This post is from the JMBzine Blog Vault, which means it is a very old blog post that I wrote at a very different time of my life. My views on religion (I’m now a Humanistic Jew), politics (today I’m a democratic socialist), and many other subjects (LGBTQ+ inclusion, abortion rights, etc.) have drastically changed over the years, so please bear this in mind when reading this post.
I am beginning to slowly wake up a little bit. Maybe it’s a matter of my metabolism kicking in.
In Ethics today we are talking about an alternative to the 2 types of ethics we previously talked about. (The first two types we talked about were teleological ethic – based on consequences, and the demetological ethic – based on duty or obligation.)
This alternative would be a response-based ethic. This means basically that all of our actions are based first of all on the questions put to us. We respond to our environment.
Secondly we have to interpret our environment. We don’t respond to just raw facts. As my prof said, “Life is a response to what we have to interpret.”
Three, we act in anticipation of receiving a certain response for our actions, and finally we act in the context of a community that shares the same interpretations.
This whole concept is very interesting . . .