no matter what methods they apply to those questions, no matter what languages they evoke, and no matter what purposes and values they attach to the research enterprise, nothing counts as accounting knowledge until it is argued before ones peers. Thus, while rhetoric is not going to substitute for the many and different substantive ways in which accounting researchers produce accounting knowledge, neither can those substantive methods substitute for rhetoric. An understanding of rhetorics role within research is thereby necessary to understand the practice of accounting research and, in turn, the knowledge such practice produces.

Radical Interpretation and Moral Responsibility: A Proposal for Theological Ethics

Questions about responsibility are at the heart of most contemporary moral and political debates. For instance, we ask about who is responsible for decisions in medical care and the termination of particular treatments. Then again, there are debates which surround the responsible use of deadly force against aggression and oppression, or about the morality of intervention into the affairs of other nations in order to relieve human

The Good and Moral Identity: A Theological Ethical Response to Charles Taylor's "Sources of the Self"

Charles Taylor, in his Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, attempts to articulate the goods that ground our sense of why life is worth living while also showing how this entails a commitment to specific moral aims and principles. Taylors breathtaking historical study of modern identity must then be read as a work of moral philosophy. In this review I want to specify Taylors argument and attend to its theological import. I do so mindful that a book so rich in historical detail, subtle in argument, and humane in its vision escapes summary. The reader must explore the text in order to ponder its contribution to our sense of why the moral life is worth living.

Cities of gods : faith, politics, and pluralism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

In this fertile collection of essays, prominent theologians, philosophers, historians, and social scientists explore the mutual entanglements of religious identity with political activity in religiously plural societies. Four essays are devoted to each of the three great religions of The Book, evidencing the variety of conceptions of such a relation within the same religious tradition and demonstrating how they came to be so conceived. In addition, the three sections together display intriguing similarities between the conceptions that are pertinent to the different traditions. These range from definant theocracy to religious sanction of the liberal, secular state.

Monotheistic Faith and the Cosmopolitan Conscience

The central focus of this book draws us into a question sweeping the globe, namely, what is the relation between, on the one hand, religious convictions—say, beliefs in God and ideas about revelation and sacred scriptures—and, on the other hand, political loyalties, including ideas about the rule of law. Three things about this topic seem obvious, at least to me: first, religion will not go away but is in fact shaping global and local social life, so the idea of a purely secular future is not really a viable one; second, the rule of just law is at risk in part because of disputes raging in many countries about the pressure that religious and cultural diversity puts on legal systems; and third, global dynamics—economic, cultural, technological, environmental, and so on—arising out of modern social conditions are going to spread and to accelerate, thereby forging deep connectivity among the peoples of the world that can be the cause of conflict as well as cooperation.1

Responsibility and the Attunement of Conscience

The modern and postmodern worlds in the West have posed fundamental challenges to the idea of “theological ethics.” Modern philosophers—Kant, Hume, Rousseau, and the rest—struggled to establish the autonomy of ethics from theological claims. Kant could speak of ethical theology. Yet ethics in his account provided the rational justification for the postulate of the idea of God. Kant’s agenda was a radical departure not only from traditional Christian thought but also from ancients, like Aristotle, who identified theology with first philosophy ðmetaphysicsÞ related to human happiness and the highest good. Furthermore, advances in modern science seemed to foreclose any idea of moral purpose or value writ into the structures of reality. For instance, Thomas Aquinas’s complex account of interlocking forms of law reaching from the divine mind directing reality to its proper ends ðeternal lawÞ through human moral reason ðnatural lawÞ to the ordering of human social life ðhuman lawÞ hardly made sense in the new world of Baconian science. Advances in biology ðDarwinÞ and physics ðEinsteinÞ mean that the ordering of finite reality seems devoid of moral purpose; it is a whirling confusion devoid of good or right. That is so, even if, as Einstein put it, “God does not play dice with the universe.” The postmodern rediscovery of ethics and the claim of the Other over against what is seen ðrightly or wronglyÞ as the totalizing drive of modernity has often, and in various ways, sidestepped the question of the relation between religion and morality. That is the case despite the new reality of postsecular global societies that pose anew the question of the relation that can and ought to obtain between religious and moral convictions.

The Love of Power

In the following pages I want to address a question at the intersection of authority, power, and religion. How can and ought we to speak about moral authority, that is, the authority of norms, ideals, and values in the responsible life. The focus of my reflections is the “sources of normativity,” as Christine Korsgaard has called it.1 In contrast to Korsgaard and many others as well, my argument does not center on the values that individuals or communities make and impose on the world, the stance of the “love of power” as denoted in the title of these reflections. Rather, moral normativity, I contend, has to be understood with respect to responsibility toward what makes us human. To ask about the sources of normativity is then just to ask about the character of the claim that moral responsibility makes on persons and even communities. Responsibility designates the practice of the moral life. The account of responsibility outlined below is set within a theological context, and so is the relation between the God of Christian faith and the moral space of human life. The task of theological ethics, accordingly, is to articulate and analyze the structures of lived reality in relation to the divine and thereby to interpret the ultimate environment within which we must responsibly orient our lives.

The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: On Iris Murdoch’s Humanism

In this chapter I want to show that the connection in Iris Murdoch’s thought between morality and art discloses her understanding of what it means to be a human being. She intimates that we are straddled between kinds of fate: the necessity of virtue and the necessity of death. I want to probe these necessities on three levels of reflection in order to sustain my contention about Murdoch’s work. I start with art and morals. The second level of inquiry indicates how Murdoch anticipated concerns found in current humanism even though she once called humanism a flimsy creed. Things turn on definition, of course. I will strive to indicate rightly her kind of humanistic outlook. The final level of reflection examines morality and death in order to clarify her deepest claims about human existence. This reflection on what is ultimately important is the inner aim and purpose of the chapter. ‘To do philosophy’, Murdoch once wrote, ‘is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth’ (SG, p. 46). Think of my inquiry as a stab at that way of thinking and on different levels of reflection.

Responsibility and Moral Realities

This essay explores ‘responsibility’ within moral theory and around the question of God’s relation to the world and to acting and suffering human beings. Advancing reflection beyond the outlooks of twentieth-century theologians, the inquiry outlines a multidimensional position that interweaves different rationalities crucial to orienting responsible life. Actions and relations are responsible which respect and enhance the integrity of life. Responsibility is thereby not in itself the object or norm of the ethics but the form of moral existence. This account enables current thought to weave together previous arguments in Christian ethics in a way productive for our global times.