From “Abundant Lives: A Progressive Christian Ethic of Flourishing” by Amanda Udis-Kessler
Most approaches to ethics focus on principles or abstract values such as justice, freedom, duty, or virtue, often using hypothetical situations to make their claims. In contrast, my approach puts people ahead of principles. As I’ll discuss in chapter 1, principles and abstract ideas can be used for ill as well as for good, to harm as well as to help. If our goal is for all people to have the opportunity to have good lives, we must understand even our most cherished principles, ideas, values, and beliefs not as ultimate goals, but as the way we reach the ultimate goal: a world in which all people have a real chance to flourish.