Monday, February 23, 2009

Ritam = justice

[Justice: Rehabilitating religious rights talk posted by John Schmalzbauer
In
Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Yale University philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a devastating critique of the historical narrative employed by my professor. Drawing on the work of historians Brian Tierney and John Witte, Jr., Wolterstorff argues that the “conception of justice as inherent rights was not born in the fourteenth century or the seventeenth century.” Debunking the notion that natural rights are the outgrowth of philosophical nominalism and the European Enlightenment, he pronounces this narrative “indisputably false.”
Along the way, Wolterstorff critiques the notion that rights talk is an offshoot of modern individualism. Questioning Stanley Hauerwas’ claim that the language of rights “underwrites a view of human relations as exchanges,” he presents an account of justice that is irreducibly communal. Wolterstorff also takes on those philosophers who would ground their accounts of justice in the classical Greek and Roman descriptions of the well-lived life. In his judgment, such approaches fail to take into account the inherent worth of human beings.Rather than treating rights as a modern invention, Wolterstorff traces them back to the early church fathers and the Bible itself.
10:25 PM]

[Feb 20, 2009 Justice and theism from The Immanent Frame by David Johnston
The central claim of Nicholas Wolsterstorff's
Justice: Rights and Wrongs is that justice is based on natural human rights that inhere in the worth of human beings, a worth that is bestowed on each and every human being through God's love. He contrasts this view of "justice as inherent rights" with an alternative notion of "justice as right order," the view that was espoused by pagan philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and dominated philosophical thinking until relatively recent times.]

[Ritam Indian philosophy Indian ethics (in ethics (philosophy): India) Encyclopædia Britannica
In the Vedic philosophy, the basic principle of the universe, the ultimate reality on which the cosmos exists, is the principle of Ritam, which is the word from which the Western notion of right is derived. There is thus a belief in a right moral order somehow built into the universe itself. Hence, truth and right]

Ritam = justice. [TNM]

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