Grenzverschiebungen und neue Blickachsen

Eine (subjektive) Kartierung theologischer Sozialethik

Abstract

Reflecting on her own scientific biography, the author considers aspects of boundary shifts in various fields and at different levels of social-ethical research over the past decades. The overture explores the unavoidable perspectivity of perception, which determines both everyday experiences and scientific knowledge and is therefore also fundamental to social-ethical reflection. Against this background, the category of gender is used to trace how thematic and perspectival boundaries in social ethics have shifted since the 1990s, opening up new spaces. As an object of social and political-ethical reflection, political and territorial boundaries and the power logics of political boundary shifts are further reflected upon as instruments and practices of ordering human coexistence; this complex of topics leads to the ethically controversial relationship between the normative universalistic claim of human rights and the right to exclude of sovereign states. Finally, specific profiles, boundaries, and transgressions of a genuinely theological form of social ethics, which determine its modes of reflection—especially with regard to the universalism-particularism problem in ethics—in a problem-oriented and epistemological sense are examined. This article is based on the author’s academic farewell lecture at the University of Münster in July 2025.