Ethics beyond Rules

How Christ's Call to Love Informs Our Moral Choices

Keith D Stanglin

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310120919
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

An introduction to ethics that will help Christians rediscover a moral reasoning rooted in Scripture and navigate the ethical crises of our time.

How should Christians live? How should we interact with one another? Why do we think the way we do about right and wrong? How should we approach today's complex moral questions? Keith Stanglin realigns our ethical thinking around the central question: What does real love require? applying it to our ethical reasoning on many of the social issues present in today's culture:

• abortion
• sexual ethics
• consumerism
• technology
• race
• and politics

Moral evaluation must be based on more than our subjective feelings or the received wisdom or majority opinion of our community. But thinking objectively and reasonably about our ethical commitments is a process that's rarely taught in contemporary education or even in churches.

Ethics Beyond Rules is a clear and accessible introduction for thoughtful Christians who want to lead moral lives—who want to define their moral code by firm biblical standards while acknowledging the complex nature of the issues at hand. Stanglin's love-based framework for moral decision-making engages Scripture and the historic Christian faith, giving Christians the tools to clear-mindedly consider the ethical problems of today and the foundation to confront new issues in the years to come.

FOUNDATIONS
PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Is There Such a Thing as Right and Wrong?

Therefore, having girded your loins, serve God in fear and truth, having left behind the empty and meaningless talk and the error of the crowd, having believed in the one who raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead and gave him glory and a throne at his right hand.

—Polycarp of Smyrna¹

For a country, the universe,
and for law one’s own free will,
and especially, the intoxicating thing:
Liberty! Liberty!

—Georges Bizet²

Several years ago, I was on a late-night flight back home to Austin. At some point early in our small talk, Rhonda, the elderly woman seated next to me, asked me what I do for a living. When she found out that I teach at a seminary, rather than moving on to something less controversial, as many strangers are prone to do, she pressed me with religious questions that intrigued her. She was educated and well spoken, the wife of a retired University of Texas professor. The gleam in her eyes told me that this could be an interesting discussion. As the conversation progressed, she expressed her belief that all religions are equal, that none is better than the others. It hardly needs to be said that this is a common sentiment in our culture. In fact, the equality of all religions is modern-day orthodoxy, and to doubt the sentiment would be seen by many as bigotry of the highest order.

Well, with clear eyes, but at great risk, I expressed doubt. Is the Christian faith better than the Aztec religion? Is a faith that teaches love for all people better than a religion that required human sacrifice in order to feed the sun god? What may seem like an easy question, at least to a Christian, put her in a quandary. She smiled uncomfortably. She could not answer definitively. She clearly had a hard time declaring that human sacrifice, at least as practiced in the early Mesoamerican context, is wrong. So I pressed on, turning the conversation away from religion and more explicitly toward the issue of moral evaluation. I pulled out the trump card: What about the Nazis? Again, she hesitated. Was it morally wrong to kill six million innocent people? She struggled to answer.

At this point, I was amazed. I should not have been. I had read about, heard about, and taught for many years about moral relativism. But up to that moment in my life, I had not engaged in many actual conversations with relativists about their moral beliefs. Admittedly, I would have been less surprised if these opinions had come from a college student or a philosopher. But the fact that they came from an older woman who otherwise seemed to be completely rational contributed to my disbelief. Her reluctance to offer moral evaluation is a testimony to the pervasiveness of this way of thinking in our culture.

I assume that her reticence was motivated by competing interests within her. On the one hand, the disadvantage of appearing to approve of mass human sacrifice, whether of the Aztec or the Nazi variety, is fairly obvious. On the other hand, to affirm the superiority of one religion (to be sure, not just any one religion, but Christianity) over another (specifically, a Native American religion) would, to her mind, presumably open the door to all the worst abuses of colonialism, genocide, and cultural annihilation. If any practice is deemed to be wrong, the immediate cultural fear is that the practitioners will be punished or become victims of hate. She did not express this dilemma in so many words, but this rationale lies behind much of our culture’s moral relativism.

ETHICS AND RELATIVISM

The conversation that Rhonda and I had on the airplane was about ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that considers the moral life and deals with character formation, decision making, and behavior. Ethics is the study and pursuit of the good, how to know what is good, and how to do good. Pursuing the good entails avoiding evil. This line of thought raises a very basic—but also very important—question anticipated by my conversation with Rhonda: Is there such a thing as good and evil, right and wrong?

To many, the answer may seem like a no-brainer. Of course, there is such a thing as good and evil! But contrary to the consensus of human history, and contrary to our common sense, our modern culture increasingly assumes that objective goodness and objective evil do not exist. Have you heard someone say, “That’s good for you, but not for me,” or “That may be right for their culture, but not for ours”? These expressions reflect moral relativism, which, in its strictest form, claims that all moral judgment is subjective. At best, whatever the individual or the culture believes about morality is right. Moral relativism is not a recent discovery. As the ancient Deuteronomist observes, “There was no king in Israel. Each did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg 21:25). Moral relativism saturates today’s culture. We see it all over the media. We experience it more and more often in everyday life, when people shrug their shoulders and say, “Who am I to judge? As long as they don’t hurt anyone else, then let people do whatever they want.”

Is that correct? Is moral evaluation—assessing something as good or evil—simply a product of a historically conditioned culture that could have gone a different way? Is there absolutely no place in life for moral judgment? Before we simply give it a free pass, we should put moral relativism to the test. Before we can evaluate moral relativism, we must first seek to understand it.

First of all, not everyone who is reluctant to offer a moral judgment is necessarily a moral relativist. Sometimes we do not know enough about a situation to make a determination; in such cases, withholding judgment for or against may be the wisest move. At other times, we may know everything there is to know about the situation, but we simply cannot resolve the dilemma. At still other times, we may decide that the behavior is not strictly obligatory (that is, something you must do, “thou shalt”) or impermissible (something you must not do, “thou shalt not”), but simply permissible (something you may or may not do). The apostle Paul judged the eating of food sacrificed to idols to be, in itself, a matter of indifference (see 1 Cor 8). To be indifferent in this way is not to be a relativist or to doubt the very reality of truth.

If objective truth is something like two plus two equals four, and if a relativist is someone who tends to doubt it, then a thoroughgoing moral relativist is someone who claims that there is no objective truth value to moral statements. The “truth” behind a moral statement is, at best, simply what our culture decides or, at worst, what I as an individual decide. If this can be called truth at all, it is truth based on something subjective.

Some philosophers claim that the moral law is grounded in one’s inward feelings. For philosopher A. J. Ayer, a moral statement is nothing more than an expression of a particular, individual emotion. For example, to say, “You were wrong to eat your coworker” really means, “I don’t like it that you ate your coworker!”³ According to this view, evaluative moral judgments are not statements of objective truth but mere expressions of preference, reactions and opinions, attitudes or feelings. These emotions and the subjective moral law that they express are not naturally implanted, but they come as a result of the nurture of a specific culture and more general evolutionary development. In the opinion of a true relativist, when we say something evaluative about anything external to us, we are really saying more about our own inward feelings than about any truth that is supposedly out there.

Moral relativism is a natural corollary of atheism. If, according to atheist or naturalist narratives, there is no reality beyond the material, physical realm, and if human beings and everything else that exists are just a random collection of atoms, then good and evil, right and wrong, are mere fabrications and illusions. Moral choices amount to what I like and what I don’t like. Of course, this implication does not stop most atheists from living a morally decent life and even appealing to the concept of the good, especially when they feel they have been wronged. But at the end of the day, it is difficult for atheistic naturalism to ground ethics in anything beyond individual or communal preferences, derived ultimately from the need for survival. For that matter, if the notion of objective morality arose as an evolutionary good—as it does on the naturalist account—then why would we want to discard this great idea?

To the true believer of moral relativism, then, moral judgment is nothing but an expression of cultural or individual preference, and this line of thought is becoming increasingly common. Our society has for some time been experiencing a crisis of morals. In such an environment, ethical discussions can tend to devolve into shouting matches wherein each person’s mind is already made up. Morality and moral debate are often reduced to one subjective opinion against another. So those who shout the loudest or have the most power tend to win.

Given the prevalence of moral relativism, we ought to assess it as a way of determining right and wrong and as a way of living. First of all, if moral relativism is true, then there is no such thing as real evil. As such, if someone concedes that there is even one action that is always morally wrong—like torturing babies—then relativism is undermined. If just one evil action exists, then the category of real evil exists, and so does true good.

If moral relativism is true, then moral assessment is impossible. All moral evaluation is out the window. You would be left unable to take any exclusive stance or say that something is universally wrong. At most, a practice can be only culturally disapproved or inadvisable for this or that group. No cross-cultural judgment is allowed. Moral discourse is simply a description of habits. The individual or the culture becomes god, the supreme moral authority.

Additionally, if moral relativism is true, then all moral persuasion is prohibited. One cannot convince anyone or be convinced by anyone that any position is wrong. This means that moral reform or moral progress is impossible. The abolition of slavery or the work of Martin Luther King Jr. would have been unthinkable in a truly relativistic culture. Indeed, if moral relativism is true, then power wins the day. Whether a practice will be permitted depends not on truth, but on who has the numbers on their side and the power to enforce it. But it is hard to find people who speak about their own moral opinions as if they are completely subjective.

This idea that cultural preferences determine what is right is the assumption behind popular-level social ethics today. It declares that whatever the crowd or the majority believes and practices is right. In other words, simply describing what most people think and do is almost the same as recommending what people should think and do. Once decided, then the relativism tends to fade away.⁴ The crowd can be very confident in its judgments. The implication is that, if you are in the minority, you had better get on board. This set of assumptions is constantly on display and is so pervasive that it usually goes unnoticed, even by those who would challenge the practice in question.

Here is a subtle example. On the news a couple of years ago, I saw that a linebacker in the National Football League (NFL) was released by his team after being charged with domestic assault. Another NFL team immediately acquired him for their roster. This alone did not make the story newsworthy; professional sports has long been a haven for many domestic abusers. Rather, this story made headlines because one of the new team’s executives appeared to minimize the player’s actions, suggesting that the accusation of domestic abuse against the player is “small potatoes” compared to what other people do.⁵ On the news show that was reporting this story, the commentators at the desk visibly shook their heads in dismay. Their judgment was that the comment was inappropriate and that this executive is, as they put it, extremely “tone deaf.” “Tone deaf ” is frequently used to describe people—and by extension, their comments—who seem ignorant of the prevailing cultural wisdom. They are not on the right side of the current moral outrage, or they have not provided enough public evidence that they feel strongly enough about the issue. The tone is the sound given off by the prevailing crowd, or at least a prevailing crowd. To the news anchors, the executive’s comments were wrong because they appear to be unaware that domestic abuse is, at this cultural moment, a very unpopular behavior.

Setting aside the executive’s full comments and the important question of the truth of the allegations, there are two ethical standards at odds in this story. One side, represented by the football executive, assumes that exceptional ability on the football field covers a multitude of sins. The primary goal of his business is to satisfy the crowd of football fans, no matter what. Besides, he says, it is a minor offense, “small potatoes,” because there are plenty of other people committing apparently “large potatoes.” But the other side, represented by the media, assumes that everyone should go along with another crowd, for whom domestic violence is currently much out of favor. My point is that neither side addressed anything deeper than public opinion; instead—and this is what the opposing views had in common—both sides tacitly appealed to their respective crowds. Indeed, there are competing crowds, and they can all be very fickle. Apparently, neither the team executive nor the news anchors thought of saying, “No matter what people think or how other people behave, an innocent person made in the image of God should never be abused, and if it happened, such an evil and shameful action should come with consequences.” No, you will never hear that in public discourse. Subtle examples like this one can be seen every time you turn on the television.

Other examples are more overt. No group of people is more famous for bowing to the whims of the crowd than politicians. After all, especially in a democratic republic, politics is downstream from culture. Again, many instances could be cited, but a particularly famous example is Barack Obama’s change of heart on same-sex marriage. During his first term as president, he was opposed to same-sex marriage, but during the campaign for his second term in 2012, he had a public change of heart. He now supported same-sex marriage, without offering a rationale for the change or, for that matter, an apology for his years of opposing it. At the time, there was considerable debate whether this change was out of convenience or conviction. Of course, another person’s motives are inscrutable, but I speculate based on knowledge of how politics typically go. Leading up to the election of 2008, the majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage. That percentage was shifting and beginning to tilt in favor of same-sex marriage by 2012. One crowd was giving way to another. Like many politicians, Obama put his finger in the wind to check its direction. It stretches credulity to think he experienced such a significant change of personal and moral understanding on the eve of the election. More like...