Telling Stories-Giving Reasons: Narrative Ethics revisited

The paper attempts to give a systematic survey of different strands and intentions of “narrative ethics” both in philosophy and in theology and proposes how to develop narrative ethics in the future. This proposal features three different dimensions of the term “moral vision,”, i.e. morally substantial ideas that are embedded in traditions (Moral Vision 1), the appropriation of these ideas by particular historical cultures or individuals (Moral Vision 2) and moral perception channeled by Moral Vision 2 (Moral Vision 3). Narrative ethics, the paper argues, can describe how (religious) traditions can inspire moral thinking and learning without falling prey to traditionalism. Theological ethics is about forming an ethical culture in which we remind each other of the stories that continue to inspire us and in which we tell each other of our moral world-view and commitments, our strong feelings about the good and the bad which are based in our individual and common lives and not derived from grammatical rules or ultimate principles.