Autor: McCarthy, Michael

Buch: Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Theological Reflection and Christian Renewal

Stichwort: ethics: concrete, critical; echter Pluralismus und Ideologie mit Gegenpositionen

Kurzinhalt: Konkretheit: upper and lower blade, Unterscheidung between authenticity and alienation, The counter positions: ideological attempts to defend existential and historical alienation

Textausschnitt: Existential ethics begins with human beings as they actually are: embodied, polymorphic subjects, situated in a web of interpersonal relations, and manifestly dependent on the comprehensive orders of nature and history. Existential ethics is marked, therefore, by a threefold concreteness:
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The thematization of this threefold concreteness has a foundational and invariant upper blade and a highly differentiated and variable lower blade.
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At this level of concrete human praxis, of history as lived, the basic critical distinction is between authenticity and alienation, between the achievement and refusal of intentional self-transcendence. This intentional achievement has two aspects, the minor authenticity of the existential subject and the major authenticity of the underlying cultural traditions within which the subject is educated. Existential and cultural authenticity are the fruit of sustained fidelity to the foundational principles of ethics. Conversely, existential and cultural alienation are the result of personal and communal violations of the structural invariants constitutive of the free human person.
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The counter positions, by contrast <zum echten Pluralismus>, are ideological attempts to defend existential and historical alienation and to justify the numerous human refusals of self-transcendence.
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The fundamental insight underlying Lonergan's dialectical criticism is that genuineness in concrete living and objectivity in theoretical and scholarly judgments are equally the fruit of authentic intentional performance. There is only one way to achieve epistemic and moral objectivity: through the sustained exercise of authentic subjectivity, existential and historical.