Nåd, skillnad, universalitet - teologiska och filosofiska perspektiv på nåden som resurs för en situationsbunden etik

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is motivated by three parallel discussions; the popular Lutheran rhetoric in placing law against grace, the discussion in contemporary moral philosophy where a neutral perspective on ethical assessments is assumed, and a recent Swedish case and public debate in which a minority group's need for bodily integrity was breached with reference to universal principles. These discussions intersect in the issue of how universal principles are to be weighed against the needs of particulate people in certain situations. The purpose of the thesis is to contribute to the discussion of how an ethical discourse may contain universal claims and yet be rooted in the particular. More specifically, the thesis’ main question asks whether – and if so, how – it is possible from a Protestant doctrine of grace to articulate a theological foundation for an ethics of casuistry capable of balancing the universal and particular, so that concepts such as truth and justice are not emptied on content while at the same time protecting intangibility and difference. In order to study this question, I analyze how grace is framed in a theological, feminist and Protestant discourse by studying the theologians Anna Mercedes and Serene Jones’ doctrines of grace, and the concepts of grace in a philosophical discourse represented by the philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. By analyzing these theological and philosophical conceptions of grace and thereby discussing them against each other, the conversation of the relationship between law and grace, as well as universality and particularity is deepened. My conclusion is that the doctrine of grace, successively elaborated by deepened debates may serve as a constructive theological recourse for an ethics of casuistry. By emphasizing grace as situated in the particular; in stories, bodies and a living hope of the Coming, an eschatological dimension of universalism appears which, I argue, fills the ethics with content and direction whilst avoiding reducing the truth to what is already known.