ABSTRACT
This chapter shows ways in which divine affirmation of the human is entailed by a theistic ethic and coheres with many of the insights of secular moral philosophy. The purpose of ethical theory has been understood to specify just what qualifications can be permitted in the application of universal moral laws. The fact of otherness, the reality of continual interpretation and re-interpretation, and of contextuality, all stand at the heart of deconstruction's 'take' on ethics. The issue that is posed to a non-deconstructionist ethic is how to preserve singularity and otherness without sliding off into sheer relativism or, at the other end of the moral spectrum, embracing a totalitarian absolutism that permits no exceptions. The heteronomy of law imposed upon persons of color or women in America prior to the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s and the gender equity acts of the present is experienced by its victims as oppressive: as an imposition by force of someone else's morality.
