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INTRO TO ETHICS (2021)

Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition

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The Rev’d Maria Gwyn McDowell, PhD

Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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What do you value?

  • Should you use a plastic water bottle?
  • How long should your shower be?
  • Should you give money to a homeless person?
  • Should you wear clothes made in China?
  • Should you own a firearm?
  • Should you hire an undocumented worker?
  • Should you own a Ford Super Duty truck?

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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What do we value?

  • Should we allow decrepit camper vans to park on residential streets?
  • Is selling property at commercial value in an impoverished neighborhood morally acceptable?
  • Is it acceptable to deny education to non-citizens?
  • Is it acceptable to deny health care to those who cannot pay? who are non-citizens?

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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What is Ethics?

“If you opt out of the process of reflecting and clarifying your own conduct, you are, in a fundamental way, also opting out of the hard work of being a moral person.”

—Beverly Wildung Harrison

From Harrison, Beverly Wildung "Doing Christian Ethics" in Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004.

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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What is Ethics?

  • “Ethical reflection is critical questioning of our evaluations of the world.”
  • “Ethical discourse involves judgments about what is right or good in a moral sense.”
  • Ethical inquiry:
    • “To improve our ability to reflect on…”
    • and “to choose better or worse ways of shaping our personal or social actions.”�

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From Harrison, Beverly Wildung "Doing Christian Ethics" in Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004.

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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What is Christian ethics?

  • about moral community
  • the “aspirational dimension”: “the horizon that we aim for in our agency.”
  • “redefining our moral priorities so as to shape our actions in the direction of solidarity with the most dramatically excluded, what Jesus identifies as ‘the poor.’”

From Harrison, Beverly Wildung "Doing Christian Ethics" in Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004.

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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What is Christian ethics?

“Invoking the principle of ‘love’ is not the revolutionary note in Jesus’ moral teaching. It is, rather, the critical criterion he offers—that our love be aimed at those who have suffered exploitation and injustice—that sharpens and specifies the direction of our efforts. The transformative force of the Christian ethic, what the ancient prophets called hospitality to the stranger, defines the most urgent strangers as those who are currently the most excluded ones.”

—Harrison

From Harrison, Beverly Wildung "Doing Christian Ethics" in Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004.

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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How do we evaluate our morality?

Ethics is for everybody...

  • Principled action: by what principle should I act? it the right thing to do?
  • Right Intention: if I do a good thing for the wrong reason, was it a right act?
  • Obligation: is this action, behavior, practice, or policy lead required by duty? Am I obligated to take a particular action?

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Deontological Ethics: moral actions are based on correct principles rightly intended.

Or, “for whom do we speak”?

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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How do we evaluate our morality?

Ethics is for everybody...

  • The Good: what is the good towards which I strive?
  • Consequences: will this action, behavior, practice, or policy lead to a good result?

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Teleological Ethics: moral actions correspond to the good ends of our acts or policies.

Or, “for whom do we speak”?

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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How do we evaluate our morality?

But who is everybody…?

  • Context: who is left out of “universal” claims?
  • Praxis: doing justice teaches us what justice is.

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Subversive Ethics: praxis of justice for the vulnerable and marginalized.

Or, “for whom do we speak”?

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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How do we evaluate our morality?

For Christians, ethics is the church

  • Communal: Christian ethics is formed by and in relationship through the church.
  • Character: We do what we are.
  • Secular vs. Sacred: Does such a distinction exist? Amish vs. Theocrats (i.e., Her Majesty the Queen, Head of the Church of England

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Ecclesial Ethics

Or, “for whom do we speak”?

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

Be Happy:

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"happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct.”

(Utilitarianism, X: 237).

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

Be Happy:

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  • Desirability: that happiness is desirable as an end
  • Exhaustive: that nothing but happiness is desirable as an end, and
  • Impartiality: that each person’s happiness is equally desirable.

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

Desirability:

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"The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it."

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(Utilitarianism, X: 234)

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

Exhaustive:

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"Everything we desire is ultimately because it makes us happy. What we think brings us happiness may vary, but our conceptions of what ought to make us happy may actually become an essential part of happiness.”

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(Utilitarianism, X: 234)

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

Impartial:

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"each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons”

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(Utilitarianism, X: 234)

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

The “Greatest Happiness Principle”

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"actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness."

(Utilitarianism, X: 210)

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

What is Happiness?

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Happiness is pleasure and freedom from pain:

“By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”

(Utilitarianism, X: 210)

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

How do we know what makes us happy?

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We ask. We ask the experts.

“If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference […] that is the more desirable pleasure.”

(Utilitarianism, X: 211)

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Consequentialism and Utilitarianism

How do we know what makes us happy?

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  • Pleasures “of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments” are amongst the higher pleasures
  • Pleasures gained in activity are of a higher quality than those gained passively

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Deontological Ethics

Command Ethics

  • Divine Command: actions are required, good, permissible, bad, or evil simply because God decrees them so.
    • Source: Revelation
  • Natural Law: the order of the universe and creation directs morality.
  • Reason

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Deontological Ethics

The Categorical Imperative

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“I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law”

(Kant, Groundwork 4:402)

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Deontological Ethics

The Categorical Imperative

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  • Rational: not subject to or in order to fulfill a desire.
  • Categorical: because it applies unconditionally, categorically, period.
  • Imperative: because if it can be done, it must be done, it is a command.
  • Not good (which is always partial), but moral.
  • Motivated by duty alone.

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Deontological Ethics

The Categorical Imperative

This is actually a method for deciding what to do:

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  1. Articulate a reason for your action.
  2. Recast it as a maxim, a universal natural law governing everyone.
  3. Consider whether such a world makes any sense at all.
  4. Can you rationally "will" to act on such a law in such a world.�

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Deontological Ethics

The Categorical Imperative

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The Good Person is the one whose will is only to make morally worthy decisions, and considers moral decisions the deciding factor for behaving.

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The Good Person would never forsake her commitment to moral goodness, would never vary her behavior according to circumstance.

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)

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Deontological Ethics

The Person behind Categorical Imperative

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Autonomous: We are not simply free DO our duty, we make our duty, the laws to which we will conform. We are lawgivers.�

Rationally Necessary: The will is unbound, the author of the law that binds it.�

Objective (free): The will and our behavior is not instrumental, not externally required. It is a priori, non-experiential, non-sensual, not drawing from observations of human beings or nature.

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Christian Ethics in the Anglican and Liberative Tradition: Intro to Ethics (Session 1)