Christian Ethics

The End of the Law

David S. Cunningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780415375993
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134185047
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Christian Ethics provides a biblical, historical, philosophical and theological guide to the field of Christian ethics. Prominent theologian David S. Cunningham explores the tradition of 'virtue ethics' in this creative and lively text, which includes literary and musical references as well as key contemporary theological texts and figures.

Three parts examine:

• the nature of human action and the people of God as the 'interpretative community' within which ethical discourse arises
• the development of a 'virtue ethics' approach, and places this in its Christian context
• significant issues in contemporary Christian ethics, including the ethics of business and economics, politics, the environment, medicine and sex.

This is the essential text for students of all ethics courses in theology, religious studies and philosophy.

Part 1

Narrating the Christian life

1Character and community

or: Why ethics probably
isn't what you think

If you were to ask a random group of people to tell you what ethics is about, you would probably receive a fairly predictable range of answers. “It's about the differences between right and wrong.” “It tells you how you're supposed to act.” “Rules for good behavior.” “How we should live.” But if you press a little further and ask for an example of a topic that might be discussed in an ethics course, I'll wager that almost all the examples would be of the same type: they would be about difficult decisions concerning hard cases. Most people think of ethics as a discipline that is designed to help us wrestle with complicated dilemmas: whether to turn off the life-support system for someone in a persistent coma; how to balance a region's economic dependence on the logging industry against the potential environmental degradation; whether to send soldiers into combat.

Climbing into the lifeboat

One particular example of these difficult decisions concerning hard cases tends to appear quite frequently in conversations about the nature of ethics. The example runs something like this: “You're one of five people stranded at sea in a lifeboat. You have food and water for only four people. How do you decide what to do?” This example is so common that it has provided a name for this way of thinking about ethics: “lifeboat ethics.” The more technical term is “quandary ethics”: you're in a difficult situation, a quandary. You are faced with competing goods—that is, more than one morally positive element—which can't all exist simultaneously, or else there are insufficient resources to meet the needs that are present. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to prioritize these goods—or to divide the scarce resources among the competing needs.

How economics influences ethics

Right away, we can observe how thoroughly this way of thinking about ethics has been influenced by the way that we think about economics. Resources are scarce; people with particular needs are in competition with each other for a slice of the pie; and you, the student, are expected to jump into the situation that has been described and to render a decision without asking too many questions about the context or the circumstances. In its form, at least, this is very similar to the way that we make economic decisions. I have only a little money and even less time; other people are getting ahead of me by buying the right things at the right moment; and so I need to jump into the marketplace and make my strategic purchase. If you start asking me questions about the working conditions of the people who produced the goods, or about the environmental impact of the material from which they're made, or about the impact they may have on my health thirty years down the line—well, I just can't deal with all those questions right now. I don't have much time or much money, and I have to make this purchase, and it's a good bargain, and that's the end of the story.

Of course, the dilemmas that are described under the rubric of “lifeboat ethics”—whether they are about lifeboats or about turning off life-support systems or about sending soldiers into combat—are usually much weightier matters than our decisions about which new consumer toy we're going to buy. (Note, however, that in the previous example, the questions that we tend to put off when we're trying to decide whether to buy something often have wide-ranging ethical implications. We'll return to this point in a moment.) In any case, these decisions—whether about our purchases, or about matters with more immediate life-and-death consequences—are very similar in structure: they're about limited resources and competing goods. Nevertheless, those lifeboat-style questions tend to be much more frustrating to us than are most of our economic choices, because we don't have such straightforward ways of resolving them. We would like to be able to resolve those life-and-death quandaries in the same way that we make economic decisions: by minimizing the costs and maximizing the benefits. But when it comes to something like turning off someone's life-support system, or throwing someone out of the lifeboat, the costs and benefits are not always easy to identify with precision. (Just how much is a human life worth, anyway? Are some worth more than others? Does my life lose some or all of its worth when I'm in a persistent coma? How do we know?) In fact, when you get right down to it, the costs and benefits of our economic decisions aren't always very easy to identify. (Exactly how much will my life be improved by this new MP3 player? Will the iPod really provide me with seven more units of social approval than the off-brand model? Will it lose its value entirely if I can't stop thinking about how much damage its production is doing to the planet? How can I know?) The trouble with defining ethics as being about “hard cases” is that, when you think about them long enough, they're all hard cases.

In order to imagine an alternative approach, we can retrieve an insight that goes quite far back into the history of ethics—at least as far as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. We might put it this way: we're tempted to imagine that all of our actions as human beings might be divided into two types—those actions with moral significance and those without. In truth, however, all human action is moral action. This is so because, first, as human beings, we are possessed of an intellect and a will, and we're not constrained to act merely from instinct; thus, even at the most physical, bodily level of satisfying our appetites, we actually have considerable choice in what we do. Second, we can't always predict the consequences of our action with precision; one thing leads to another, and who knows whether the half-eaten sandwich that someone accidently leaves alongside a mountain stream might fall into the water, breed bacteria, and eventually poison someone who lives many miles downstream. We might have a spirited argument over whether or not the sandwich-tosser is responsible for the poisoning (indeed, moral philosophers have done exactly that!); but it would be difficult to imagine that the initial action was not, in some sense, a moral action—particularly given the effects that it eventually brought about.

Decisions, decisions

Nor are we on safe ground when we define ethics as being primarily about decisions. The trouble is that, in most cases, they're not really decisions at all—or rather, they are decisions, but not in the way that we typically think about making a decision. In other words, they are not carefully considered, thoroughly examined judgments that take all relevant data into account. We don't actually stop to weigh all the potential costs and benefits every time we make a choice about, say, our purchase of consumer goods; if we did, life would grind to a halt. The difficulties are already obvious enough to us, even when we limit ourselves to considering the immediate costs and benefits; as I've already suggested, we often end up comparing apples and oranges, trying to weigh social approval against growing credit-card debt, or measuring potential entertainment value against time lost from work. As we begin to consider the wider environmental and human costs of any particular purchase, the boundaries of the conversation expand infinitely. They stretch back in time to consider the origins of the materials from which the item is made; they also reach forward in time, leading us to ask how it will affect us a decade or two later (and how we're ever going to dispose of it). The boundaries also stretch out to other people—not just down the street but on the other side of the world: Who made this object? Under what conditions? With what degree of sacrifice? Do I want to be involved in that? These questions, in turn, lead us back to recalculate the original cost–benefit analysis, about the depth of our desire for the item, its potential usefulness or benefit, and all the other ways we could spend our paltry disposable income. And all the time, while we're standing at the register attempting to evaluate this potentially endless list of concerns, we realize we're late for dinner—and the people standing in line behind us are starting to get a little annoyed.

If it's this difficult to weigh the costs and benefits of purchasing an article of clothing or a small electronic item, how much more complex will be the decision-making process when the question involves human beings whom we know, and/or involves human beings in direct and immediate ways—perhaps facing matters of life and death? Precisely because the weighing of costs and benefits is so difficult, we don't actually do it in most cases. We make decisions, but rarely do we base them on a careful calculus; in most cases, we don't have the time to do so, nor the information that we'd need (particularly since some of that information would require us to be able to predict the future with stunning accuracy). But most of all, when we're in the moment and facing the actual choice of alternative paths of action, we don't even have the inclination to go through a careful decision-making process. We are too constrained by circumstances, too limited in our knowledge and foreknowledge, and—particularly since it's likely to be a matter of great personal interest to us (we're among the people on the lifeboat, after all)—we are too emotionally involved to sit down and make a carefully nuanced, wholly rational, truly unconstrained decision about the right course of action. Such decisions are only possible if made in the abstract, far away from the realities of the moment. In fact, the only place that ethical decisions of this sort are likely to be made is when analyzing case studies in an ethics course.

All of this suggests that, in the end, ethics is not primarily about making difficult decisions when faced with hard cases—and this for at least three reasons. First, all the cases are hard cases; in fact, they are even harder than we imagined, because their ramifications expand through time and across space. Second, all action is moral action; we can't limit discussions of ethics to an isolated subset of all the things we do, because everything we do has potential moral consequences. And third, because—while we do in fact make decisions—our decision-making usually will not (and, in fact, very often cannot) be based on a careful process of cost–benefit analysis that can be taught and learned in a class.

Babel: why all action is moral action

In Genesis 11, we read a story in which all people speak a single language. They decide to build a great city, including a tower that would reach to the heavens, in order to “make a name” for themselves. God is not impressed by their pretensions to grandeur, and confounds the building project by multiplying their languages and dispersing them. “Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Gen. 11:9).

This story has proven to be very fertile soil for reflections on the human condition. It has re-appeared in many genres of art and literature—from the paintings of the Dutch masters, to the work of postmodern philosophers of language, to the inimitable comedy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (where the ”Babelfish” serves as an intergalactic translating machine and plays a fundamental, if somewhat ironic, role in a “proof for the non-existence of God”!).

In 2006, the story re-appeared in the title of an Academy-Award-nominated film that helps to illustrate the claim that “all action is moral action”—Babel. In its complicated, non-linear plot, an interconnected series of events transpire in three far-flung locations: North Africa, Japan, and the US–Mexico border. At various points during the film, we become aware that various characters have made certain decisions and taken certain actions that would seem to have no obvious moral implications: a sightseeing trip to Morocco; a trip to a cousin's wedding; a hunter's gift of a rifle to his African guide. But eventually, these seemingly benign actions lead to death and near-death, to arrests and international tension, and to a whole series of physical, emotional, and psychological wounds.

Of course, as a genre, film is well known for tying together events that appear to have no obvious relationships; but in this case, the connections are not just coincidences. Rather, the film helps us understand the reasons why minor, casual decisions can have such significant moral consequences. Ours is not a world of perfect communication; we are divided, not only by our differing languages, but also by national borders, by differences in age and socio-economic class, and by a whole range of customs that seem perfectly natural to one group but are totally incomprehensible to others. We live, as one philosopher has put it, “after Babel”: we are separated from one another by a whole host of political, economic, and linguistic structures. We are scattered abroad over the face of all the earth.

And this means that we often cannot predict the consequences of our actions. If we lived in a single closed system in which every part of the system was in tune with every other part (as in a well designed computer program or a perfectly functioning automobile engine), then we would know exactly what ramifications would ensue from an action taken in one part of the system. But our world does not experience the perfect communication and interlocking structures that mark a computer program or a car engine. It is filled with human actors who have a certain degree of freedom, and whose actions— undertaken, as they must be, in the absence of perfect communication with other human beings—will often lead to consequences that could never have been predicted. And thus, no human decision or action is entirely void of moral implications; we just don't always know what those implications will be.

Well then, what is it?

If this commonly assumed definition of ethics as difficult decision-making provides an inaccurate portrait of the enterprise, then exactly how should we define it? For a hint about the answer to that question, we need to go back to the ancient Greeks, and to the Greek word ēthos, from which our word “ethics” is derived. We also have the English word “ethos,” which we use to describe the general atmosphere of a place or an institution; the ethos of a good college or university might be described with phrases such as “intellectually stimulating” or “encouraging and caring” or “a ‘work hard, play hard’ environment.” That same word “ethos” can be applied to people as well as places; but rather than speaking about a person's “atmosphere,” we speak about her or his “character.” That word—“character”—is probably the best English translation of the Greek word ēthos. And character is the ultimate answer to the question we've been examining throughout this chapter: it's what ethics is all about. Ethics concerns the study, evaluation, and formation of people of good character.

At first glance, this may seem to be an odd claim. We usually prefer not to evaluate a person's moral standing until we've had a careful look at what they actually do. We might not care for that man who lives down the street, but we're not about to make a judgment about his character until he does something that gives us some evidence for doing so. Thus in our culture we have devised a method for gathering, sifting, and examining such evidence, and for making judgments about people based on that evidence. It is a relatively reliable method, but—as we will soon see—it also has some significant disadvantages.

The role of law

In making judgments about character, at least in our culture, we rely very heavily on law. (I raised this point in the introduction to this book, but now we need to examine it in more detail.) We live relatively private, isolated lives, and so we rarely know enough about the actions of “that man down the street” to make a judgment about his character. But if his name were suddenly to appear in the local newspaper as having been indicted on a charge of, say, domestic violence—well, then we'd feel we could safely make a judgment, because we would have learned something about his actions. (However, if we know very much about the law, we'd recognize that an indictment does not give us direct access to knowledge of exactly what the defendant has done; so even then, we would be wise to wait until we were more certain that he had actually done what he was said to have done.) And because we rarely have any direct access to that information, we're not very comfortable pronouncing on a person's character—at least not until after some kind of broadly recognized external authority (such as a court of law) has rendered some form of judgment, so that we might be reasonably certain about that person's actions.

But by that point, of course, it's too late. If we are studying ethics in order to think about how people should act an...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Christian Ethics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: the thin line
• PART 1 Narrating the Christian life
• PART 2 Practicing the Christian life
• PART 3 Living the Christian life
• Sources cited and suggestions for further reading
• Permissions
• Index