General editor's preface

Summary

This book is the eleventh in the series New Studies in Christian Ethics. In many respects it returns to the pattern set in the very first book in the series, Kieran Cronin's well received Rights and Christian Ethics. Both books offer an important service for Christian ethics, providing reliable guides for the discipline through a complex area of philosophical discussions. It is the great merit of Cronin and Rudman that both authors show a knowledge of these discussions which is still rare amongst theologians and yet both also offer a position of their own which is distinctively theological.

Stanley Rudman sets out and contests the division being made by a number of secular philosophers (such as Peter Singer) between ‘persons’ and ‘human beings’. He regards such divisions as both internally inconsistent and as having dubious ethical consequences (in Singer's case involving a justification of infanticide). For Rudman, human personhood ‘is importantly related to relationships and communication between people as well as individual rationality and purpose. All of these features are best understood in a context of moral agency which includes human biology and environment, rational purpose and social belonging’. He argues at length that relational understandings of ‘persons’ – present within a number of theological understandings of ‘persons’ – are important correctives to the individualistic understandings, centring upon consciousness, that have been popular in secular philosophy since the Enlightenment.