In Mysticism and Morality author Richard Jones explores an often neglected question of religious ethics: Is mysticism moral? Through a discussion of several religious traditions--including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Tantrism, Daoism, and Christianity--Jones fills a major void in the scholarly literature by considering all relevant points pertaining to mysticism. Rather than looking at mysticism abstractly, the book focuses on such topics as ritual, practice, and the processes of mystical becoming. This work provides new perspectives for those interested in ethics and will prove essential to anyone interested in comparative philosophy and cross-cultural studies of religion.

Critical Realism and the Objective Value of Sustainability contributes to the growing discussion surrounding the concept of sustainability, using a critical realist approach within a transdisciplinary theoretical framework to examine how sustainability objectively occurs in the natural world and in society. The book develops an ethical theory of sustainability as an objective value, rooted not in humans’ subjective preferences but in the holistic web of relationships, interdependencies, and obligations existing among living things on Earth, a web believed to have maintained life on Earth over the last 3.7 billion years. It proposes three pillars of sustainability ethics: contentment for the human existence given to us; justice (beyond distributive justice); and meaningful freedom (within ecological and moral limits). Using abductive reasoning, the book infers that there is an out-of-this-world Sustainer behind the Earth’s sustainability acting as a metaphysical source of all being and value. It argues that sustainability value, accepted as a shared understanding of the common good, must guide individual decisions and socio-economic development efforts as a matter of deliberate choice, as well as be built on the awareness that there are non-negotiable, pre-established conditions for our planet’s sustainability. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across fields of inquiry, including sustainability, sustainable development, environmental philosophy and ethics, philosophy of science, and ecological economics, and to whoever may wonder why seasons exists and why humans have creative minds.

"What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? In The Property Species, Bart Wilson explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities - nor the social sciences squarely in the middle - are synthesizing a full account of property, Wilson offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, Wilson makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property - not property rights - is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle of sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as "Mine!", and what that means for our humanity. "--

Garth L. Hallett provides the first thorough, systematic exposition and defense of proportionalism in Christian ethics. Prominent in both philosophical and theological ethics, proportionalism judges the morality of acts by their proportion of good and evil. Hallett proposes judging acts using a norm he calls Value Maximization. He defines this norm and offers a full response to such critics of all forms of proportionalism as Finnis and Grisez. The author assesses the norm's moral and theological validity in and of itself; in dialogue with the encyclical Veritatis Splendor; and in comparison with various rival viewpoints, stressing natural law, divine commands, respect for persons, inviolable goods, proportionate ends, irreducible rights, and agent-centered ethics. He appraises the norm's overall significance, showing its rootedness in Christian tradition, its inclusiveness and amplitude, and its relevance to those seeking a foundation for Christian ethical thought and moral activity.

This Landmark three volume series examines how modern Catholic, Protestant & Orthodox thinkers have responded to the most pressing political, legal & ethical questions of our time.

Written during a period when cultural diversity and pluralism were beginning to have an impact on ethics and politics, these essays provide a defense of natural law and natural right that continues to be timely."--BOOK JACKET.