Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed

Victor Lee Austin

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780567639998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Christian ethics is a most perplexing subject. This Guide takes the reader through the most fundamental issues surrounding the question of Ethics from a Christian perspective: Is ethics a meaningful topic of discourse and can there be such a thing as an ethical argument or ethical persuasion? What is the meaning of the adjective in "Christian Ethics"?Could right behavior be different for Christians than it is for others? Can we turn to the Bible for help? Does the Bible tell us what to do, or give us insight into the good we should aim to achieve, or give us a narrative by which to live? Is it best to think of ethics as a matter of duty, or good, or excellence? If we take the virtue line and say that ethics is about human excellence, doing well as a human being or succeeding at being a good human being then what will we say about humans who cannot achieve excellence? The virtue approach leads us to place friendship as the goal of ethics.

CHAPTER ONE

Can We Talk?

Why some people argue that ethics cannot be the subject of rational discourse, and how such arguments can be answered

Challenges to the Reasonableness of Ethics

I start with an observation. Most people have a sense of right and wrong. When we think about things we’ve done, sometimes we judge that we have done what we ought not to have done, and as a result we may feel guilt. “I was driving along, listening to the radio, when I pulled right in front of that bicyclist. I ought to have seen him before I moved into the turn lane.” And at other times, we may judge that we have done something ethically commendable, and as a result we may feel happy about ourselves. “I was on my way to play cards when she phoned with news of her mother’s diagnosis. Of course I went right to the hospital. It was good to be with them.”

This sense of right and wrong that we apply introspectively, we also apply to others. I might judge that you have done morally well, or that you have fallen morally short. And I might do the same about him or her or them, and about individuals or groups. We formulate moral judgments in all three grammatical persons, and in both singular and plural.

And yet, particularly when it comes to others, many people today are likely to hesitate in such judgments. I might be ignorant of some significant details of the situation, so how dare I say that what was done was right or wrong? Alternately, that person might have a different sense of morality than I do, and I should not force my own morals upon him. And in “I—you” situations, I might hesitate to judge you lest it harm our relationship with one another.

So on the one hand, most people have some sense of ethics, a sense of right and wrong. And yet most people also know that the matter is complicated, to the extent that we often withhold making judgments upon others. How can this tension be resolved?

For a number of people, the tension is resolved by denying that ethics is a proper topic for rational discourse. They may say that our sense of right and wrong is nothing more than an illusion, something we need to grow out of (as we grow out of our childhood sense that the sun circles over the earth every day and our childhood sense that our parents are God). Ethics on this view is just a sophisticated way, and perhaps a deceptive and manipulative way, of expressing personal preferences. Or it may be that our sense of right and wrong has no bearing upon reality because we are overwhelmingly determined in our actions by factors outside our control—which is to say that, according to this view, we lack freedom to accomplish ethically meaningful action.

Yet another way to resolve the tension is to grant that it is meaningful to speak of ethics but only within given cultural contexts. In a Western European democracy in the early twenty-first century, say, such-and-such activity is morally right, but in other cultures at other times it could well be morally wrong. Thus when faced with the differing judgments made upon collecting interest on money, or the differing judgments made upon polygamous sexual relations, or any other matter upon which cultures have differed, the most we can say is that what’s right and wrong simply depends on the cultural context. On this view, it would be illusory to think, for instance, that honesty is really and in itself commendable, because “honesty is commendable” means only that it is deemed commendable in certain contexts.

Now if any of these strategies is true—if the tension we feel between our sense of ethical right and wrong, on the one hand, and difficulties of making judgments, on the other, must be resolved by making ethics out to be in some fundamental way a disguise—then clearly there is nothing to talk about in this book. For if ethics is just a mask for something else (the imposition of will, say), then there is no point in our troubling our minds about ethics, and this Guide for the perplexed is already a much longer book than it should be.

Yet to resolve the tension by saying that ethics is just camouflage may not seem satisfactory. If I failed, as a driver, to take proper precautions and as a result a bicyclist ran into me, is the corresponding sense that I acted in a morally wrong way really an illusion? If, on the other hand, I changed plans in order to be with a needy friend and her mother, is the corresponding sense that I acted in a morally right way also illusory?

I believe that there are good reasons to reject the strategies that deny the reality of ethics. In the main part of this chapter, I will outline some principal objections to ethics and some reasons not to accept those objections. Readers may then decide if it’s worth their while to continue with the rest of the book. My over-arching argument is that before we can talk about Christian ethics, we need to satisfy ourselves that “ethics” is something with enough claim upon reality to command our attention. Because the sentiments against it are so strong in contemporary Western cultures, those of us who are in one of those cultures need to know the countering arguments. But do not think that, when it looks at the reasonableness of speaking about ethics, this chapter is putting theology on hold, bracketing it aside for later consideration. On the contrary: for Christian theology the defense of reason is fundamental—a claim that I will unpack in the final section of this chapter.

First Challenge: There’s No Such Thing as Moral Right and Wrong

It is clear that moral judgments of right and wrong are different than other sorts of claims we might make. To say that Paris is the capital of France or that water is constituted of oxygen and hydrogen is to make a different kind of claim than that Joe ought not to have killed Josephine or that Samantha did a good thing by standing up to the school bully. Although it is difficult to describe the difference between these two kinds of claims—one might say the first is “factual” and the latter not, although, in the case of water, it’s a pretty sophisticated line of reasoning that one has to follow before one gets to the fact of its being H₂O—still it is clear that there is some sort of difference here. And so, it seems, one might say that morality is unreal on the grounds that moral claims are not “factual.” We can’t live very well as human beings without Paris, without geography, without politics, and so forth, nor can we live intelligently without the truths of chemistry. But perhaps we could get along without all our moral problems if we just recognized that morality isn’t real.

This first challenge is the most radical approach to the problem: to deny altogether that there is anything real to morality. Here are two main headings under which such an argument is sometimes made.

Amoralism is the view that there just is no such thing as right and wrong. Amoralists are people who try to live accordingly without morality. If right and wrong are merely illusions, then we should reject any impositions upon our life that come from others telling us, or even ourselves telling ourselves, that we ought to do certain things and we ought not to do other things.

Emotivism, often linked with amoralism, is the ethical theory that when we say something is right or wrong we are expressing our own emotional attitude towards it. Morality is not a judgment about actions, but rather an expression of our emotions. And when we express our emotions by declaring something right or wrong, we are at the same time attempting to entice others to adopt the same attitude for themselves. So if I say to my son that punching the nose of his little sister is “wrong,” what I mean, according to emotivism, is (a) I don’t like him punching the nose of his little sister, and (b) I want it to be that he, my son, doesn’t like it either. “Ethical judgments are social instruments,” concluded the American philosopher Charles L. Stevenson in an influential 1937 paper.¹

When I teach ethics at college, there are usually a few students who find the amoralist or emotivist argument convincing, and many more who would like to find it convincing. They want to believe that morality is an illusion, and they are thus willing to consider that it flat out does not exist. But a simple experiment disabuses them. I will announce, say, that I intend to assign the final grades in the course on the basis of the length of their last names—those with the shorter names getting the higher grades. There will be outrage. “That’s not fair!” Well, I say, what do you mean? “It’s not right!” To which I might say, “But it’s good for people to have shorter names—by which I mean that I like shorter names and you should too.” And they then predictably say, “No, that’s not right,” and again try to invoke some notion of objective fairness… . When you talk to students about their grades, amoralism and emotivism quickly flee away. I get absolutely nowhere with them by explaining that, since there is no such thing as right or wrong, all that matters is that one impose one’s will successfully, and that it is my will to reward those who have shorter names with the better grades.

My students, in other words, find they are unwilling to abandon the idea that morality speaks to a feature of the world. When faced with an existentialist crisis over their grades, they discover that, after all, they hold “fairness” to be something real in the world about which we can and ought to have rational conversation. They thus discover the fundamental problem with amoralism. It is logically impossible to hold that everyone should be an amoralist.² For if I am willing for you to be an amoralist, then I am necessarily willing for you to do whatever you please. I am thus necessarily willing for you, if it pleases you, to deny me the right to be an amoralist. Which means, for example, that you could perfectly well use whatever is at your command to throw me in jail if I fail to act as you want me to act, and I would have no grounds for objection. If I were to say, “But there’s no such thing as morality, therefore I should be able to do as I please,” you could well reply, “There’s no such thing as morality, therefore you have no grounds for objecting over what I do with you.” Most amoralists really want everyone else to be moralists. My students think they would be happy amoralists, but they insist on denying that privilege to their teachers.

Second Challenge: There’s No Such Thing as Freedom

A second challenge—determinism—runs like this. Judgments of moral right and wrong are meaningful only if the agent is free to do otherwise. But, in reality, our actions are determined and are not free. Therefore, since freedom is an illusion, so is morality.

Why might one think that freedom is an illusion? There are several possible lines of thought; I will limit myself to one that derives from our growth in the understanding of the human brain. The more we know about how the brain works, the more it seems that our thoughts and feelings are determined by the physical stuff of our bodies. We have seen that attitudes and feelings can be altered by the controlled introduction of pharmaceuticals. And we feel that science is just at the threshold of an explosion of understanding of the brain—that, in another generation or two at most, all sorts of mysteries about thought, memory, decision, intention, fear, aggression, and so much else will be answered. We’ll know why we used to forget, and we won’t forget any more. In the old days (it will be said of benighted folk like you and me) we would often do things that afterwards we felt bad about and couldn’t understand why we did them. “What were we thinking?” we used to say. But now (in this future we envisage) we understand how our brains give rise to intentions and how intentions give rise to action, and there’s no mystery any more. No mystery—and no freedom.³ Everything human is the result of chemicals at work in the human body.

That, one might say, is science fiction, but such ideas exert a powerful contemporary influence. For instance, Tom Wolfe’s best-selling novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is premised on the basic question raised by neuroscience, the question of identity. Is everything Charlotte believes and decides upon determined by her brain functions? Is a human being to be identified with the matter of which she is made? Or is there something more to being human, more than our physicality?

The response to this second challenge may be introduced simply. Each of us has the subjective experience of being free. If you ask me if I had to write this book on Christian ethics, I will answer, “Of course not.” Did I have to include that reference to Tom Wolfe? Not at all. There are many other things I could have done instead of this book, and (once having taken on this book) many alternate ways I could have written it. Having real options, and having the power to act or not to act upon them, is fundamental to the experience of being human. If we don’t really have freedom, then we are fundamentally deluded through our whole life.

Determinism—the view that freedom is illusory—cannot account for a number of basic human experiences. If we were to have a good talk with each other, you and I would each have the sense of being listened to, of having our own views engaged, and perhaps of leaving the conversation as persons different than we were when we began it. But if there is no freedom, then our conversation (in Herbert McCabe’s vivid image) is no different from two tape recorders running simultaneously.⁴ That, of course, is what we mean when we say of a bad conversation, “We were just talking past each other.” Human beings, and not tape recorders, are free.

So, I say, the response is simple. It is, however, unsatisfying, in that it leaves open many questions. Sometimes we aren’t free (we might have been under the influence of drugs, or we might have been under the influence of a wicked stepmother, or we might have been simply ignorant of what was going on). Sometimes—perhaps most of the time—we are free only in certain respects. Given my age and my personal history up to this time, I am not free to become a ballet dancer. And I am not free to become you, whoever you are. I am Victor Lee Austin, and whatever I do will be in some fundamental continuity with what I have been and what I am. I am tempted to say that I am not free to become a woman (although that sort of change is, arguably, medically possible). Would you at least agree that I am not free to become an elephant—or an angel?

So freedom is limited in a number of ways. But to have something that’s limited is not to have something that’s extinguished. Limited freedom, freedom within parameters—freedom exercised under the influence of any number of things—is still real freedom. A good football (soccer) player cannot pick up the ball with his hands and throw it through a hoop and still call the game “football.” Football is not basketball. Yet while he is limited within the rules and boundaries of what constitutes football, he at the same time might well be unlimited in the possibilities for being a good football player. He is free.

The defense of authentic human freedom is an important task for Christian ethics. Freedom and morality are inextricably connected.

Third Challenge: All Morality Is Subjective

The first and second challenges to the rationality of moral discourse were fundamental, in that they challenged the reality of morality as an object of discussion. As we turn to the third and fourth challenges—subjectivism and cultural relativism—we come to challenges that are less fundamental, and perhaps for that very reason more commonly accepted. Both subjectivism and cultural relativism hold that we are saying something true when we speak about morality. What they deny, however, is that there is any point to having a discussion about it. That is to say, on these views moral claims do point to something real, but it is an illusion to think that what they’re pointing to is morality. And thus it makes no sense to try to have rational discourse about morality.

Moral subjectivism holds that a moral judgment is a claim about rightness or wrongness according to the views of the person making the judgment. In the subjectivist’s view, moral judgments are not purported truths that have some standing independent of the person making the judgment. Rather, every moral judgment is founded upon the subject who makes the judgment. All moral judgments are thus subjective.

For instance, if I say that it is wrong to take home from the office a ream of copy paper and use it for my own purposes, I am indeed speaking a truth. But according to subjectivism, the truth is this: such an action does not accord with my own sense of morality. And according to subjectivism, that is the end of the story. I cannot go on to say, for instance, that there is a likelihood that my own sense of morality corresponds with something like justice that exists apart from me. That is to say, I cannot hold that my sense of justice is in accord with (or, conversely, might be at odds with) anything that’s larger than I am.

Some writers consider emotivism to be a form of subjectivism, as it shares the claim that what matters is something within the person making the judgment. But for emotivism the important inner matter is the emotions (or perhaps the sheer will) of the subject. By contrast, above, I put emotivism alongside amoralism because it seems to me helpful to separate out and emphasize a certain dignity that lies with the subjectivist claim.

For although ...