Book Review: On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics Stephen LongD., 2024, Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press, 305 pp., ISBN 9781647124144
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This scholarly work addresses the need to recover the theological roots of ethics within Western academia.Long traces the historical and philosophical secularization of religious ethics, exemplified by Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874), before presenting the classical case for religious ethics as articulated in Frederick Maurice's Social Morality (1886).The author examines in considerable depth the academic debate between these two streams: what ought to be versus what is, the common good versus the ontological good, utilitarianism versus intuitionism, and duty versus virtue.He engages a wide range of thinkers, including G.E.M. Anscombe, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Rawls.In Part I, Long explores the nineteenth-century movement to disentangle ethics from theology, a development driven in large measure by the ethical failures of religious wars.Sidgwick exemplifies this trend in his formulation of "professionalized ethics" (p.12), guided by methodological rigor and scientific precision.Part II advances the argument that without the reintegration of ethics with Christian theology, ethical reasoning risks losing its capacity to resist the pressures of politics, the state, and corporate power (p.16).After outlining Sidgwick's approach, Long shows how Rawls and Anscombe, while indebted to Sidgwick, follow divergent trajectories.Rawls moves away from Sidgwick's utilitarianism toward political constructivism, recognizing that what is right for the common good may not be fair for free and equal citizens.Anscombe, by contrast, rejects Sidgwick's framework because it permits the justification of murder through appeals to good intentions or consequentialist calculation.Long also considers the role of faith in the ethical philosophies of Rawls and Anscombe: Rawls abandoned religious faith but retained confidence in communities, progressivism, and constitutional democracy, whereas Anscombe remained committed to her Catholic faith and emphasized the limits of justice measured solely by rational procedures without spiritually informed virtues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.069 | 0.048 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".