A key aspect of the human rights debate in Africa has centered on the kinds of rights that are appropriate for the continent. This essay examines the controversy between the advocates of civil-political rights and those of socio-economic rights, and the tendency to separate these two sets of values on the grounds of their supposed incompatibility and of Africa's unique realities. The essay contends that this conclusion is dangerous as it could be used as an excuse to ignore any human rights in Africa, a fear that is justified by the recent history of the continent. Drawing upon religious and ethical perspectives, it proposes the concept of interdependence to forge a normative unity between the two contested sets of rights and argues that this integral vision of rights is needed to ensure maximal realization of human and communal flourishings in Africa.

Public policy analysis employs a discounting to translate future costs or benefits of alternative policies into a "present value" by reducing them, based on a discount rate and the number of years in the future when these outcomes will occur. In recent years, many professional ethicists, from both philosophical and religious perspectives, have criticized discounting as morally inadequate, particularly when assessing potential long-term environmental damage, such as that arising from global warming. This essay reviews the ethical objections to discounting and concludes that discounting is a necessary dimension of the moral assessment made in public policy analysis, ultimately helpful provided that policy makers also respect two constraints to ensure sustainability and equity.

In the complex field of agricultural biotechnology, is there an approach that Christian ethicists can use to evaluate competing claims, multiple goods, and human rights issues in this important arena where humans and natures are intertwined? This paper is an attempt to apply Gibson Winter's three root metaphors (organic, mechanistic and artistic) as an ethical analysis that describes key socio-historical patterns in Western society and deciphers moral landscapes that undergird different forms of agricultural biotechnology. The paper also explores five key principles of the emerging "artistic" root metaphor that could guide more appropriate application and use of agricultural biotechnology.

Augustine encouraged Christian bishops and magistrates to coerce and constrain religious dissenters, he participated in these activities almost from the start of his career as presbyter under Valerius, and he offered justifications for what he did. Robert Markus and John Milbank consider Augustine's justifications inconsistent with the aspect of his social thought each admires most. Their conclusions are unwarranted and unnecessary. Augustine's justifications are neither inconsistent with the rest of his social thought, nor dependent upon judgments about just and unjust coercion that are fundamentally different from our own.

This paper considers the thesis that grief holds special and significant moral knowledge. First, I argue that grief recognizes and responds to moral good. Second, I argue that grief holds special moral knowledge by contending that the goodness of the unique other and the unique love for the other are made conspicuous and thus specially known in grief. Third, I argue that grief holds significant moral knowledge. The griever has significant moral knowledge of her radical bond with a unique other. Also, grief's moral knowledge has a significant impact on the character of the griever. Furthermore, grief's moral knowledge is significant for moral psychology by highlighting the relationship among uniqueness, radical interdependence, and human good.

Working within the framework of concern for justice, Christian ethicists have treated the counsel of detachment as destructive of active involvement in history and have undertaken to rehabilitate anger as the mark of caring and as the engine powering the struggle for social justice. Aided by the suggestive accounts of virtue offered by Georges Bernanos in Diary of a Country Priest and Charles Dickens in Dombey and Son, the author upholds the importance of detachment (understood not as indifference but as the alternative to self-will) and explores the problematic character of anger in its relation to justice, change, and gratitude. While the two novelists set before us powerful and magnetic instances of just anger in Mme. la Comtesse, Chantal, and Edith Dombey, they also deliberately contrast these characters against the detached love of the nameless priest and Dombey's daughter Florence. The critique of anger constituted by these stores raises provocative questions about the notion that anger can be good.