-
THE LINK BETWEEN PROJECT PURSUIT AND BROADER ETHICAL FRAMEWORKS
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
munity cannot be fully realized. The value of mutual respect, while generally supported by its role in encouraging understanding and thoughtful deliberation, stands self-sufficiently as a normative claim about how human beings should live together.5 THE LINK BETWEEN PROJECT PURSUIT AND BROADER ETHICAL FRAMEWORKS At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that behind Cheryl’s assertion that “we shouldn’t play God” was an ethical framework, a broad notion of the good life that informed her values, her commitments, and—in this chapter’s terminology—her projects. In many cases, then, respecting the particularity of someone’s projects will require an understanding of the ethical framework from which those projects emerge. We all have ethical frameworks, and they help shape who we are. We cannot do without them—if we claim to know where we stand on matters of importance to us, we have an ethical framework. Combined with our life experiences, they help shape our sense of self. Charles Taylor uses the term narrative to describe the way our identities are shaped over time by a range of experiences and beliefs. He explains, “In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going. . . . My life always has this degree of narrative understanding, that I understand my present action in the form of an 'and then': there was A (what I am), and then I do B (what I project to become).” In this way, understanding both the self and its location require a recognition of what came before, what has shaped who we are, and our relationship to the good we seek.6 While the notion of narrative is a particularly evocative one, this shouldn’t be taken as merely a string of experiences that add up to a particular self. The self is not simply a series of attachments or evaluations. Rather, the various identifications that arise over a life’s course contribute to a broader framework within which we stand to evaluate the world around us, a framework whose significance is more than the sum of its parts.7 This also speaks to the complexity of the self and again raises the question of how fully we can understand others’ unfamiliar ethical frameworks , a challenge I will return to in chapter 4. Our selves, then, are inextricably linked with—and in many ways defined by—our various ethical projects as they comprise a broader 43 Why Religion Belongs in Ethical Dialogue ...