Mitchell Ethics and Moral Reasoning

A Student's Guide
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3770-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 112 Seiten

Reihe: Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition

Gay marriage. Embryonic stem cell research. Abortion. Such generation-defining issues loom large in our society and demand a thoughtful response. Helping Christians to interact with our morally confused world, Ben Mitchell challenges the relativism so rampant in the West today. In addition to examining the history of ethical reflection from Moses to Immanuel Kant, Mitchell also incorporates the voices of current Christian ethicists such as Stanley Hauerwas and N. T. Wright, proposing a holistic approach to ethics-one based on biblical principles, historical views, today's leaders, and Christian virtues.

C. Ben Mitchell (PhD, University of Tennessee) is the provost and vice president for academic affairs and holds the Graves Chair of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He also serves as the editor of Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics. He is a senior fellow in the Academy of Fellows of the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity and previously served as its executive director. Additionally, for more than ten years he served as a faculty member at Trinity International University.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mitchell, C. Ben

Leseproben

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

WHY ETHICS MATTERS

Few people need to be convinced of the importance of ethics. We live in a tragically flawed world where we are confronted daily with moral failures. People lie, commit adultery, steal from their employers, and pollute the environment. At the same time, we all know people whose lives reflect personal integrity, sacrificial love, and unimpeachable virtue. We know that ethics is important at all levels of society. Whether presidents or members of Congress, CEOs or their employees, doctors or nurses, teachers or pupils, or parents or children, we all believe it is important to make good moral decisions, to be ethical people.

What might take some convincing is the notion that we could ever come to common conclusions about ethics. There is deep skepticism in our culture about moral agreement. In his study of the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults ages eighteen to twenty-three years old, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith found that

emerging adults have been raised in a world involving certain outlooks and assumptions that they have clearly absorbed and that they in turn largely affirm and reinforce. Stated in philosophical terms, their world has undergone a significant epistemic and axiological breakdown. It is difficult if not impossible in this world that has come to be to actually know anything objectively real or true that can be rationally maintained in a way that might require people actually to change their minds or lives. Emerging adults know quite well how they personally were raised in their families, and they know fairly well how they generally “feel” about things. But they are also aware that all knowledge and value are historically conditioned and culturally relative. And they have not, in our view, been equipped with the intellectual and moral tools to know what to do with that fact. So most simply choose to believe and live by whatever subjectively feels “right” to them, and to try not to seriously assess, much less criticize, anything else that anyone else has chosen to believe, feel, or do. Whether or not they use these words to say it, for most emerging adults, in the end, it’s all relative. One thought or opinion isn’t more defensible than any other. One way of life cannot claim to be better than others. Some moral beliefs may personally feel right, but no moral belief can rationally claim to be really true, because that implies criticizing or discounting other moral beliefs. And that would be rude, presumptuous, intolerant, and unfeeling. This is what we mean when we use the terms crisis and breakdown. . . .

Many know there must be something more, and they want it. Many are uncomfortable with their inability to make trust statements and moral claims without killing them with the death of a thousand qualifications. But they do not know what to do about that, given the crisis of truth and values that has destabilized their culture. And so they simply carry on as best they can, as sovereign, autonomous, empowered individuals who lack a reliable basis for any particular conviction or direction by which to guide their lives.1

This state of affairs sounds dire because it is. This is the world many of my students inhabit. And, in most cases, it’s not their fault. They have inherited this worldview from social media, schoolmates, pop culture, and sometimes even from their parents. They intuit that this is not the way it’s supposed to be, but it’s the only way they know. When they look to my own Boomer generation, they do not see many attractive alternatives.

Because the culture is largely relativistic, we also often trade ethics for legal compliance. If someone asks, “Is it ethical to do X?,” it is likely that someone will respond, “The policy [or the law] says do X.” Ethical right and wrong are confused with legal right and wrong. But to comply with law and/or policy is not necessarily to act ethically. The law or policy could be wrong. Just because what Hitler did was legal in Nazi Germany does not mean it was right. Just because chattel slavery was legal in the South in the 1860s did not make it right to own slaves. Sometimes it is right to disobey the law. Sometimes we are morally obligated to quit a job or blow the whistle over immoral policies.

These are some of the issues we will explore in this volume. The terrain is not always easy to traverse, but perseverance has its rewards. As a great Catholic thinker, A. G. Sertillanges, once said, “Truth serves only its slaves.”2

THE LANGUAGE OF ETHICS

Before we go further, I should point out that like every other discipline, ethics and moral reasoning have their own language. Ethics and moral reasoning fit in the category called “axiology.” The big three questions of philosophy include metaphysics (What is?), epistemology (How do you know?), and axiology (What is value? and What is valuable?).

Axiological questions may apply to economics if we ask how we determine value monetarily. Axiology may also apply to art if we explore aesthetic value. Axiology applies to ethics when we think about moral value. So if metaphysics asks, “What is truth?,” axiology asks, “What is beauty?” and “What is good?” The true, the good, and the beautiful are important subjects indeed.

This book is a guide to thinking about the good. We can think about the good in several ways. First, we may describe good behavior, decisions, or attitudes. Descriptive ethics attempts merely to describe a certain moral state of affairs. For instance, “Dr. Jack Kevorkian ended the life of at least 130 patients through physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.” This statement merely describes Dr. Kevorkian’s behavior without making a judgment about whether it was good or bad, right or wrong.

Prescriptive or normative ethics takes us into the realm of words such as right, wrong, good, bad, ought, ought not, should, should not, obligated, and nonobligated. This is the language of moral assessment. If I say, “Dr. Jack Kevorkian should not have ended the life of his patients,” I am rendering a moral judgment about his behavior. I am saying he was wrong to do so. I am prescribing what his moral behavior should have been and implying that it should be normative for other physicians, too.

Applied ethics is simply bringing the tools of prescriptive ethics to bear on issues or disciplines such that we talk about the ethics of abortion, capital punishment, war, the environment, or genetic engineering. Similarly, we can apply normative concepts to a variety of disciplines and discuss business ethics, medical ethics, legal ethics, nursing ethics, pharmacy ethics, military ethics, and so on.

Lastly, metaethics considers what we mean when we use words such as good. How do we define the word  good?

In sum, every area of ethics is ultimately concerned with moral goodness as a way of determining right conduct, attitudes, and character.

Because I am a Christian, I am concerned about how conduct, attitudes, and character should be oriented toward the triune God through Jesus Christ by the power of the indwelling Spirit. At the same time I must ask myself, in light of that relationship, how I am to behave toward others. These three moral relationships—to God, to others, and to self—define the ethical territory.

This is exactly how the ancient Jews and Christians understood their ethical duties. When a lawyer came to Jesus and asked him which commandment was the most important, Jesus replied:

The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:29–31)

Jesus described a trinity of moral relationships—to God, to others, and to self. These three relationships were to be ordered by the virtue of love. Importantly, when one of these relationships becomes disordered, the others are affected. If one’s relationship with God is broken or distorted, one’s relationship with others will be negatively impacted, and one’s relationship with oneself will also be affected. Similarly, if one’s relationship with others is disordered, one’s relationship with God and self will be negatively impacted. Jesus alluded to this reality in the Sermon on the Mount when he taught about anger:

So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matt. 5:23–24)

Before God can be worshiped rightly, our strained relationships with others must be made right. Once our relationship with our brother or sister is reordered and reconciliation takes place, our relationship with God is reordered so that worship is unhindered. Rightly ordered loves not only mark the moral life of the faithful believer but also are the means of human flourishing, of having a right relationship with the God who is the personification of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

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1 Christian Smith with Patricia...