Everyday Ethics

Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life

Michael Lamb, Brian A. Williams, Michael Lamb, Brian A. Williams

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781626167087
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Religion

What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gather some of the world's leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some GUP authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. Inspired by the work of Michael Banner, these scholars cross disciplinary boundaries to analyze the ethics of ordinary practices—from eating, learning, and loving thy neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology.

PART I

EVALUATING BANNER’S PROPOSAL

INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES ON MEANING AND METHOD

1

TOWARD AN ETHICS OF SOCIAL PRACTICE

MOLLY FARNETH

MICHAEL BANNER’s The Ethics of Everyday Life proposes that moral theology attend to ordinary social practices, explain how these practices create and maintain the norms that constitute a shared ethical life, and then offer a theological understanding of and response to them. It is a worthy proposal that resonates with work already under way in religious studies. Religious ethicists, in particular, should welcome its attempt to bring ethnographic and normative inquiry together.

The importance of rituals and other social practices in religious and ethical formation is a common theme in contemporary religious studies, but it also echoes through a tradition of theologians and philosophers stretching back to antiquity. When moral theologians and religious ethicists recover this theme, they enter debates that have been going on for a long time: debates about how character is formed, deformed, and transformed; debates over the social functions and effects of rituals; and perhaps most importantly, debates over what sorts of people and communities we should aspire to become through them.

These debates assume what Banner rightly asserts—namely, that social practices shape people of one kind or another. The contestation is largely about what kind of people, and thus what kind of communities, we have reason to want. The cultivation of compassionate subjectivities, which Banner commends, is important. It also prompts us to consider what other virtues well-formed people should have. We need to grapple with such questions if we are going to take Banner’s proposal seriously as scholars of our traditions and as critics of our societies.

In what follows, I illustrate how these questions arise for religious ethics when, in the spirit of Banner’s proposal, we look closely at one of his examples, the following of the Stations of the Cross.¹ Banner argues that the Stations of the Cross and other forms of meditation on the Passion are ethically and politically significant because of how they imagine the suffering of Christ and the cultivation of compassion in the face of such suffering. But, we must ask, compassion for whom? Accompanied by what other affective and behavioral habits and dispositions? With what social structure, roles, and powers as their context? If ethics is to take the social practical turn, we will need to be clear about how these questions should be answered in light of the diversity of contemporary practices modeled on the Stations of the Cross—and the diversity of effects that these and similar practices might produce in people and societies.

Banner’s Social Practical Turn

Before turning to the Stations of the Cross, let me first outline Banner’s methodological proposal and say a few words about its concern with rituals and other social practices that inculcate habits, dispositions, and virtues. Banner argues that moral theology is overly preoccupied with “hard cases.” “So practiced,” he writes, “moral theology is insufficiently interested in the social; specifically, it lacks a concern for the plausible narration of moral lives, and this lack of concern has doleful consequences for its apologetic, or . . . its therapeutic or evangelical responsibilities and potential.”² In this, Banner echoes moral theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, whose work turns to the character and conditions of moral lives, understood within a Christian narrative.³ The so-called narrative turn has been one of the most important developments in recent Christian ethics.

Banner combines this narrative turn with what we might call the social practical turn—an ethics that considers the relationships, social practices, and organizational structures in which moral lives are shaped and lived. Banner proposes that moral theology and ethics, in conversation with social anthropology, ought to make those relationships, practices, and structures visible. “Anthropology’s concern with the reproduction of the social,” he writes, “is a concern with the everyday, the routine, and the normal—and thus may serve to remind moral theology of where its work might, at the very least, begin.”⁴ Banner directs his readers’ attention toward “everyday life,” and he draws on the work of social anthropologists first to show how the categories that shape our lives—categories such as kinship, childhood, compassion, aging, and mourning—are constructed and maintained and then to offer theological guidance for an ethics of everyday life.

The turn from an ethics of hard cases, or what the philosopher Edmund Pincoffs called “quandary ethics,” toward an ethics of everyday life involves a significant shift in what ethicists analyze.⁵ Quandary ethics, as Pincoffs characterized it, focuses on “a quandary which arises because I fall into a certain situation. The situation is such that it can be described in perfectly general terms, without any reference to me as an individual.”⁶ Quandary ethics abstracts from the characteristics of the moral agent and his or her social and historical context. It also tends to focus on extraordinary cases that most people will never confront, such as the famous trolley problem and the ticking time bomb scenario. An ethics of everyday life, by contrast, must be concerned with character, its formation, and its transformation, on the one hand, and with the social roles, relationships, and institutions in which moral agents are embedded, on the other.⁷ It must attend to the social matrices in which moral agents are formed and live their lives. Banner aims to show how social anthropology—and, in particular, ethnography—can contribute to and inform normative inquiry in these matters.

The social practices that constitute our everyday lives are sites of continual innovation and change. One often implicit challenge for an ethics of everyday life is to make clear which forms of relationship and practice ought to be cultivated and why. This normative question adds the distinctly ethical dimension to anthropological accounts that focus on ethnographic observation and thick description of everyday communities and practices.

On the second page of the book, Banner notes the vast diversity of Christian reflections on the life of Christ. I will quote him at some length here to give a sense of the diversity he describes:

Christ’s life has been imagined, represented, enacted, expounded, and interrogated, not only through the drama of the liturgy and the liturgical year, but also through sermons, prayers, through biblical commentary, exegesis, and contemplation, in doctrinal, moral and philosophical theology, in art of all kinds . . . , in devotional writings, mystery plays, poems, and other forms of literature, in hymns, oratorios, cantatas, spirituals, and every other type of musical work—and so on. Through these highly diverse and virtually countless engagements with the life of Christ, that life has been brought to an imaginative realization and in that realization a particular architecture of the human and of human subjectivity (with certain emotions, attitudes, and perceptions), has been explored, staged, elaborated, and commended.⁸

The diversity of forms that these Christian imaginations of the life of Christ have taken and, presumably, the diversity of effects that those imaginations have on those who have “explored, staged, elaborated, and commended” them is striking. But by the end of the introduction, Banner has begun to refer to the Christian imagination in the singular. The book’s main question, he writes, is this: “How does the Christian imagination of conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial bear on the human life course, and envisage and sustain a Christian form of human being?”⁹ Surely the answer to Banner’s question must be multiform. But his use of the singular here—“the Christian imagination” and “a Christian form of human being”—leaves me wondering about which imagination is normative in Banner’s account of the ethics of everyday life and what principled grounds he employs in making that determination.¹⁰

What Kinds of Selves and Societies?

To see the implications of this diversity for the ethics of everyday life, we might turn to one of Banner’s own examples, meditation on the Passion, which was not an important focus of Christian thought or practice until the late medieval period. Banner argues that the emergence of practices that focused on Christ’s suffering enabled new ways of experiencing and responding to that suffering—empathically, in sorrow, compassion, and love.

Among these practices is the following of the Stations of the Cross, a form of devotion that developed as a way of bearing witness to Jesus’s suffering and death. In the traditional form of the practice, the worshipper proceeds along fourteen stations, each of which depicts a moment in Jesus’s procession from his condemnation in Jerusalem to his crucifixion to the placement of his body in the tomb. Worshippers stop at each station for prayer, contemplation, and visualization. On Good Friday, this practice often takes the form of a public processional. One person will carry a cross, recalling Jesus’s own bearing of the cross. Banner quotes historian of Christianity Rachel Fulton, arguing that the Stations of the Cross “schooled religiously sensitive women and men in the potentialities of emotion, specifically love, for transcending the physical, experiential distance between individual bodies—above all, bodies in pain.”¹¹ Banner suggests that through the enactment of the Stations of the Cross, medieval Christians cultivated compassion for the suffering Christ.

The Stations of the Cross, Banner argues, is what Foucault calls a “technology of the self.”¹² It is a bodily practice through which worshippers train their thoughts and actions in order to cultivate an empathic response to the suffering of another—to feel Christ’s suffering, to share in it, and to respond in sorrow, compassion, and love. Reenacting the Stations of the Cross is not only a symbolic remembrance; it is also a bodily practice that enables particular ways of being in the world.

This is one situation in which the diversity of Christian imaginations and enactments of the life of Christ complicates matters. Banner asks, “How do we take up or take on Christ’s suffering and those in whom he suffers?”¹³ Contemporary forms of meditation on and reenactment of the Passion, some inspired by the Stations of the Cross, respond to this question in different ways. Some focus on the cultivation of compassion for the suffering Christ, while others also intend to cultivate compassion for sufferers other than Christ. This is not an insignificant distinction. It is worth keeping in mind that meditation on Christ’s suffering in Good Friday liturgies and Passion plays was long associated with outbursts of anti-Semitic violence in Europe.¹⁴ It is often unclear whether or how the cultivation of compassion for the suffering Christ might translat...