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Altruism and Christian ethics / Colin Grant

Author
Grant, Colin, 1942-
Additional Titles
Altruism & Christian Ethics
Published
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Physical Description
1 online resource (xix, 266 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
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Series
Contents
Alien Altruism -- Explanations for altruism -- Evidence of altruism -- The elusiveness of altruism -- Ideal Altruism -- Contract altruism -- Constructed altruism -- Collegial altruism -- Real Altruism -- Acute altruism: Agape -- Absolute altruism -- Actual altruism.
Summary
Separated from its anchorage in religion, ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterised by self-interest, so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that, as a modern secular concept, altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity, so that its dismissal represents a social levelling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. The Christian affirmation is that God is characterised by self-giving love (agape), then expected of Christians. Lacking this theological background, the focus on self-interest in sociobiology and economics, and on human realism in the political focus of John Rawls or the feminist sociability of Carol Gilligan, finds altruism naive or a dangerous distraction from real possibilities of mutual support. This book argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.
Subject(s)
ISBN
9780511488351 (ebook)
9780521791441 (hardback)
9780521093613 (paperback)
Note
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
View MARC record | catkey: 34836588