On the Integrity of Life
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of life. Insofar as reflective goods demarcate a range of personal and social meanings, these goods are linked to the reality of people as individual agents. Pleasure and pain can and do move human beings to act without delibera-tion; the desire for recognition and fear of shame can provoke action without
questions about the truth of those feelings. Yet human beings are also moved by the question of the truth of their self-understanding and the values and goals that orient life. As Emmanuel Levinas once pointedly put it, “we all want to know if we have been duped by morality.” (^9) At crucial moments in
life – the encounter with someone suffering, the joy of a new child, revul-sion at gross injustice – one awakens from the habitual and asks about the truth of one’s life and what is held good and true and sacred. A sense of justice that exceeds sympathy and benevolence arises. From this awakening
to the moral density of the world arise other feelings that situate human life, specifically our sensibilities to guilt and innocence and justice.judgments about what to do and to be in relation to others and the variety Self-interpreting agents constitute the coherence of their lives through
of basic and social goods that saturate life. These judgments gives rise to a proper sense of sense of the gravity of one’s life. In addition to find, then, arising out of the range of goods that permeate human life, basic autonomy, a sense of self in relation to others, and also the universality and finality, we
and social and reflective goods, an often inarticulate sense and demand of autonomyor demean one’s own sense of agency or that of other human beings. The idea of autonomy is thereby infused with the sense of justice.. And this sense bears within it the claim that one ought not destroy
Immanuel Kant’s humanistic motto is experientially true: what one finds holymous. Unlike Kant, since he denied that a sense of moral demand could be It is at this level of reflection, although reached in a very different way, that within oneself and others is the freedom to be an agent, to be autono-
found in human finitude and sociality, this “autonomy” is not simply about rationality devoid of sensibilities about the goods that permeate all of life. For theological humanism, freedom situates human life within the complex matrix of basic, social, and reflective goods that saturate human individual
and social existence, rather than separating the self from those relations.bit of earth and during some time in history. Basic, social, and reflective goods are thereby always Human life always takes place somewhere: in some community on some located in space and time. As many philosophers and
environmental scientists have noted, too often and too readily the natural and social habitats of human and non-human forms of life have been ignored in the West. The technological age endangers the “place” of life. The present time is one in which the earth and its many forms of life are endangered by