“
A strong definition of business success often incorporates elements from several frameworks. A balanced approach might combine financial health with a commitment to innovation and social responsibility. This ensures the company remains profitable while considering its long-term impact and ethical obligations.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
Doing no harm, both intentional and unintentional, is the fundamental principle of ethical AI systems.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Doing no harm is the first principle of ethical AI system.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
CSIPP™ (Crisis Solution Internal Philosophy and Practice) is a framework I created that is designed to help organizations effectively handle crises. It emphasizes proactive planning, continuous learning, and adaptability, focusing on maximizing the organization's ability to add value throughout the crisis.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
“
One of the key roles of an ethical AI system is to protect humanity from air pollution and ensure pure and healthy air for the next generation to breathe.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Artificial intelligence has many bigger roles to play for environmental sustainability, energy recycling, and pollution prevention.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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An ethical AI system must have a high level of traceability so that any damage done can be traced back to its source and rectified.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
The principles of ethical AI systems are more focused on reducing carbon footprints and improving socio-environmental sustainability.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Artificial intelligence is defined as a machine's ability to automatically learn, adapt, and solve complex problems with increasing precision and performance that benefit society.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
The basic guidelines of an ethical AI system refer to those values which can be implemented at the core of every AI algorithm to bring out the safety, security, and fundamental goodness of artificial intelligence for all beings and human society at large.
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Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Ethical AI systems aim to end the practice of using people from low-income backgrounds as test subjects in clinical trials and also support their equal rights in patent claims and revenue generation from the medicines.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
The promise of artificial intelligence for achieving sustainable development goals needs comprehensive safety and ethical standards and protocols.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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Ethical artificial intelligence is concerned with benefiting humanity, doing no harm to humanity, and respecting human values and preferences.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Artificial intelligence has many roles to play to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in healthcare and the protection of humanity.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Doing no harm and uplifting human freedom, values, and rights are the core aspects of ethical AI systems
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Ethical AI system principles are more focused on lowering carbon footprints and improving socio-environmental sustainability.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Future artificial intelligence is more focused on compassionate, caring, and creative intelligence than just hard intelligence.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
In ethical AI system frameworks, the systems, the creators, researchers, organizations, governments, and international agencies should always behave and update their own internal moral compass in the most advantageous way for humanity.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Internal controls and audit oversight are indispensable pillars of sound financial management, providing a framework for safeguarding assets, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of financial reporting, and promoting operational efficiency.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
“
One of the primary responsibilities of an ethical AI system is to protect the environment and stop human violations on nature in the name of modernization and development so that future generations can keep breathing happily and live joyfully.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
For ethical AI systems, the question is, "Who decides what is ethical?" Well, starting from the developer, researchers, organizations, governments, and international bodies should always act according to their conscience and always in the best interests of humanity. Equal effort must be made to guarantee human safety, freedom, autonomy, and justice.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Buddhism, with its non-theistic framework, grounds its ethics, not on the notion of obedience, but on that of harmony.
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Bhikkhu Bodhi (The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering)
“
Ethics is the compass that guides artificial intelligence towards responsible and beneficial outcomes. Without ethical considerations, AI becomes a tool of chaos and harm.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
AI algorithms should be tuned with human values, empathy, and a deep understanding of the consequences of their actions.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Without an ethical framework, the will is random, controlled solely by the individual's more or less fleeting desires...
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Svend Brinkmann
“
Ethics is the map that helps artificial intelligence make decisions that are good for people and the world. Without addressing ethics, AI can be cause of chaos and suffering for humanity.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Humans have limitations due to selfish genes, competitive genes, and the fear-driving genes. The aim of compassionate AI is to overcome those limitations through service, care, compassion, honesty, and genuine love.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
The modern virtues fail because they concern the outer self, the human facade, the part of ourselves the world sees most readily – while the classical virtues form an organizing framework for our inner selves… for our souls.
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Jonathan V. Last
“
It is a disturbing sign of the times when the two most transformative science technologies affecting the globe—biotechnology and nanotechnology—are governed by no external ethical or legal frameworks to protect public safety and other public interests, despite the fact that both industries have benefited from heavy taxpayer-funded government support.
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Ralph Nader (The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future)
“
How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning.
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”
Cornel West (Race Matters)
“
We need a combination of supreme moral sensitivity and economic knowledge. Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values.
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Wilhelm Röpke (A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market)
“
Science has marched forward. But civilization’s values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago. Even our economic system, capitalism, is half a millennium old. The first stock exchange opened in 1602 in Amsterdam. By 1637, tulip mania had caused the first speculation bubble and crash. And not a lot has changed. Virtually every business stills uses the double-entry bookkeeping and accounting adopted in thirteenth –century Venice. So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ideas that were firmly set before anyone knew the world was round. In many ways, they reflect how we understood the world when we didn’t understand the world at all.
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Carl Safina (The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World)
“
Responsible data and complete transparency are the unbreakable shields in the realm of large-scale Ethical AI for protecting humanity and fostering growth.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Compassionate AI has many roles in achieving the United Nations' development goals, especially in healthcare and the protection of humanity.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
The energy of youth, combined with the dynamism of science and compassionate AI, pushes for a better world and the protection of humanity.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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Youth's energy, science's vitality, and compassionate AI can shape a society for a better world where equity, prosperity, and peace prevail.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
The energy of youth, combined with the dynamism of science and compassionate AI, can lead to a better world of peace, prosperity, equity, and protection for humanity.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
The evolution of AI should always be guided by shared Human Values, the protection of human rights, and the survival of future generations.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Businesses must operate within the legal framework, respecting the rules of the game.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Ethical AI systems aim to provide equal educational opportunities to students from low-income and high-income backgrounds.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
Leaders should utilize ethical decision-making
frameworks to guide decision-making and ensure that actions align with ethical principles.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Thiel’s Randian ethical framework makes it easy to cast Parker as someone who’s “turning the wheels of history” despite the morally challenged projects his fame is built upon. The notion that Parker is a great disrupter cannot be disputed, but the fact that his businesses were built on copyright theft (Napster) and deep consumer surveillance (Facebook) leads us to question what exactly these attention harvesting industries create and whether they’re aiding the larger culture or destroying
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Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy)
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From a nonpatriarchal metaethical standpoint, however, Singer's and Regan's theoretical similarities are as significant as their differences. In particular, both Singer's utilitarian theory and Regan's rights approach are developed within a framework of patriarchal norms, which includes the subordinatin of emotion to reason, the privileging of abstract principles of conduct, the perception of ethical discussion as a battle between adversaries, and the presumption that ethics shoudl function as a means of social control.
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Brian Luke
“
When it comes to specifying the values particular to paganism, people have generally listed features such as these: an eminently aristocratic conception of the human individual; an ethics founded on honor (“shame” rather than “sin”); an heroic attitude toward life’s challenges; the exaltation and sacralization of the world, beauty, the body, strength, health; the rejection of any “worlds beyond”; the inseparability of morality and aesthetics; and so on. From this perspective, the highest value is undoubtedly not a form of “justice” whose purpose is essentially interpreted as flattening the social order in the name of equality, but everything that can allow a man to surpass himself. To paganism, it is pure absurdity to consider the results of the workings of life’s basic framework as unjust. In the pagan ethic of honor, the classic antithesis noble vs. base, courageous vs. cowardly, honorable vs. dishonorable, beautiful vs. deformed, sick vs. healthy, and so forth, replace the antithesis operative in a morality based on the concept of sin: good vs. evil, humble vs. vainglorious, submissive vs. proud, weak vs. arrogant, modest vs. boastful, and so on. However, while all this appears to be accurate, the fundamental feature in my opinion is something else entirely. It lies in the denial of dualism.
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Alain de Benoist (On Being a Pagan)
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Ethical AI systems must learn not to discriminate or manipulate anyone based on race, color, religion, gender, age, national origin, marital status, social status, genetics, or medical information. Must understand its own misuse or misconduct limits and recertification mechanisms.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
“
If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.
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Kalid Gilad
“
The hero of the following account, Homo immunologicus, who must give his life, with all its dangers and surfeits, a symbolic framework, is the human being that struggles with itself in concern for its form. We will characterize it more closely as the ethical human being, or rather Homo repetitious, Homo artista, the human in training. None of the circulating theories of behaviour or action is capable of grasping the practising human - on the contrary: we will understand why previous theories had to make it vanish systematically, regardless of whether they divided the field of observation into work and interaction, processes and communications, or active and contemplative life. With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity - that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other.
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Peter Sloterdijk (Du mußt dein Leben ändern)
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There is no ethical or moral framework that transcends context and the complexity of human life. All we have is the messy world within which to work and better ourselves. These ordinary as-if rituals are the means by which we imagine new realities over time construct new worlds. Our lives begin in the everyday and stay in the everyday. Only in the everyday can we begin to create truly great worlds.
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Michael Puett (The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life)
“
I looked at the internet for too long today and start.
ed feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think
people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses
are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply
and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempis
to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to
be essentially gibberish. Everyone is understandably attached
to particular identity categories, but at the same time largely
unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how
they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only
apparent schema is that for every victim group (people bom
into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppres-
sor group (people born into rich families, men, white people)
But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor
are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are
transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For
this reason, an individual's membership of a particular identity
group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a
great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individu-
als into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their
proper moral reckoning.
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
... everyone is understandably attached to particular identity categories, but at the same time largely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. the only apparent schema is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). but in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. for this reason, an individual's membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning.
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up?
Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.
”
”
Michael Warner (The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life)
“
The Three Sisters offer us a new metaphor for an emerging relationship between indigenous knowledge and Western science, both of which are rooted in the earth. I think of the corn as traditional ecological knowledge, the physical and spiritual framework that can guide the curious bean of science, which twines like a double helix. The squash creates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing. I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges. And so all may be fed.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
“
The legal structure of Islamic marriage is predicated on a gender-differentiated allocation of interdependent claims, which would be thrown into chaos by a same-sex union. In the standard contractual understanding of marriage, the husband holds milk al-nikah, control of the marriage tie, and the wife has a claim to dower and the obligation of sexual exclusivity and availability. Several early jurists considered the possibility of whether these rights and duties could be reallocated – whether a woman could pay a man a dower, for example, and retain control over sex and divorce – and agreed unanimously that such a reallocation is not permitted. Not only are husbands’ and wives’ rights distinct, but each role is fundamentally linked to the sex/gender of the person exercising it. A woman cannot wield control of the marriage tie; a man cannot be contractually bound to sexual availability to his wife. Thus, following that logic, it would not be possible for one woman to adopt the “husband” role and the other to adopt the “wife” role in the marriage of two women. The self-contained logic of the jurisprudential framework does not permit such an outcome.
”
”
Kecia Ali (Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur'an, Hadith, and Jurisprudence)
“
But once it was conceded that Kissinger operated from a Realpolitik framework with intellectual, even moral principles of its own that were larger than himself or his personal advantage, then difficult questions about which decisions best served American interests or humanitarian ends were open to debate. Judgment calls weren’t the same as the perpetration of crimes (although some Realpolitikers were sure to recall Talleyrand’s words upon hearing of the murder of the Duc D’Enghien: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder”). Because Kissinger’s leftist critics didn’t accept Realism as a legitimate basis for foreign policy, they didn’t see any need to debate matters of judgment. What was more, locked in their partisan cocoons, they had trouble acknowledging that policymakers frequently made those judgment calls in a fog of ambiguity, in which outcomes could not be predicted and the ethics of a situation could point in several directions at once. “Statesmanship,” Kissinger said, “needs to be judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes.” But what the left craved, what they insisted on, was moral certainty in an uncertain world, or what Kissinger, in a combative mood, called “a nihilistic perfectionism.
”
”
Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
“
The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.
”
”
Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
“
I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is understandably attached to particular identity categories, but at the same time largely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual’s membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning. If serious political action is still possible, which I think at this point is an open question, maybe it won’t involve people like us—in fact I think it almost certainly won’t. And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it. But I would like to be helpful in some way to the project, whatever it is, and if I could help only in a very small way, I wouldn’t mind, because I would be acting in my own self-interest anyway—because it’s also ourselves we’re brutalising, though in another way, of course. No one wants to live like this. Or at least, I don’t want to live like this. I want to live differently, or if necessary to die so that other people can one day live differently. But looking at the internet, I don’t see many ideas worth dying for. The only idea on there seems to be that we should watch the immense human misery unfolding before us and just wait for the most immiserated, most oppressed people to turn around and tell us how to stop it. It seems that there exists a curiously unexplained belief that the conditions of exploitation will by themselves generate a solution to exploitation—and that to suggest otherwise is condescending and superior, like mansplaining. But what if the conditions don’t generate the solution?
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
Like it or not, religion has been a key touchstone in most societies. Likely it will continue to be a key part of many societies. Maybe long term religion is doomed as countries get rich and knowledge grows. Maybe faith and belief will be substituted by ethical culture? Or maybe some form of religion or morality is genetically innate?101 Or maybe good morals simply mean better chances of surviving? If not through religion, then we better strengthen our moral/ethical backbones and societal frameworks fast because… We can be certain of one thing… The technologies and changes we are talking about are so powerful that they are changing humanity itself.
”
”
Juan Enríquez (Homo Evolutis)
“
Now from science we have a new creation story, which is very alluring and very exciting. It's not about deposing all the other wisdom stories about creation that humanity has gathered, but it certainly supplements it. It offers a real universal view because it's beyond any particular religion, ethnicity, nation and so forth. As we're struggling as a species to come together as a tribe, it provides us our basic framework, because it's from creation stories that ethics derive. Today's creation story from science is that we come from 14 billion years of an organic unfolding of the universe and are connected physiologically with every being in the universe. We all share the same atoms and the same molecules. That's truly significant and important at this time in history. We're all kin, we're all interdependent. And that's the basis of compassion, which was Jesus's ultimate teaching.
”
”
David M. Felten (Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity)
“
Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . .
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . .
Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . .
So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . .
There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . .
Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.
The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . .
Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.
This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.
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Robert Locke
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One day, early in our friendship, Svetlana had spontaneously told me that she thought I was trying to live an aesthetic life, and that it was a major difference between us, because she was trying to live an ethical life. I wasn’t sure why the two should be opposed, and worried for a moment that she thought that I thought that it was OK to cheat or steal. But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more risks than her and cared more than she did about “style,” while she cared more about history and traditions. Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different. When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions. Svetlana liked taking introductions and survey classes, “mastering” basics before moving to the next level, getting straight A’s. I had a terror of being bored, so I preferred to take highly specific classes with interesting titles, even when I hadn’t taken the prerequisites and had no idea what was going on. I could see how my way might be called aesthetic. It was less clear to me why Svetlana’s way was ethical, though it did seem “responsible” and obedient.
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Elif Batuman (Either/Or)
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The development of a working alliance is crucial because it addresses a psychic phobia associated with relationships that is common in complex trauma clients. As we discussed, when primary relationships are sources of profound disillusionment, betrayal, and emotional pain, any subsequent relationship with an authority figure who offers an emotional bond or other assistance might be met with a range of emotions, such as fear, suspicion, anger, or hopelessness on the negative end of the continuum and idealization, hope, overdependence, and entitlement on the positive. Therapy offers a compensatory relationship, albeit within a professional framework, that has differences from and restrictions not found in other relationships. On the one hand, the therapist works within professional and ethical boundaries and limitations in a role of higher status and education and is therefore somewhat unattainable for the client. On the other, the therapist's ethical and professional mandate is the welfare of the client, creating a perception of an obligation to meet the client's needs and solve his or her problems. Furthermore, the therapist is expected to both respect the client's privacy and accept emotional and behavioral difficulties without judgment, while simultaneously being entitled to ask the client about his or her most personal and distressing feelings, thoughts and experiences. Developing a sense of trust in the therapist, therefore, is both expected and fraught with inherent difficulties that are amplified by each client's unique history of betrayal trauma, loss, and relational distress.
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Christine A. Courtois (Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach)
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As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men. I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. Taking on its own account Descartes' revolt against the evil genius, the pride of the thinking reed in the face of the universe which crushes him, it asserts that, despite his limits, through them, it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute. Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: "Do what you must, come what may." That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.
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Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics of Ambiguity)
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Metasploit is a framework, which means it is a collection of multiple independent software tools developed for specific purposes. With the tools contained in this framework, a hacker can carry out reconnaissance and information gathering from various sources, scan targets for vulnerabilities, and even hack local and remote computers and networks, all from one platform. Simply put, the Metasploit framework is a hacker’s Swiss knife.
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Code Addicts (THE HACKING STARTER KIT: An In-depth and Practical course for beginners to Ethical Hacking. Including detailed step-by-step guides and practical demonstrations.)
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God doesn’t whisper in our ears what to do next — that would short-circuit the growth of wisdom and path to maturity. Instead, God works through our understanding to enable us to determine the best course of action. He has given us a clear body of ethical teaching in the Scriptures and then, within that framework, given us room to make our own decisions using our renewed thinking. Discernment based on love is the way to know what’s best.
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Matt Perman (What's Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done)
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Modern debates were over truth and reality, reason and experience, liberty and equality, justice and peace, beauty and progress. In the postmodern framework, those concepts always appear in quotation marks. Our most strident voices tell us that “Truth” is a myth. “Reason” is a white male Eurocentric construct. “Equality” is a mask for oppressions. “Peace” and “Progress” are met with cynical and weary reminders of power—or explicit ad hominem attacks. Postmodern debates thus display a paradoxical nature. Across the board, we hear, on the one hand, abstract themes of relativism and egalitarianism. Those themes come in both epistemological and ethical forms. Objectivity is a myth; there is no Truth, no Right Way to read nature or a text. All interpretations are equally valid. Values are socially subjective products. Culturally, therefore, no group’s values have special standing. All ways of life from Afghani to Zulu are legitimate. Coexisting with these relativistic and egalitarian themes, we hear, on the other hand, deep chords of cynicism. Principles of civility and procedural justice simply serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays. Disagreements are met—not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail—but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force.
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Stephen R.C. Hicks (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition))
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It is vitally important that we pay attention to the narrative framework in which the Old Testament laws are set.
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Christopher J.H. Wright (Old Testament Ethics for the People of God)
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The Intellectual Vacuum of Current Moral Thought Toward the beginning of this chapter we made the statement that the centuries-long attempt to devise a morality from within merely human resources has now proven itself a failure. Now we want to return to this point in the light of Jesus’ exposition of the rightness of the kingdom heart. What is the basis of such a statement? Simply this: that, as noted in the opening of chapter 1, there is in fact no body of moral knowledge now operative in the institutions of knowledge in our culture. This is the outcome of the now centuries-long effort to develop a moral guide to life within the framework of human thought and experience alone, unassisted by revelation. By contrast, the Christian teaching about moral goodness that derives from the principles laid down by Jesus does have a historical, theoretical, and practical claim to constitute the true body of moral knowledge. This is not said to encourage blind acceptance but precisely the opposite. It is said to encourage the toughest of testing for those teachings in all areas of thought and real life. We saw in chapter 1 the young lady who went to Professor Coles on her way out of Harvard and said to him, “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?” Then she added, “What’s the point of knowing good, if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?” But, as we pointed out, knowing good is not seriously proposed in college or university courses today. Any “knowing” in such matters is thought to be totally impossible. In fact, both knowing good and being good are for the most part treated with open scorn in the academic settings which determine so much of our lives. That is the outcome of the long effort to establish a secular ethic in the modern period. But the concern for becoming good and being good remains, as the words of both President Bok and Professor Coles show, for it is a real-life issue that will never go away. And it is with regard to this issue of what kind of people we are to be that the teachings of Jesus about the rightness of the kingdom heart show him to be the unrivaled master of human life. Any serious inquirer can validate those teachings in his or her own experience. But they cannot invalidate them by simply refusing to consider them and hiding behind the dogmas of modern intellect.
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Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God)
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Organisations that are consistently successful have strong systems and a framework to enforce those systems. In the course of our corporate sessions we often ask people, and the larger teams they represent, what their one per cent things are and how much time they spend practicing working on them. Doing the one per cent things is a sign of humility, while on the other hand ignoring them would be a mark of arrogance. It is also a great indicator of work ethic, the one factor more than any other that contributes to winning consistently. I fear not the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once. I fear the man who practiced one kick 10,000 times. —Bruce Lee
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Anita Bhogle and Harsha Bhogle (The Winning Way 2.0Learnings from Sport for Managers)
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The word ethics tends to come off as academic and authoritarian, but ultimately professional ethics are just a formalized gut check. They’re a personal statement about what you will and won’t do at your job, and a framework for seeking out clients, projects or employers that are a good match for your beliefs. We encourage every design activist to think through and write down a set of personal ethics, so something is in place to guide you when you run into a sticky situation while racing against four different deadlines.
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Noah Scalin (The Design Activist's Handbook: How to Change the World (Or at Least Your Part of It) with Socially Conscious Design)
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Modern civilisation does not generate an ethical framework for human life.
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Simon du Plock (The Needs of Counsellors and Psychotherapists: Emotional, Social, Physical, Professional)
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The fear that self-acceptance necessarily annihilates ethical judgment is groundless, for we are perfectly able to distinguish between up and down at any point on the earth's surface, realizing at the same time that there is no up and down in the larger framework of the cosmos. Self-acceptance is therefore the spiritual and psychological equivalent of space, a freedom of which does not annihilate distinctions but makes them possible.
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Alan W. Watts (Nature, Man and Woman)
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There is an enormous amount that we still don’t understand—because, as always, what we don’t know is vastly greater than what we know. But we are learning. Perhaps in a curious way, transporting ourselves back to our natural reality, which for Price has its roots in pragmatism and in a respect for what we have learned about reality thanks to scientific rationalism, ends up bringing us closer to the intuitions of Nietzsche, which along a different route have led to the excesses of postmodernism: before being a rational animal, man is a vital animal—“It is our needs that interpret the world . . . Every instinct has its thirst for dominion.” True, but our reason also emerges from this magma, and emerges as our most effective weapon. Price’s book argues with strength and rigor for a humble and complete naturalism: we are natural creatures in a natural world, and these terms give us the best conceptual framework for understanding both ourselves and the world. We are part of this tremendous and incredibly rich nature about which we still understand little, albeit enough to know that it is sufficiently complex to have given rise to all that we are, including our ethics, our capacity for knowledge, our sense of beauty and our ability to experience emotions. Outside of this there is nothing. For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than a hundred billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism. Emptiness Is Empty: Nāgārjuna December 8, 2017 We rarely come across a book with the capacity to influence our way of thinking.
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Carlo Rovelli (There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World)
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The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality:
The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of
capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218)
Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament.
Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198).
Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to
subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and
its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist
ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.
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Kelsey Wood (Zizek: A Reader's Guide)
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One of the epithets the Buddha acquired over the years was “the Doctor of the World.” A reason for this is that the central insight and framework that he taught, known as the Four Noble Truths, is cast in the formulation of a classical Indian medical diagnosis. The format begins with the nature of the symptom. In this particular kind of psychological or spiritual disease, the symptom is dukkha, the experience of dissatisfaction; this is the First Noble Truth. The second element in this diagnostic format is the cause of that symptom, which the Buddha outlined as being self-centered craving, greed, hatred, and delusion. These are the toxins that Matthieu referred to, the negative afflictive emotions, habits, and qualities that the mind gets caught up in and that poison the heart; this is the Second Noble Truth. The third element is the prognosis, and the good news is that it is curable. This is the Third Noble Truth, that the experience of dissatisfaction can end; we can be free from it. The fourth element—and the Fourth Noble Truth—is the methodology of treatment: what the Buddha laid out as the way to heal this wound. It’s known in some expressions as the Eightfold Path, but it can be outlined in three fundamental elements: first, responsible behavior or virtue, living a moral and ethical life; second, mental collectedness, meditation, and mind training; and third, the development of insightful understanding in accordance with reality, or wisdom. These three elements are the fundamental treatment for this psychological, spiritual ailment of dissatisfaction. I should underline that the Buddha didn’t make any claim to have a monopoly on truth. When somebody once asked him, “Is it the case that you’re the only one who really understands the way things are, and that all other spiritual teachings are incorrect, all other paths are erroneous?” He said, “No, by no means.” It’s not a matter of the way the teachings are framed, the language or symbolism that one uses. It is simply the presence or absence of these three central qualities: ethical behavior, mental collectedness, and wisdom. If any spiritual path contains those three elements, then it will certainly lead to the possibility and the actuality of freedom, peace, a harmony within oneself, and an easefulness in life. If it doesn’t contain those elements, then it cannot lead to easefulness, peace, and liberation.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation)
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Surely we would want to encode a powerful AGI [artificial general intelligence] with the most utopian ethical framework we can, rather than lock in the prevailing ethics of the early twenty-first century.
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Jonathan Leighton (The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering)
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I would ask you to expand on what the goal of meditation is from your perspective. HH Dalai Lama: The objective of spiritual practice in the traditional context of Buddhism was well summarized by Ajahn Amaro in the framework of the three trainings: ethical discipline, cultivating concentration, which is the meditation practice, and, based upon that, cultivating insight. At the initial stage, because some of our impulsive behavior is destructive and damaging, we need to find a way to restrain ourselves from engaging in these impulsive, destructive actions. This first stage of training is where we deliberately adopt a set of precepts or a code of life, which is the training in ethical discipline. Since these impulsive, destructive behaviors really stem from a restless, undisciplined state of mind, we need to find a way of dealing with them directly. But our normal state of mind is so dissipated and unfocused that the mind cannot deal with mental problems immediately. Therefore one must first cultivate a degree of mental stability, an ability to focus. This is where the second training in concentration or meditation comes in. On that basis, once we have a certain degree of stability, then we are able to use our mind, empowered with a focused attention, to deal with destructive emotions and habitual thought patterns. The antidote that overcomes the negative and destructive tendencies of the mind is insight.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation)
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provide no stable framework for ethics. Contraception minimizes the risk of unwanted pregnancy, thus facilitating sex as recreation without the need for the context of a long-term stable relationship. Condoms curtail the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and therefore enable “safe sex” in the gay community. Mutual consent moves to the center of discussions about what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior. And this, in its turn, places huge pressure on even the most deeply rooted of sexual taboos. Why should incest be prohibited if it is between consenting adults and there is no risk of conception?
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Carl R. Trueman (The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution)
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Spinoza’s (1632—1677) Ethics starts with a clear framework, explanation, and definition of his terms. In that way, the philosophical inquiry becomes more accessible and precise for a reader or interpreter to understand and grasp. When Spinoza, in his definitions, uses the term substance, we understand that it is God. But when the term substance reappears under point III and then again under VI, which treats God, we must question why. For Spinoza, there is substance and substance. What is the difference between the substance under III and VI? We would say that, according to Spinoza, the ultimate, infinite substance is God, and everything formed is of the same substance. If that is the case, all substance is God or Nature. If all substance is God, then the question is, why separate substance from substance?
Spinoza wanted to highlight the difference between the infinite substance of the ultimate Being, God, and the substance that makes Nature in all its forms. But nature, or anything in nature, is substance “which is in itself and is conceived through itself and does not need another “thing” to form it.” Nature is just a manifestation or mode of God or Substance.
Substance (substantia) is not a new term and has been used since Aristotle, if not earlier. Perhaps the substance is interchangeable with terms like arche, aether …. fifth element, proton archon (first principle), Plotinus’ Divine mind (nous), or intelligence. Here are Spinoza’s definitions:
Of God
DEFINITIONS
I. By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing.
II. That thing is called finite in its own kind (in suo genere) which can be limited by another thing of the same nature. For example, a body is called finite because we always conceive another which is greater. So a thought is limited by another thought; but a body is not limited by a thought, nor a thought by a body.
III. By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; in other words, that the conception of which does not need, the conception of another thing from which it must be formed.
IV. By attribute I understand that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.
V. By mode I understand the modifications of substance, or that which is in another thing through which also it is conceived.
VI. By God I understand Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.
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Dejan Stojanovic (ABSOLUTE (THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS))
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And, once again, this contextualizing of Christian virtue within the redemptive eschatological framework underscores the great revolution in virtue ethics that took place from Paul onward, or as Paul would say, from the cross of Jesus Christ onward: the dethroning of pride and the enthroning of humility and gratitude.
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J. Ross Wagner (The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays)
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The Framework of Life Deuteronomy 6:2 “Thus for the sake of Christ and his coming, natural life must be lived within the framework of certain definite rights and certain definite duties.” —ETHICS The Christian’s concern should never only be for the church and for God’s future kingdom, but also for natural life and the world. Our concerns should include good government, equal opportunity, justice, values that ennoble the human person, as well as concerns for our environment and the world’s resources. These concerns are not secular. Rather they are deeply spiritual, for without a sustainable world and cultural values based on freedom and justice, the message of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ would fall into a vacuum. Thought The God of the Bible is Creator as well as Redeemer. He is concerned about this life as much as He is concerned about eternal life.
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Charles R. Ringma (Seize the Day -- with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A 365 Day Devotional (Designed for Influence))
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Thus, metaphors reshape perception. For example, when the Gospel of John presents Jesus as saying, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven” (John 6:51a), the message jolts his hearers, who are looking for him to play the role of Moses by providing them with miraculous bread to eat (6:30–31). Jesus’ striking response refuses the identification with Moses and posits instead a metaphorical conjunction between himself and the manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness. The metaphor quickly takes a gruesome turn when Jesus goes on to say, “[T]he bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” and affirms that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life” (6:51b, 54a). At one level, the metaphorical shock induces the reader to confront the scandal of John’s claim that “the Word became flesh.” (Indeed, the statement that the Word became flesh strikingly illustrates the power of metaphor to “mutilate our world of meanings” and create a new framework for perception.)13 On another level, the metaphor leads the reader to make the imaginative connection between the Exodus story and the church’s Eucharist, with the flesh of Jesus as the startling common term. The hearer of such a metaphor is confronted by two options. We can take offense at this jarring conjunction of images, as did those disciples who went away murmuring, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (John 6:60). Or, alternatively, we can “understand” the metaphor. To “understand” it, however, is to stand under its authority, to allow our life and perception of reality to be changed in light of the “ontological flash”14 created by the metaphorical conjunction, so that we confess with Peter, “Lord, to whom [else] can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (6:68).
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Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
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Friction-Free Economies Why is it necessary to turn to a cultural characteristic like spontaneous sociability to explain the existence of large-scale corporations in an economy, or prosperity more generally? Wasn’t the modern system of contract and commercial law invented precisely to get around the need for business associates to trust one another as family members do? Advanced industrialized societies have created comprehensive legal frameworks for economic organization and a wide variety of juridical forms, from individual proprietorships to large, publicly traded multinational enterprises. Most economists would add rational individual self-interest to this stew to explain how modern organizations arise. Don’t businesses based on strong family ties and unstated moral obligations degenerate into nepotism, cronyism, and generally bad business decision making? Indeed, isn’t the very essence of modern economic life the replacement of informal moral obligations with formal, transparent legal ones?1 The answer to these questions is that although property rights and other modern economic institutions were necessary for the creation of modern businesses, we are often unaware that the latter rest on a bedrock of social and cultural habits that are too often taken for granted. Modern institutions are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for modern prosperity and the social well-being that it undergirds; they have to be combined with certain traditional social and ethical habits if they are to work properly. Contracts allow strangers with no basis for trust to work with one another, but the process works far more efficiently when the trust exists. Legal forms like joint-stock companies may allow unrelated people to collaborate, but how easily they do so depends on their cooperativeness when dealing with nonkin.
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Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
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By “global ethics,” the Dalai Lama means that all people must take personal responsibility for ensuring human rights, fairness, equality, and environmental protection, regardless of their belief system. He believes that people need not embrace Buddhism to live good lives. Often he says that practicing Buddhism is unnecessary. Everyone can find the keys to a purposeful and moral life within their own culture and religious framework.
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Lynn M. Hamilton (The Dalai Lama: A Life Inspired)
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Maqasid represents a middle ground, offering a way to infuse governance with ethical and spiritual values without compromising secular principles... It is a framework that respects individual beliefs while striving for the common good based on shared values.” (Chapter 2: The Essence of Din (Religion), p. 10)
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Abdellatif Raji (Heaven Is Under the Feet of Governments: Steering Nations With Maqasid)
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Compassionate AI aims to create a political system free from politicians, ensuring that every citizen is equally empowered and included, where empathy leads the way.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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Compassionate AI envisions a political system free from politicians, where every citizen is guaranteed equal empowerment and inclusion.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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If our whole social and economic organization is based on each one seeking his own advantage, if it is governed by the principle of egotism tempered only by the ethical principle of fairness, how can one do business, how can one act within the framework of existing society and at the same time practice love? Does the latter not imply giving up all one's secular concerns and sharing the life of the poorest?
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Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)
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Legal education," Nader said, "assumes its chief purpose to be the development within a refined ethical framework of the analytical and empirical skills necessary to further justice.
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Scott Turow (One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School)
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I described research showing that people who grow up in Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies are statistical outliers on many psychological measures, including measures of moral psychology. I also showed that: • The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. • Moral pluralism is true descriptively. As a simple matter of anthropological fact, the moral domain varies across cultures. • The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e., moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader—including the ethics of community and divinity—in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies. • Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society. In the next three chapters I’ll catalogue the moral intuitions, showing exactly what else there is beyond harm and fairness. I’ll show how a small set of innate and universal moral foundations can be used to construct a great variety of moral matrices. I’ll offer tools you can use to understand moral arguments emanating from matrices that are not your own. SIX
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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Purpose creates a unifying vision for all of a company’s stakeholders, including its employees, customers, partners, and shareholders. It drives ethical behavior and creates an essential check on actions that go against the best interests of stakeholders. Finally, it’s a powerful driver of culture, providing a framework for consistent decision-making throughout an organization, which ultimately helps sustain long-term financial returns for the company’s shareholders.
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Ranjay Gulati (Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies)
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We can see, then, how conflicts arose in the formation of Christianity between those restless, inquiring people who marked out a solitary path to self-discovery and the institutional framework that gave to the great majority of people religious sanction and ethical direction for their daily lives. Adapting for its own purposes the model of Roman political and military organization, and gaining, in the fourth century, imperial support, orthodox Christianity grew increasingly stable and enduring. Gnostic Christianity proved no match for the orthodox faith, either in terms of orthodoxy's wide popular appeal...or in terms of its effective organization.
To the impoverishment of Christian tradition, gnosticism, which offered alternatives to what became the main thrust of Christian orthodoxy, was forced outside.
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Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels)
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Just as mountains stand tall with resilience, Compassionate AI rises with an unwavering commitment to understanding and serving humanity.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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In summary, a conceptual framework is a plan that guides the researcher in developing a research question; contemplating epistemology, theory, and ethics; engaging with community; self-situating; considering existing knowledge; hearing story; choosing methods and analytical strategies; and presenting the research and arranging for reciprocity in disseminating findings.
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Margaret Kovach (Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts)
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Meanwhile, the shortfalls in our legal, governance, and ethical frameworks are growing as technology keeps advancing.
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Vivek Wadhwa (The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future)
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In a rapidly changing world dominated by technology, the survival of humanity depends on the early incorporation of Compassionate AI, Compassionate Social Robots, and Compassionate Peacekeeping Robots.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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To have a consistent ethic of life is to be comprehensive in our advocacy for life and to refuse to think of issues in isolation from each other. It is a fundamental conviction that every person is sacred and made in the image of God. It requires pursuing whatever allows people to flourish and fighting everything that crushes life. That means that all these difficult issues -- the military, guns, racism, the death penalty, poverty, and abortion -- are connected, and we need a moral framework that integrates them. That's what it means to be pro-life for the whole life.
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Shane Claiborne (Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person)
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How did Jesus “do” ethics? What framework did Jesus use when it came to discipleship? Were his moral teachings truly requirements for salvation? For entrance into the kingdom? Necessary for salvation?
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Scot McKnight (Sermon on the Mount (The Story of God Bible Commentary Book 21))
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Rather than being predicated on the ideological framework of West German postwar politics with its emphasis on economic growth, political integration, and cultural recovery, their speeches are characterized by their insistence on a historical absence and an ontological loss: the (virtual) absence of Jews and survivors and their living memory in Germany and the concomitant loss of truth and meaning, justice and ethics.8
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Sonja Boos (Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust)
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Ethical AI systems focus on removing human bias from legal systems while adding more humanity to them. Bias in terms of interpretations, judgments, and delaying judgments.
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Sri Amit Ray (Ethical AI Systems: Frameworks, Principles, and Advanced Practices)
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Virtue ethics as studied here does not always fit well into certain alien molds, as much as we might hope—molds that are humanistic, secular, Western, or democratic. Rather, writings on virtue seem to have fit and to continue to fit into a much larger body of knowledge, a framework from which thinkers drew their own “Islamic” ethics. Evidence for this can be found in the stories that Muslims told, and those they still tell, which make use of various branches of moral learning more freely than what is observed in writings specific to one science or another. Those who advocated scripture or voluntarism cannot be excluded from this. Sciences such as philosophy and Sufism could be considered tools in almost any scholar’s toolbox, even if the overall epistemological architecture of that science contravened that scholar’s claims. Such was the case with Ghazālī’s use of philosophy. While he has been presented as appropriating humanistic virtue ethics, Ghazālī, like his later Shiʿi interpreter Fayd. Kāshānī (d. 1679), reminded Muslim readers that religious law and virtue ethics (both philosophical and Sufi virtue ethics) have a common goal, the achievement of ultimate happiness through the perfection of the soul. For advocates of traditional Islamic law, Ghazālī’s intellectual mission typifies a recurring corrective in Islam, perhaps because of Islam’s rich and hermeneutically complex legal tradition: to caution readers not to lose sight of Islam’s larger ethical aims by becoming absorbed with ritual technicalities or divinely commanded limits. Such reminders can be found today to an even greater extent than in the past. New philosophical positions have meant that Muslim thinkers interested in “God’s law” often return to it with insights gleaned from the Western ethical traditions. Networks of ethical reasoning that exist today, moreover, mean that almost no moral decision can truly be made in a scriptural void, just as they could not in the past. The salience of certain single-minded interpretations of Islam often brings us to forget that on a day-to-day basis, a Muslim (like any moral agent) draws on multiple pools of knowledge and culture to make any decision or develop any habit.
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Cyrus Ali Zargar (The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism)