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> What I was taught in seminary as "Christian Ethics," was divided
> into two parts. On the one hand, there was the divine law, expressed as
> norms, rules, principles, guidelines and commandments. It struck me then
> (and still does) as a move to reduce Christianity down to a system of
> ethical practice. Frankly, I find it odd to call that sort of thing,
> "Christianity." But the notion that Christianity essentially embraces a set
> of divine principles for righteous living is apparently attractive to many.
Certainly Christianity can't be reduced to ethical norms: It is
fundamentally gospel, not law. The question here is really whether
there is a "third use of the law" - i.e., a specifically Christian use
beyond the law's functions of revealing sin and controlling society. A
lot of Christians have thought that there is, but that doesn't seem to
take sufficient account of Paul's insistence in Romans & Galatians that
"Christ is the end of the law" (Rom.10:4).
> On the other hand, I was taught that "Christian Ethics" can be summarized in
> the mandate, "Love one another." But "love," no matter what its source, and
> no matter what its object, is not a component of ethics. It is, rather, a
> specific type of psychological motivation. I may be prompted to perform
> some act by love, meaning that I might be motivated by love in any number of
> my activities. But being motivated in this way does not tell me what is
> good or bad, right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate. There is no
> ethical "content" to love, such that I can make sound moral judgments on the
> basis of being moved by love.
Augustine said "Love, and do what you will" - which is pretty
nebulous _unless_ we are shown what love is. & for Christians I think
that has to be seen in Christ, not in law (whether from Sinai or
somewhere else) or general moral principles. The distinction between
ethics and motivation for ethics may be made in principle, but it runs
the risk of suggesting that the real content of ethics must be some set
of rules.
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> I'm not any longer
> persuaded that developing a "more satisfactory Christian ethics" is the
> answer here, but I'd certainly be interested in seeing what that might look
> like.
I think the recent book by N. Murphy and G. Ellis, _On the Moral
nature of the Universe_ (Fortress) is helpful here. They propose a
theologically motivated "kenotic" ethic as part of a branched hierarchy
of natural & human sciences. This has a good deal of resonance with my
feeling that what is needed is an "ethic of the cross" - though some of
their explicitly radical reformation views don't mesh well with my
Lutheran ones.
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> > 4) There may be professional codes which are _not_ consistent
> >with Christianity. The implicit code of professional ethics for Nazi
> >medical research is an example. (I recognize the danger of appealing to
> >extreme cases, but _reductio ad absurdum_ is a valid form of argument.)
> > Thus a Christian should not simply check his or her religiously based
> >ethics at the door when entering a profession.
>
> Just one quibble: I don't like the "Nazi" example, and here's why.
> It suggests that the ethical offense here is a manifestation of an evil
> belonging to a political system or a culture, and the proper line of
> resistance is a religiously based ethics. But insofar as medical research
> is a professional practice flourishing in Germany, the U.S., Russia and
> South Africa (or anywhere else), then medical research is an international
> community of practice, with standards of ethical conduct appropriate to that
> practice. Any practitioner in that profession could have (and should have)
> risen and declared that what was going on in Nazi Germany was a violation of
> the moral standards upheld by that particular practice. The moral evil here
> was not merely political, it was professional; and the appropriate response
> should have come from within the profession itself. If the individual
> practitioner objecting to the Nazi medical research is *motivated* by, say,
> a love of Christ, that's perfectly natural. But the identification of the
> evil being carried out within the profession, and the summons to
> professional accountability, properly belongs to the professional practice
> itself.
But recall that a lot of our ideas about informed consent for
research &c are relatively recent. At the same time that Nazi research
(_some_ of which was technically competent & produced valuable results)
was going on, the Tuskegee syphillis experiments were in process. What
the Nazis were doing was at the far end of an ethical spectrum which
includes less extreme but still dubious practices. Professional codes
of ethics, even if they have international recognition, can't be the
last word.
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@imperium.net
http://www.imperium.net/~gmurphy