At the Roots of Christian Bioethics Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.
Edited by
Ana Smith Iltis Department of Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri and
Mark J. Cherry Department of Philosophy, St. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas
Published by M & M Scrivener Press 3 Winter Street, Salem, MA 01970 www.scrivenerpublishing.com Copyright © 2010 M & M Scrivener Press ISBN-13: 978-09764041-8-7 ISBN-10: 0-9764041-8-4 Cover design by Russell Richardson Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data At the roots of Christian bioethics : critical essays on the thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. / edited by Ana Smith Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-9764041-8-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Bioethics. 2. Bioethics—Religious aspects— Christianity. 3. Engelhardt, H. Tristram (Hugo Tristram), 1941- I. Iltis, Ana Smith. II. Cherry, Mark J. QH332.A88 2010 241’.64957—dc22 2009042388
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote shortpassages for use in a review for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast or website. Printed in United States of America on acid-free paper.
Contents
Acknowledgements
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Thomas J. Bole, III Foreword Engelhardt: Brief Biographical Reflections Mark J. Cherry and Ana S. Iltis Introduction At the Foundations of Christian Bioethics; or, Why H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s Orthodox Christian Bioethics is so very Counter-Cultural
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1
Part I: Re-reading Engelhardt: The Old and the New Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes Morality in a Post-Modern, Post-Christian World: Engelhardt’s Diagnosis and Therapy
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Ruiping Fan A Confucian Student’s Dialogue with Teacher Engelhardt
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Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J. Completing the Picture: Engelhardt’s Christian Bioethics
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Part II: Challenges to Engelhardt’s Orthodox Christian Theology Gerald McKenny Desire for the Transcendent: Engelhardt and Christian Ethics
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M. Cathleen Kaveny Down by Law: Engelhardt, Grisez, and the Meanings of “Legalism”
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Christopher Tollefsen Missing Persons: Engelhardt and Abortion
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Frederic J. Fransen Engelhardt the Anabaptist: Pursuing Ascetic Holiness in the Spirit of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s The Foundations of Christian Bioethics
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Part III: Christian Bioethics, Moral Pluralism, and the Hope for a Common Morality Griffin Trotter Is “Discursive Christian Bioethics” an Oxymoron?
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Joseph Boyle The Ethical Significance of Moral Disagreement
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Stephen Wear Bioethics for Moral Strangers
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Nicholas Capaldi Ethics Expertise
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Thomas A. Cavanaugh On the Appropriateness of a Christian Bioethics
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Part IV: A Restatement H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Re-reading Re-reading Engelhardt
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Contributors
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Index
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The development of this volume benefited from the kind efforts of many. We are deeply thankful to the contributors, many of whom recast their essays several times over the course of the project to create the final versions contained herein. We also thank The Thomist for permission to reprint M. Cathleen Kaveny, “What Is Legalism? Engelhardt and Grisez on the Misuse of Law in Christian Ethics,” The Thomist 72 (2008): 443-85. Special thanks are also due to Martin Scrivener, a friend of many years, whose guidance has been essential to the successful completion of this project. Mark J. Cherry wishes to recognize the on-going generosity of St. Edward’s University, the School of Humanities, and the Department of Philosophy, especially Donna Jurick, SND, Louis T. Brusatti, William J. Zanardi, Peter Wake, Jack Green-Musselman, and Stephen Dilley. Each has been instrumental, though in diverse capacities, to the success of this project. This volume would not exist without the support, kindness, and love of Mollie E. Cherry. Ana Iltis wishes to recognize the generous support of the Saint Louis University Department of Health Care Ethics, especially its department chair, James DuBois, as well as the on-going support of the Graduate School through Dean Donald Brennan. Finally, it would not be possible to pursue a career without the generosity and love of her husband, Steven Iltis. The volume is dedicated to the life and work of our friend and mentor: Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Ph.D., M.D. May God grant you many many years!
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Foreword Thomas J. Bole III
Engelhardt never was, nor is he now, a man of half-measures. He is disposed to take whatever is important, especially heaven, by violence if necessary (Matthew 11:12). He can be hot or cold on issues, but on matters of significance he is never lukewarm (Revelations 3:16). This was my first impression of him, and it remains unaltered. We met as graduate students in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. In January of 1966 he had taken a leave of absence from the study of medicine, going from a surgical clerkship at the Tulane University of Louisiana School of Medicine to the graduate study of philosophy and a course on Immanuel Kant taught by Klaus Hartmann (Hartmann 1966; 1970; 1999), a man who would help direct both our dissertations at the University of Texas, and at the University of Bonn, where Engelhardt and I would study and where Hartmann was then a professor. When I met Engelhardt, he was newly married to his wife Susan (25 November 1965). Little did I know then that this couple would in friendship accompany me in most of the important personal, intellectual, and religious journeys of my life. Engelhardt presented himself with a mixture of intellectual intensity and existential seriousness. This may in part have been born of his experience in medicine. He was out to explore and understand the human condition, which from his episodic service in New Orleans’ Charity Hospital’s emergency room had been presented to him in life-and-death extremes. He was committed to engaging the three cardinal questions on which Kant saw all philosophy hinging: (1) what can I know, (2) what should I do, and (3) what should I hope for (Critique of Pure Reason A805=B833), as well as the general question from vii
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Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, namely, “what is man?” Engelhardt’s philosophical work has explored the necessary conditions for the possibility of answering these questions, which he appreciated as foundationally intertwined. The late 1960s and the whole of the 1970s was a period of intellectual change and academic advancement for Engelhardt. He completed his doctorate in philosophy in 1969, spent a Fulbright post-doctoral year in Bonn (1969-70). Bonn gave Engelhardt the opportunity for further study with Klaus Hartmann, as well as with the Kantian Gottfried Martin. He then returned to Tulane, where he undertook work in the history of medicine with John Duffy, did some psychotherapy, and had an academic appointment even as he completed an M.D. with honors in 1972. Then in the summer of 1972 he began his academic career in earnest at the University of Texas Medical Branch in what was at that time a department of the history of medicine. This allowed him to do further serious work in historical scholarship. As the Institute for Medical Humanities was founded, he was drawn to work with bioethics, serving among other things as an associate editor for the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. He received tenure in 1975. Engelhardt completed a translation of Alfred Schutz (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973), as well as a philosophical examination of the mind-brain relationship (H.T. Engelhardt, 1973). The latter drew heavily on Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Edmund Husserl. This book allowed Engelhardt to examine fundamental issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and categorial theory. At the same time, he continued to explore the work of the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (H.T. Engelhardt, 1975), which investigations in turn led him to further studies in the history and philosophy of medicine, especially to an examination of medical explanations and concepts of health and disease (Caplan, Engelhardt, and McCartney, 1981). This work brought his attention to how explanations are local in the sense of requiring a particular categorial framing. He thus came to appreciate not only the particular character of different types of scientific explanations, but the disparate character of diverse forms of moral discourse. This is not to say that his project regarding the foundations of bioethics was clear to him at this point. In fact, he confesses that, early in his career, he contributed to bioethics’ rather naïve fascination with principlism, which he later criticized (H.T. Engelhardt 2002; 2003a). This contribution occurred through an essay commissioned by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1975). As Albert Jonsen observed about Engelhardt’s contribution to the National Commissions: “H. Tristram Engelhardt’s paper suggested three basic principles: ‘respect for persons as free moral agents, concern to support the best interests of human subjects in research, intent in assuring that the use of human subjects of experimentation will on the sum redound to the benefit
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of society’” (Jonsen, 1998, p. 103). In any event, beginning at least in the mid-1970s, the philosophical community came to recognize that Engelhardt was working on a major volume fundamentally reconsidering the character of bioethics. This recognition resulted in his being named in 1977 the Rosemary Kennedy Professor of Philosophy of Medicine at Georgetown University, with appointments in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Medicine. He was also a senior research scholar in the Kennedy Institute, working within the Center for Bioethics. This was a period of sustained debate and reflection in Engelhardt’s life. He lived across the street from James Childress in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and often argued with Childress on their way to the university. Their discussions were rich and productive of many important articles, but his opus magnum remained unpublished, going through various drafts as Engelhardt attempted to explore and critically to assess the range and capacities of secular moral knowledge. He was slowly being confronted with the nature of the moral pluralism that defines secular morality, as well as its intractability. He was being forced to reconsider all his prior assumptions regarding secular morality and its foundations, many of which assumptions he brought with him out of a youth marked by rather Scholastic instruction regarding natural law. He came to realize that fallen man could not reason to a common morality. It was a period in which Engelhardt was engaged in a wide range of undertakings. He was not only Associate Editor of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, which he joined Edmund Pellegrino in founding in 1976, but was also at the time co-editor of the Philosophy and Medicine book series, which Engelhardt and Stuart Spicker founded in 1975. This book series was originally connected with a series of conferences with the title “TransDisciplinary Symposia on Philosophy and Medicine”. He also directed six seminars for the National Endowment for the Humanities. His work at the Hastings Center produced a series of collected volumes (Engelhardt and Callahan, 1976; 1977; 1978; 1980; Callahan and Engelhardt, 1981; Engelhardt and Caplan, 1987). These volumes grew out of working groups under Engelhardt’s guidance that were exploring the foundations of moral and scientific claims, as well as the circumstances under which controversies in morality, technology, and science can be resolved. Among his discussion partners was Alasdair MacIntyre, who at the time was completing After Virtue (MacIntyre, 1981). In all of these venues, Engelhardt was exploring the conditions under which controversies can be brought to a resolution. The most significant immediate publication from these efforts was Scientific Controversies: A Study in the Resolution and Closure of Disputes Concerning Science and Technology (Engelhardt and Caplan, 1989). In the exploration of these issues, Engelhardt gave no quarter. As Jonsen summed up matters, “Engelhardt has been the enfant terrible of bioethics: irrepressible, irreverent, unpredictable, but ever insightful and brilliant” (Jonsen, 1998, p. 82).
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In late 1982 he returned to Texas, where he was appointed Professor in the Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, and Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Rice University, while also working in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. He was in addition engaged with the Institute of Religion, which he had first come to know in the early 1960s. Back in Texas, The Foundations of Bioethics finally took mature shape and was published in 1986, as well as his Bioethics and Secular Humanism: A Search for a Common Morality (1991), which he wrote during his stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in West Berlin, 1988-89. These books expressed his mature recognition that there is no universal secular morality, nor can there be. The controversies fragmenting our contemporary society are the result of the conflict of numerous, incompatible moralities, a point underscored by his experience in clinical and bioethical consultation. Clinical bioethicists, as he discovered, rarely gave actual normative guidance, but instead provided legal advice, mediated disputes, and offered a genre of psychological interventions to support the interaction of physicians, patients, and family members (H.T. Engelhardt, 2003b). The fabric of cooperation among moral strangers, as he showed, is at best held together by practices that rely not on a common view of the good or of human flourishing, but merely on a consent to collaborate, as, for example, occurs in the market. The first edition of The Foundations of Bioethics was widely read, widely translated, and widely misunderstood. To address these misunderstandings, Engelhardt produced a second and thoroughly revised edition of The Foundations of Bioethics in 1996. This revised edition appeared five years after his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, an event that radically transformed his life. The connection between these two editions of The Foundations of Bioethics in great measure cannot be understood without taking into account Engelhardt’s conversion. Already in the first edition, Engelhardt takes pains to inform the reader that the sparseness of the morality left to bind moral strangers is not a matter that he celebrates. As he puts it in the first edition, “Some may wish to see this volume as a defense of a secular pluralist ethic. That would be a mistake” (H.T. Engelhardt 1986, p. viii). In the first edition, he underscores the well-worn Western moral-theological distinction between what one can know by natural reason and what one can know by grace. He stresses that he does not intend to disparage through his criticism of the limits of secular moral reflection the scope and substance of knowledge theologically acquired. As he puts it, “Those with religious persuasions should know that grace makes plain what reason cannot discern” (H.T. Engelhardt, 1986, p. 13). Since few readers of the first edition seemed to take these statements fully to heart, in the second edition he phrases matters a bit more stridently: “If one wants more than secular reason can disclose−and one should want more−then one should join a religion and be careful to
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choose the right one…I indeed affirm the canonical, concrete moral narrative, but realize it cannot be given by reason, only by grace. I am, after all, a bornagain Texan Orthodox Catholic, a convert by choice and conviction, through grace and in repentance for sins innumerable (including a first edition upon which much improvement was needed). My moral perspective does not lack content. I am of the firm conviction that, save for God’s mercy, those who willfully engage in much that a peaceable, fully secular state will permit (e.g., euthanasia and direct abortion on demand) stand in danger of hell’s eternal fires” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. xi). His general philosophical point about the inadequacy of secular morality was already articulated in the first edition of The Foundations of Bioethics, which volume already pointed ahead to The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, which was to appear four years after the second edition of The Foundations of Bioethics. Even if one can understand the two editions of The Foundations of Bioethics without taking into account Engelhardt’s conversion to Christianity, much of his subsequent work is incomprehensible apart from this event. The story of Engelhardt’s conversion is an instance of the unfailing love of God. He now recognizes his life has been a journey in God’s hands. Engelhardt’s first appreciation, however unclearly, of the truth of Orthodoxy, occurred in a history of Christianity course as part of his fifth-grade education at St. Mary’s Grammar School, taught by Dominican nuns in Houston. He knew that he had never seen the Christianity of the first millennium as described in the textbook. Puzzled, he asked the nun teaching the class how that could be the case, but received no satisfactory answer. Later, in the 8th grade he was asked to serve as an altar boy for a Palestinian Uniate bishop, who would celebrate the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Not only did this experience of the Liturgy point to what would be the major center of his liturgical life, but after the Liturgy the old bishop made a startling statement. He said to Engelhardt, then thirteen years old: “Listen. This is important for you. All Christianity will disappear in the West. True Christianity will come again like a light from the East.” To Engelhardt’s astonishment, the bishop repeated this remark twice. However, in the mid-1950s (someplace in 1954 or 1955), nearly a decade before the Roman Catholic Second Vatican Council (A.D. 1962-1965), the statement was unsettling and incomprehensible. Engelhardt sensed that it carried an important message, but he could not scry the circumstances under which it would be true. Having graduated from St. Thomas High School (Houston, Texas) in 1959, the old St. Thomas College from which his father had also graduated, Engelhardt left for college with a pre-Vatican II experience of Roman Catholicism. He benefited from the education of the Basilian fathers, many of whom were ailing university professors from Canada sent south to the supposedly more clement climate of Texas. With a understanding of history, Latin, and the stateliness of liturgy rightly celebrated, he found the chaos of Vatican II
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and its sequellae puzzling, even disturbing. He recognized that what had taken place in the Roman Catholic church had deep analogues, if not roots, in the forces that had driven the Cultural Revolution in China and the student movements in North America and Western Europe. There was a passionate commitment to starting societal institutions anew in general and Roman Catholicism in particular. Under the slogan of renewal, fasts were abolished, Latin fell into desuetude, the priest was turned around to face west to the people, and ancient pieties were brought into question. Caught up in the forces of the time, Roman Catholicism had embraced a revolution in its liturgical habits, ascetical commitments, and paradigm of theology. A radically new thought and liturgical style had been embraced, which transformed the fabric of its worship, scholarship, and everyday religious life. In the wake of these changes, the lives of many of the Roman Catholic priests, whom Engelhardt knew in high school and later in the 1960s, some of whom even gave Roman Catholic baptism to his children, had fallen into disorientation and chaos. Most of those left their priesthood; practically all had difficulty bringing coherence to their lives in the wake of Vatican II. Even then, Engelhardt recognized that humans are beings of ritual. He appreciated that rightly-ordered ritual bears the incarnate unity of symbols, community, history, and bodily movement. With the continuity of ritual shattered, and indeed with the abrupt loss of the Latin language as the scholarly theological lingua franca, a post-Latin Western church emerged in which its denizens were substantively isolated from their liturgical and scholarly theological past. As Engelhardt engaged the intellectual projects just sketched and shouldered the burdens of raising a family, his religious and liturgical Sitz im Leben was uncertain at best and in shambles at worst. He found himself estranged from the new spirit that shaped most of the Western Christianities. Some time before he left the Kennedy Institute and Georgetown University in December, 1982, he was approached by Francesc Abel, a Jesuit physician-theologian from Barcelona, to provide his services as a bioethicist to the International Federation of Catholic Universities. At that time, fully engaged in the project of completing The Foundations of Bioethics, he declined. His demurral was grounded in at least two independent concerns beyond the need to finish The Foundations of Bioethics. First, given his Roman Catholic intellectual roots, and given the arguments that he would lay out in The Foundations of Bioethics, he recognized already that the intellectual commitments, moral, philosophical, and theological, that had framed the Western theological project could not secure the claims to which they were directed. Second, given how uncongenial he found the liturgical experimentations of the Western Christianities, he was not attracted by the prospect of engagement with matters theological. Nevertheless, some time in 1984, John Collins Harvey repeated the invitation to Engelhardt. By accident, the invitation
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came to include his being accompanied to Milan by his second daughter Christina, a woman who, while describing herself as a wife and mother, has been a contributor to the journal Christian Bioethics (Partridge and Turiaso, 2005). Engelhardt could not turn down such an opportunity for his daughter. Quite quickly, Engelhardt found himself immersed in theological and bioethical reflections. In part, these were associated with his service on the International Study Group in Bioethics of the International Federation of Catholic Universities. In part, these resulted from discussions with his eminence, Carlo Cardinal Martini, the man who became the runner-up behind Benedict XVI for Pope of Rome. Despite himself, Engelhardt was forced to think through with seriousness what it meant to claim to have a religion, indeed, to claim to be a Christian. As Engelhardt read and reflected, it became clear to him that both Roman Catholicism and the Protestant religions were very particular creations of cultural forces tied to the intellectual singularity of Augustine of Hippo for the early Latin world, the political singularity of the coronation of Charles the Great and the subsequent Carolingian Renaissance, various neo-Platonic influences on the church of the West that led to a celibate clergy, the reorganization of the Church of the West through Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII (A.D. ca. 1020-1085), and then last but not least the philosophical and theological synthesis of the Western Middle Ages. In the spring of 1988, Engelhardt’s academic life could not have been going better. He enjoyed his positions at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, the first edition of The Foundations of Bioethics had appeared and was widely and favorably reviewed, and he had received an invitation to be a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in West Berlin. Yet, he felt as if he were a prostitute eating the dainties at a false table. He tells the story of one day driving to the university and praying that, if there be a true Church and if God would show it to him, he would join, no matter the consequences. He describes having an immediate experience of awful recognition that something would dramatically occur. Shortly thereafter, he received an invitation to attend an Orthodox musical recital. What he saw seemed too alien to a sixth-generation Texan. He and his wife proceeded to West Berlin, from which they sought safety from the cold of a central European Christmas through lectures in Constantinople. As Christmas approached, his wife asked where they would attend Christmas Mass, to which Engelhardt flippantly responded, “Let’s go to the Greeks.” On Christmas morning, 1988, they hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take them to the Romans (the term even now for the patriarchal Church of New Rome). They found themselves in a fairly empty church, with most of the congregation over the age of 60, with the Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrius I celebrating. His daughter Christina made a remark to the effect that this must be the original church. Engelhardt observed, “Yes, but is it ever poor!”
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It is never easy to leave that to which one is accustomed, especially if the framing customs are those of one’s entire civilization and the history of one’s family and folk for the span of over a millennium. Engelhardt was faced with bringing himself and his family through a paradigm change. He and they would need theologically to return to a place where few in the West had been for some twelve hundred years (the first dramatic rupture of the West from the East occurred when St. Photios the Great excommunicated Nicholas I of Rome in A.D. 867). The task was formidable, because it involved a change of life-worlds, of taken-for-granted ways in which one thinks, feels, and acts. The thought-style of the Orthodox Church in both its Eastern and its Western rites, the theological paradigm within which it locates its understanding of theology, Church, Bible, Liturgy, asceticism, and worship in general, is quite apart from the commitments, understandings, and sensibilities of the contemporary West. A return to the mind of the Fathers, to the undivided Church of the first millennium, was undoubtedly made more difficult by Engelhardt’s engagement in interesting moralphilosophical debates supported through the International Federation of Catholic Universities, and because of his Irish wife’s disinclination to enter Orthodoxy (although she herself would convert some two years after her husband) (S. Engelhardt, 1995; 1996). Finally, Engelhardt took the decisive step. In September, 1990, in Maastricht he submitted a letter of resignation from his membership in the International Study Group in Bioethics of the International Federation of Catholic Universities. He indicated that he would soon become a catechumen in the Orthodox Church. Engelhardt entered the Orthodox Church on Great Saturday, 1991, was tonsured a reader by his grace Bishop Basil of Wichita and Mid-America on November 19, 1996, and in 1997 made his first trip to the Holy Mountain. Amazed, he found himself in a surreal world, populated by frighteningly holy fathers and unanticipated wonders. He quickly became immersed in the theological life of Orthodox Christianity, which is not primarily academic, seeking to know about God, but ascetic, aimed at bringing one to know God. This ascetic turn was combined with engagements as a lecturer for Orthodox groups in North America and Europe. All of a sudden, he found himself no longer living in the taken-for-granted assumptions that had been those of the West for over a millennium. He now found himself in that Church whose 9th Ecumenical Council (A.D. 1341, 1347, 1351) in affirming St. Gregory Palamas (A.D. 1296-1359) had rejected those Scholastic theological and philosophical aspirations that had fashioned the life-world and theological paradigm of the West and the commitments of his youth. Engelhardt could now see with an unanticipated depth why secular discursive rationality had such a limited vision of morality and bioethics. Now it was clear why a Christian bioethics grounded in empirical noetic
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experience was that which alone could supplement the incompleteness of the general moral vision underpinning The Foundations of Bioethics. This epistemological state of affairs, which made perfect sense to his new Orthodox readers, now gained a more forceful clarity for Engelhardt. In the light of this clarity, his subsequent academic work has been focused on laying out with greater precision the geography of secular morality and its bioethics, as well as the force and implications of Orthodox Christian bioethics. As one would expect, Engelhardt has continued to address these two and often quite divergent audiences for his work. Although it superficially appears that a second Engelhardt has emerged, his philosophical and theological projects, The Foundations of Bioethics and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, are essentially interconnected. The first demonstrates the severe limits and character of secular moral-philosophical reflection. It explains why the morality of the emerging secular, global culture, despite its aspirations to consensus, is marked by intractable plurality. The second points the way out of the moral and metaphysical disorientation that characterizes this emerging global culture. It shows why The Foundations of Bioethics should lead to The Foundations of Christian Bioethics.
Note 1. The author, as well as Engelhardt and some of our fellow students, contributed to a Festschrift in honor of this teacher, whose influence on us was profound. See Engelhardt and Pinkard 1994.
Bibliography Callahan, D., and H.T. Engelhardt, Jr. (eds.) The Roots of Ethics: Science, Religion, and Values. New York: Plenum Press, 1981. Caplan, A., H.T. Engelhardt, Jr., and J. McCartney (eds.) Concepts of Health and Disease. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. Mind-Body: A Categorial Relation. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. ———. “John Hughlings Jackson and the Mind-Body Relation,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 49 (Summer), 137-151, 1975. ———. “Basic Ethical Principles of the Conduct of Biomedical and Behavioral Research Involving Human Subjects,” submitted to the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, December 3l, 1975. ———. “Basic Ethical Principles in the Conduct of Biomedical and Behavioral Research Involving Human Subjects,” The Belmont Report, Appendix Vol. 1, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Pub. No. (12) 78-0013, section 8, pp. 1-45, 1978. ———. Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality. Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1991.
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———. “The Ordination of Bioethicists as Secular Moral Experts,” Social Philosophy & Policy 19.2 (Summer), 59-82, 2002. ———. “The Foundations of Bioethics: Rethinking the Meaning of Morality,” in The Story of Bioethics, edited by Eran P. Klein and Jennifer K. Walter. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 91-109, 2003a. ———. “The Bioethics Consultant: Giving Moral Advice in the Midst of Moral Controversy,” Healthcare Ethics Committee Forum 15.4 (December), 362-382, 2003b. ———. Engelhardt, H.T, Jr., and D. Callahan (eds.) Science, Ethics, and Medicine. New York: Hastings Center, 1976. ———. Knowledge, Value, and Belief. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Hastings Center, 1977 ———. Morals, Science, and Sociality. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Hastings Center, 1978. ———. Knowing and Valuing: The Search for Common Roots. Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Hastings Center, 1980. ———. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr., and A. Caplan (eds.) Scientific Controversies: A Study in the Resolution and Closure of Disputes Concerning Science and Technology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr., and T. Pinkard (eds.) Hegel Reconsidered. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994. ———. Engelhardt, S. “Bless me, St. Patrick, I’m Coming Home,” Again 18.2 (June), 18-19, 1995. ———. “From Rome to Home,” in Our Hearts’ True Home, edited by Virginia Nieuwsma. Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, pp. 61-71, 1996. ———. Hartmann, K. Sartre’s Ontology: A Study of Being & Nothingness in the Light of Hegel’s Logic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966. ———. Die Marxsche Theorie. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970. ———. Hegels Logik. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999. ———. Jonsen, A.R. The Birth of Bioethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965 [1781]. ———. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, edited and translated by Robert B. Louden, intro. Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. MacIntyre, A. After Virtue. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1981. Partridge, C., and J. Turiaso. “Widows, Women, and the Bioethics of Care,” Christian Bioethics 11.1 (April), 77-92, 2005. Reich, W.T. Encyclopedia of Bioethics. New York: Free Press, 1978. Schutz, A., and T. Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World., translated by R.M. Zaner and H.T. Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Introduction At the Foundations of Christian Bioethics; or, Why H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s Orthodox Christian Bioethics is so very Counter-Cultural Mark J. Cherry and Ana S. Iltis
This book is as much about a philosophical puzzle as it is about bioethics. This book is more about a religious quest than it is about a philosophical puzzle. Yet, it is directed to a philosophical puzzle which it approaches though philosophical reflection and analysis. The philosophical puzzle is this: if we are trapped in immanence, can moral truth be anything but ambiguous? H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (2000, p. xi).
I. Introduction In The Foundations of Bioethics, published in 1986 followed by a second edition in 1996, Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. critically and carefully articulated the limits of a secular morality which could legitimately bind moral strangers.1 He argued that given the reality of deep moral pluralism and the starkly limited ability of secular rationality to resolve controversies, general secular moral authority must be created through, and thus limited to, the actual agreements of actual persons; general secular morality is thus 1 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 1-21) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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libertarian – not due to any particular celebration of personal liberty, nor because of any simple assumption regarding the rights of persons,2 but as a default moral and political reality. Reason fails to secure rationally justifiable ultimate foundations for universal morality and, as a result, there is a prima facie lack of moral authority to interfere in the free choices of persons acting with consenting others, even if some would condemn their actions as imprudent or even sinful. It is this unflinching libertarianism for which Engelhardt is best known. Indeed, it is widely assumed not only that Engelhardt affirms the libertarian social political consequences of his conclusions, but that he celebrates all of its frequently libertine personal consequences. Many (perhaps most) readers have not taken seriously Engelhardt’s own announcements found throughout the two editions of The Foundations of Bioethics that general secular morality permits and justifies many activities that he, himself, knows to be deeply sinful (e.g., abortion on demand, human embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, same gender marriage, and so forth)3 as well as imprudent (e.g., utilizing a chiropractor or doctor of naturopathy for treatment of heart disease). The challenge, however, as he argues in great depth, is that there simply does not exist secular moral authority permissibly to prohibit such actions among consenting persons. With the publication of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics in 2000, Engelhardt completed the previously one-sided picture. Supporters and critics alike were provided with the other half of the very same coin – Engelhardt’s detailed and deeply serious account of Orthodox Christian bioethics. Where secular bioethics is limited to what general secular reason can show to be authoritative and is thus very limited, Christian bioethics, Engelhardt argues, does not originate in human reason but in the command of God. Christian bioethics is not a secular bioethics that all presumably should endorse through their shared rationality; nor is it a bioethics that can be adequately captured in terms of universal accounts of human rights and the best interests of patients; nor can it be known through the sound rational arguments of philosophers, healthcare lawyers, bioethicists or others. Rather, Christian bioethics articulates a spiritual and moral framework at one with the Christian commitments, beliefs, and practices of the ancient fathers of the Christian Church, founded in the experience of God and the ways in which He has revealed Himself to man. It is a bioethics set within the Holy Traditional Orthodox Christianity of the first millennium, which is all-encompassing, transcendentally oriented, frequently mystical, and framed in terms of the single-minded struggle towards ultimate salvation. As Engelhardt describes these circumstances: …this volume invites the reader to the Christianity of the first millennium, a Christianity rooted in mysticism, or better stated in noetic theology. It is here that the puzzle is solved and the door found in the horizon of immanence: Christianity’s disclosure of an immediate experience of the uncreated energies
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of a radically transcendent, personal God. Here philosophical solutions and theological truth coincide: the truth is a Who. Such a theology is pursued ascetically through prayer bound to repentance expressed in worship. Within such a theology, bioethics is a way of life. It can only be introduced via an invitation to enter. To the question of “How can I know the truth?” one receives first and foremost instruction in ascetic transformation. It is the “pure of heart who shall see God” (Matt 5:8) (2000, p. xiii).
In short, while The Foundations of Christian Bioethics details and defends a robustly content-full Christian bioethics, often articulated in the language of philosophy – an occupational hazard – the book attempts neither to present a philosophical moral system, nor to provide a legalistic moral framework for decision making, nor a set of personal values and virtues. Whereas some critics attempted to frame the volume as just another cultural stop for the devoutly secular cosmopolitan tourist, such a judgment reflects a significant error.4 Instead The Foundations of Christian Bioethics seeks both to help readers adequately to comprehend the real moral chaos of the contemporary moral and cultural landscape, while also to draw readers into a journey in which philosophy must be left behind so as to engage in a relationship with a living and very personal, but fully transcendent, God. Engelhardt’s scholarship since 2000 has been dominated by this central and monumental task: to clarify, explore, and articulate traditional Christian bioethics, untainted by the errors of scholasticism, the Enlightenment, modernity, post-modernity, or the numerous religious heresies and false gods of both east and west (see for example, Engelhardt, 2005, 2007, 2009). At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr., critically regards Engelhardt’s search for ultimate foundations – his search for the decisive ground of the why and how of human existence and knowledge of appropriate moral choice. Compassing essays authored by his students, friends, and colleagues, at the surface this book may appear as but an academic assessment of the Christian scholarship of Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. At another level, however, the book draws on Engelhardt’s diagnosis and exploration of the contemporary social and cultural crisis to illustrate the remarkable moral and political shifts so evident in our time.5 The authors seek, for example, to make sense of the collapse of Christianity in Western Europe, which as Engelhardt documents, has become decidedly post-Christian and often openly anti-Christian (Engelhardt, 2009). Still deeper, the volume seeks also to understand and appreciate one scholar’s personal and tireless enquiry to secure ultimate moral foundations as well as to recognize the full implications of the results of his investigations. Perhaps most profoundly, it is also a book about one man’s religious quest to find God, Himself, and why others ought also to accept Engelhardt’s invitation to enter Traditional Orthodox Christianity.
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II. Bioethics and the Culture Wars In part, the challenge for contemporary bioethics and public policy, as Engelhardt’s scholarship both before and after the publication of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics details, is that so much of contemporary bioethics functions, at best, at the level of political ideology.6 Bioethics and its adepts routinely assert unique access to an ethical vision that operates on analogy with the universal legislator of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, or the privileged and unbiased utilitarian calculator of costs and benefits, who, in either case, purports to derive a canonical understanding of appropriate human choice, rational human preference satisfaction, and legitimate governmental authority from a particular account of moral rationality and rational volition. Through its robust moral claims, bioethics attempts to authorize and legitimatize state moral authority in terms of a rationally discoverable vision of morality, justice, and proper conduct. This is why bioethicists routinely give significant accent to supposedly universal special goods, such as “basic human rights” or “health”, while also asserting special insight into the human condition through claims regarding the so called “best interests” of patients, children, women, and society, and articulating ubiquitous universal statements on morality, bioethics, and proper public policy.7 Such appeals attempt to side-step any actual regional, cultural, community, or religious morality, and thereby to claim a universal morality to bind all nations and peoples through so-called enlightened reason. Or to speak in a more Kantian metaphor: the community of faith has been restated as the community of reason; the kingdom of grace has become the kingdom of reason.8 The underlying quasi-religious belief is that all humans are morally bound together without a common confession of religious faith, cultural background, or shared moral worldview. As Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes illustrates, Engelhardt often functions as an intellectual and cultural critic, documenting the ways in which the twentyfirst century is marked by explicit disorientation, both moral and metaphysical (2009). Similarly, Thomas Bole chronicles (2009) that, over the time of his professional career, Engelhardt came to recognize that the cacophony of moral perspectives worldwide empirically demonstrated that there did not exist a particular universal secular morality; and, through his philosophical exploration regarding the character of moral arguments, that, in principle, a universal content-full secular morality was not possible: “The controversies fragmenting our contemporary society are the result of the conflict of numerous, incompatible moralities…” (2009, p. x) and there is no in principle way definitively to resolve such moral conflicts in general secular terms. The contemporary moral world is sundered into a wide variety of religions and secular worldviews, with no definitive set of secular reasons for privileging one particular moral viewpoint among the many starkly divergent religious and secular points of view. As Engelhardt argues:
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The elements or dimensions of morality cannot be fully integrated in a secular moral vision. One cannot bring into harmony (1) the right and the good, (2) the claims of universal moral perspective and particular moral commitments, (3) the justification of morality and the motivation to be moral, or even (4) justify the content of morality (2000, p. 75).9
The typical bioethical fault lines (e.g., such as abortion, cloning, embryo experimentation, euthanasia, selling human organs for transplantation, human subjects research, and healthcare resource allocation), illustrate the real depth of the divisions sundering foundationally different accounts of the moral life.10 Note, these circumstances are not simply a debate about which policies will best achieve the desired objectives, but a much more fundamental disagreement regarding which objectives themselves are desirable; that is, which moral understanding should be established in public policy and individual choice (e.g., pro-life or pro-choice). Given the great diversity of moral viewpoints in contemporary society, alternative moralities compete without an apparent principled basis for establishing one as uniquely true. Or as Delkeskamp-Hayes makes the point: Richard Rorty and others have begun to speak the unspeakable: once one is no longer willing seriously to follow Immanuel Kant and act as if God exists, and once there is no basis in the end to justify as canonical one account of the right, the good, and the virtuous, there is also no way to guarantee that the right should trump the good, or even that moral rationality should have precedence over prudential rationality. Despite passionate proclamations of moral consensus, the contemporary condition is marked not only by disagreement, but by the inability to determine how through sound and rational argument, moral diversity—indeed, deep moral conflict—can be set aside (2009, p. 23).
In secular terms, persons are isolated within the finite bounds of human nature, and are embedded in an immanent world marked by a significant plurality of moral perspectives. Faced with such a stark reality, bioethicists and public policy makers routinely acquiesce to individual preference, current convention, cultural custom, or falsifiable claims to moral consensus. Moral content to guide public policy has been sought through appeal to intuitions, consequences, casuistry, the notion of unbiased choice, game theory, or middle-level principles. All such attempts, however, as Engelhardt argues in The Foundations of Bioethics, confront insurmountable obstacles: one must already presuppose a particular morality so as to choose among intuitions, rank consequences, evaluate exemplary cases, or mediate among various principles, otherwise one will be unable to make any rational choice at all. As he argued, even if one merely ranks cardinal moral concerns, such as liberty, equality, justice and security differently, one affirms different moral
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visions, divergent understandings of the good life, varying senses of what it is to act appropriately. How then does one break through the seemingly interminable bioethical debates to truth? Absent definitive moral foundations, grounded in an unshakable moral anthropology, canonical accounts of human well being, good consequences, and right action, morality – and thus bioethics – appears to be no more or less than what humans make it out to be. Or, as Protagoras famously observed: “Of all things the measure is of man, of the things that are, that [or “how”] they are, and of things that are not, that [or “how”] they are not.”11 Secular morality, and thus bioethics, is deeply ambiguous, with no definitive reasons for choosing one particular moral content rather than another.12 Absent the ability of human reason to deliver a particular content-full universal morality to bind all in a common moral framework, without simply begging the question, and insofar as one decides to eschew violence, Engelhardt argues that moral authority must instead be drawn from the actual choices of actual persons. It is this situation which gives general secular morality and political authority its inescapably libertarian character. It is libertarian by default – because no authoritative content-full morality can be justified in general secular terms, moral authority must be created through the actual agreements of actual persons to cooperate in common projects. Given such foundations, the morality available to guide the secular world is stark indeed. Such was the moral and social political conclusion for which Engelhardt argued in both editions of The Foundations of Bioethics.
III. Re-reading Engelhardt: The Old and the New Given his overtly and defiantly libertarian positions in The Foundations of Bioethics when The Foundations of Christian Bioethics appeared there was much surprise in many quarters. Consider, for example, James Childress’ comment on the back of the book cover, which states: ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been,’ to echo the Grateful Dead, as Tristram Engelhardt has moved from a bioethics for moral strangers in a pluralistic society to a contentful bioethics grounded in traditional Orthodox Christianity that revels in its separation from and challenge to that society. Those of us who cannot make the same journey can nevertheless marvel at the coherent and powerful vision that now motivates Engelhardt’s work and shapes his understanding of Christian bioethics as a way of life.
For many commentators, there was now a second Engelhardt – an Orthodox Christian Engelhardt seemingly estranged from his secular libertarian doppelganger. It is to this particular question, Engelhardt the old and the new, to which the first section of essays is addressed. Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes, Ruiping Fan, and Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J. each demonstrate the organic unity between the past and the present in Engelhardt’s research, scholarship, moral
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and political thought, even while acknowledging that his faith in God has profoundly shifted his personal and spiritual life. Delkeskamp-Hayes, for example, argues that Engelhardt’s secular and religious dimensions are both needed for an accurate intellectual diagnosis of our cultural condition: From his early writings in the 1970s (1973), to his contemporary publications (2006), in diverse venues and in a wealth of articles and books, Engelhardt persisted in addressing our cultural predicament. In his two editions of The Foundations of Bioethics, and in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt provides a substantive exploration of this state of affairs… (2009, p. 23-24).
Through both editions of the Foundations of Bioethics, Engelhardt demonstrated that the resources available in secular reason are inadequate to the task of securing an authoritative universal morality. Then, in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, he provides a way out of the post-modern philosophical puzzle. On the one hand, the author accounts for the fractured character of our postmodernity, as well as for the practices that transcend its moral plurality (e.g., the market). … On the other hand, he accounts for the ultimate disorientation and loss of final meaning that characterizes the dominant secular culture. Engelhardt appreciates that the moral and metaphysical challenges of postmodernity proceed from the collapse of Christendom and of Christian metaphysical orientation. He describes this collapse as linked with the failure of the Western-Christian project of combining theology with philosophy—a project that he recognizes as having led to the Enlightenment’s claims regarding the possibility of a universal, rationally justifiable secular morality (2009, p. 24).
As Delkeskamp-Hayes argues, when both aspects of his scholarship are seen together, the reader is provided with a unified philosophical diagnosis and religious therapy. Ruiping Fan and Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J. similarly argue that these two dimensions of Engelhardt’s thought organically fit together, exploring different sides of the same fundamental puzzle. Fan argues that the secular morality provided in The Foundations of Bioethics can only be appreciated as one-sided and incomplete. He argues that the arguments in the earlier secular works required the completion that is only offered in the later Christian work. As a result, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics provides the epistemic perspective which is necessary to complete the account of moral knowledge, content, and community found in Engelhardt’s secular work. Or, as Wildes makes a related point, Engelhardt’s model of moral knowledge and moral community is along the lines of the exclusive model of community. One needs to be a member of a community. Moral reason only works within the context of a community and its presuppositions. Moral reason is part of a way of life. But, he also believes
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Morality and decision making need the moral life of a substantial community, such as Confucianism or Orthodox Christianity, to give it content, shape, and commitments, to specify standards of moral evidence and inference, to distinguish right from wrong and good consequences from bad, virtue from vice, or even to ground a proper account of the human good and human flourishing in an authoritative moral anthropology.13 In short, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics completes an intellectual journey begun in The Foundations of Bioethics.
IV. Challenges to Engelhardt’s Orthodox Christian Theology The second bolus of essays raise specific challenges to Engelhardt’s Orthodox Christian bioethics. Gerald McKenny notes that Engelhardt’s foundation in Orthodox Christian theology is at core a call to personal religious conversion – a call to return to the ancient Christian religion embodied in the Orthodox Christian Church, a call to experience God rather than to reason about God. His arguments and conclusions at times display a character that rings oddly to the modern academic ear. Indeed, Engelhardt explicitly states that until one converts to Orthodox Christianity and enters into a proper relationship with God, one will only one-sidedly and incompletely understand what is truly at stake and why one must act in particular ways. Each of the essays in this section puzzles about such a foundation for Christian ethics. Such knowledge is not private – it is shared by the entire Church – however, it is a very particular epistemological vantage point for understanding and appreciating Truth. Alas McKenny straightforwardly refuses this conversion to Orthodox Christianity (at least as of the time of this writing), setting aside its importance, while recasting Engelhardt’s call for conversion into a reawakening of the desire for the transcendent in modern Christian ethics. Consider McKenny’s core concern: why Orthodox Christianity? As McKenny argues, Engelhardt has demonstrated the limits of discursive reason to disclose universal moral truth. “It proves that discursive reason is bound to immanence and that the ground morality requires must be transcendent and, therefore, must be reached in some other way than by discursive reason” (2009, p. 114). However, McKenny continues, such a demonstration does not, and indeed cannot, show that any particular account of the transcendent is true, which is why Engelhardt’s account in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics shifts from discursive argument to an invitation to conversion. This is how it must be if transcendent truth can be known only noetically. But, as Engelhardt also realizes, this means that there are no criteria external to Orthodoxy itself by which the now disillusioned rationalist can choose which
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invitation to the transcendent to accept as an invitation to truth. Even where the argument succeeds, then, it brings one not to Orthodoxy but only to a notion of the transcendent as such (McKenny, 2009, p. 114).
Thus, McKenny concludes that from an external perspective Orthodox Christianity will only appear as one among many competing accounts of truth, each account issuing its own invitation. How can one determine which account is genuine, which one is uniquely Truth?14 M. Cathleen Kaveny focuses on Engelhardt’s criticism that much of Western Christian moral theology is legalistic. She argues that Engelhardt’s attack on what he terms Western Christianity’s “legalism” is for the most part merely polemical, missing the forest for the trees. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s account of law, she works carefully through a comparison of Engelhardt and Germain Grisez, both of whom criticize “legalism”. Aquinas argued that law “is nothing else than (1) an ordinance (2) of reason (3) for the common good, (4) made by him who has care of the community, and (5) promulgated” (ST, I-II, q. 90, art. 4). Working her way through each of these categories, Kaveny seeks to show that “legalism” is not a straightforward concept, but rather a complex phenomenon with many components, each leading to what she terms “trigger points”: These trigger points touch on basic issues in Christian ethics, such as whether morality is more appropriately seen as an aspect of God’s will or God’s reason, what relationship obtains among the individual, the community and the common good, and what role various ecclesiastical authorities and theologians play in interpreting Christian moral teaching (2009, p. 159).
She argues that moral theology must be understood within the relevant frameworks of particular accounts of Christian morality and that once one appreciates the appropriate framework, mode of reasoning, and appropriate exceptions, the criticism of “legalism” loses much of its relevance. What is more important than charges of “legalism”, she concludes, is the clarification of more fundamental disagreements about the nature and purpose of the Christian life and of the guiding force of the moral law within such a life. Christopher Tollefsen changes tactics, turning to questions regarding whether Engelhardt’s secular moral and political philosophy can in principle be adequately integrated with his Christian bioethics. Tollefsen raises puzzles, for example, regarding the ways in which Orthodox Christian bioethics absolutely condemns much that a libertarian bioethics must permit. On the one hand, the libertarianism of The Foundations of Bioethics requires that the state permit abortion on demand, at least as a de facto non-prosecutable practice, provided that all those involved consent. No tax dollars may ever be spent in support of abortion, nor may any hospital or health care professional be forced to participate, absent actual contractual agreements, but abortion on demand remains permissible in the general secular state. On the other hand, The
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Foundations of Christian Bioethics states unequivocally that abortion is the spiritual equivalent of murder. How are two such positions to be fully integrated? Tollefsen argues that an adequate understanding of human biology and the human good provide strong secular reasons straightforwardly to prohibit abortion. Moreover, he argues that an argument against abortion that, unlike Engelhardt’s, distinguishes between the evils of contraception or sterilization on the one hand and abortion on the other is necessary for modern Christians. The argument against abortion, Tollefsen argues, must be built around the language of rights and personhood. Abortion must be rejected, according to Tollefsen, in part because it involves unjustly taking the life of a person, reasoning Engelhardt explicitly rejects in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics.15 In the final essay of this section, Fred Fransen concludes that despite Engelhardt’s protestations to the contrary, there really is a new Engelhardt in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics – a triumphal Engelhardt dreaming of the establishment of an Orthodox Christian empire with the crowning of an Orthodox emperor at the fourth Rome. Consider Engelhardt on such issues: As every young Texian16 Christian of school age knows, Austin shall surely be the fourth Rome, and if not Austin, then Dallas or perhaps even Abilene. … The patriarch of all the Texans will then bear the weight of that priority among the bishops which is the Primacy of St. Peter that will be preserved by that Church, that future diocese of Santa Fe. As the capital of the Empire of Holy Texas, it will preside as first in loving care for all true believing and worshipping churches. …Once all is put in order, the Empire can be reestablished and the populace of Texas baptized in the Brazos de Dios. Then the Orthodox Mounted Posses can saddle up and ride out to the Second Rome to restore the Hagia Sophia, Christendom’s great temple, carrying the Bonnie Blue Flag next to the Empire’s banner of gold with the proud double-headed eagle (2000, pp. 393-294).
Fransen’s concern is whether such a millennial vision is compatible with Christianity. He argues that it may be impossible for persons to embark on the ascetic path of holiness, while also fully carrying out their duties as magistrates. The role of governing a society may simply be incompatible with what is necessarily proper to the struggle towards salvation. Here, Fransen’s concern is that the Orthodox concept of symphonia, in which the church and the state are in “perfect harmony” seems incompatible with Engelhardt’s account of secular political authority in The Foundations of Bioethics: From the point of view of symphonia, the state is good, if different from the Church. There is no room in the world of the Foundations, however, for a “good” general secular realm. Moreover, for a thick community to rise up and set out to conquer its neighborseven Traditional Christians in Texas or Papists and Muslims in Rome and Constantinoplewould be legitimate cause for the general secular world, together with other thick communities, to intervene (p. 194).
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As a result, while Fransen finds himself in deep sympathy with many of Engelhardt’s Christian commitments, he believes that there is a greater difference between Engelhardt’s Orthodoxy Christian bioethics and his secular philosophy. As Fransen concludes: “There can be no crusading symphonia within the terms of the [secular] Foundations” (p. 194).
V. Christian Bioethics, Moral Pluralism and the Hope for a Common Morality The final section brings together a series of applications and critiques of Engelhardt’s arguments, conclusions, and methodology. Each draws out and carefully explores the ways in which Engelhardt’s account of Christian bioethics, in Griffin Trotter’s words, “is flagrantly sectarian and outrageously counter-cultural” (p. 203). Here Trotter asks whether there can be a middle ground between the stark, substance-free secular bioethics of Engelhardt’s secular morality and the content-full sectarian bioethics of his Christian morality. Joseph Boyle and Stephen Wear each consider the ethical significance of moral disagreement and moral pluralism. Nicholas Capaldi lays out the implications of Engelhardt’s work for conceptualizing expertise in ethics, arguing that many of the ways for which bioethicists claim expertise are flawed. Thomas Cavanaugh considers whether it is even appropriate to speak of Christian bioethics as a distinct set of moral and spiritual understandings. Cavanaugh contends that a Christian bioethics is necessary if one is to ascertain the role of sin in the fallen world. Griffin Trotter questions whether Engelhardt has drawn too fine of a line between moral stranger and moral friend, with too wide of a cognitive and moral gap between moral strangers. Trotter shares Engelhardt’s disquiet about the deceptive ideology of much of contemporary bioethics. As Trotter argues At its worst, discursive reason devolves into “conceptive ideology”—intellectual adornment for coercive politics …, replete with an inventory of academic high priests (e.g., tenured bioethicists), ritual deployments of intellect (e.g., political advisory committees), and creative myths disguised as facts (e.g., stories that portray infant mortality or life-span inequalities as consequences of poor health care access) (p. 204).
However, Trotter argues that it is more accurate to the ways in which we often experience the world to think, as Wildes does (2000), in terms of moral acquaintances. He argues that he finds it fruitful to approach others in terms of the commitments and concerns that we share in common, to deliberate together seeking peaceful short term collaboration, and possibility a common appreciation of ethical truths in the long run. He concludes that Engelhardt is wrong to so neatly divorce sectarian bioethics from discursive bioethics.
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Following similar threads of argument, both Joseph Boyle and Stephen Wear approach Engelhardt’s thought with a critical eye to his conclusions regarding the importance of moral disagreement. Stephen Wear notes that Engelhardt seems to think of the failure of reason to provide a content-full secular morality as a bad outcome. Why? Also, Engelhardt states openly that one ought to want more moral content than a cosmopolitan libertarianism can provide. Again, why? On the one hand, Wear argues that many of the basic moral guidelines, such as truth telling, do not kill, and beneficence, remain remarkably useful tools for day-to-day medical decision making, even if Engelhardt is correct in his observations regarding the deep disagreement on hard cases. On the other hand, while Wear by and large affirms a political position much like Engelhardt’s libertarianism, he notes that once we recognize ourselves as wholly within the realm of the immanent, then the liberal affirmation of liberty and equality, as positive values, is as much on the table for discussion as any other position: Once we have placed ourselves wholly in the realm of the immanent, with our ethics charged with ascertaining how we might best “coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness,” then it would seem that restricting ethics to considering freedom as a side constraint is no longer mandatory, and a reflection on whether and how a given society might consider supporting the liberal view of human flourishing becomes as legitimate as any ethical reflection (2009, p. 258).
In short, Wear argues that secular reason can, and has, fashioned an ethic for moral strangers, evidence for which in bioethics he sees in the past several decades of discussion, argument, and often agreement about many types of cases and circumstances with which physicians and bioethics routinely grapple. Joseph Boyle argues that persons have, or can obtain, a common grasp of basic moral principles, that cover a wide variety of cases, even if not all will articulate such content through the same principles or virtues. Many moral disagreements can be explained in terms of insincere moral disagreement, innocent mistakes, and morally flawed ethical thinking, discernment or formation. Regarding apparently deep moral disagreement in complex cases he argues: “in these cases, moral disagreement is to be expected; there is no ground for expecting agreement because the necessary thinking is complex and can easily go wrong without any moral fault on the part of a person addressing such a problem” (p. 240). As a result, he concludes that the existence of moral disagreement, even significant disagreement, does not demonstrate that the serious moral judgments of reflective persons are false; nor, he argues, does such disagreement show that public ethics and state policy must be crafted in such a way as to stand free of any particular deep moral commitments and value rankings, as Engelhardt’s libertarianism would require. Rather, he argues that conscientious political compromises will accomplish what good people should do, even though it may routinely be less than perfect.
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VI. Engelhardt’s Reply – A Restatement of Position and a Response to Critics As is traditional in these circumstances, we the editors have provided Engelhardt with the last word – the final shot, as it were, at least within these pages – to comment on his friends and critics alike. Rather than attempting to summarize his arguments in this brief introduction, we will simply let him speak for himself – as he would have done in any case. Instead we offer the reader two short reflections, which we hope will give those who do not have the pleasure of knowing Professor Engelhardt personally, some insight into his personality, intellectual and religious commitments, as well as his sense of humor. “Discrete” is hardly an adjective most people would use to describe Professor Engelhardt. “Provocative” and “in your face” seem more accurate. Another graduate student and I (Ana) were checking in for a conference when Professor Engelhardt appeared at the registration desk and said, quite loudly, to the young woman working at the desk: “It is a pleasure to see you facies ad faciem.” The woman looked stunned and proceeded to check him in. After he left, she asked us: “Did he just say the f-word to me?” We explained the phrase, and have enjoyed sharing the story over the years. Although the provocative Engelhardt no doubt is the one many know, there is a truly discrete – and deeply generous – Engelhardt. Many who hear his famous toast, “To a world without taxes, to a world without welfare, to a world without borders,” assume he does not wish to share his resources with the poor and, moreover, that he validates selfishness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over many years, I have watched Professor Engelhardt very quietly and abundantly give to those in need, including to people whose actions and lifestyles I suspect he finds deeply offensive. Not only does he give generously and without “making a fuss”, he does not flaunt the depth of his generosity when people attack him for being a selfish libertarian, someone who clearly must not care about the poor given his disdain for a tax-based social welfare system. I (Mark) received a call one night after 11:00 p.m., a time at which phone calling is properly reserved to close family members and perhaps philosophy professors with metaphysical emergencies. “Mark, let’s fly to Kabul and preach the gospel of Christ!” Professor Engelhardt enthusiastically replied to my simple “Hello”. “I just checked and we can get tickets on the cheap. Business Class! If we get lucky”, he continued, “the Mohammedans will martyr us. That’s first class to heaven! It doesn’t get better than that!” “Before we leave,” I suggested, “we should both officially change our names to Bubba, that way, if we are martyred, the Church will have gained two saints: Bubba the Greater and Bubba the Lesser from Texas.” One can only imagine the glorious Orthodox icons, complete with Texas boots, cowboy hats, and large
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belt buckles, as well as a feast day presumably appropriately set on March 02, or perhaps April 21.17 Cooler heads prevailed, our spouses, and the trip was indefinitely postponed. At any rate, while Orthodox Christians are at all times obliged to live the faith, and sometimes obliged to die for the faith, they are not in general supposed to seek martyrdom, although they are permitted to accept martyrdom if it is offered. Again, as is the usual circumstances of academic volumes, there is no real opportunity adequately to acknowledge the many gifts he has given us, nor the love and guidance he has shown over the many years of our deep and abiding friendships. Nor are we permitted to reflect on the grand insanity of dayto-day life while living as his students in a state only properly referred to as slavery, or even on his wonderful relationship with his many grandchildren (some 10, as of this writing), who shout “Opa!” with great zeal while climbing up for a great bear hug, chatting away variously in German, English, and Romanian. We will, however, openly thank his wife Susan for her frequent protection and kindnesses far too numerous to mention. Still, with such heady matters in mind we commend this volume to the reader’s consideration; it is a great pleasure to present it to the worlds of both secular philosophy and Christian scholarship; two of the many worlds of our friend, mentor, and professor: H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Ph.D., M.D.
Notes 1. “Moral strangers are persons who do not share sufficient moral premises or rules of evidence and inference to resolve moral controversies by sound rational argument, or who do not have a common commitment to individuals or institutions in authority to resolve moral controversies. A content-full morality provides substantive guidance regarding what is right or wrong, good or bad, beyond the very sparse requirement that one may not use persons without their authorization. Moral friends are those who share enough of a content-full morality so that they can resolve moral controversies by sound moral argument or by appeal to a jointly recognized source other than common agreement. Moral strangers must resolve moral agreements by common agreement, for they do not share enough of a moral vision so as to be able to discover content-full resolutions to their moral controversies, either rby an appeal to commonly held moral premises (along with rules of evidence and inference) and/or to individuals or institutions commonly recognized to be in authority to resolve moral controversies and to give content-full moral guidance” (Engelhardt, 1996, p. 7). 2. For all of the brilliance of the arguments in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick just begins with the assumption of forbearance rights: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do” (1974, p. ix). For Engelhardt, forbearance rights are the end result of the failure of general secular reason to secure content-full moral norms without begging the question. If we are to eschew simply
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appealing to violence as a means for solving controversies, then we must act only with the permission of the persons involved. As a result, forbearance rights provide a conceptual framework for thinking about the authority of persons over themselves and their private property, for assigning praise and blame, as necessary to the practice of morality in a general secular world. In Engelhardt’s language: “It is a disclosure of the minimum grammar involved in speaking of moral commitments with an authority other than through force. This account can be regarded as a transcendental argument to justify a principle of freedom as a side constraint, as a source of authority” (1996, p. 70). Respecting the forbearance rights of persons permits the resolution of controversies without appeal to violence, and recognizes persons as in authority to grant permission to common projects. It is thus a social fabric that can bind moral strangers in general secular terms. 3. “Here the reader deserves to know that I indeed experience and acknowledge the immense cleft between what secular philosophical reasoning can provide and what I know in the fullness of my own narrative to be true. I indeed affirm the canonical, concrete moral narrative, but realize it cannot be given by reason, only by grace. I am, after all, a born-again Texan Orthodox Catholic, a convert by choice and conviction, through grace and in repentance for sins innumerable … My moral perspective does not lack content. I am of the firm conviction that, save for God’s mercy, those who willfully engage in much that a peaceable fully secular state will permit (e.g., euthanasia and direct abortion on demand) stand in danger of hell’s eternal fires. … Though I acknowledge that there is no secular moral authority that can be justified in general secular terms to forbid the sale of heroin, the availability of direct abortion, the marketing of for-profit euthanatization services, or the provision of commercial surrogacy, I firmly hold none of these endeavors to be good. These are great moral evils. But their evil cannot be grasped in purely secular terms. To be pro-choice in general secular terms is to understand God’s tragic relationship to Eden. To be free is to be free to choose very wrongly” (Engelhardt, 1996, p. xi). 4. “He offers a Baedekker’s guide to a system of belief that most of us have heard about but few of us know much about. One should read this section of the book just as one would read a book that attempts to describe any system of belief, secular or religious, mainstream or not. In this sense Engelhardt’s is one more book for those who take their cross-cultural education seriously. If your bioethics library has a section devoted to Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Hmong, and Christian Scientists… here’s one more for your collection” (Scofield, 2002, p. 324). Such a verdict would be amusing if it were not to display historical ignorance to place Christianity of the first millennium on a par with the religious beliefs of the Jehovah Witnesses, the tribal customs of the Hmong, or the spiritual convictions of Christian Scientists. As Engelhardt underscores, ancient Traditional Christianity was one of the central historical sources out of which the West drew its cultural, intellectual, and moral substance. Where the ancient Christian Church defined Christian belief and culture over against other religions, including the paganism of ancient Greece and Rome, the Roman Catholic Church, while affirming the first seven ecumenical councils, recast such reflections within the framework of Western social, political, and religious institutions. Prior to the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church was the principle institution that framed the Christian moral vision of Western
16
5. 6.
7.
8.
9.
Mark J. Cherry & Ana S. Iltis Europe: from the crowning of Charles the Great by Pope Leo III as “romanum gubernans imperium,” after the third Mass on Christmas, A.D. 800 to Pope Urban II’s announcement of the First Crusade in A.D. 1095; from Pope Innocent IV’s official inauguration of the Inquisition on May 15, 1252, with the bull Ad extirpanda, to the founding of the University of Paris in A.D. 1208 and eventual development of natural law moral philosophy. Thus, when Western Christianity explicitly articulated its notions of proper medical deportment, Roman Catholicism offered a significant institutional locus for much of the moral discussion of the first thousand years of Christianity. The morality of Western Christianity became the morality of medicine and of the good physician. Clearly, this circumstance has for the most part ended. Contemporary American and Western European bioethics, as Engelhardt documents, has been post-Christian if not anti-Christian. This moral cacophony of the contemporary world and the struggles its political expression and control is often termed the culture wars (see Hunter, 1991). Ideology: 4. A systematic scheme of ideas, usu. relating to politics or society, or to the conduct of a class or group, and regarded as justifying actions, esp. one that is held implicitly or adopted as a whole and maintained regardless of the course of events. … 1970 D.D. Raphael Probl. Pol. Philos. i. 17. Ideology… is usually taken to mean, a prescriptive doctrine that is not supported by rational argument (Oxford English Dictionary, On-line edition, 2008). See the following for examples and discussion of such statements: UNESCO, 2005; National Commission, 1979; World Medical Association, 1964-2008; Council of Europe, 1997; InterAction Council, 1996; Parliament of the World’s Religions, 1993; Journal of Medicine and Philosophy volume 34, number 3, 2009, especially Cherry, 2009; Engelhardt, 2006. “…insofar as we take account only of the rational beings in it, and of their connection according to moral laws under the government of the supreme good, the kingdom of grace, distinguishing it from the kingdom of nature, in which these rational beings do indeed stand under moral laws … To view ourselves, therefore, as in the world of grace, where all happiness awaits us, except as we ourselves limit our share in it through being unworthy of happiness, is, from the practical standpoint, a necessary idea of reason” (Kant, 1965[1781], pp. 639-640, A812 = B840). Engelhardt addresses the relationship between philosophy and theology, faith and reason in Engelhardt, in press. For example, if one holds that torture is always morally wrong, and one also knows that if one tortures suspect A.G. that he will provide you with information necessary to save many many innocent lives, should one choose to save the innocent lives or should one respect the principle not to torture? If one chooses not to torture, do the family members of those innocents whom one has failed to save, have a justifiable claim against you for having failed to torture A.G. when you knew, or should have known, that torturing A.G. would have saved their loved ones? Or, consider a case in which claims of a universal good conflict with one’s own particular interests and special obligations. If a physician has access to a vaccine that is in very short supply for a deadly disease, and which will very likely kill his family, would the physician be acting wrongly if he sets the vaccine aside for his family? Do rights trump even potentially devastating consequences? If so, which rights? Or whose rights? Which consequences should be given priority over
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others? Which values should we choose or eshew? As Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes notes, …once one is no longer willing seriously to follow Immanuel Kant and act as if God exists, and once there is no basis in the end to justify as canonical one account of the right, the good, and the virtuous, there is also no way to guarantee that the right should trump the good, or even that moral rationality should have precedence over prudential rationality (2009, p. 23).
10.
11. 12.
13.
14.
15.
Here, the recognition of post-modernity is simply the understanding of the foundationally irresolvable character of moral pluralism in general secular terms. For those who believe that the culture wars are a movement of the past, consider the outrage that was apparent in much of the American Roman Catholic community when President Barack Obama was invited to give the commencement address and to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, May 17, 2009. See generally www.notredamescandal.com. Very early in his term of office, Obama acted to increase federal funding for abortions and embryonic stem cell research, and many of his choices for high office in his administration are well know pro-abortion activists. Freeman, 1983, DK 80b1. Here one might consider G.W.F. Hegel, who argued that moral concepts, such as “moral duty”, possess no particular content, they must first be outfitted with such a content: “Because every action explicitly calls for a particular content and a specific end, while duty as an abstraction entails nothing of the kind, the question arises: what is my duty? As an answer nothing is so far available except: (a) to do the right, and (b) to strive after welfare, one’s own welfare, and welfare in universal terms, the welfare of others” (1967 [1821], p. 89, §134). However, even here, there is no particular content to “welfare”; that is, there is no particular content to the good or to the good life, many competing incommensurable accounts of the good exist without an in principle method for authoritatively choosing among them in a general secular world. Here one might think of Hegel’s critique of Kant: where reason can show you that you ought to fulfill your duty, it cannot provide the very content of that duty. So, for example, we may know that having made a promise or agreed to a contract, one ought to fulfill that promise or contract; reason cannot demonstrate which promises or contracts to make, or which ones to keep given countervailing circumstances (Hegel, 1967 [1821], p. 107, §150) See also, Mark J. Cherry, “The normativity of the natural: Can philosophers pull morality out of the magic hat of human nature? In M. J. Cherry (ed.), The Normativity of the Natural: Human Goods, Human Virtues, and Human Flourishing (Springer: Dordrecht, 2009). Here one might recall Engelhardt’s admission: “If one wants more than secular reason can disclose – and one should want more – then one should join a religion and be careful to choose the right one. Canonical moral content will not be found outside of a particular moral narrative” (1996, p. xi). As Engelhardt documents, the spiritual implications of destroying human embryos is unambiguous: it possesses a moral and spiritual impact equivalent to murder. The Didache, for example,which dates from the first century A.D., states: “Do not murder a child by abortion, nor kill it at birth” (Sparks 1978a, p. 309). Likewise, the
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Epistle of Barnabas, dated to the first or second century A.D.: “Do not murder a child by abortion, nor, again, destroy that which is born” (Sparks 1978b, p. 298). Canon 91 of the Quinisext Council (A.D. 691) states: “Those who give drugs for procuring abortion, and those who receive poisons to kill the fetus, are subjected to the penalty of murder” (Schaff and Wace 1995, second series, vol. XIV, p. 404). Moreover, as St. Basil the Great (A.D. 329-379) made clear, the ensoulment, or state of formation of the fetus, is not relevant to this traditional Christian judgment: “The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. With us there is no nice enquiry as to its being formed or unformed” (Letter 188, 1995, vol. VIII, p. 225). St. Basil recognized that even early embryocide possesses the same spiritual effects as murder, without ever committing himself to understanding the embryo as already possessing a soul or as being a small person. As Engelhardt argues, to appreciate the destruction of embryos rightly, one must understand this practice in terms of its full spiritual implications. 16. “TEXIAN. The term Texian is generally used to apply to a citizen of the AngloAmerican section of the province of Coahuila and Texas or of the Republic of Texas. Texian was used in 1835 as part of the title of the Nacogdoches Texian and Emigrant’s Guide. As president of the Republic, Mirabeau B. Lamar used the term to foster nationalism. Early colonists and leaders in the Texas Revolution, many of whom were influential during the Civil War and who were respected as elder statesmen well into the 1880s, used Texian in English and Texienne in French. However, in general usage after annexation, Texan replaced Texian. The Texas Almanac still used the term Texian as late as 1868” (Fletcher, 2009). 17. On March 2, 1836 at Washington on the Brazos,Texas declared its independence from Mexico citing, among other grievances: “When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression. When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants” (March 2, 1836). The complete document can be found at www.lsjunction.com (accessed July 6, 2009). On April 21, 1836 the Battle of San Jacinto was the climax of the Texas war of independence against Mexican rule.
Bibliography Basil, Saint. “Letter 188,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, Vol. VIII, eds. P. Schaff and H. Wace. Peabody: MA: Hendrickson Publishers, pp. 223-228, 1994. Bole, T. J. III.. “Engelhardt: Brief Biographical Reflections,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. vii-xvi, 2009.
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Boyle, J. “The Ethical Significance of Moral Disagreement,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 229-245, 2009. Capaldi, N. “Ethics Expertise,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 261-272, 2009. Cavanaugh, T. “On the Appropriateness of a Christian Bioethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 273-283, 2009. Cherry, M.J. “‘Universal Bioethics’, and State Regulation of Health Risks: A Philosophical Critique,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (2009) 34: 274-295, 2009. Council of Europe. “Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Covnention on Human Rights and Biomedicine,” CETS No. 164, Oviedo, 1997. Available: http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/164.htm (accessed July 8, 2009). Delkeskamp-Hayes, C. “Morality in a Post-Modern, Post-Christian World: Engelhardt’s Diagnosis and Therapy,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, p. 23-69, 2009. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. The Foundations of Bioethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. The Foundation of Bioethics, second edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. “What is Christian about Christian Bioethics? Metaphysical, Epistemological, and Moral Differences,” Christian Bioethics 11(2005): 241-253. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. (ed.) Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, 2006. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. “Why Ecumenism Fails: Taking Theological Differences Seriously,” Christian Bioethics 13 (2007): 25-51. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr. “Christian Bioethics in a Western Europe after Christendom,” Christian Bioethics 15 (1)(2009): 86-100. Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., “Kant, Hegel, and Habermas: Reflections on ‘Glauben und Wissen,’” Review of Metaphysics (in press). Fan, R. “A Confucian Student’s Dialogue with Teacher Engelhardt,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 71-87, 2009. Fletcher, H. Handbook of Texas Online, “Texian” [On-line] Available: www.tshaonline. org/handbook/online/articles/TT/pft5.html (accessed July 6, 2009). Fransen, F. J. “Engelhardt the Anabaptist: Pursuing Ascetic Holiness in the Spirit of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s The Foundations of Christian Bioethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 181-201, 2009. Freeman, K. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983 (reprint edition).
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Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967 (1821). Hunter, J. D. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991. InterAction Council. “In Search of Global Ethical Standards,” Vienna, 1996. Available: http://www.interactioncouncil.org/meetings/report/m961.pdf (accessed July 8, 2009). Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965 (1781). Kaveny, M. C. “Down by Law: Engelhardt, Grisez, and the Meaning of “Legalism”, in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 135-163, 2009. McKenny, G. “Desire for the Transcendent: Engelhardt and Christian Ethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 107-133, 2009. National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Belmont Report. Washington, D.C.:Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1979. Nozick, R. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Parliament of the World’s Religions. “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic,” Tuebingen, 1993. Available: http://www.parliamentofreligions.org/_includes/FCKcontent/ File/TowardsAGlobalEthic.pdf (accessed July 8, 2009). Quinisext Council. “The canons of the council in Trullo (Often called the Quinisext Council)” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, Vol. XIV, edited by. P. Schaff and H. Wace. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, pp. 356-409, 1995. Scofield, G. “Without Regret.” HEC Forum 14 (4) (2002): 299-324. Sparks, Jack N. (editor). “The Didache,” The Apostolic Fathers, translated by R. Kraft. Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Company, pp. 305-320, 1978. Sparks, Jack N. (editor). “The Epistle of Barnabas,” The Apostolic Fathers, translated by R. Kraft. Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Company, pp. 266-301, 1978. Tollefsen, C. “Missing Persons: Engelhardt and Abortion,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 165-179, 2009. Trotter, G. “Is ‘Discursive Christian Bioethics’ an Oxymoron?” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 203-227, 2009. United Nations Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). “Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights,” in Records of the General Conference (pp. 74 – 80). Geneva, Switzerland: UNESCO, 2005. Available: http://portal. u n e s c o . org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31058&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_ SECTION=201.html (accessed July 8, 2009). Wear, S. “Bioethics for Moral Strangers,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 247-259, 2009.
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Wildes, K. Wm., S.J. “Completing the Picture: Engelhardt’s Christian Bioethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., edited by A. Iltis and M.J. Cherry. Salem: M & M Scrivener Press, pp. 89-104, 2009. Wildes, K. Wm., S.J. Moral Acquaintances: Methodology in Bioethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. World Medical Association. “Declaration of Helsinki,” 1964, 1975, 1983, 1989, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008. Available: http://www.wma.net/e/policy/b3.htm (accessed July 8, 2009).
Part I Re-reading Engelhardt: The Old and the New
Morality in a Postmodern, Post-Christian World: Engelhardt’s Diagnosis and Therapy Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes
I. Life with a Plurality of Moralities The twenty-first century is marked by an explicit moral and metaphysical disorientation. There is a growing appreciation of the dominant secular culture’s inability to justify a particular content-full morality or an account of the final meaning of human life and the cosmos. In this secular culture, isolated within the horizon of the finite and immanent, humans find themselves embedded in a seemingly irresolvable plurality of moral perspectives. Richard Rorty and others have begun to speak the unspeakable: once one is no longer willing seriously to follow Immanuel Kant and act as if God exists, and once there is no basis in the end to justify as canonical one account of the right, the good, and the virtuous, there is also no way to guarantee that the right should trump the good, or even that moral rationality should have precedence over prudential rationality. Despite passionate proclamations of moral consensus, the contemporary condition is marked not only by disagreement, but by the inability to determine how, through sound and rational argument, moral diversity—indeed, deep moral conflict—can be set aside. This is H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s diagnosis of our cultural condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. From his early writings in the 1970s 23 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 23-69) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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(1973), to his contemporary publications (2006), in diverse venues and in a wealth of articles and books, Engelhardt persisted in addressing our cultural predicament. In his two editions of The Foundations of Bioethics, and in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt provides a substantive exploration of this state of affairs, first in terms of the resources available in secular thought (which he takes pains to show are inadequate to the task) and second, in terms of the resources available within traditional Christian theology (a code-word, which he uses alternatively to identify the Christianity of the first millennium or Orthodox Christianity). When both dimensions of his work are put together, one is offered two levels of philosophical diagnoses and of treatment. On the one hand, the author accounts for the fractured character of our postmodernity, as well as for the practices that transcend its moral plurality (e.g., the market). Though Engelhardt’s examples are in great proportion drawn from medicine and, therefore, focus on bioethics, his project encompasses moral philosophy and moral theology. On the other hand, he accounts for the ultimate disorientation and loss of final meaning that characterizes the dominant secular culture. Engelhardt appreciates that the moral and metaphysical challenges of postmodernity proceed from the collapse of Christendom and of Christian metaphysical orientation. He describes this collapse as linked with the failure of the Western-Christian project of combining theology with philosophy—a project that he recognizes as having led to the Enlightenment’s claims regarding the possibility of a universal, rationally justifiable secular morality.1 In the wake of this collapse, and the failure of the Enlightenment to produce a moral surrogate for Christianity, many have become disconnected from ultimate meaning. They are lost in the cosmos, as Walker Percy would put it. Given both those failures, moral pluralism has again become salient. In this essay, my goal is to lay out the importance of this diagnosis as well as why many have resisted its truth and its implications.
A. Postmodernity’s nostalgia for the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment Taking up MacIntyre’s image of “life among the ruins of the past” (1981; 1984), Engelhardt modifies its meaning so as to confront the puzzling circumstance that we live among the ruins of the Middle Ages as well as among the more recent edifices from the Enlightenment. On the one hand, as Engelhardt shows, postmodernity is all that is left after nothing else can be justified. On the other hand, many still are not willing to abstain from asserting the truth of Enlightenment claims to universal human rights and the capacities of philosophical rationality. Engelhardt’s account of this contradictory cultural situation runs something like this. Contemporary culture is defined by pressing moral questions, a plurality of plausible answers, a recognition that there is no secure way of rationally choosing between them, and—irrespective of all that—recurring proclamations of a reasonable consensus. To be sure, moral
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pluralism has always been with us. “Post-Babel”-civilizations have always been confronted with a diversity of incompatible moral norms and narratives. Yet postmodernity goes deeper. It is the principled abandonment of the hope to transcend this pluralism. It involves the recognition that secular moral reason is unable to determine whether or when one has adopted the correct morality. It accepts secular reason’s incompetence to establish the proper ranking of moral values or right-making conditions. Throughout Engelhardt’s work as teacher and writer, much of his analytic acumen has been devoted to persuading his audiences and readers of this foundational limit of moral reason.2 As he argues: to affirm one ranking of values over another presupposes a prior endorsement of particular basic moral premises3 and rules of moral evidence,4 and so on in an infinite regress. As a consequence societies that have anchored their moral orientation in rationality, now confront postmodernity. Most persons live within the overlap and conflict of disparate moralities (see Engelhardt, 1996). As a result of this development, so Engelhardt argues, serious secular reflections on morality at the beginning of the twenty-first century are beset by the awareness that we are not clear about what it means to be serious about morality, or about how one could gain clarity in moral matters. Somewhat as in the ancient world, one lives surrounded by a multiplicity of alternative philosophical accounts and narratives, as well as by a plurality of moral understandings. There is, however, a crucial difference. The ancient world never experienced the Western Middle Ages’ institutionalized-religious canonization of humans’ rational powers, which later encouraged the Enlightenment’s arrogance of idolizing reason by proclaiming an “Age of Reason”. Ancient philosophers were, therefore, able to achieve a critical awareness of the limits of reason (see, for example, Agrippa in Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus, as well as Clemens of Alexandria). By contrast, the conceits of the Western Middle Ages which form the heritage of our contemporary cultural impasse had supported an unjustifiable, yet ever increasing confidence in the capacities of human reason. The immediate result was a cultural predominance of the institutions of Western Christian faith, which endorsed as much faith in reason as faith in faith. Understandably, in the wake of the Western European wars of religion (i.e., the 1618-48 Thirty Years War on the continent and the 1641-52 Civil Wars in England), the Enlightenment recommended abandoning faith in faith and instead maintaining only faith in reason. In the process, the confidence in natural law reflections that took shape in the thirteenth century and grew in boldness in the second scholasticism ultimately led to Kant’s conviction, that from reason he could derive a morality for all persons. It was thus the very Medieval conviction that one can reason one’s way to an adequate account of morality and human flourishing, so Engelhardt argues, which was further developed and affirmed by the Enlightenment. Or, as he also puts it, even
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today, the remaining children of the Enlightenment are the legitimate grandchildren of the Middle Ages. In Engelhardt’s diagnosis, reason replaced God, and in the end the will to impose one particular morality or sense of authenticity came to replace reason. Thus today, in the absence of a canonical reason, each is left with his own narrative. Postmodernity has not only lost faith in faith, but also faith in reason. Among its followers, the quest for a universally valid morality reduces to the will to impose on all any one of the numerous alternative narratives of morality and human flourishing they themselves have constructed. But postmodernity also permits them to enter into the sparse normative fabric that Engelhardt characterizes as the “morality for moral strangers” (Engelhardt, 1996).5 In this context, Engelhardt discerns multi-dimensional culture wars. On the other side of the battle field, the legitimate children of the Enlightenment, the followers of “modernity,” still cling to their Middle Ages- and Enlightenmentbased faith in reason. They do not wish to recognize that they cannot think their way out of the cacophony of competing philosophical and moral visions. It is as if they were screaming at postmodernity, “Please tell me it is not so!” Not wishing to face the abyss to which Western culture has led, they passionately assert the possibility of a moral consensus. In addition, as we shall presently see, both parties find themselves over against Western Christianity.
B. Religion in the ruins of the Middle Ages and the remnants of the Enlightenment Engelhardt’s cultural diagnosis also extends to the state of religion at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the failure of reason is more obvious here. As a matter of historical development, sound rational argument did not secure the dogmatic truths embraced by the Medieval West. Instead of securing a basis for religious and moral unity, these criteria proved unsuccessful not only for silencing heresy but also for establishing a generally accepted account of natural law. The project broke into the theological controversies of the Protestant Reformation, thus encouraging even further religious pluralism. On the other hand, at least the hard-core Roman Catholics today still place their hopes in reason’s ability to reach across divisions of faith. Yet, even they remember the scholastic difference between a reason that is illumined by faith and the secular reason endorsed by those on the other side. Accordingly, even hard-core Roman Catholics, encouraged by Vatican II, have for the most part ceased to assert an unqualified exclusive uniqueness for their faith. While holding on to the supposed rationality of their faith, and to the confidence that that rationality reveals religious truth, they had to adjust to the fact that other faiths—since these are now entitled to their own, very different truth-claims—may also claim their own, different kinds of rationality. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one thus finds some Western Christians who still hold to a medieval faith in reason’s capacities confronting those who have begun to acknowledge its impossibility.
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The Shema (“Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God is one” Deut. 6:4) of the Middle Ages had been “Hear oh world, our faith is one, our reason is one, and both are in unity.” Confronted with the allures of postmodernity, the contemporary religious scene is characterized by a foundational abandonment of the pursuit of religious or philosophical truth in the singular. Truth has become plural. This has occurred in two respects. On the one hand, one no longer speaks as if one were seeking the correct religion in order to find the one ultimate truth. Instead, each religion has become a particular culture with its particular narratives and its particular claims. On the other hand, even with regard to the religion of one’s choice, each person has become the crafter of his own particular version of that religion. Thus it has become popular not to speak of one’s religion, but of one’s religious tradition, recasting truth-claims into engaging narratives. One says not only: “I speak as a Methodist, a Roman Catholic, a Reformed Jew, and so forth,” but, in addition, one feels free to embellish and recast such traditions in the pursuit of self-realization and selffulfillment with others. Religion remains a necessary building-block for some in their pursuit of a good life, but only as a matter of personal taste. In the turmoil of postmodernity, religious reflection on right conduct and the deep nature of being is no longer able to disclose the truth. It is at best useful for articulating a particular moral perspective that is both recognized as particular and imposes acquiescence in its particularity. The Shema of the postmodern world is thus, “Hear oh world, our faith and our gods are many, our reason is plural, and our reason cannot bring unity to our faith!” It is this cultural impasse, which Engelhardt’s works describe, diagnose, and critically explore.
C. Why Engelhardt’s readers often don’t get it One can understand Engelhardt’s literary style as motivated by the attempt to force down the throats of a mostly unwilling readership recognition of the circumstance that there is neither a univocal secular sense of truth nor the possibility to justify such a sense either through philosophy or through mainline Western Christianity. He accounts for this resistance to acknowledging the inescapability of postmodernity by noting two circumstances. First, universalist moral claims have a considerable social political market. Moralists, so Engelhardt argues, can more easily advertise themselves as useful experts, if they claim that there is a common morality, that they are experts about that common morality, and that they can use that expertise to solve contemporary moral and public policy problems. Here Engelhardt agrees with Marx and Engel’s account of the service of ideologies (i.e., for him: the Enlightenment claims regarding a common morality), so as to characterize the defenders of any such common morality as “conceptive ideologists” (Engelhardt, 1996, p. 17 f). Secondly, Engelhardt recognizes what Nietzsche acknowledges: the horror of facing the abyss. Once the promises of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment have failed, it is still not easy, even against this background, to accept postmodernity.
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One can now re-state Engelhardt’s diagnosis: contemporary Western culture is caught in a conflict between an Enlightenment-generated rationalistic optimism, and the postmodern pessimism concerning the rational accessibility of truth. In such a culture, persons’ moral life has become a puzzling enterprise: there are no reliable grounds on which to choose one moral vision over another. Yet, one cannot escape serious life and death choices. One must decide whether to have an abortion, to use artificial insemination to have a child, to have homosexual relations, to use physician-assisted suicide. Moreover, one determines those choices not just for oneself but with others who may wish to choose differently. How then is one to coordinate such choices “after truth”, that is, while recognizing an (at least currently) intractable plurality of moral perspectives? How in particular is one coherently to proceed while facing the persistence of Enlightenment rationalist promises that moral consensus will be reached in some distant future? This state of affairs has disturbing implications for the possibility of a rationally established, canonical morality. Despite proclamations of consensus or of a perennial core of common moral commitments, persons and communities are separated by incompatible views about the circumstances under which one should have sexual relations, bear children, kill the unborn, execute the guilty, transfer funds from the rich to the impecunious, and euthanatize the willing, to choose only a few examples. In the face of incompatible rankings of human goods and right-making conditions, patients, physicians, and the producers of medical goods, as well as members of a society in general, must in some fashion collaborate. Here, Engelhardt identifies yet one further motive for denying the contemporary postmodern condition: given the resources of postmodernity, if one is to have a secular society, one must either settle for Engelhardt’s sparse default position of a libertarian, that is, minimal state (and most people want more), or one must impose more without any general secular rational justification.
D. A partial summary in anticipation From the secondary literature concerning Engelhardt’s work and proposals, it becomes clear that it has been difficult for many readers: 1. to accept his harsh diagnosis regarding the limits of secular moral rationality and, therefore, the collapse of the Enlightenment project, because of the political usefulness of the Enlightenment ideology, the fear of the postmodern abyss, and concern for securing the legitimacy of sufficient political power so as to establish desired political structures; and 2. to distinguish between his arguments regarding the capacities of secular moral reason and the possibility of Christian theological knowledge.
First, on the secular philosophical level, to meet the loss of a common substantive morality, Engelhardt offers a very sparse procedural foundation (which amounts to what one might call a second order “morality”). This
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morality, while not claimed to be rationally compelling in the sense of being able to establish its goodness by sound rational argument, can still be made transcendentally compelling in the sense of opening up a possibility for common collaboration. The practice of drawing authority from the consent of collaborators deprives those who violate this rule, that is, who use persons without their consent, of any coherent rational basis for complaint when they are visited with defensive or punitive force. Second, on the theological level, Engelhardt offers a full Christian morality, that recognizes, pace Plato’s Euthyphro (to whom the author likes to refer), that the just (and thus by implication also the good, the right, and the virtuous)6 can only be understood in terms of the holy. Engelhardt’s argument here depends on the empirical claim that there is a nous, and that Christian theologians can and do know noetically. As a consequence, what he offers in his account of Christian morality are conclusions not from sound rational arguments but from the empirical data of noetic theology. Both projects, so I shall argue, form two sides of a single coin. That is to say, the Engelhardt of The Foundations of Bioethics and the Engelhardt of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics offer complementary views of the human condition. These views not only allow us to reconcile ourselves to the loss of the Enlightenment project that had shaped modernity, but they allow us also morally to transcend postmodernity. Engelhardt offers us not only a clear diagnosis of our paradoxical modern/postmodern condition, but also of how we can get beyond it. Each of these two works is developed in response to one of the two most fundamental questions confronting thinkers at the beginning of the twenty-first century, namely: What, if anything, can secular rationality tell us concerning what we can know, what we ought to do, and what we can hope for? And: What can Christianity show us about what, Whom, and how we can know, what we ought to do, and what we can hope for ? The two remaining parts of my essay (II and III) address these questions. In each case, I shall lay out first (A) the force of Engelhardt’s diagnostic account, then (B) his conclusions and insights for (in Part II) secular or (in Part III) Christian morality and bioethics, and finally (C) the challenges which Engelhardt’s work on each of the two levels has presented for contemporary mainstream thinkers.
II.
Morality in Secular Philosophy
A. The Western theological roots of the secular project—from Thomas Aquinas to Immanuel Kant and Gianni Vattimo Though postmodernity is a period in intellectual history, Engelhardt takes pains to indicate that it is also the perennial human epistemic condition after Adam’s fall. He concedes that dominating ideologies and historical circumstances have often obscured this state of affairs (e.g., the high Western
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Middle Ages’ and the Enlightenment’s faith in reason). It is for this reason that he treats the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment as contingent cultural perspectives (i.e., perspectives that, as a matter of history, happen to be prior to our own). We have simply collapsed back into the saliently irreducible moral pluralism that constitutes the post-Fall condition, and that is once again recognized by postmodernity. Engelhardt thus sketches how the theological, moral, and metaphysical premises embraced in the Western Middle Ages were doomed to failure in spite of the Enlightenment’s attempt to bring rescue. Thus with postmodernity, we have returned to a realization of what Engelhardt might term our epistemological fate. Still, that realization in the twenty-first century draws its particularly confusing and incoherent character from the circumstance that it combines insight regarding the failure of human reason with nostalgia for the promises of those two preceding periods, the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. For contemporary morality, and bioethics in particular, all of this implies that moral and bioethical theory must make sense of both our general human condition and of the historical events shaping that condition. In addition to that two-dimensionality, Engelhardt’s genealogy of philosophical postmodernity, in a quasi-Hegelian sense, plays on two levels. One level contains Engelhardt’s account of what happened in the realm of ideas, stated from the standpoint of an outside observer (quasi an sich). The second level delineates how these ideal developments became reflected upon by the philosophical agents who played their role as part of those developments (quasi becoming für sich). Engelhardt’s analysis of the persistence of intellectual commitments to the rationalistic dreams of modernity, finally (and beyond those two levels), singles out Western Christianity’s own historical contribution to the genesis of those dreams. He thus, as one might say, exposes that philosophized theology as Christianity’s own gravedigger. 1. Developments in the field of ideas Engelhardt defines the morality of postmodernity as the experience and acceptance of the rupture from the Western Medieval and Enlightenment promise of normative orientation. He describes this rupture in view of its contingent history (a) and its inner logic (b). a) As Engelhardt argues, the miscarriage of reason as a historical event issued from Western Christian theology having engaged in a novel project of integrating philosophy’s resources into the framing of theological truth. From its beginning, Christianity had always recognized that Truth is a person, not a set of propositions. Access to this personal truth is gained through the unifying experience of Divine love. It presupposes (or at least imposes ex post) the hard work of ascetic struggle and personal spiritual purification. As Western Christianity took shape in the early second millennium, a complex of political and social forces began to frame a new Christian culture with new expectations.
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In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, a liaison was forged between Christian theology and ancient secular Western philosophy.7 In his account of this history, Engelhardt selects the works of such early scholastics as Thomas Aquinas (A.D. 1225-1274) to show how his reception of Aristotelian philosophy contributed to a turning-point in Western cultural and religious understandings. As Engelhardt playfully depicts the affair, the comely lass philosophy offered the allure of providing theology an easy, i.e., merely cognitive access to ultimate truths. She could, without the hard work of ascetic dedication, disclose to theology the general structure of being. Among her beautiful allures were those of general metaphysics—a new queen of the sciences that supposedly possessed truths no empirical knower could secure but which philosophy would reveal to her obedient lover. She also offered special philosophical charms, such as those of rational psychology and natural theology. She guaranteed to show theology the very nature of the soul, rationally exposing its immortality. She promised rational proofs for the existence of God, so that one no longer needed to experience God, or personally know Him. Instead, one could study at the new universities and come to know about God in ample rational detail. The difficulty with this as with many seductions was, so Engelhardt maintains, that the comely lover was not able to deliver all she had promised. Reason turned out not to have the ability, independently of an already established faith, to secure a general metaphysics. Reason could not disclose the basic structure of reality in a way that went beyond the powers of ordinary empirical science. In time, general metaphysics became replaced by fundamental physics. Nor could philosophy deliver on her claims on behalf of rational psychology. Instead, her rational assertions about the soul shattered into a pluralism of paralogisms, a multiplicity of different and incompatible “rational” accounts of the soul. Moreover, and worst of all, philosophy turned out not to be true and constant to her lover theology. Or rather she was faithful to theology in her own way, in a way that satisfied each philosopher’s desire to develop his own speculative framework, thus engendering multiple competing philosophies and theologies. In the historical sections of The Foundations of Bioethics, Bioethics and Secular Humanism and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt lays out how the promises born of the Western Middle Ages came to engender the Enlightenment and, along with it, modernity. Here ‘modernity’ is understood as the Western philosophical pursuit of truth, once that pursuit has been separated from its theological origin. Already during the Enlightenment, the comely handmaiden philosophy had tired of her liaison with theology and had come to demand that her claims provide knowledge in their own right. Thus modernity becomes understandable as a further continuation of the Enlightenment’s continuation of medieval scholasticism’s promise that human rationality,
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without appeal to theology or faith, can lay out a universal account of morality and the ultimate meaning of things. b) On a philosophical level, philosophy’s liaison with theology involved a crucial transformation of the theological concept of knowledge. Thomas Aquinas, along with the scholastics and secular philosophers who followed him, gradually distanced themselves from a core original Christian claim regarding the nature of knowledge. This claim had originally encompassed not only theology as such, but through theology it also encompassed man’s relationship to the world and to his soul. As Engelhardt makes clear through greater detail in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Christians had always taken for granted that there are three ways in which humans know reality: 1) through sense experience, subsequently reflected upon and systematized, as exemplified in empirical physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine; 2) through discursive analysis, as exemplified in logic, mathematics, and geometry; 3) through noetically (i.e., non-sensibly) experienced self-revelation of God Himself, and through the light this Divine light sheds on man’s spiritual and moral concerns. This latter kind of knowledge can be found exemplified in the theological experience and subsequent insights and writings of the holy saints of Christianity, e.g., St. John the Evangelist , St. Ephraim of Syria (306-373 A.D.), St. Isaac of Syria (seventh century), St. Gregory of Nazianzus (330-389 A.D.), and St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022 A.D.). The philosophical transformation of what it means to know subsequently reduced what traditional Christianity had conceived as a union of love (i.e., between God and man), to a matter of merely theoretical cognition. It introduced a separation between the knowing subject and the object of its knowledge. Christianity had always affirmed that man knows God insofar as he is known by God, thus reserving the superior position for God, the ultimate telos of human efforts at knowing. By contrast, the increasingly secular philosophical assumptions, when integrated into the scholastic account of theology, gave rise to an interpretation of theological knowledge, according to which the knowing subject attempts to grasp mentally, and thus conceptually master, its (inferior) object of knowledge. What should have been a deep personal relationship became a detached endeavor at objectification. Moreover, since the Divine “object” must from the very start be defined as transcendent, it must in principle remain beyond the grasp of the merely finite concepts accessible to a finite knower. Not surprisingly, Engelhardt can, therefore, show how Western theology fragmented in a plurality of theologies. Considered from this perspective, postmodernity results from the recognition that the philosophical, i.e., the discursively rational, search for ultimate truth inevitably fails. This failure discloses the inherent absurdity of the hope that a philosophical theology could discursively know truth with a capital T, or know Truth in its native transcendence. Confronted with such transcendence, humans’ inescapably immanent discursive rationality can veil its
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impotence only by multiplying its attempts, thus disintegrating into a plurality of equally abortive, and in this respect equally “plausible,” constructions of truth. 2. Reflections on the limits of knowledge As a result of these developments, the West lost sight of man’s capacity as knower to come into union with the One by Whom he had been designed for knowledge of Him. Western philosophy, as Engelhardt makes clear, progressively found itself isolated within the sphere of sense-experience. Having become disconnected from the possibility of recognizing, much less experiencing, the personal ground of all being, God, one was no longer able coherently to talk of knowing reality in itself. What Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) would later term the “thing in itself,” what lies behind sense experience, could no longer with assurance be known. Accordingly, the “object for us” was no longer assuredly connected to what the object is “in itself.” Thomas Aquinas had naively integrated into his account of knowledge the Aristotelian philosophical assumption that the agent intellect could abstract the ousia, the quidditas, the essence of what was known, from sense experience. With Hume and Kant, the subjectivity of knowledge claims became clear. The philosophical problem then arose of how rationally to justify one’s claims about the objective “reality in itself.” One knew one was affected by one’s sense-impressions, imagined some sensible species. But how could one know that one knew the truth “behind” such sensible species? How could one be sure that one “knew” the intelligible species one claimed to know, and which supposedly lay at the basis of one’s natural law and discursive theological claims, if all one actually had were sense impressions? In Engelhardt’s account, the major thinkers who responded to these questions were (a) Hume, (b) Kant, and (c) Hegel. a) The very path of discursive rational reflection, into which Aquinas and his colleagues had invited the West, ultimately led to the critical onslaughts of David Hume (1711-1776). Hume recognized that if the knower could not immediately know the known, then one could only speak of sense impressions, the ideas they leave, the de facto mental habits through which we deal with them, and the internal logic of our discursive powers. One could not know that which was making the impressions. Only the impressions were left. Apart from appeals to a uniform “human nature,” which could not in turn be empirically asserted but only imposed (as it were) as an interpretive perspective, one remained confined to, and also isolated from others within, the deliverances of one’s sensibility and the formal capacities of one’s reason. None of these could assure philosophy that it could secure access to reality itself. b) Reacting to this ultimate exposition of the rupture between the knower and the known, Kant offered the stop-gap measure of promising at least the grammar of an objectivity, now transformed into mere inter-subjectivity.
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Confined within that inter-subjectivity, Kant nevertheless, as it were, still gestured beyond what he could claim to know within the sphere of sensible empirical experience, to the subject in itself, to the object in itself, and even to God. All of these are proclaimed as thinkable, even indispensable for solving certain antinomies of reason, but in principle not knowable. c) Hegel (1770-1831), as Engelhardt explains, goes beyond Kant and anticipates Wittgenstein.8 He recognizes: “that about which one cannot speak one must be silent.”9 If one cannot speak of the subject in himself, the object in itself, and God as noumenally transcendent, then any Kantian gesturing towards the “thing in itself” (or to the noumenon) is vain. All philosophical discourse must be resolutely confined within the sphere of the immanent, the sphere of inter-subjectivity. This is Hegel’s ‘Golgotha of the spirit’ (Schädelstätte, 1952, p. 564). Transcendence is crucified and resurrected within the immanence of Hegel’s dialectic. Thus Hegel brings being in itself, the subject in itself, and God, within the ambit of human reflection. As a consequence, systematic human reflection on reality, or being, along with the recognition of the limitations of that reflection, is presented as “absolute thought.” That is, the philosophical standpoint becomes that standpoint from which one can recognize and diagnose categorial one-sidedness and incompleteness, all within the sphere of the immanent. This categorial (albeit non-transcendental) standpoint is as much of an absolute standpoint as one can achieve. Absolute thought thus presents the final perspective, once humans are understood as isolated within the horizon of the finite and the immanent. Moreover, as Engelhardt interprets him, Hegel initiates the recognition that all knowledge of natural and social reality is constituted within a cultural-historical context. Thus, as our basic understandings of reality change, reality itself changes, because for Hegel there is no possibility of thinking of reality, or reality-being-for-thought, beyond our categories. As a further consequence, all revolutions in the understanding of natural and social reality depend upon revolutions in basic categories.10 Because, as was noted above, there is no “thing in itself,” no noumenal world outside our categories, of which, for Hegel, one can think, much less speak, Hegel’s reflections lie at the roots of postmodernity in his recognition that there cannot be one normative inter-subjectivity, as Kant had hoped. Moreover, Hegel holds that one can categorically apprehend the character of categorical thought. Thus his recognition (the perspective of absolute Spirit) of the cultural-historical embeddedness of the categories is not itself simply a deliverance of a particular culture at a particular time. The Kantian “objectivity-as-inter-subjectivity” fragments into a plurality of inter-subjectivities, once knowledge is recognized as socially and historically constituted. Each perspective has its own categories, its own dialectic, its own hermeneutic, its own logic of inter-subjectivity. All facts become interpretations. It is this Hegelian immanentization of the thing in
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itself, the subject in itself, and God, along with the recognition that objectivity as inter-subjectivity is plural, in which Engelhardt discerns even explicit premonitions of postmodernity. It is not for nothing, so Engelhardt points out, that Richard Rorty (1989) and Gianni Vattimo (2002; 2005) acknowledge indebtedness to Hegel. 3. The tragedy of Western Christianity Beyond offering philosophical arguments and historical analyses on its two quasi-Hegelian levels, The Foundations of Bioethics seeks to wake up its readers to a crucial insight: it was not merely the philosophical reliance on the powers of human discursive rationality (merely as such), which in the end led to an exorcising of Christianity, and its exclusion from both the religious and the moral culture of the West. At bottom much more importantly, this downfall was initiated by the Medieval venture of linking theology itself with discursive rationality. It was this linking, after all, which had induced Enlightenment thinkers, irrespective of all their anti-clerical and anti-Christian passions, to believe that they could still, by rational means exclusively, secure the general lineaments of that very morality, which had previously been endorsed by (and was taken to constitute the lasting contribution of) Christianity. One thus finds Immanuel Kant drawing out of his appeals to that which can be rationally universalized all the moral constraints to which he in his youth had been committed as a Protestant Pietist. Obviously, most secular moral thinkers today no longer accept many of those (Christianity-derived) moral norms (especially with regard to sexuality) which Kant had presented as universally compelling. These norms have come to be discounted and Kant’s faith in their rational character exposed as illusionary. In fact, the indebtedness of a person’s supposedly rational insights to his early socialization had already been recognized by David Hume (1973, pp. 176 n. 293), and subsequently invoked by him against “Christian rationalism” (1973, pp. 456 ff). Still, and even though contemporary secular thinkers frequently impute particular “religious prejudices” to their purportedly “rational” Christian discussion partners, these secular thinkers also, despite the culturally postmodern, pluralist spirit of our times, tend to endorse modernity’s moral project. They still entertain the hope that an at least remotely Christianity-congruent content-full moral common sense can be rationally grounded as universally valid. Engelhardt in great detail shows that this project of securing the secular equivalent of a Christian morality is philosophically impossible. As the most plausible candidate for having achieved a universally compelling moral account, Engelhardt focuses on Kant’s attempt to ground morality in rationality. Kant, assuming that a merely formal principle of universalizability could also secure moral content, attempts to lay out a morality for all rational beings, irrespective of their time and place. Yet, in spite of Kant’s proclamations to the
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contrary, all that can be made rationally to follow from that principle is a morality which, as will become clear in the next section, closely resembles Engelhardt’s own second-order morality of mutual consent. Or, to use a Kantian term, the focus is on the non-instrumentalization that Engelhardt also endorses, though Engelhardt’s grounding is in the will, not in reason. Kant’s principle of non-instrumentalization prohibits killing the un-consenting innocent for sport. Yet, even though Kant wished it otherwise, that same principle cannot prohibit the killing of those who consent, as Engelhardt shows. And even though Kant wished it otherwise, his own principle denies intrinsic moral status to all those humans who cannot will, and who thus are not moral agents or persons in the Kantian sense. As a consequence, even though Kant never acknowledged this circumstance, his principle not only fails to justify the prohibition of abortion, but also fails in view of infanticide. It cannot coherently prohibit assisted suicide and euthanasia—even though Kant surely wanted it otherwise. Once one faces this predicament, one finds oneself returned to a situation which in many ways resembles the moral fabric of the pagan world before the advent of Christendom. As Engelhardt emphasizes, his exposition is meant not only to bring the reader’s attention to the limits of what can be rationally prohibited or demanded by secular morality. He also insists on the circumstance that it had originally been Western Christianity’s ratification of the turn to secular (ancient and at the same time pre-skeptical) philosophy in the Middle Ages, which deluded thinkers into thinking that one can think one’s way to ultimate truth. It had been this theological alliance with pagan philosophy, which had endowed the quest for discursive rationality with a quasi metaphysical authorization, thus feeding, to this day, the unjustifiable Western faith in the moral competence of human reason. Even after the loss of Christian faith, it is this faith in reason which is responsible for most contemporary moral thinkers’ resistance against the challenge of recognizing postmodernity.
B. Engelhardt’s second-order moral framework—or a morality beyond particular moralities 1. The principle of permission as the ground of a default morality Unlike Rorty and Vattimo, more like Hegel (in his model of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft, 1972, pp. 168 ff, Part III, section II, §§ 182 ff), and yet against Wittgenstein, Engelhardt points out that underneath the multiplicity of cultural interpretations of what one ought to do, a sparse secular grammar of grammars can be preserved for secular morality. This grammar discloses a secular morality not as THE morality, but as a second-order “morality” into which all can enter, despite their diverse particular (first-order) moralities. It offers a shred of what the Middle Ages had hoped to attain through a deep harmony of faith, moral rationality, and metaphysics, and what the Enlightenment had hoped to achieve in a rational post-Christian morality. But of course this shred
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also radically transforms those historical aspirations. Engelhardt’s secondorder morality is set against, and recognizes the existence of, the plurality of (first-order) moralities that are concerned with moral content and particular rankings of human goods and right-making conditions. His formal, or procedural, “morality” is designed for those who wish to speak across the plurality of moralities, and who are ready to discount the rational moral project that has gone aground in postmodernity. All it requires is that one rely on mutual consent, that is, on each other’s permission. Let us look, first (a) at that principle’s content and basis, then (b) at the conditions for its applicability. a) Engelhardt’s second-order “morality-of-mutual-consent” is not posited as foundational. Instead, he shows that it discloses a transcendental possibility which can be entered into out of an indefinite number of motives, rational perspectives, and narratives. It is de facto entered into from an innumerable number of motives. It is grounded in the will to collaborate (for whatever reason11). This dimension relies on affirming only one right-making condition, one that lies beyond all reasoning about the good, the right, and the virtuous; namely, the will to authorize collaboration. The Engelhardt of The Foundations of Bioethics thus accepts much of the diagnosis of the postmodernists. At the same time, however, he offers a sparse step beyond them. He offers the possibility of a “game,”12 a “practice” into which one can will to enter, for whatever reason, thus securing a common (if only second-order) moral world (bound by such practices as the market). Engelhardt recognizes that he cannot show that it is good, right, or in any sense generally rationally attractive to enter into this world or practice. In fact, he would be violating the rules of the language-game he proposes were he to do so.13 Engelhardt shows that recognizing the possibility of this inter-subjectivity of wills, not of reasons, discloses the only (if meager) universalizable justification (in will) and availability of a possible common moral world. Atheists, capitalists, persons living in socialist communes, Amish, Orthodox Jews, and persons with no coherent moral vision whatsoever, though separated by disparate understandings of the moral life, can collaborate in institutional structures, whose authorization and justification lies simply in the participants’ will to collaborate. Naturally each of the particular collaborators will have his own view of why he is collaborating. But from the perspective of the whole, the whole is simply a concourse of wills for which no particular reason can be given. b) In a primary sense, these wills are the wills of individuals who are recognizably “moral persons,” i.e., able to have a will of their own and make it known to others. They must have a minimal appreciation of moral responsibility.14 In thus focusing on moral personhood, Engelhardt takes up a Kantian theme, without however adopting Kant’s philosophical commitments to “moral freedom.” Unlike with Kant, therefore, Engelhardt’s (second-order) moral persons are not morally enjoined to exercise their autonomy in a lonely
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(and merely rational-humanity-cushioned) manner. Engelhardtian persons may indeed will to give up even their entitlement (or specified areas of their ability to assert their will) to others. These others can be individuals (with whom a nucleus for a new moral community is thus created) or already established communities. Such communities determine the social space in which morality in its full, object level, content-filled and goods-securing sense can be realized. In (establishing or) entering such communities (or in ratifying their membership in case they were born or socialized into one), individuals exercise their secondorder autonomy in voluntarily subjecting themselves to the norms and values of these communities. Individuals construe their moral responsibility alongside these communal terms. As a result, the will to collaborate and the entitlement to have one’s consent considered can also be exercised by moral communities, just as by individuals.15 2. The heuristic value of the principle of permission Understanding this transcendental framework for justification and this availability of two tiers of possible moral interaction has also a heuristic value. On the tier of second-order “morality”, this framework allows one to appreciate the rationale behind those practices which, as a matter of fact, bind “moral strangers.” Engelhardt uses this concept of moral strangers for those inhabitants of the postmodern world who live morally isolated from one another, without a common view of the good, of morality, or human flourishing. People who are moral strangers to one another may spend the bulk of their lives as members of their different “home” moral communities (with their respective particular rankings of values and right-making conditions). But people can be moral strangers to one another also if they have decided to do without (or gleefully affirm their independence from) any moral community whatsoever. In that case, they will usually even marry moral strangers and produce children who are moral strangers to their parents. Such (non-communitybound) persons can be observed all over the world. Indeed, and despite the morally fragmented character of their own cultural context, they still frame agreements with one another as well with those who are strangers to them but who belong to moral communities. All such mutual strangers can still enter into the market, and sometimes constitute very limited constitutional democracies. The project of The Foundations of Bioethics is to lay out the grammar, geography, and limits of this fabric of agreements. It is this fabric of agreements which de facto binds moral strangers across the globe. Thus, Engelhardt (second-order-morally) reconstructs a set of important successful practices and gives an account of their possible justification. On the tier of first-order morality, the permission-principle’s heuristic function concerns the many different moralities that bind those who are moral friends to one another, as they are viewed from the outside. By “moral friends”
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Engelhardt identifies those who share common moral premises and rules of evidence, so that they can come to common moral conclusions and/or commonly recognized persons who are in authority to resolve moral controversies. Those who are truly moral friends in this sense live in moral community. They embrace one common particular morality, along with (for example) its bioethics. Of course, Engelhardt recognizes that many, if not most persons live morally incoherent lives, unclear as to which moral communities, if any, they wish to give their overriding allegiance. Moreover, many, if not most moral communities are in various levels of disarray. Postmodernity, as already observed, is the condition in which one finds oneself somewhere on the spectrum between either partaking in one among many surrounding moral communities, or in the chaotic territory between these communities, where one lives deprived of an integrated, persistent, and clear understanding of one’s own moral life and of the proper character of human flourishing. Engelhardt’s second-order “morality of consent” provides a conceptual device that allows one to navigate the moral chaos defining our contemporary culture. 3. Political implications Engelhardt’s permission-principle thus authorizes the delegation of individual autonomy to communities, but requires that this delegation be actual, not rational-hypothetical. This leads Engelhardt (a) to a critique of Kant’s crypto-Christian (yet at the same time particular community hostile) endorsement of (a very particularly conceived) human dignity which Kant engages for normatively framing a universal community based on hypothetical rational concurrence. This same requirement (b) implies that morally acceptable states are restricted to those with a thin, libertarian structure. a) Engelhardt criticizes contemporary political “liberalism” (i.e., the liberalism of social democracies), with its particular moral endorsement of freedom as a value (i.e., as placed within the context of commitments to equality, security, and prosperity). It is by reference to such particular values in particular hierarchies that thickly “liberal” polities seek to justify their societywide acknowledgement of extensive claim-rights. These rights are posited so as to provide each member with the material resources necessary for his “proper” self-realization (i.e., as determined by some theory of the good, and rationally-hypothetically justified, in view of its securing conditions for the material implementation of individual freedom). In such non-sparse “liberal” polities, both the provision of material goods and the reference to supposedly rational values (the one on the practical, the other on the ideological level) discourage communal life by construing the state as a community. On the practical level, the endeavor societally to satisfy supposed claim-rights imposes a burden of taxes to finance the needed goods and services. It thus drains away resources necessary for private investment in the communitybased provision of goods and services. On the ideological level, the thick
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“liberal” (e.g., social-democratic) invocation of the canonical character and value of a particular (i.e., individualistic and hedonistic) view of human flourishing (as supposedly grounded in some account of rationality or the reasonable) presupposes the endorsement of a particular view of liberty which undermines communal (i.e., non-“liberal”) life when this is considered as illiberally confining and/or as a threat to a human dignity.16 At the same time, the (non-sparsely) liberal endorsement of such a (supposedly universally agreed upon) particular value of individual freedom repudiates the very possibility of lasting moral commitments. Such commitments, after all, characteristically reduce a person’s resources for arbitrary changes of mind. Engelhardt’s permission principle, by contrast, tolerates both individual (spontaneous, inclination-based, a-moral) and communityoriented (i.e., possibly normative) action. b) While any (non-sparsely) “liberal” protection of individual freedom (in the sense of preserved or enhanced autonomy-resources) transforms polities themselves into (forced membership-) hybrid-moral communities, Engelhardt’s permission principle imposes a fundamental distinction: real moral communities are private, polities are public. Whereas communities exist within the moral space sustained by the second order “morality” grounded in the consent of moral strangers, the secular moral justification of political action (by some individuals in the name of, and authorized by, the polity) is not simply problematic but insecurable.17 To be sure, a polity that is based on the actual concurrence of its members (i.e., as persons who use each other only with consent) would enjoy that concurrence that binds the participants in the market. In such a case, no true community (e.g., no group of persons sharing common basic moral premises and rules of evidence) would have come into existence. Merely a sparse and limited framework of collaboration would have been created, which, among other things, could maintain a rule of law. Politically constituted societies, however, as they actually exist today, cannot invoke such a justification.18 To the extent that such secular political societies can be “morally” justified at all—and Engelhardt leaves the question, whether this is indeed the case, pointedly open—they can assume at most the character of very thin, libertarian states. Political force in such states may be used exclusively for enforcing (externally through defense, and internally through the police) the principle of permission. Any additional engagements, which Engelhardt discusses under the heading of a hypothetical public provision of health care, would have to be restricted to those circumstances in which, mirabile factu, the state came into the possession of independent collective resources which could then be distributed in whatever way the polity determined. Engelhardt’s (at most) secular libertarian orientation is thus not only based on his arguments concerning the lack of rationally compelling grounds for any more invasive use of political power. It is also based on his insight into the (voluntary) communal
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framework on which any substantial and (if only parochially) defensible moral claims must rely.
C. Challenges to the cultural environment—or why Engelhardt’s philosophical work is so divisive The resistance with which many of Engelhardt’s readers have met his arguments can be explained by the extent to which these arguments go against the grain of contemporary social democratic liberal culture. In particular, Engelhardt’s account (1) undermines the plausibility of the secular project of moral progress in favor of (2) a recognition of and resignation to the inevitability of postmodernity. 1. The “iconoclastic” impact of Engelhardt’s arguments Engelhardt denounces as futile what most of his academic colleagues (not even to speak of politicians and other participants in the public discourse) continue to affirm: the possibility of a global moral consensus (Engelhardt, 2006). What should mostly scandalize his modernity-endorsing readers who have transferred their religious faithfulness to the affirmation of a global moral consensus is his insistence on the rational intractability of moral diversity. The challenges operate on both the conceptual (a) and the political (b) level. a) Engelhardt’s important recognition of the persistence of moral pluralism provokes conceptual resistance. Typically, those who believe in the possibility of moral consensus counter this threat against their (supposedly universal) authority as secular philosophers by restricting dis-sensus to the realm of less essential fringe-values. They affirm some common core, or overlapping consensus among the many different moral accounts Engelhardt has taken such pains to expose as mutually incompatible. Among the various candidates for such supposedly crucial common values are honesty, health, social inclusion, tolerance, beneficence, mutual recognition in view of one’s human dignity, or, to include the more down to earth utilitarian voice, the satisfaction of basic needs in their survival-privileging, Maslow-defined order. A prominent exponent of such attempts at limiting the dis-sensus creating impact of moral pluralism is Hans Küng’s pan-religious world ethos, or also Beauchamp and Childress’ discounting the diversity of theoretical contexts by focusing on the supposed “middle-level” principles of justice, autonomy, beneficence and equality.19 In his critique of such attempts, Engelhardt notes that even if all persons share concerns for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice, their ordering such moral concerns in different lexical rankings will generate different moralities. There will be the affirmation of different moral maxims regarding the major choices in life. It is by reference to the diverse ordering of values and right-making conditions (including the different content that different persons give to such values and conditions—not to mention that some persons
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affirm still further special moral concerns, as with respect to the clean and unclean), that Engelhardt accounts for the diversity of public views regarding such issues as when one may or ought to take human life (e.g., the allowability of abortion and the appropriateness of capital punishment) or to have carnal conversations (e.g., whether homosexual unions are morally permissible). Humans manifestly do not share a common morality, if one means by that a common set of settled moral judgments about the major moral choices that confront individuals. The persistent invocation of a common morality and common middle level moral principles very likely rests in the political rhetorical effectiveness of such claims. As Engelhardt has pointed out, if one wishes to convince others that they should comply with one’s moral vision, it is likely very effective to advance the claim that one’s proposals are grounded in a universal morality and, when establishing ethics commissions, to populate them with persons who will endorse one’s morality and its consequences. b) The political and social consequences of the irredeemable moral pluralism that Engelhardt discloses are quite unwelcome. Most post-Enlightenment political thought rests on the claim that political authority can be justified by sound rational argument, and thus in a universally compelling manner. The political agenda this account would support rests on precisely what Engelhardt disputes, at least insofar as such political authority is claimed to transcend the limits of a libertarian state. Such political accounts hope to be able to justify a network of human rights, even claim-rights, which are supposed to respond to an equally rationally required respect for human dignity. With Engelhardt’s refutation of the possibility of such universally compelling grounds for a common secular morality and for the moral authority for the secular state, such states’ claim to legitimacy collapses. Moreover, if Engelhardt is right, there are no good reasons left for disregarding or denouncing as “exotic” or “deviant” any one of the still extant moralities endorsed by traditionalist minorities (e.g., the Amish and polygamous Mormons). All those supposed “splinter-groups” or archaic societies, which had seemed negligible once human progress appeared to be moving in the direction of secular moral universals, are suddenly re-instated into the respectability of an equal intellectual footing. These moral minorities can thus no longer be subjected to the humiliating charge of extremism and fundamentalism. They can no longer be silenced by the demand that they should de-traditionalize their commitments to advance to the stage of contributors of a civilized, i.e., enlightened, diversity. These moral minorities, instead, suddenly appear justified in making their non-enlightened voices heard, and appear entitled, both globally20 and nationally, to the peaceful enjoyment of the normative freedom rights embraced by the moral majority. All of this, as Engelhardt points out, increases the puzzles a moral thinker has intellectually to confront.
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2. The moral seriousness affirmed in Engelhardt’s philosophical work Those contemporary thinkers, who have resigned themselves to the moral relativism of postmodernity, will find not only Engelhardt’s proposal of a second-order “morality” (a), but also (and especially) his first-order moral commitments (b) morally embarrassing. a) Those postmodern thinkers who have recognized the impossibility of securing a canonical moral position through sound rational argument, and have as a consequence become moral relativists, will find Engelhardt’s position troubling. They accept the particular moral bias of each culture or religious tradition as given and—from these cultures’ respective standpoints— even inevitable. Since no moral resources are acknowledged outside of such particular milieus, the various peaceful or violent ways, in which such communities affect one another, can only be described, not evaluated outside the commitments of that particular community. There are thus no general, secular, rational grounds left for justifying one genre of political structure (say, democracy) in comparison to another (say, oligarchy). There are as well no general secular rational grounds for establishing liberal instead of “fascist” communities. Challenged to disclose the implication of their abandonment of any general moral perspective, consistent postmodernists often become implicit defenders of the “rule of the stronger.” Engelhardt’s insistence on a—even if “default” and “second-order”— procedural morality exposes such accounts of postmodernity as unnecessarily pessimistic. He offers a secular moral perspective, from which moral distinctions (including moral distinctions amongst competing political structures) can still be made. Engelhardt can both recognize the intractability of moral diversity and yet offer a moral framework for judging the proper and improper use of persons. Here Engelhardt salvages a remnant, albeit content-less, of the Enlightenment’s project of disclosing a secular morality open to all. b) In fact, as will turn out in the third part of my essay, Engelhardt remains a moral absolutist in two senses. As just discussed, he insists that all persons, whether or not they are postmodernists, have the ability to enter into a cluster of moral practices (e.g., limited democracies with no content-full view of justice and fairness, the free market, etc.). Authoritative collaboration (where the authority is drawn from the concurrence of the collaborators) is maintained, so that a transcendental moral perspective is—pace Rorty—preserved for secular morality. Even more, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics makes clear that, in addition to affirming this secular second-order morality, Engelhardt refuses to posit a logical transition from the irresolvable secular moral pluralism to the unavoidability of first-order moral relativism. As becomes clear from this latter work, Engelhardt is not a metaphysical moral skeptic: he does not deny the existence of an ultimate moral truth. His account of the pluralism that characterizes secular morality is grounded in a (secularly moral) epistemological skepticism: a recognition of the inability of secular
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rationality to establish a canonical secular moral vision by sound rational argument. Among the various consequences of this position, two deserve particular emphasis. 1. Members of particular traditional moral communities need not in the face of moral pluralism internalize the postmodern view that all moral accounts and narratives are equal, thus discounting the seriousness of the moral claims made within their own moral community. 2. Christians in reflecting on the status of their moral claims not only can, but should recognize their claims as not relative to being Christian, but relative to the special epistemic resources of the Christian community which invites all other human beings into membership.
Engelhardt’s formal permission principle thus protects the seriousness of existing content-full moralities against their (thickly liberal) destruction in the name of affirmative tolerance. Accordingly, in reserving the term “moral friends” to members of closely knit moral communities, Engelhardt exposes the dismal estrangement that characterizes postmodern existence in the cultural space between intact moral communities. He refuses to celebrate the postmodern condition which confronts us as an outcome of modernity’s collapse.21 He thus exposes the contemporary mainstream’s commitment to an individualistic pursuit of self-satisfaction and self-realization (shorn of rightly ordered communal life) as a mark of hollow-ness and broken-ness. Whereas the dominant Western culture nurtures a post-traditional commitment to emancipation from thick moral communities, and to an eclectic individualist pursuit of human flourishing, along with a celebration of “diversity” as valuable in itself, Engelhardt reminds his readers of the faithfulness, obedience, dedication, reliability, altruism and sense of obligation, which can only flourish in a thick communal environment. To do so in an academic milieu and with impeccable scholarly and intellectual resources, challenges the liberal life-style and the breakdown of families liberally accepted within that milieu. By unveiling, behind the public endorsement of an individualistic freedom, postmodern man’s abandonment to the arbitrary and egocentric play of his passions, Engelhardt puts postmodern man to shame. In all of this, Engelhardt’s work makes particularly clear what it means for the West to live “after Christendom.” He not only shows that nothing like Christian morality can be secured without Christianity, he also forces the reader to encounter, in his very principle of permission, the harmfulness, emptiness, and triviality, indeed the perversity of the moral life after Christendom.22 The Foundations of Bioethics, in a number of passages, thus points beyond itself. It brings the reader’s attention to the circumstance that, if a second-order “morality” of mutual consent is all that one has, one is left with a vision of human flourishing that is radically empty, incomplete,
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and one-sided. Most of Engelhardt’s readers, who imagine themselves having happily adjusted to postmodernity, are resolutely committed to repudiating this diagnosis. Engelhardt disturbs their denial by invoking Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855): the worst of all despairs is the despair that one does not wish to acknowledge. One can even go one step further. One can, at the roots of contemporary culture’s hostility, not only among secular thinkers but in particular among post-Enlightenment Christians, to traditional Christianity, discern an attempt to suppress the threat presented by that despair. It is in response to the perverted state of that culture, that Engelhardt invites the reader to reflect on the possibility of engaging, once again, in the pursuit of ultimate truth and religious commitment. To accomplish this, he has to bring the reader to a standpoint that existed before the seduction of theology by philosophy.
III. Morality within “Philosophy as Theology” In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt poses once more the questions of The Foundations of Bioethics, but now within a broader and deeper horizon. Whereas the earlier book had shown that, as long as one restricts one’s efforts to the level of secular philosophizing, the philosophical quest for truth will produce nothing but a multiplicity of incompatible conceptions of truth, in this later book Engelhardt removes that secular restriction. He discloses that the quest for truth is in its fullness a theological endeavor. Whereas the earlier book had developed a “moral” framework that secures the condition for peaceful collaboration in spite of a multiplicity of conflicting truth-claims, this later book invites the reader into a pursuit of the Truth “as personal,” a pursuit that is experientially grounded. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics incorporates and expands the analysis of postmodernity developed in The Foundations of Bioethics. It asks, for example: what would be needed in order to take our contemporary postmodern cultural situation seriously, while at the same time also taking seriously a Christianity that had not yet been philosophically numbed, and that looked back to the traditions and epistemological resources of the first millennium? What would it mean, while recognizing that the historical development of Western philosophy has led to a situation in which all moral, epistemological, and ontological reflection is placed within a horizon of the finite and the immanent, also to acknowledge that Christianity is rooted in an experience of the transcendent personal God? Indeed, what would be involved in acknowledging the secular intractability of the moral pluralism that defines contemporary culture, while at the same time endorsing the one single unique and personal religious Truth? Let us, in investigating Engelhardt’s answers to these questions, once again follow the three-step schematism of Section II.
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A. Retrieving Christianity from postmodernity In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt invites the reader beyond the failure of reason into the possibility of theological experience. This invitation is predicated on his recognition that Christian theology in the strict sense is an empirical endeavor. It would make as much sense to ground theology in philosophical speculation as it would be to ground medicine in philosophical speculation, rather than in empirical investigation. Speaking in conformity with the Christianity of the first 1000 years, Engelhardt underscores that the theological knowledge sensu strictu that leads to ultimate truth requires knowing God, not simply knowing about God. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics re-introduces an epistemological viewpoint (the possibility of noetic23 knowledge), which recalls the foundations of traditional Christian theology, but not the foundations of contemporary philosophical reflection or, for that matter, contemporary Western Christian theology. This has consequences for his portrayal of a properly anchored, and therefore successful, moral philosophy (as shown in the next sub-section 1) as well as a properly oriented theology (as shown in the next sub-section 2). 1. Moral philosophy as based on theology The first three chapters of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics may seem to review some of the philosophical territory covered in the first five chapters of The Foundations of Bioethics. Yet already for the limited field of human philosophy, everything now is placed within the quest for, and the meaning of the transcendent. Here again, but in greater detail, Engelhardt confronts the circumstance that without some grounding reference to an omnipotent, omniscient, creator God, Who resembles the God of the Christians, human philosophy cannot even attempt to devise any moral theory deserving its name. Only by recurring to such a God can the priority of the right over the good be guaranteed, can any particular content for morality be secured, and the priority of morality over the counsels of prudence be established. That is to say, only by reference to what such a God has revealed about Himself is it possible philosophically to explain why one should always take the so-called moral point of view (i.e., appreciating the good and the right in terms of what is good and right for persons in general). That is, as Kant clearly recognized, if one does not at least act as if God exists, and as if humans are immortal, then it cannot always be rational to assume the moral point of view irrespective of its costs to oneself and/or to those whom one loves. In particular, (and here Engelhardt addresses a central failure of Kant’s rationalistic account of morality), only by reference to such Divine self-revelations can the normative significance of human biological life be properly appreciated (e.g., as when such life does not yet and may never achieve rational personhood). In sum, only by reference to Divine self-revelation can the realm of bioethics be rightly established. Yet, such a “philosophically helpful” God may no longer in turn be
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regarded as philosophically penetrable, and His revelations as replaceable by discursive reasoning. What can be secured by secular rational discursive argument is no longer confused with what can be secured by theological experience. Under these conditions, moreover, the authority of specific Christian norms is protected against the eroding impact of secular rational assumptions. But, of course, the involvement of revealed truths within philosophy presupposes that true Divine revelation can be identified. It is at this point, that philosophy must turn to the empirical findings of theology. The latter, of course, is no longer understood within the Western account of theology as a discursively rational academic discipline. The original sense of theology, which Engelhardt seeks to recapture for his Western audience, involves a spiritual journey24 from the envisaged chaos of a world without God to the experience of a world informed by the grace of God. 2. Noetic theology Engelhardt highlights three respects in which noetic theology differs from the discursive rational theology of the West: these concern (a) the way in which the pursuit of theological knowledge is initiated, (b) the implications of its noetic character, and (c) its relationship to its (scriptural and traditional) manifestations. a) The Christian journey is not carried forward by rational reflection, but, once again, centrally involves the will. Yet this time the will is turned not to an assembly of moral strangers. It is a will of a person intent upon turning in love to God. In order to lay out the consequences of such a turning for moral knowledge, Engelhardt reminds his readers of the Greek Fathers’ distinction between God’s Divine nature and His Divine energies. Without endorsing the voluntarism of William Ockham, Engelhardt acknowledges the unbridgeable distance, which the Patristic tradition affirmed as separating the nature of God from what His creatures can access. At the same time, however, he insists on the equally traditional distinction between God’s nature and His un-created energies, through which He manifests Himself, and imparts knowledge about Himself, to His chosen friends. The will to turn to God invoked by The Foundations of Christian Bioethics thus envisages the “standing offer” of transcendent personal presence, and responds to the call for a faithful reaction to that presence. Theology itself (instead of partaking in the discursive grounding efforts of merely human philosophy) becomes grounded in learning how personally to turn to and respond to the person Who is the source of reality. Philosophy thus becomes re-fashioned on the model of theology, which in turn is understood as the ascetical pursuit of wisdom.25 b) It is in particular this empirical turn (i.e., the turn to experiencing God noetically) at the core of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, which is radically disturbing for both Western secularists and Western Christians. It presupposes taking seriously the idea of God as alive. It presupposes an anthropology that was lost in the West in the ruins of its Middle Ages. Whereas the Fathers
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had distinguished nous (as the receptive organ for Divine revelations) from reason (the merely human capacity to analyze and systematize sense data and mathematical ideas), the corresponding distinction between intellectus and ratio in the West was lost through the integration of pagan philosophy into the presentation of dogmatic knowledge. As Western theology ceased to recognize the central importance of noetic knowledge, its underlying “sociology of knowledge” changed. Exemplar theologians were no longer recognized as holy men who experience God but as learned academics who can write about God. The ascetical pursuit of wisdom (i.e., philosophy in the sense of noetic theology) was replaced by scholasticism. The result for theology was a rupture between theologians and God; for philosophy, as already observed, this led to a rupture between the knower and the known. In contrast, the theology of the first millennium, which in the third millennium is alive and well all over the world, with its exemplar theologians in such places as Mount Athos, is not a rational philosophical system. Rather, it is a way of life informed by grace. It lives and sustains a Christianity that has existed for two thousand years without requiring support from any speculative philosophical theology (and, for that matter, without a magisterial institution). It is nourished by God’s personal encounters with His saints. It is the original Christianity faithfully preserved by the Orthodox Church. c) As Engelhardt points out, this Christianity is characterized by a rather different approach both to the Bible and to tradition. In what concerns the Bible, Engelhardt underscores that this set of books came to be constituted officially only after the travails of the Western Reformation26 as revelatory authority in its own right. Patristic theology, by contrast, has always understood the sacred Scriptures as mere records of such personal revelations. To be sure, they are among the most important sources for guidance in a Christian life. Still, they reveal their true meaning only as interpreted in the Spirit of renewed Divine-human collaborations, i.e., through the church as the assembly of the Saints.27 In the Christianity at one with the Apostles and the Fathers one finds, to risk an ambiguous term, a Christianity grounded in mysticism as the noetic experience of the Holy. In what concerns tradition, Engelhardt accordingly distinguishes two senses. On the surface, tradition concerns what is “passed on” among humans. At bottom, however, tradition concerns what is “passed on” by God to humans in the context of a deifying unification, and thus the “carrying on” of the Holy Spirit. The truth-status of the first (taken by itself) is questionable, especially when “tradition” appears in the plural, and represents an exclusively human, exhaustively cultural phenomenon. The second, by contrast, denotes mans’ participation in the Holy Spirit as Divine Truth. In the ordo essendi, the latter is primary to the former, even if in the ordo cognoscendi the former is usually encountered first. That is to say, most Christians on their theological journey will first be guided by what the Church has recorded about God’s chosen friends’ personal encounters with
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Him. This will enable those Christians to recognize that the Church lives in an unchanging understanding of doctrine, spanning two millennia of Christianity. Reference to the unbroken mind of the Fathers will help them to pick out false human additions from true doctrine. It will also inform those Christians about how to direct their efforts and prayers so as to approach the goal of becoming friends of God themselves. Only if they reach the end of that spiritual journey and are blessed with personal encounters with God Himself, will they gain personally experiential access to the unchanging Truth at the bottom of what had guided their journey. Once a saint has reached that goal, even the Bible, even the writings of the Fathers and oral tradition (understood in the first sense of the term) will no longer be necessary.
B. Christian bioethics: the noetic experience of a personal God For the person schooled in the conceits of the philosophical theology born after the Western Middle Ages, this entire account will seem strange. The appeal is not to a set of rational reflections, but to an empirical confidence regarding a noetic fact: God lives, and manifests His transforming energies to those who rightly turn to Him. The reader thus finds in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, first, three critical chapters de-constructing the rational attempt to do what postmodernity has recognized to be impossible. Second, one encounters a chapter (i.e., chapter IV) that describes the original Christian empirical noetic account of theology. After that (thirdly), Engelhardt lays out what this theology means for the conduct of life, drawing primarily on the injunctions of the Christianity of the first millennium regarding matters bioethical. Let us take a closer look at that meaning first 1) in view of such a life, taken by itself, and then 2) as placed within a postmodern environment. 1. Morality and bioethics in the context of a life in Christ No doubt a life that follows the guidance of the—predominantly Eastern—Fathers would seem at points radically unsettling, not just to secularists, but even to Western Christians. This Christianity, untouched by Augustine of Hippo, offers a morality and bioethics not centered around currently expected norms or values, such as an absolute prohibition against intentional deception (a norm previously unknown in Christianity). One finds a teleological moral framework within which the good, the right, the virtuous, and the pure are all placed in terms of a holy righteousness that is achieved through lovingly turning to the transcendent person Who is at the root of all. a) The goal of Christian morality Christian morality, as Engelhardt never tires of underscoring, derives its character from its aim of promoting humans’ holiness by helping them to turn from love of self to love of God. All the proscriptions and prescriptions that frame Christian liturgical life invite mankind into that obedience which, in liberating from the rule of the passions (whether sensual, emotional, or
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intellectual), also liberates from the ego-centrism at the root of those passions. In struggling towards the restoration of that paradisiacal nature which was lost through Adam’s disobedience, such obedience supports Christians in turning from themselves to God, and to their human brothers. More significantly, it allows deification to occur. In disrupting the original community between man and God, Adam’s fall not only abandoned man’s heart to the passions, but also clouded his intellect; that fall had compromised man’s capacity for moral discernment. This is why moral orientation is promoted primarily through a life of ascetic dedication towards holiness. On the basis of such an understanding of the purpose of morality, Engelhardt’s last four chapters (i.e., chapters V through VIII) delineate how vital areas of man’s embodied life, such as sex roles, procreation, and dying, disclose their moral relevance. Thus, during a dying process, the secular mainstream’s endorsement of happiness (or the avoidance of suffering) as the one overarching goal is complemented by a concern for the patient’s ultimate happiness, which leaves space for the possibility of sorrow in repentance for one’s sins. And thus also the differences between the sexes are understood by reference to a Divinely ordered economy of mutual love and support within a hierarchical context which, to the outsider, may appear improperly sexist and patriarchal. In this way, however, human sexuality is integrated into the creation of families, which, in turn, are appreciated in a manner that is un-fathomable for modern liberals, as constituting small house churches, illumined by sainthood and the martyrdom of mutual love. b) The solution of moral conflicts As the Church has affirmed throughout the ages and in all places, there are certain limiting rules proscribing actions which separate the human heart from God.28 Beyond these, however, whichever course of action either helps or hinders in a person’s spiritual progress depends on that person’s spiritual state. Christian morality is not legalistic: it is not a set of legalistic rules, which one would be guilty for transgressing only if one did so in knowledge and with intention. From the first century, after all, Christians have recognized sins committed involuntarily and in ignorance. The focus is not on identifying courses of action that would incur guilt in the sense in which guilt is established in a court of law. The focus is instead on how particular actions, omissions, or intentions bring one closer to or move one further away from aiming flawlessly at God. Since all of human life is drawn into the dynamic of God’s invitation into His love, there exist, strictly speaking, no morally “neutral” areas. All moments of a person’s life are placed within the alternative of either responding to God’s call or permitting the gravity of one’s fallen nature to pull one away from God. This is why moral guidance is properly therapeutic rather than juridical: it should aim at strengthening a person’s ability to resist (supported by the grace of God) the crippling force exerted by one’s fallen nature.
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As Engelhardt emphasizes, this goal-directedness of Christian morality, as lived in a fallen world, can generate real moral conflict. A Christian may have to accept committing a sin (a certain act not perfectly aiming at God), in order to avoid greater spiritual harm to himself or to his neighbor (i.e., much more turning away from God). For example, though women (among others) are in general called to turn their other cheek to an aggressor, yet when they are responsible for protecting their children, they are obliged to use deadly force against a human aggressor. Yet, even though a woman having acted accordingly knows that she ought not to have acted otherwise and that, in a similar situation, she should adopt the same course of action, she nevertheless ought to repent; that is, she should mourn the circumstances in which the broken world of Adam’s sin places her, and pray for the guilty person, whom she has sent before the dread judgment seat of Christ. In fact, she will incur (temporary) excommunication— but for therapeutic, not for punitive reasons. Rather than clearing her from any juridical guilt, such a response is designed to support her repentance, her wholehearted turning to God in a broken world. Her repentance will be directed to healing the damage she has suffered through having engaged in sin (that is having had to undertake an action which in its broken character did not fully partake of Christian perfection). c) The sources of moral orientation Whereas Western theologians recognize the first millennium Eastern Fathers as historical sources, Orthodox Christians endeavor to live with those Fathers’ writings and those of all of the Fathers, including those of this day, so as to integrate their own minds with the minds of the Fathers. Or, to use a modern idiom, one is called to enter into their paradigm, their thought-style, their thought-community. Living within this thought-style, Orthodox Christians seek to accept spiritual guidance from the Fathers as in the immediacy of a personal friendship. Such Christians know, as Engelhardt takes effort to spell out in great detail, that the technological developments introduced in the twentieth century, even in the field of bioethics, have never impaired the validity and applicability of the moral and spiritual insights of the Fathers. In a very important sense, as Engelhardt shows, traditional Christianity does not possess a morality, moral philosophy, or theology—at least as these are understood in the West. There is no third thing between man and God. There is no morality, moral philosophy, or theology apart from the relationship between God and man. So, in this very important sense, the Fathers do not point to morality, moral philosophy, or theology as something one could know outside of being in a rightly ordered relationship to God. The focus, substance, and significance of traditional Christian morality and theology are thus ascetical-theological (Engelhardt, 2005; 2007). As a consequence, the cardinal methodology of morality and theology involves prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and vigils. Its anchor is not academic. Rather its anchor is in a re-orientation
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towards God, a metanoia that aims one away from self-love to a love of God, through which one can also finally rightly love one’s fellow men. It is in view of this ultimate source of moral orientation, that the motto placed over The Foundations of Christian Bioethics invokes the Holy Spirit’s overflowing of grace: “The Holy Spirit provideth all; ….He hath revealed the fishermen as theologians.” Moral knowledge is thus ultimately a Divine gift—a relationship to Himself that God gives men. Its very acceptance already presupposes that achieved detachment and humility, which in turn can be developed only with God’s help. As in all human encounters with the Triune God, the immediate consequence (and thus the most reliable criterion for the reality of such an encounter) is a deepened perception of one’s sinfulness. That is, the closer one comes to God, the more clearly one appreciates how one usually fails to aim at Him. It is in this sense that repentance secures the recognition of the labor involved in finally getting matters morally and theologically right, in finally aiming rightly at God. Again, all of this is understood outside of the moral philosophical and moral theological academic framework that in the West is to supply moral and theological orientation. Because everything turns not on an academic framework but on a personal theological orientation, pace the Euthyphro, the good, the right, and the virtuous are only to be understood in terms of the holy, and the holy, indeed all of theology, only in terms of right orientation to God. In appreciating the traditional Christian understanding of repentance and right orientation to God, it is important that these not be understood in merely psychological or intellectual terms. Repentance is not merely feeling sorry. Repentance is actually aiming rightly at God, and then being transformed by His un-created energies. The result of this is an appreciation of theology that is radically at odds with that of the West. The core engagements required to be theological, and to be rightly morally oriented, turn out not to be having the right feelings, or forming the right ideas. Instead, they are connected with an ascetical liturgical theology that brings one into contact with the living God, Whose un-created energies change the persons who turn to Him. Here we are returned to the metaphor of the journey. The journey of the theologian in the strict sense is not an academic journey but an ascetical-liturgical journey. One ought to recall that all of the distinctions that the Western world has come to take for granted, among them moral theology, dogmatic theology, and systematic theology, are rather recent innovations. These distinctions may provide some service in organizing reflections about the experiences of those who have actually come into union with God. The theology that has just been described is not an academic endeavor but a realized relationship between real persons and their personal God. It is for this reason that the Scripture reads that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are offered not to the “wise and prudent” but to “babes” (Matt. 11: 25-6). Even educated moral thinkers must take those spiritually poor in the wisdom of the world as their models, and recognize
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their own spiritual poverty. The whole of Engelhardt’s The Foundations of Christian Bioethics can be read as an effort towards, and invitation into, such recognized poverty. 2. Pursuing holiness in a modern/postmodern environment What does it mean for Christians to maintain their prayer and fasting in the context of contemporary Western societies? As Engelhardt makes abundantly clear, Christians have always had to sustain their struggles in this world while refusing to be of this world (Jn. 17:14-8). Their home is always elsewhere, even if this world is recognized to be the arena where they must prove themselves. Even if Christ blessed the peace-makers, he blessed them as the ones who know that true peace is a Divine gift. This orientation towards an eschatological kingdom of God becomes especially clear in the Christian acceptance of (and sometimes even welcoming of) martyrdom. Wherever the obligation to confess and suffer for the faith is inescapable, Christians have never held themselves excused from this pursuit of Christ, merely because the world required their assistance in building some earthly “kingdom of God.” This distance of Christians from the surrounding life-world has surely increased, as contemporary culture has come to celebrate change and diversity. Postmodernity’s anti-traditional commitment to pluralism tends subtly to distract Christians from the unchanging nature of God as the goal of their personal spiritual development, and from His unchanging commandments as support towards that goal. Maintaining this same distance has, moreover, become still more difficult in a world that claims its highest civilizing accomplishment to lie in the establishment of an ecumenical consensus—not only among certain culturally dominant Christianities, but even with the morality of the secular world. Such a consensus, in being recommended as the only hope for peace on earth, and thus as a central condition for the ultimate goal of general wellbeing on earth, leaves traditional Christians at odds even with what seem to be the most noble aspirations of the dominant culture. There is, as Engelhardt acknowledges, a real hunger for unity among humans, just as there is a real hunger for truth. Yet, just as the latter is not stilled by a mere phantom of truth, offered through discursive reflection, so is the former not stilled by consensus with a fallen world. Real unity among humans, just as real truth, is available only through Christ. Whoever disregards this truth will find himself moved to construe as peace-threatening even that very effort at distancing oneself from the world, which is indispensable for a Christian life and the attainment of Divine peace. It is especially Western Christians who, having made their peace with this secular world, regard such an ascetic, moral and social distancing with suspicion. They tend to denounce traditional Christianity as sectarian.29 And in this they will even be right, insofar as traditional Christians must both be in the world and spiritually cut off from the world.
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As Engelhardt makes clear in both The Foundations of Bioethics and in the first three chapters of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, there is an implicitly secular, post-Christian, totalizing tendency penetrating contemporary culture in spite of its dividedness between modern and postmodern commitments. This tendency is merely covered up by the endorsement of freedom as the one overarching value. Both Engelhardt’s criticism and his own identification of a secular second-order “morality” argue for the need to acknowledge existing moral differences. Both disclose spaces for moral distancing—even to the extent of allowing space for a traditionally Christian health care, which would pursue “first the kingdom of God” (and that kingdom not in terms of all receiving equal health care). Engelhardt’s critical, as well as his philosophically constructive, undertakings thus serve the ultimate purpose of securing a condition for that minimal “peace” (as renunciation of violence), which will enable committed traditional Christians (among others) to pursue their salvation, and—by engaging in public (although peaceable) persuasion—that of the world.30 C. Why is reading Engelhardt so difficult? We return here to an issue engaged at the beginning of this essay, yet now against a richer background. The foregoing shows how the Engelhardt of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics undertakes a project that completes the projects of The Foundations of Bioethics. Far from being two isolated undertakings, they are intimately connected and should not be read one without the other. Yet, many readers have been unable to appreciate this complementarity. There are at least ten circumstances that can help explain why Engelhardt’s endeavors both in secular and Christian morality and bioethics are often radically misunderstood. First, right at the surface of things, these undertakings integrate areas of scholarship usually kept separate. Engelhardt’s corpus ranges from a volume exploring the relationship of mind and body, drawing on the work of Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, to various studies in the history and philosophy of medicine. Many have not recognized the basic categorical and ontological interests that have driven Engelhardt’s work from the very beginning. Given the diversity of philosophical arguments he engages, and because of his attempt to bring into contact both philosophical and theological insights, The Foundations of Bioethics and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics may to the superficial reader appear radically different. Readers have often not recognized that the former book mainly explores a morality for moral strangers and the latter a morality for Engelhardt’s moral friends (and for all those who, through conversion, might accept the invitation into this community of friendship). Some may even be tempted to talk of an ‘Engelhardt I’ and an ‘Engelhardt II.’ The two Engelhardts, however, are one. Second, there may be a conflict of paradigms, thought styles, or research projects separating the author from some of his readers. His two Foundations are grounded in two rather unique and bold intellectual projects. It is difficult
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to communicate across the gulf of disparate conceptual perspectives. To take some examples from Engelhardt’s philosophical work: many may have never seriously considered the crucial distinction between freedom as a value and freedom as a side constraint. Nor may they have appreciated the distinction between content-full moralities that can affirm the goodness and badness of particular choices, versus the morality of moral strangers, which can only acknowledge a sparse right-making condition as a default position in the face of intractable moral diversity.31 Accordingly, Engelhardt underscores the difference between affirming the good of liberty or freedom, on the one hand, and appealing to the concurrence of wills that makes possible a common fabric of moral authority, on the other hand. If readers fail to awaken to such distinctions, they may easily mis-conclude32 from The Foundations of Bioethics that Engelhardt is a passionate defender of liberty as an overriding human good. Though he has repeatedly emphasized the contrary, such readers may never yet have appreciated that his major focus is upon freedom as a right–making condition,33 and that freedom in this sense (not as a good) underlies the possibility of a general secular morality. Such readers will remain blind to Engelhardt’s endorsement of freedom as condition for a transcendental possibility for navigating moral pluralism.34 Accordingly, some misunderstandings of Engelhardt’s work result simply from a failure to attend to the conceptual tools framing that work. Third, some readers may just not be up to the foundational bilinguality postmodernity imposes on members of thick moral communities when outside their moral home-milieu. They may not understand, for example, that a Christian will both need to speak without hesitation in the thick moral language of his own community, and that he also may engage in the thin moral language presupposed by a world market. Such Christians might employ a “public” or “inter-community” language in order to be understood by, and rally (political or economic) support from, non-communal fellow citizens, while faithfully tithing from their profits in the market for the support of their very particular community. If Engelhardt’s readers fail to distinguish intrafrom inter-community communication, they will be even less able to appreciate the third language-game his two-layer account of human society offers: the possibility of an extension of intra-communal discourse into the “public” space of inter-communal communication. This further manner of speaking belongs to situations in which members of particular moral communities publicly proclaim their moral truths in an effort to persuade and invite moral strangers to join them. Readers who are un-aware of the basic bilinguality underlying such extensions will be unable correctly to assess, within Engelhardt’s modes of speech, the differences both between the main text and some of the footnotes in The Foundations of Bioethics, and between that former work and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics.35 Fourth, Engelhardt’s intellectual aspirations are not modest. He pursues nothing less than a comprehensive account of the human condition in
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contemporary Western societies. He sets his analysis in the context of Western civilization’s development during the last two millennia. In pursuing this task, he not only critically exposes other influential contemporary claims (such as the ones offered by John Rawls and Richard Rorty) as sorely limited. He also sets a standard for coherence, against which others may find it hard to compete. By connecting issues in epistemology and the sociology of knowledge with issues of morality, as well as problems in the history and substance of theology with questions concerning the development and tenability of philosophical theories, Engelhardt makes it harder for his academic colleagues to get by with basing their general claims concerning the right and the good on merely particular areas of research. Fifth, some readers may fail to realize the political implications of either affirming or denying moral consensus. Or else, if they do appreciate these implications,36 they may be unwilling to accept Engelhardt’s libertarian reflections on the limits of what secular political entities can be rationally justified in enforcing. The implausibility of the secular moral authority of governments (beyond that of the minimal state) is, as Engelhardt shows, the inescapable consequence of the failure of reason to establish a canonical morality. The resulting distinction between the moral authority of states, of society, and of communities with regard to their respective members, may be incompatible with such readers’ secular ideological commitments.37 The fact that Engelhardt himself bemoans the libertarian conclusions to which his arguments bring him, might gratify the moralizing aspirations of such non-classical liberal readers. Still, such regrets may not suffice to win them to his standpoint. Similarly, the circumstance that Engelhardt’s secular account would leave them at liberty peaceably to pursue their particular views of the human good and human flourishing within communities of their own making may not compensate them for the loss of their larger political ambitions. The very distinctions Engelhardt insists on drawing among state, society, and community will appear unacceptable to those who seek to construe the political state as a moral community (so as to feel justified in politically enforcing on others the values they happen to hold dear). Sixth, some readers may be existentially unable to acknowledge the truth of Engelhardt’s description of the strangely contradictory nature of contemporary secular Western culture. As already indicated above, this culture is marked by four characteristics, namely: 1) there is both theoretical and practical disagreement on important moral issues; 2) there is no common basis to resolve these controversies through sound rational argument, indeed; 3) no one has offered such common basis; but 4) nevertheless there is the view that there is a common morality, moral core, or at least an overlapping moral consensus. To accept the incompatibility of the fourth characteristic with the other three requires the courage to take moral diversity seriously. Yet, as has been observed, if one’s livelihood depends upon being able to claim that one
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can articulate the foundations of a universal moral consensus, or a global bioethics, opening one’s eyes to that diversity may just be too economically and psychologically threatening. Seventh, some readers who have destroyed or abandoned their familial or communal frameworks, so that they are left to struggle with contriving new patchwork identities, may find disturbing Engelhardt’s exposition of communal life as the condition for moral substance, integrity, and coherence. While engaged with construing some surrogate communality that will morally shelter humanity’s enlightened representatives in a culture of affirmative tolerance and mutual support for individual self-gratification, such readers will find it embarrassing even to consider thinking differently: to do so, after all, would feed the suspicion, that it might have been less the confining impact of others inviting them to enter into traditional communal structures than their own inability to outgrow their immature opposition, which placed them into the morally chaotic and insipid moral niche in which they find themselves. Eighth, out of nostalgia for the Enlightenment’s universalist claims, some readers may refuse to acknowledge moral diversity and communal morality as the only guarantee for integrity. Recognizing the cacophony of postmodernity and its lack of metaphysical depth would require such readers to abandon their Promethean expectations from philosophy. An unwavering yearning for the restoration of such depth is expressed, for example, in John Paul II’s plaintive exhortations in Fides et Ratio on behalf of a philosophy with the courage once more to do metaphysics (see, for example, Engelhardt, 2000, p. 231 n. 151). Facing the death of the Enlightenment project, confronting the full consequences of the death of God for secular culture, is psychologically impossible as long as one insists on preserving accustomed and taken for granted cultural commitments. Because Engelhardt doggedly presses the consequences of postmodernity for secular morality and culture, those who vainly hope to recover the powers of reason for which John Paul II pined will not find in Engelhardt’s The Foundations of Bioethics insights they can with ease embrace. Ninth, Engelhardt’s frank recognition of moral pluralism may to some seem tantamount to resigning in the face of a threat to social peace. That is, some may engage a strategy of pursuing “peace on earth” by denying that there is anything of moral seriousness about which any reasonable man could be willing to fight. Engelhardt’s insistence on both the seriousness of man’s moral vocation and the intractability of secular moral pluralism upsets such thinkers’ well intentioned projects. He disturbs the graveyard peace that has been secured by a resolute restriction of one’s moral attention to “middlelevel principles” as supporting a general appearance of harmony. Or instead, following Francis Fukuyama, they may attempt resolutely to restrict human aspirations to those of a civilized animal. Given the resolutely secular orientation
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of such thinkers, Engelhardt’s offer of the uncertain and incomplete secular peace of contracts, the market, and limited democracies for life in this world must appear unattractive. His reference to a true peace beyond this world, to be achieved only through rightly directed ascetic struggle, will be considered not only unrealistic but all too disruptive of a comfortable life. Tenth and last of all, there are those who are not willing to accept a return of Christian theology to its roots in the first millennium. To begin with, they may have fallen in love with—as Engelhardt playfully presents the matter— the various intellectual children spawned of the early Western medieval liaison between theology and the comely maid philosophy. Some may desperately want, despite the collapse of the scholastic and Enlightenment projects, to forward the very discursive rational theological project, which Engelhardt argues will always collapse in a plurality of mutually incompatible arguments and narratives.38 Others may prefer a domesticated Christianity that, given the loss in Western Christianity of a clear biblical basis for its beliefs after the onslaughts of higher Bible criticism, has become one among the many cultural inheritances of mankind. There will yet be others who may be quite disturbed with Engelhardt’s reminder, that the theology of the first millennium was not a rational a priori but a noetic empirical undertaking, that it was aimed not at knowing about God but knowing God. They may in particular be disturbed by Engelhardt’s reminder that the failure to come to the right conclusion about matters theological in the end is grounded not in an intellectual mistake but in a moral mistake, or more precisely in a sin: a failure to turn to the universe as having meaning, and then with ascetic commitment to search for that meaning, is a moral failure, a sin, with eternal consequences. Any one of these issues would be enough to bring one to reject Engelhardt’s project. After all, the project asks us to recognize the blind alleys to which discursive philosophical reflection has led contemporary culture. At the same time, it calls us to acknowledge that the cardinal question is not “What is the truth?”, but “Who is the Truth?”—the focus of the noetic empirical theology lying at Christianity’s roots.
IV. Conclusion: Why One Ought to Re-read Engelhardt with Care In 1997, three years before the publication of the The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, a book appeared with the title Reading Engelhardt. This book (various contributions to which were discussed in the footnotes of this essay) was drawn from a conference on Engelhardt’s work, held September 30, 1995. Even though this conference took place four years after his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and in the same year in which he launched the journal, Christian Bioethics, the resulting book makes little mention of Christianity and Christian bioethics. That alone would justify a systematic re-reading of
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Engelhardt. Since that conference, Engelhardt published scores of studies on Christian theology and bioethics. All of this makes it indispensable to re-explore Engelhardt’s work. Such a re-exploration is not only important in that Engelhardt has influenced bioethics through both his Christian and his secular scholarship. Much more significantly, it is his work with Christian theology and bioethics that helps us, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to re-assess our place both as secular moral thinkers and as Christians. Engelhardt deals a devastating blow to the intellectual foundations of the liberal mainstream culture of both the secular and the purportedly Christian West. That mainstream not only denies the depth of dis-sensus fragmenting the moral life in Western societies. It also tends culturally to discount the quest for an ultimately orienting truth, in terms of which moral dis-sensus could ever be properly recognized as posing a problem. In demanding that traditional moral and religious communities relativize their various claims regarding such truth, contemporary Western liberalism seeks first and foremost to destroy those very communal lifeworlds which cultivate the quest for ultimate truth. Engelhardt’s work restores the conceptual conditions for the viability of such life worlds. In reconnecting our contemporary reflections in moral theory and ontology with the moral and metaphysical commitments that lie at the roots of Western culture, Engelhardt re-opens the question concerning man’s place in the cosmos. He thus secures, once again, the ground on which one could even ask the question whether or not one should pursue that genuinely (non-reduced) Christian quest for ultimate Truth into which Engelhardt invites his readers. These are large and perennial issues. Indeed, Engelhardt brings philosophy back to its traditional concerns regarding the place of God in finding orientation for morality, epistemology, and metaphysics. He does this by reaching behind the philosophical-theological synthesis of the Middle Ages to a period when all of Christianity recognized that natural theology was ascetic and liturgical. These are matters possessing a scope usually avoided by a bioethics intent on addressing the bioethical controversies of the moment. It is here that the enduring significance of Engelhardt’s secular and Christian reflections lies.
Notes 1. Because Engelhardt focuses on modernity’s dream of rationally grounded moral progress, his account of the Enlightenment gives heavy accent to what is usually associated with the German (Kantian) tradition. Though his account does attend to the French intellectual developments that gave rise to the French Revolution, it should be noted that even those French, Scottish, and English thinkers, who possessed a greater scepticism with regard to the powers of human reason, nevertheless thought of themselves as disclosing a space for an Enlightenment secular morality. 2. A foundational failure, to be sure, is not by itself sufficient to repudiate the possibility of truth-claims. Perhaps many of those who have remained un-impressed
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3. 4.
5.
6.
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8.
9. 10.
Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes by Engelhardt’s thesis feed their resistance from a (usually tacit) commitment to the possibility of transferring scientific coherence-theories of truth to the realm of morality: the wide-spread persistence of faith in a moral consensus of mankind may thus mirror a different truth-theoretical assumption. But quite independently of the theoretical value of such an approach, the difficulty with morality and bioethics is that they are used for the justification of political power. To the extent, that contemporary democratic polities derive their legitimacy from the moral principle (established by the Enlightenment) of an individual right to autonomy, any political violation of that autonomy requires a strong (i.e., foundational) justification, which the coherence view of moral truth does not offer. Basic moral premises are axioms taken as given within a morality. These may include claims such as “civil liberty is more valuable than prosperity.” Rules of moral evidence identify those procedures or methods through which a moral claim is accepted as established, such as through the outcome of a wide reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 1971, p. 20 f). Engelhardt uses the term ‘moral stranger’ to identify persons who do not share sufficient basic moral premises, understandings of moral evidence, and/or of who is in moral authority, so as to be able to resolve substantive moral controversies by sound rational argument or by an appeal to authority. Socrates, of course, discusses primarily the nature of the pious, and whether it is so because the gods love it, or whether the gods love it, because it is (in itself) lovable (a distinction introduced in Plato, 1961, 11 a, 4-6). The extension to the right, the good, and the virtuous is secured by Plato’s linking the pious (which the gods love) with the just (11 e, 5). To be sure, philosophy always had played some role, even for the theology of the early Church Fathers. Not only were many of the Fathers educated in secular rhetoric, literature and philosophy. They frequently employed philosophical arguments for the purpose of warding off heresies, for defending their faith against false charges, for ordering and representing the content of others’ reports about their personal theological experiences, and for missionary inroads into the cultural elite. Beyond these uses of philosophy, there were no deeper commitments. Philosophical accounts were not rendered either foundational to their theological understandings or integral to their theological accounts. Philosophical concepts were used and discarded, exchanged for one another and re-defined in a pointedly easy-going way. These borrowings from philosophy were intellectual tools engaged insofar as this seemed helpful for communicating and clarifying insights, which some had derived from their own theological experiences. Forever placed under a hermeneutic of suspicion in light of Christ’s own opposition to the wisdom of this world (Matt. 11:25), philosophy served at best as a humble handmaiden for theology (see Engelhardt, 2007). For Wittgenstein (1967), the ontology of reality is the grammer of a particular practice: “Das Wesen ist in der Grammatik ausgesprochen…Welche Art von Gegenst and etwas ist, sagt die Grammatik” (Theologie als Grammatik) (#371, 3). “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen” (Wittgenstein, 1963, p. 85). “All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to
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possess and grasp iself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner” (Hegel, 1970, p. 202, §246). 11. Engelhardt’s second-order “morality” has been criticized in diverse ways in the literature. In the following, I shall restrict myself to the authors who contributed to the volume Reading Engelhardt, edited by Brendan P. Minogue, Gabriel PalmerFernandez, and James E. Reagan (1997). To begin, Engelhardt’s second-order morality’s openness for all sorts of motivations accounts for the fact that different participants in the permission-game can be directed and motivated by their “particular views of rationality”. This state of affairs, which Wildes thought he could invoke as the basis for a criticism of Engelhardt’s position (1997, p. 91), is thus accounted for by Engelhardt’s position. This same openness also makes Weiner’s speculations about “What does it mean to accept the permission principle” (Weiner, 1997, p. 117) plainly beside the point. The principle will concretely mean different things to different people. 12. Engelhardt’s notion of a “game,” taken from Wittgenstein, but in fact grounded in Kant’s understanding of transcendental practices, has given rise to misunderstandings. For example Robison (1997, pp. 95 ff, 104) fails to distinguish between two levels of moral concern. One level of moral concern (that of second-order “morality”) identifies a general possibility for the collaboration with moral authority of moral strangers. (This level also can identify certain practices of the interaction between moral strangers as such, e.g., the market as a general practice). The other level of moral concern identifies particular collaborations among particular consenting individuals who have come to agree with regard to particular rankings of goods and/or certain right-making conditions. Here one might think (among many other examples of collaborations within thick moral communities) of very particular markets with very particular participants, all of whom have come to agree to the rules of that market. To apply this distinction to the issue of games: the (second-order) “game”-character of the permission-principle as a transcendental condition for the possibility of collaboration as such must be distinguished from the particular (first-order) games which that permission principle allows people to play with one another (after agreeing on particular rules or goals). When Robison argues for changing the rules of the transcendental practice (second-order “game”) so as to include children as persons (p. 103), he misunderstands the transcendental and, at the same time, default character of that type one “game”. If a practice is truly a transcendental practice that lays out the grammar of a general possibility for human interaction, one cannot simply decide to change its rules. Its rules are, after all, transcendental conditions. Rule-changes are possible only with regard to first-order games, and they happen with moral authority according to the second-order “game” only if all participants have agreed. Rather than impose the particular demand that all players in all types of collaboration accept Robison’s intuitions about the importance of children, along with the rather particular moral and psychological assumptions motivating these intuitions, he should be content with the fact that Engelhardt’s second-order “game” (resting on the permission principle) offers him, like everyone else, the possibility and, therefore, the freedom to find collaborators for whatever first-order games (i.e., practices) they chose, and among those also games which admit Robison’s children.
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13. Quite understandably, Engelhardt refuses to offer particular motivations for entering into practices rooted in a transcendental possibility for authoritative collaboration. He offers a possibility, to be accepted or rejected (at a cost) by persons according to their commitments. Thus to try and challenge his proposal by demanding such motivations (“why should the strong be moral?”) (Nelson, 1997, p. 22) is beside the point. 14. For the purpose of Engelhardt’s account of the morality of moral strangers, he can say no more about persons than is necessary to recognize persons as beings who can agree to collaborate in the face of their substantive moral disagreements. This account of personhood does not carry with it any commitment regarding the dignity, absolute worth, or metaphysical roots of persons. Instead, the ontology of persons is fully exhausted by their being the source of authorization for collaboration. This is why a criticism that imputes to Engelhardt any specific view about personhood (as in Hogan, 1997, p. 181) is misplaced. 15. But even when acting in community, persons retain their personal accountability. A community’s action is accounted for by all its members, who, in entering (or ratifying their membership through their consent), accepted this responsibility. Similarly, wherever individual members affect those “outside” in obedience to their community’s norms, they remain personally responsible for any violation of the permission principle. In what concerns inter-community traffic from this person, the principle of permission has an inter-communally accepted priority over any communal morality. Whoever prioritizes the other way around (and affects outsiders without their permission) also accepts the sanctions which any breach of that principle implies. He has no generally justifiable secular grounds for protest against such sanctions. 16. The political implications of the assumption of a general moral consensus, given the failure rationally to secure such a consensus, undermine the justification of the political authority of the secular liberal state. This accounts for the merciless character of Engelhardt’s philosophical criticism—a circumstance obviously not appreciated by Nelson (1997, p. 18). These same implications also explain why the analogy between scientific and moral transcendentals, which Nelson challenges (1997, p. 25), indeed holds. Nelson claims that not accepting what is transcendentally assumed in science leaves no alternative but insanity, whereas in morality it leaves many alternatives. But if the issue is the legitimacy of political authority, and thus of political power, then those many alternatives reduce to a “yes” (simply indispensable for justification) or a “no” (disruptive of justification, and in that sense also quasi insane). 17. It should be clear that the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ introduced here concerns the presence of voluntary consent, not the personal versus institutional manner of offering such consent: institutions can, after all, be either private or public. 18. Many have attempted to construct a secular moral justification for the more than minimal state. Among the less sophisticated defenses we find Nelson (1997), who argues (p. 20, borrowing from Locke) that consent to political power is offered tacitly by any constituent who continues to reside on the territory of his particular state. Nelson here disregards what Engelhardt presupposes, namely the Nozickian insight that in a world exhaustively “owned” by states, no option is
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left for those who would rather do without any particular citizenship. Nelson also discounts the question of how states can justify imposing on those who do not welcome being politically governed the burdens of having to emigrate. Why should the individual have to leave the state, rather than the state have to leave the individual alone? Much more must be said than Nelson says. In any event, among the more sophisticated representatives of a hypothetical social contract model of the state, one may single out John Rawls (1999) with his supposition of a hypothetical rational contract. This suggests that, if only the assumed “rational” society-designers were placed behind a veil of ignorance concerning their own status in the society they were about to design, they would come up with principles (combining equality of starting positions with a justification of inequalities in outcome under the condition that all must profit some, if some are permitted to profit more), which are “procedurally just.” Yet, as Engelhardt makes clear, even this supposedly “formal” solution is anchored in a substantial, and hence particular, rationally un-authorizable, value commitment to a very particular view of “fairness”. It presupposes a specific interpretation of certain aspects of humans’ embodied life (namely their achievement of material and social resources, as well as their comparative status in this regard) as normatively relevant for those who count as “rational agents.” Rawls’ account, so Engelhardt argues, imposes as universally canonical his own parochial academic-culture vision of human flourishing, as it includes aversion to risk and envy, moderate commitment to benevolence and peace, and suspicion against human aspirations at greatness and victory—all of which may seem attractive for the limited population of somewhat more than middle-aged, well settled, New England white males, but not to others. 19. Among Engelhardt’s critics who relativize the depth of moral pluralism, there are also those others who, while conceding normative dissensus for the present, rely on future homogenizing developments for the overcoming of this plight (Hogan, 1997, p. 176). Global communication and the media-mediated proliferation of cultural products, so they argue, will surely transform a previously geographically diversified world into a “global village.” In particular, the free exchange of marketable products and services in that village will, so it is held, lead to a cultural uniformity that will affect the moral sphere as well. There is, of course, the problem of factual evidence (or counter-evidence) for such claims. Secular prophecies concerning the future universal endorsement of some particular moral vision are not helpful, given the fact that whatever agreements those who consider themselves competent (and entitled to) inaugurate such a process posit as preliminary condition for such moral harmonization, given the existing moral diversity, must be politically enforced in societies that still refuse to subscribe to such harmonization. In particular, any predictions of future global consensus will be challenged by the question as to what amount of consensus regarding what moral issues is supposed to count as normatively significant, and why. 20. On the global level of human rights advocacy, it thus becomes impossible to claim a moral superiority for Western liberal democracies and—with a philosophically good conscience—to discriminate against cultures and societies which refuse to honour the Western-democracy-version of human dignity. Once reason’s moral sterility
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21.
22.
23.
24.
Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes is exposed, all Western attempts at normatively colonizing the world degenerate into merely ideological devices. These ideas are further developed in Engelhardt (2006). Readers who find themselves classified as “moral strangers” often react with consternation. They feel rejected, and are tempted to retaliate. It is important to notice, however, that this prima facie rejection is designed, inter alia, to create some free space between the author and his readers, to impose a pause, so as to secure an opportunity to scrutinize those conditions for a more intimate normative friendship, which the customary assumption of an already accomplished mutual agreement merely hides from view. The very polemical intent of Engelhardt’s analysis of contemporary culture was obviously lost not only on Robison (1997, p. 101) and Hauerwas (1997, pp. 40 ff), who (rightly) exposes (but unfortunately with a critical intent) the lack of trust (and corresponding extensive need for coercion) in such a society, but it was also lost on Nelson (1997, p. 17). The latter criticizes Engelhardt for being oblivious to the evil consequences of permitting the principle of permission to rule supreme. But of course, Engelhardt by no means celebrates this secular transcendental fact of the matter and/or its consequences. Rather, he confronts this state of affairs as conceptually unavoidable, as long as one remains committed to justifying the use of political power by reference to a generally justifiable secular morality. He wishes to confront his contemporaries with the moral state of their culture, to awaken them to the necessity of abandoning their hope for such a secularly normative universal morality. When Nelson claims that the permission principle does not allow a person to shove another in order to avoid a mass destruction (though Engelhardt will surely concede that one may make reasonable assumptions in emergencies as to that to which a person will agree), Nelson disregards the fact that any one engaging in such an act, and pursuing a particular good which he claims as objective and important, has already thereby outed himself as member of some— how so ever soft-fringed—moral community. Engelhardt’s account leaves space for such members’ pursuing what they (if parochially) consider “good” in the social space between communities. It is just that, should their pursuit involve using others without their permission, such members must be willing to suffer whatever sanctions the public has determined for such a using. The willingness to accept an unavoidable martyrdom, after all, is a normal ingredient of any serious moral commitment. The term “noetic” is derived from the Greek ‘nous,’ understood by the Fathers of the Church in one mind with the Church of the first millennium as a capacity of the soul which, in its original design, renders the soul receptive to Divine revelations. Engelhardt’s notion of a journey is crucial. In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, the cardinal journey is the journey of persons to union with God: the journey of the particular to the Particular. Yet, Engelhardt appreciates that many persons are bound on quite different journeys. He recognizes that each journey transforms the one undertaking the journey. Engelhardt lodges a special criticism against those who invite others on a journey to universal moral agreement. To move from the particular to the universal requires sacrificing the particular. As a consequence, the very assumption of a universal rational morality evacuates the content of all
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particular moralities. The very notion of a rational moral consensus as a regulative ideal in ecumenical discussions, for example, leads the discussion partners to abandon their particular moral positions, once grounded in an experience of a particular God, in favor of the requirements of their general rational norms. Since all universality is purchased at the price of particularity, the very assumption of the possibility of taking the journey to rational moral consensus will evacuate one’s own moral and theological content and that of one’s dialogue partners. Such a journey thus leads to ever thinner moral and theological commitments. Wildes correctly recognizes this (1997, p. 87). The tendency in our culture to underestimate moral diversity is fed by the tendency in most of the still extant moral communities (especially among the Western Christian denominations) to adopt a language that enables their members to meet outsiders on the latter’s own conceptual and normative grounds. Such endeavors have usually resulted in such communities reducing what they have to offer to that which outsiders can confirm on the basis of their own beliefs. This in turn has led to the weakening of the communal profile. The ancient pagan philosophy of the circa-Mediterranean world was surely heterogeneous. Among its various expressions were those philosophical schools that recognized philosophy to be not merely an academic or intellectual endeavor, but as a way of life that would bring one into union with the object of knowledge Who is, par excellence, God. As Engelhardt shows in great detail in chapter four in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (2000, see especially pp. 184-185), when Christians came to reflect on philosophy, they recognized that a philosophy without a theology was blind and perverse. They affirmed that all true philosophy was undertaken by those holy Saints whose hearts were pure so that they could see God. It is for this reason that the great church of Christendom is called Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom). As Engelhardt makes amply clear (2000, p. 213 n. 14), Roman Catholicism (and indeed the Church of the first thousand years alive in Orthodoxy) had not concerned itself with publishing a final, single definitive list of the books of the Bible until the council of Trent (although a first step had been taken at the Synod at Basel, Session 11, February 4, 1442, in the Bull of Union with the Copts). It took quite a while before particular Protestant religions decided which list they would use. The creation of a final universal definitive list in the West was in part driven by the Protestants invoking the Bible as a means to criticize the heresies of the Roman Church, having forgotten that there was a church alive and well in the East that had excommunicated the church in the West for much the same reasons for which the Protestants were protesting against Rome. There was also the technological innovation of the printing press, so that one needed to decide which of the books of the Bible would be printed in the book now called “The Bible.” All this led to the taken-for-granted social construction of “The Bible” as the Gideon Bible that travellers find in hotel rooms. For that Christianity at one with the Christianity of the first millennium the Church is revelation. The Bible is the exemplar record of revelation. Such actions encompass the killing of the innocent (except on explicit Divine command as with Abraham), disordered sexuality, idolatry, and blasphemy.
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29. It is this destructive implication of the liberal consensus-culture for any traditional, and hence specific, moral community (and especially for traditional Christianity) which explains the rigor with which Engelhardt separates moral friends from moral strangers. It is for this reason as well that he warns the former against getting too close to the latter. Christ prophesized that those who were His would be hated by the world (Matt. 10:22)— a harshness which is not repudiated by, just as it does not repudiate, the fact that Christians, since they are enjoined to love their enemies, are at least as much obliged to love their moral strangers. 30. In all its morally and religiously cosmic significance, this rhetorically very limited agenda explains why Engelhardt has no time to engage in a detailed phenomenology of moral communities and their variegated relationships one to another. Thus Wildes’ argument (1997, p. 88) that there exists indeed overlapping consensus (securing members’ “moral acquaintanceship”) between different “milieus” within Roman Catholicism is relatively irrelevant (and insufficient to repudiate the confessed “emptiness” of Engelhardt’s secular society), as long as such consensus cannot be claimed to be universally shared and, therefore, able morally to justify secular political power in implementing whatever that consensus celebrates or demands. 31. Examples of the latter mistake can be found in Nelson (1997, p. 17) and in Weiner, when he without reservation affirms “Engelhardt’s secular bioethics supports a two-tier health care system” (1997, p. 113). Precisely because Engelhardt’s permission principle does not support public health care, but only in very hypothetical terms concedes its possibility (and affirms only that if there were such a thing, it would have to be two-tier), Engelhardt, pace Weiner (p. 120), would not even have to explain that concept of “general ownership” (which, in fact, he does at length explore). 32. Only if one conceives of freedom as a value will one worry about the different degrees to which a human being is able to realize this value (Hogan, 1997, p. 178). 33. Only if Engelhardt had affirmed freedom as a value, would it be a valid criticism that he “never defines” what it means to be free (Weiner, 1997, p. 119), though Engelhardt does explore the minimum conditions necessary for conveying permission. Similarly, when Nelson (1997, p. 21) charges Engelhardt with positing a “value” involved in keeping promises, he falls into this first trap, which was aptly recognized by Wildes (1997, p. 83). When Nelson, in addition, claims Engelhardt’s value is “very specific” he disregards the fact that promise-keeping is a central formal requirement for all efforts at collaborating freely with others, and thus a central requirement for any secular morality. 34. Readers who falsely interpret Engelhardt’s permission principle as affirming an individualism, and who then criticize him on anthropological grounds as doing an injustice to the intrinsic relatedness of humans (Hogan, 1997, p. 177), have failed to read his texts with attention. They are, in other words, unable to appreciate that both the extent and the way in which any individual conceives of his relatedness to different subsets of others will depend in each case on normative commitments, about which many among them will differ. It is precisely because Engelhardt appreciates more deeply than others the depth of certain kinds of human relatedness that he recognizes more clearly than Hogan that the “objectivity” of such relatedness is shaped by the different interpretations attached to it. However,
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Engelhardt’s general second-order “morality” is a transcendental possibility and is not dependent on Hogan’s anthropological assumptions. 35. A good example of this inability is Hauerwas (1997, p. 34 ff). In particular, when he argues that Christians should witness, rather than trying to refashion the political structure of the secular world (p. 43), he neglects the need, recognized by Engelhardt, first to separate Christianity from its all too intimate involvement with that “world.” Thus Hauerwas accepts, for example, as “Christian witness” Western Christianities’ supporting a health care system that pays exclusive attention to patients’ worldly well-being. Hauerwas is insensitive to the fact that Engelhardt endeavors to provide the very political conditions under which Western Christianity could reform itself so as to recapture the Christian tradition and recognize such support as dangerous and improper. 36. The political implications of the absence of a morally significant consensus or other ground for secular political authority are profound. The secular moral legitimacy of contemporary social democratic states is brought into question. A particularly pronounced inability to understand this political dimension is evinced by Robison, whose use of “we” oscillates between denoting players in a game all agreed on playing and members of a political entity where membership is enforced. In suggesting that one can still play the transcendental “game” Engelhardt invokes, while nevertheless introducing the permission principle “differently,” and in giving as his example “let no one become a physician unless he is willing to perform abortions” (1997, p. 105), Robison makes clear that he has not grasped the difference between voluntary and non-voluntary collaboration. 37. One of the most persistent of these secular moral commitments concerns equality (or, as in Robison, 1997, p. 107, a “fair share of a public good”). Thus Weiner misunderstands the transcendental character of Engelhardt’s permission principle: he does not realize its character as a default position which any one can assume for whatever reasons he may have, so as to secure the basis for morally authoritative collaboration among moral strangers. Engelhardt makes no claim that this possibility is good, only that it is the only possibility for authoritative collaboration in the face of robust moral pluralism. Weiner interprets the proposal quite differently; namely, as an endorsement of a particular view of just or proper interaction. Weiner consequently reflects on the conditions for a “moral authority”, which could bring all to embrace that principle, conceiving those conditions as fulfilled by the mitigation of (what he mistakenly believes he can establish as) “relevant” inequalities (1997, p. 114). Indeed, as Nelson correctly observes (1997, p. 27), the permission principle (were it to be introduced point blank) would stabilize existing power positions (except where particular persons would be entitled to particular compensation from other particular persons for particular harms the latter had imposed on them). The problem with any of the alternative construals of the permission principle is that to determine which kind of equality should be implemented, those very value-judgments about “relevant” inequalities must first be secured, concerning which general consensus just does not exist. This is why, if one decides to adopt a pure default position, one is left with no alternative but to keep that position as free from any “moral burden of proof” as possible. Absent generally conceded guidelines concerning how (why, and in what way) existing differences in social status should be removed, accepting the status quo is the
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consequence of not employing un-consented force when one cannot rationally establish that a state of affairs is unjust. 38. Thus Wildes, in spite of his thorough grasp of moral pluralism in the first part of his essay, in the second part suddenly insists on the reality of his Christian “faith seeking understanding” (1997, p. 89). In Wildes’ perception, this faith, irrespective of the diversity of meanings which “understanding” may assume among those seriously committed to differing faiths, once again suggests an ongoing universalising development. Some such project is also pursued by Hauerwas. In his insistence on the “reasonableness” of Christianity (1997, p. 38), he just does not understand that, given the empirically manifest multiplicity of interpretations of rationality or reasonableness, the burden of proof for defining either “understanding” or “reasonableness” does not lie with Engelhardt (as the one affirming their incompatible plurality) but with Hauerwas himself, as the one claiming that there can be a canonical account of these terms.
Bibliography Beauchamp, T. L., and Childress, J. F. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Engelhardt, H. T., Jr. “The philosophy of medicine: A new endeavor.” Texas Reports on Biology and Medicine 31 (1973): 443-52. ———. Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality. London: SCM Press, 1991. ———. The Foundations of Bioethics. 2d. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. ———. ed. Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus. Salem, MA: M & M Scrivener Press, 2006. ———. “Why ecumenism fails: Taking theological differences seriously.” Christian Bioethics 13, no. 1 (2007): 25-51. Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Hauerwas, S. “Peace with Engelhardt’s peace.” In Reading Engelhardt, edited by B.P. Minogue, G. Palmer-Fernandez, and J.E. Reagan, 31-44. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Hegel, G.W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952 [1807]. ———. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Translated by M.J. Petry. New York: Humanities Press, 1970. ———. Rechtsphilosophie. Frankfurt: Verlag Ullstein, 1972. Hogan, M.M. “Tris Engelhardt and the Queen of Hearts: Sentence first; verdict afterwards.” In Reading Engelhardt, edited by B.P. Minogue, G. Palmer-Fernandez, and J.E. Reagan, 175-88. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Hume, D. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973. MacIntyre, A. After Virtue. South Bend: Notre Dame University Press, 1981, 1984. Plato. “Euthyphro.” In Vol. 1 of Platonis Opera, edited by Joannes Burnet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. Marten, R. Die Möglichkeit des Unmöglichen. Zur Poesie in Philosophie und Religion. Freiburg i.Br: Karl Alber, 2006.
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Minogue, B.P., G. Palmer-Fernandez, and J.E. Reagan, eds. Reading Engelhardt. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Nelson, J.L. “Everything includes itself in power: Power and coherence in Engelhardt’s Foundations of Bioethics.” In Reading Engelhardt, edited by B.P. Minogue, G. Palmer-Fernandez, and J.E. Reagan, 15-30. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999. Robison, W.L. “Monopoly with sick moral strangers.” In Reading Engelhardt, edited by B.P. Minogue, G. Palmer-Fernandez, and J.E. Reagan, 95-112. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rorty, R., and G. Vattimo. The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Vattimo, G. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Weiner, R.B. “Beyond forbearance as the moral foundation for a health care system: An analysis of Engelhardt’s principles of bioethics.” In Reading Engelhardt, edited by B.P. Minogue, G. Palmer-Fernandez, and J.E. Reagan, 113-38.. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Wildes, K. Wm. “Engelhardt’s communitarian ethics: The hidden assumptions.” In Reading Engelhardt, edited by B.P. Minogue, G. Palmer-Fernandez, and J.E. Reagan, 77-94. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963. ———. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967.
A Confucian Student’s Dialogue with Teacher Engelhardt Ruiping Fan
I. Moral Vacuums East and West A very superficial reading of The Foundations of Bioethics (1986; 1996) might suggest that there is a significant gulf between Engelhardt’s early work and his views after he became senior editor of Christian Bioethics in 1994. I shall argue twice over that this reading is both superficial and mistaken. A careful reading of the two editions of The Foundations of Bioethics shows that the author is already pointing towards The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. In these earlier publications, he gives an account not only how the life of strangers, but also why a life framed by its morality is radically one-sided and incomplete (Engelhardt, 1991) and in need of the life of the substantive community, which he describes in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (2000). The content of The Foundations of Bioethics is fully compatible with what Engelhardt develops in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. One can go so far as to show that the argument in the early work requires a completion that is offered by the later work. That is, the later work offers an epistemic and communal perspective that completes the account of moral knowledge, morality, and moral community offered in Engelhardt’s early works. Although the Engelhardt of The Foundations of Bioethics is post-metaphysical, while the Engelhardt of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics is robustly metaphysical, in fact there is only one Engelhardt. This essay explores what the resources of Engelhardt’s reflections offer the traditional Confucian addressing the major moral, social, and political challenges of contemporary China: the rebuilding of a moral community. On the one hand, China is entering the twenty-first century as a nearly unparalleled 71 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 71-87) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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success story. In terms of its recent development, China has become a leading economic, technological, and scientific power. The reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping led more quickly than many imagined to a transformation of Chinese life. On the other hand, China faces a set of moral problems that has been described as a moral vacuum resulting from a loss of moral sense on the part of many Chinese (Wang, 2002). Elements of Chinese society have come to be characterized by corruption driven by an almost nihilist pursuit of selfsatisfaction. In his works, Engelhardt addresses primarily the issue of moral communities that share a common understanding of how to resolve their disagreements, either through sound rational argument or through an appeal to commonly accepted authorities or procedures. In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, we find that his exemplar case of moral community is that of Orthodox Christians who can worthily approach Communion. In this essay, I take issue with this privileging of religious community, because Confucians must address the moral restoration of China, while appealing neither to decisive sound rational argument, commonly accepted authorities, or God’s grace. Confucians must appeal to the force of Confucian moral and metaphysical vision and its capacity to attract Chinese individuals, Chinese communities, and Chinese political structures. Engelhardt and I in our own projects start from a diagnosis of a moral vacuum that has arisen from the collapse of traditional moral and social structures, such as Engelhardt gives regarding the West (see especially Engelhardt, 2000, chapters 1-3). However, I develop his diagnosis, and in essential ways amend his diagnosis to account for, and to address, the challenges of the Chinese situation. In so doing, this essay argues that Engelhardt’s secular account of bioethics may have underestimated the function of geographical moral communities as one finds them in these East Asian areas influenced by Confucian morality. This Confucian sense of moral community is an enormously important resource that should be drawn on to reconstruct Chinese morality and politics in the twenty-first century. The essay contends that the Engelhardtian position should be seen as much more sympathetic to Chinese, especially Confucian, political approaches than might at first appear to be the case.
II. Moral Strangers and Moral Friends Engelhardt takes seriously the cacophonous plurality of ethics and bioethics. The Foundations of Bioethics1 begins with the recognition that there are concrete but different moral communities within which men and women can live coherent moral lives and pursue virtue. “There are devout Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Catholics, Roman Catholics, Moslems, Hindus, and others. There are fervent egalitarians and libertarians. There are capitalists and socialists of various persuasions. There still remain even Marxists” (1996, p. viii).2 As he sees it, contemporary society is characterized by the existence
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of moral strangers; namely, the persons “who do not share sufficient moral premises or rules of evidence and inference to resolve moral controversies by sound rational argument, or who do not have a common commitment to individuals or institutions in authority to resolve moral controversies” (p. 7).3 Such moral strangers cannot constitute a moral community. These sustain the contentious moral pluralism of at least Western societies. In his work, community is usually contrasted with society: community is used to identify a body of men and women bound together by common moral traditions and/or practices around a shared vision of the good life, which allows them to collaborate as moral friends. In contrast, society is used to identify an association that compasses diverse moral communities, as well as moral strangers. While moral friends can resolve moral controversies by sound moral argument or by an appeal to jointly recognized moral authority, moral strangers must resolve moral controversies by mutual agreement (p. 7). Therefore, the moral fabric of society is both thin and marked by contention. Engelhardt’s secular, moral, and epistemological work is best understood as a series of studies in controversy theory. In various publications, he explores the circumstances under which moral controversies can be brought to a resolution. Because of the formative influence of Roman Catholic Scholastic reflections on Western European thought, which reflections gave issue to the Enlightenment, much of the West has come to regard moral and cultural traditions as structured primarily by a web of discursive arguments. Engelhardt in The Foundations of Bioethics focuses on the possibility of resolving moral controversies through sound rational argument. He brings these assumptions into question. The appeal to sound rational argument as the foundation for the moral intellectual perspective of the West fails. As is well-known, the Western Scholastic and Enlightenment project attempts through the capacities of discursive reason to establish a universal content-full ethics and a moral community of all persons outside of any particular religious and cultural assumptions. It attempts to frame a contentful moral vision from nowhere. According to this project, all persons through sound rational arguments can come to recognize themselves as members of a common, universal, moral community. Engelhardt sees this project as totally hopeless. Indeed, one of the major arguments that he has constructed in The Foundation of Bioethics is to show why this Scholastic and later Enlightenment aspiration is a blind alley. From his view, no matter what kind of approach one takes, one’s argument will either lead to no substantive moral conclusion, beg the question, or involve an infinite regress. For instance, an appeal to a formal structure (such as a formalist approach) provides no moral content; an appeal to any particular moral content (such as an intuitionist approach) begs the question of the moral standard by which the content is selected; and an appeal to an external reality (such as a naturalist approach) will show what is, not what ought to be or how what is should be
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judged (pp. 41-42). Engelhardt analyzes in detail eight popular approaches that have been designed by modern philosophers and explicates in depth why they must all fail (pp. 42-65). Given the centrality of sound rational argument in the fabric of the Western moral and metaphysical cultural edifice, the failure of foundationalism threatens the West with postmodernity and nihilism. Indeed, this failure brings the secular West to the brink of nihilism. In the face of this crisis, Engelhardt points out that there is still another possibility for framing a common secular morality. The only difficulty is that this morality must be grounded not in reason, but in the will (in permission). This morality cannot have any canonical moral content (it cannot establish as binding one among the many possible rankings of cardinal human goods). Engelhardt’s account of this possibility for a secular morality allows him to rescue a small sliver of the Enlightenment project of framing a common morality. It also allows him to give an account of the authority of those practices such as the free market, which bind moral strangers together across the globe. Engelhardt reminds his reader that, even if one is not able to resolve controversies by sound rational argument, and even if all those in controversy are not brought to a common agreement by conversion, as long as one does not wish simply to resort to what will appear to others as mere force when imposing what one desires or what one knows to be true, then one can at least derive common moral authority from consent. Against this background, Engelhardt is able to underscore, “If one is interested in collaborating with moral authority in the face of moral disagreements without fundamental recourse to force, then one must accept agreement among members of the controversy or peaceable negotiation as the means for resolving concrete moral controversies” (1996, p. 68). He summarizes this requirement as the principle of permission: “Authority for actions involving others in a secular pluralist society is derived from their permission” (p. 122). This is a default means of gaining common authority when persons enter into moral practices grounded neither in sound rational argument nor in the noetic knowledge that, Engelhardt claims, leads to conversion. Engelhardt understands that he is outlining the equivalent of a transcendental condition in the sense of providing the grounds for the possibility of an unavoidable general human practice: the moral collaboration of moral strangers. For Engelhardt, this transcendental condition is the equivalent of a conceptual grammar that lies at the basis of all practices binding moral strangers in forms of collaboration that each of the participants can recognize as authorized by his consent. This transcendental condition, this ground for the possibility of a particular form of morality, allows an explanation of the ways in which numerous practice-relevant understandings of moral rationality take shape (which practices do have moral content). Engelhardt appreciates that, in the actual world actual persons make actual
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agreements, so that thick practices come into existence through the development of spontaneous order. The result is that, for example, very local markets can have very local and particular rules. Beyond such markets, thick moral communities with practice-relative content can be regarded as coming into existence through a set of agreements, formal and informal (such as the moral character of the bounds of a particular form of marriage: an Orthodox Jewish marriage). In this way, Engelhardt accounts for the deep structure of a wide range of practice-specific understandings. From the outside, the general secular moral legitimacy of such practices can be regarded as grounded in mutual consent. From the inside, their legitimacy will not be seen as grounded in mutual consent, but in the mutual encounter with and experience of a moralmetaphysical truth, a concern for a particular view of human flourishing or the pursuit of a particular cluster of ordered human goods. Engelhardt’s procedural morality can thus achieve one cardinal element of the Enlightenment project: it can account for the moral authority of a wide range of moral interactions, as well as disclose the possibility of a universal morality binding persons as moral strangers. It has the advantage of justifying all practices “that draw their authority from bare consent or from the necessary forbearance from using individuals without their consent…”, such as “free and informed consent, the market, and limited democracies” (1996, p. 71). It also has the advantage of accounting from the outside for the legitimacy of numerous moral communities built up around very specific moral practices. The participants can be regarded as consenting to a practice, although the participants would never see it that way. What Engelhardt has established for contemporary pluralist society to settle moral controversies among moral strangers is, in his own terms, a content-less, purely procedural morality. This morality is content-less and purely procedural because it involves no particular moral vision or understanding. Neither does it give any value to agreement or permission. It only provides “a means of characterizing the secular moral community as the possible intellectual standpoint of persons interested in resolving moral controversies in ways not fundamentally based on force” (1996, p. 69). For him, this is all that secular reason can disclose for us. Importantly, Engelhardt recognizes that there is much more to be affirmed morally than sound rational argument can justify or common agreement authorize. The exemplar case of this further and cardinal genre of knowledge he takes to be provided by the noetic knowledge (a form of non-sensible, empirical knowledge) that Orthodox Christians hold to be at the foundation of their theological claims and their way of life. It is out of recognition of what he claims this knowledge to disclose that he holds that one should want more than a sparse morality grounded in consent can justify. He goes so far as to assert that one should join a religion and be careful to join the right one (1996,
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p. xi). This claim indicates both the thickness of his community of moral friends, as well as that Engelhardt regards the exemplar moral community as one with religious commitments. Engelhardt recognizes that, since the sparse morality grounded in consent primarily presupposes that consent allows the interaction of persons embedded in diverse moral communities, it is quite another matter if all one has is what is provided by Engelhardt’s procedural morality of permission. In the last case, one’s morality will indeed be vacuous and inadequate to any substantive notion of human flourishing (see Engelhardt, 1991, especially chapters 1 and 2). Further, such a general procedural morality will allow much that Engelhardt’s moral community will noetically know to be deeply immoral and perverse. Engelhardt’s procedural morality is not celebrated by him as a freestanding morality. Instead, he would hope that at most it would serve morally to authorize the collaboration of persons already living in their own thick moral communities. It is not the morality by which one should live a full-fledged moral life (1996, p. 421). Finally, in cooperating with moral strangers in today’s secular pluralist circumstances, one must tolerate much that one knows to be profoundly wrong. This wrongness, for him, “cannot be remedied by rational analysis and argument, [but] only by conversion to the moral community that will give proper guidance and moral substance” (1996, p. 421). These reflections lead Engelhardt to The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (2000), where he addresses a content-full ethics that binds Christian moral friends. For him, this Christian ethics is not only a content-full ethics, but the content-full ethics that can remedy the one-sidedness and incompleteness of the sparse secular ethics (not to mention the wrongheaded moralities of other moral communities). Thus, it is both superficial and mistaken to take that there are two Engelhardts—an early Engelhardt engaged in secular bioethics and a late Engelhardt committed to Christian bioethics. There is in fact only one Engelhardt: his intellectual adventure is always attuned to finding an adequate answer to the question regarding how it is possible for a devout Christian like himself to live a Christian moral life in a contemporary society that is both post-Christian and neo-pagan. This possibility requires, from his view, both the sparse fabric of a libertarian cosmopolitan ethic regulated by the principle of permission and the substance of a Christian morality that draws on canonical Christian ontological and epistemological foundations. That is why the two foundations—the foundations of bioethics and the foundations of Christian bioethics—are complementary to each other. Engelhardt is diagnosing the character of life in the post-traditional West, while also pointing to what he takes to be its needed therapy.
III. Moral Community: Who is In, Who is Out, and Why As Engelhardt’s pagan Confucian student, I am not in a position to comment on his Christian bioethics. But I have enjoyed consulting him
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continuously regarding the sparse secular ethics that he proposes for binding moral strangers. I say “continuously” because our conversations reach back at least to the time I became his graduate student at Rice University in 1992. He and I must be moral strangers according to his definition: it seems that, for many moral controversies, we do not share sufficient moral premises or rules of evidence and inference to resolve our controversies by sound rational argument (since he holds fundamental Christian premises and rules while I Confucian), neither do we have a common commitment to individuals or institutions in authority to resolve them (since he has his Christian priest while I my Confucian family). He has always been careful to treat me—a pagan student—in ways in which his secular principle of permission has never been violated. Much more than that, his love, care, patience, and incessant assistance have never failed to fill, enrich, and deepen my life. I am confident to say that I cannot be luckier than to have become a student of this great man! All this seems to pose no problem for this account—we are simply affective friends, but not moral friends. As he states, “given the complexity of human circumstances and inclinations, moral strangers can be the best of affective friends” (1996, p. 7). However, this account by Engelhardt appears inadequate to the task of characterizing the full texture of the differences separating his Orthodox Christian understandings from those of most Confucians. It is also insufficient for addressing the contemporary moral crisis of China. It is clear that for Engelhardt the exemplar case of a moral community is that of a robust, religious community bound in noetic knowledge to a very personal God. The result is that his view of the exemplar moral community is one that is morally and metaphysically very thick. In part, this state of affairs may reflect the difference between a robust monotheism and a rather relaxed Chinese paganism with a de facto acceptance of polytheism. Although Confucianism claims sufficient moral premises and rules for its believers to follow, it is quite another thing to assume that religious community is the primordial model of moral community.4 Many of the religious communities of the contemporary, post-traditional West do not demand the strict coherence around a common understanding of right worship and right belief that is demanded of Orthodox Christians. No doubt Engelhardt would find such communities to be deficient cases or flawed examples of moral communities in general and of religious communities in particular. This is especially important where there are important moral communities not completely overlapped by religious communities, with the result that it is unclear as to where the final loyalties of the members lie. For example, many contemporary Roman Catholics are also liberal social-democrats in their political morality, and others are political conservatives. While both still belong to the same religious community, they could also be classified as members of other moral communities, one liberal social-democratic,
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another conservative, so that it may be unclear as to which commitment will trump which in what circumstances. When Engelhardt takes “sufficient moral premises and rules of evidence and inference” to be the standard for identifying moral friends, it is not quite clear whether “sufficient” is used in the sense of quality or quantity. If it is used in the sense of quantity, then an atheist egalitarian and a Roman Catholic egalitarian may count as belonging to a common moral community, while an anti-egalitarian Roman Catholic and an egalitarian Roman Catholic may not. This is because, given the large amount of social and moral issues involved with the egalitarian and anti-egalitarian distinction in many contemporary societies, the moral premises and rules of evidence and inference shared by the atheist egalitarian and the Roman Catholic egalitarian may outnumber the moral premises and rules of evidence and inference shared by the antiegalitarian Roman Catholic and the egalitarian Roman Catholic. On the other hand, if “sufficient” is used in the sense of quality, then one must decide which moral premises and rules of evidence and inference are weightier than others in identifying moral friends or moral strangers. Is a religious moral premise always more important and, therefore, often more compelling, than a secular moral premise? I think Engelhardt would agree that this question can only be sensibly answered by each particular moral community in terms of its respective internal view. The question then is, do all moral communities take religious moral premises as more important than secular moral premises in identifying a moral community? Are they correct in doing so, where this is the case? It seems that, in constructing The Foundations of Bioethics, Engelhardt is aware of all these issues. For instance, in an endnote to the book we read the following: It is important to recognize that persons who do not live their lives fully embedded within a very thickly joined community, such as a monastery or some other committed religious community, or a group of ideologically dedicated, will find that they are both moral friends and moral strangers in different areas with the same people—which is to say that, in some areas of discussion, they will be able to resolve disputes by sound rational argument or by commonly acknowledged moral authorities. In other areas, resolution will be possible only by agreement. (1996, p. 24 n. 13, emphasis added)
This means that since many people today do not live in thickly-bound religious communities or groups of the ideologically dedicated (which are like tight-knit religious sects in many ways), many are inevitably both moral friends and moral strangers with each other in different areas. Many who explore Engelhardt’s use of the terms moral stranger and moral friend do not have a strictly analytic philosophical problem with the substance of his claims. Instead, they are disturbed by the rhetorical associations that
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come along with calling others moral strangers. Engelhardt as an Orthodox Christian wants to draw clear lines between orthodox and heterodox moral, communitarian, and metaphysical understandings. He, therefore, engages what have been for many of his readers emotively shocking, if not highly provocative terms. His Orthodox readers along with other traditional Christians and Orthodox Jews may in principle be willing not only to grant the distinctions he draws, but also to underscore the rhetorical associations. Not only do they do so for conceptual reasons, but they join Engelhardt for his socio-political reasons as well. Others may want to resist these distinctions, because they wish to resist his divisive agenda, which is clear in The Foundations of Bioethics, and even clearer in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Engelhardt is committed to drawing a crisp line between the orthodox and the heterodox, so as to rally his troops to the defense of what he takes to be both traditional and proper. A Confucian will in general not wish to attend to such bright distinctions. For Confucians, the difficulty with Engelhardt and with Orthodox Christians generally is that, although they recognize the importance of communities and friends, and even of the family as a moral community, they always hold that their community with other Orthodox Christians, or more precisely put, their community with God, trumps all other loyalties. Engelhardt and his Orthodox will hold that the family is properly constituted in terms of its relationship with God the Father in terms of whom all other instances of fatherhood are to be understood. Hence, the focus by Engelhardt and Orthodox Christians on their community with those who recognize this prior, defining community with God. A Confucian may wish to ignore such boundaries, even when they undoubtedly exist. This is because within a Confucian perspective things look and feel quite different. If anyone is both my moral friend (in some areas) and my moral stranger (in other areas), my interest in calling him a moral friend or a moral stranger will most probably reflect some over-arching concern for community. Confucian community-building requires underscoring communality and discounting many areas of disagreements. Chinese in general, and Confucians in particular, seek social harmony.
IV. Confucianism as a Fuzzy, Bordered, Open-Ended Community Engelhardt would argue that his account is not to blame for the circumstance that many people today do not live in deep-rooted and thickly joined moral communities. They could and should, he would contend, seek and join in such profound communities. He holds that they should all become Orthodox Christians. This account, taken as a whole, overestimates the significance of non-geographical moral communities (such as religious community) and underestimates the significance of geographically located moral communities (such as family, neighborhood,
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city, and state). Non-geographical moral communities exist across the borders of states. Religious sects constitute prominent examples of such non-geographical communities. Given economic globalization and the movements of populations, non-geographical communities have begun to play more and more significant moral and cultural roles. One finds major religious denominations that maintain their respective religious and moral integrity across geographical regions. Still, while affirming the importance of such non-geographical moral communities, Engelhardt has under-analyzed the function of geographical moral communities. At least in the East Asian areas shaped by Confucian moral teachings and practices, one can find significant geographical moral communities cutting across different religious communities, so as to include Confucians, Buddhists and Daoists (the so-called “Three Teachings” or “Three Religions”). In the case of China, for example, for some two thousand years, Confucianism, as the dominant religion, has been quite tolerant of and integrative of Buddhism and Daoism. These three religions have dialogued, argued, and competed with each other in various ways, but have never fallen into bloody religious warfare. As a result, although the dominant ethics and politics in the life of Chinese have always been Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist religious elements have also been present. Accordingly, a Chinese village has certainly typically been a Confucian moral community, but it has not been a purely Confucian religious community. Confucians have never thought it a good idea to attempt to prohibit crossreligion marriages in order to maintain Confucian religious integrity. Instead, given the tolerant Confucian views, most Buddhists and Daoists have accepted the Confucian moral viewpoint that everyone is naturally born into a family and should cultivate the Confucian (natural) virtues in their familial and social lives. Hence, a Chinese family is a Confucian moral community, but may not be a Confucian religious community. In the Chinese family it is not unusual for the father to be a Confucian and the mother a Buddhist. In extreme cases, one can find religiously quite mixed families: the father is a Confucian, the mother a Buddhist, and the grandparents Daoists. But most Chinese take their three-generation families (if not even larger families) as their primary moral communities. They practice the Confucian moral virtues in taking care of each other, even when they hold more or less different religious metaphysical beliefs.5 My point with regard to Engelhardt is that, with respect to the great majority of Chinese who live, marry, and raise children, they do so within a quite open-ended understanding of what it is to be Confucian. Within such an understanding of Confucianism and in terms of the rather open-ended understanding of moral community that it sustains, does it make sense to take such Chinese family members as both moral friends (in some areas) and moral strangers (in other areas), even if that is literally true in terms of Engelhardtian terminology? With his Orthodox Christian experience,
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Engelhardt would find that Confucians do not take seriously their religious (metaphysical) convictions—e.g., a Confucian husband has no problem with his wife’s worship of Buddha for the family’s welfare, as long as she also exercises the essential Confucian rituals, such as performing sacrifices to the ancestors. Like the Christian missionaries to China, Engelhardt is unsympathetic to the circumstance that many Chinese pray to all kinds of deities, such as Confucian spirits, Buddhist gods, and Daoist immortals (indeed, they often put the statues of all of them into a common temple) and are not bothered at all by the inconsistency of these various religious and metaphysical beliefs. An ordinary Chinese might honor his ancestors by following the rigid rules of the sacrificial ritual dictated by Confucianism, attend a Buddhist pageant, and practice Daoist breathing exercises, all in the same day. Chinese are not the type of philosophers who worry about the theoretical coherence of different metaphysical systems. What they care about most is a practical morality: whom should I love and how should I love? For Confucians, the importance of moral community is not the common embrace of a consistent theoretical perspective, but the fulfillment of the practice of loyalty: your primary moral friends are those who sincerely take care of you, who give priority to your welfare over others, and who would even in some cases sacrifice their own interests to promote yours. Whether they are Confucians in religion, they are the most valuable persons to you—especially in this world of persistent scarcity of resources and competition. Indeed, from the Confucian view, even if you are a Confucian, your Buddhist mother is your primary moral friend, not a far-away Confucian whom you have never gotten to know, even if that person happens to hold Confucian religious and moral convictions similar to your own. On the other hand, it is not quite clear if these considerations stand in any real contradiction with the principle of permission that Engelhardt has proposed for guiding today’s pluralistic societies. As he points out, “the distinction between moral friends and moral strangers, between societies and communities, is directed to the way in which controversies can be resolved with commonly recognized moral authority” (1996, p. 24 n. 13). Were a Confucian child and his Buddhist mother to hold the same moral premises and rules of evidence and inference, they could resolve their moral controversies through sound rational argument. Where they do not hold compatible moral premises and rules, they can resolve their controversies by an appeal to their commonly recognized moral authority: the family as a whole. In either instance, their solutions are morally authoritative—they have not used unconsented-to force in their actions with each other. For those Confucians and Buddhists who do not share sufficient moral premises and rules, and who do not have a commonly recognized individual or institution, Engelhardt would contend that they must resolve their moral controversies by agreement or permission.
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Engelhardt’s proposal has obvious moral-theoretical advantages for the contemporary world, especially at international levels. On the one hand, Engelhardt is able to account for international collaboration among moral strangers at numerous levels. Unlike those who proclaim consensus in the face of irresolvable moral diversity, Engelhardt has the conceptual resources to recognize that global collaboration is not grounded in a common morality, in a common ranking of goods, in a common understanding of human flourishing, but rather in the sparse authority provided by the moral power of consent (Engelhardt, 2006b). On the other hand, unlike many who would step away from ever advancing canonical moral and metaphysical claims, he clearly affirms his Orthodox Christianity as providing the content-full morality that is canonical, albeit not justifiable through sound rational argument (Engelhardt, 2007a). He argues for mutual respect, peaceful negotiation, and consent-based cooperation, but he is committed to converting and baptizing us all. Despite his religious commitments, if this principle of permission could be followed in contemporary international politics, the world would no doubt be a better place than it is currently under the guidance of a liberal social-democratic ideology. The principle of permission should be understood in a practice-relevant sense. The truth of the matter is that real moralities are always embedded in particular practices.6 From a Confucian point of view, morality begins from a familial sentiment and related activities. For Confucius (551-479 BC), everyone is born into a family and has a natural sentiment to love parents and siblings. The love between parent and child and between siblings is both the genesis and the norm of the fundamental human virtue, ren (Analects 1: 2). Ren must then be cultivated and promoted through a system of familial and social activities (called li—ritual—in the Confucian Chinese culture) to become realized as a virtue. While Confucius was not unique in recognizing that humans must follow proper rules and form appropriate behavior patterns in order peaceably and virtuously to live together and realize a good life, he was truly distinguished from almost all other ancient sages in vindicating the idea that human virtue cannot be realized independently of rituals, the essential group of particular human activities and practices affirmed by a culture. The Confucian principle of morality or fundamental virtue is arrived at and embodied in the practical activities and social institutions affirmed by the Confucian culture.7 This is the case for any general moral principle or virtue, whether it is Confucian or not. In short, when a general principle or complete virtue is articulated for the sake of directing individual actions and social institutions, it is nothing but a handy abbreviation for a concrete web of ideas and values secured and embedded in particular practices. In this sense, general moral principles are inevitably practice-relevant principles. This affirmation of ritual appears to be underscored in Engelhardt’s emphasis on the central role of liturgy in the moral life (Engelhardt, 2005).
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V. Whose Morality? Which Politics? What May One Do in a Less Than Ideal Political State? In The Foundations of Bioethics, Engelhardt shows that not only can the consent of collaborating individuals account for the moral authority binding persons in actually existing practices such as global markets, but it can also in principle give authority to the minimal state. While the market does exist, the minimal state exists nowhere on the face of the earth. Whether or not the minimal state ever existed, its non-existence in the twenty-first century means that all contemporary states are, for Engelhardt, in varying degrees illegitimate. To some extent, this state of affairs does not bother him. First, he regards the minimal state as a secular regulative moral ideal. Second, he lives in a non-geographically-located Orthodox Christian moral community (with a robust religious grounding). He is of the view that this community can use Engelhardt’s secular morality to defend its existence to secular states. His community can say to the secular state, “Leave us alone. In general secular terms, we can justify our internal moral authority better than you can justify your secular moral authority. We are a free-will association, and all in this community freely submit to its power structure and affirm its beliefs.” Although he regards his community as having this defense, Engelhardt does not hold that the substantive moral authority of his community comes from consent (that defense is only the justification offered to the external moral observer). He holds that the substantive authority for his community comes from God. The question is then what Engelhardt’s theory has to tell both Orthodox Christians and Confucians about how they should regard the much-more-than-minimal states that actually exist and in which they actually live (Engelhardt, 2006a). The issue of how one ought to live in far-from-minimal states is of great significance for moral communities such as Confucians and Orthodox Christians, who are interested in maintaining traditional social structures such as the family in robustly post-traditional societies. What social structures ought one to endeavor to use the force of the more-than-minimal state to establish and protect? In answering such questions, in analyzing how to assess and limit the abuses of more than minimal secular, post-traditional states, Engelhardt unlike liberal social democrats does not hold that civil rights have a priority over property rights. Because of Engelhardt’s recognition of the strong bond between embodiment and property, property rights have for him a priority over such civil rights as the voting franchise and public protest. He will then accept some limits on civil rights, if this will protect the more fundamental property and market rights. In terms of such concerns, Engelhardt’s position allows him to judge among contemporary more-thanminimal states as to which is more morally oppressive and disordered. In deciding which is to be preferred, liberal-social-democratic states such as the
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United States with heavy taxation and an emerging post-traditional morality, or market-rights-oriented polities such as Hong Kong with an equally posttraditional morality, all else being equal, his position puts him on the side of Hong Kong. Here a bit of historical reflection is in order which surfaces in some of Engelhardt’s recent work. In the twentieth century, the United States moved from being a more-than-minimal state that gave robust recognition to market rights, while establishing a generic Christian moral and religious understanding, to being a more-than-minimal state that gives less recognition to market and property rights, while dis-establishing its generic, mostly Christian moral and religious understandings. The current American polity is now on its way to endorsing a post-Christian, post-traditional moral vision, while decreasing property and market rights (Engelhardt, 2001). In such circumstances, it would appear that in secular moral terms Engelhardt’s Orthodoxy may, and should, use the political processes of the secular, morethan-minimal state to protect or even establish their own community’s moral and religious commitments. In terms of the arguments of The Foundations of Bioethics (Engelhardt, 1996), such attempts at establishment can be justified as acts of self-defense against a state that has transgressed the constraints of a minimal state. There appears to be no secular moral grounds for Engelhardt to deny this option to his Orthodox Christian moral community. In such circumstances, the morality of a non-geographically-located community can through an act of self-defense come to establish its moral vision over a particular geographical area. Confucianism has suffered a series of anti-Confucian political movements with roots in the late nineteenth century which culminated in a number of explicit rejections of Confucianism, such as the May Fourth movement of 1919 and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The superstructures of China‘s politics and economics are no longer Confucian. However, this does not mean that the Confucian civilization has been placed in a museum. To the contrary, despite radical changes in China over the last century, the Chinese moral sense and the general understanding of moral agency remain at bottom Confucian. At the foundations of contemporary Chinese culture, there remains a strong Confucian sub-structure, which is the source of the dynamism of China‘s contemporary social transition, as well as of the Chinese economic reforms and remarkable success of the last three decades. Confucians are called morally to engage in fully restoring contemporary Chinese culture. China must be rendered whole through restoring proper Confucian intellectual understandings and actual living practices of morality and politics. There appear to be a number of points in which the Confucian can agree with Engelhardt, the Orthodox Christian. First, like the Orthodox who for the most part remained untouched by the West’s Scholasticism and Enlightenment (Engelhardt, 2007b), Confucians can regard many of the intellectual puzzles
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generated by the West as just that: intellectual puzzles irrelevant to the concrete life of Confucians and a Confucian society. Second, Confucians, like the Orthodox, will assert a privileged access to moral truth and will invoke that access as the basis for the authority of the Confucian community preserving itself, even when this involves acting to achieve governance over the surrounding society. Like Orthodox Christians, Confucians will celebrate when Heaven gives them the opportunity to enthrone an emperor. Confucians will resist Engelhardt’s crisp line between moral friends and moral strangers. Unlike Engelhardt, this attempt to establish Confucianism will not in principle give much emphasis to Engelhardt’s distinction between a Confucian moral community and a Confucian society. In part, this is the case because Confucians do not hold any ritual equivalent of the Orthodox Christian Eucharist in which only those of ritual purity may participate (Engelhardt, 2005). For the Confucian, it is enough that, in China, most people have implicitly, if not explicitly, consented to the government’s restricting certain religious actions and promoting certain Confucian practices to preserve Confucian virtues. This is so not only because the Chinese have never explicitly required state religious neutrality, but also because they have certain areas of religious freedom.
Acknowledgments I thank H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. and Mark J. Cherry for their useful comments on the earlier drafts of this essay. The support of the Governance in Asia Research Center at City University of Hong Kong is acknowledged with gratitude.
Notes 1. It has been generally agreed that there is no real substantive difference between the two editions of the book, except for some terminological changes made for the sake of accuracy, such as a change from “the principle of autonomy” used in the first edition to “the principle of permission” used in the second edition. For the sake of simplicity, this essay only cites the second edition. 2. Interestingly, he does not mention Confucians. This “omission” may not only be because of the decline of Confucianism in the modern time, but may also be because he finds that Confucians are not seriously religious. See section IV. 3. In contrast, “moral friends are those who share enough of a content-full morality so that they can resolve moral controversies by sound moral argument or by an appeal to a jointly recognized moral authority whose jurisdiction they acknowledge as derived from a source other than common agreement” (1996, p.7). 4. Engelhardt mentions non-religious moral communities in many places of his book. However, anyone seriously reading through the book would get the impression that religious community is usually in his mind when he characterizes a close or
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profound moral community. For instance, he says “moral friends can become moral strangers overnight through heresy or schism” (1996, p. 25 n. 13). 5. One must concede at least one point to Engelhardt: a Confucian highly dedicated to rightly-ordered Confucian views would not want his son or daughter to marry a Buddhist or Daoist who took either of these religions too seriously. 6. Michael Walzer has clearly spelled out the embodiment of morality in thick practices: “morality is thick from the beginning, culturally integrated, fully resonant, and it reveals itself thinly only on special occasions, when moral language is turned to special purposes” (1994, p. 4). 7. This does not mean that the rituals should never change. Confucius certainly understands that the rituals did change throughout Chinese history (Analects 2: 23). But he does not think such change can be directed by one overriding principle. Rather, it should be achieved through a procedure in which one would integrate and balance relevant moral concerns and ideas, all of which are practice-relevant (e.g., Analects 3:4, 9:3, 17:21).
Bibliography Confucian Analects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1971. Engelhardt, H. Tristram, Jr. The Foundations of Bioethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 1996. ———. Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991. ———. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, The Netherland: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. ———. “Life and Death after Christendom: The Moralization of Religion and the Culture of Death.” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity 14 (June 2001): 18-26. ———. “Taking Moral Difference Seriously: Morality after the Death of God.” In Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society, edited by Douglas Farrow, 116-39. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. ———. “Sin and Bioethics: Why a Liturgical Anthropology is Foundational.” Christian Bioethics 11, no. 2 (August 2005): 221-39. ———. “Public Discourse and Reasonable Pluralism: Rethinking the Requirements of Neutrality.” In Handbook of Bioethics and Religion, edited by David E. Guinn, 169-94. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006a. ———. “The Search for a Global Morality: Bioethics, the Culture Wars, and Moral Diversity.” In Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus, edited by H. T. Engelhardt, Jr., 18-49. Salem, MA: M & M Scrivener Press, 2006b. ———. “Why Ecumenism Fails: Taking Theological Differences Seriously.” Christian Bioethics 13, no.1 (January-April 2007a): 25-51. ———. “Critical Reflections on Theology’s Handmaid: Why the Role of Philosophy in Orthodox Christianity is so Different.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no.1 (2007b): 53-75.
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———. “The Euthyphro’s Dilemma Reconsidered: A Variation on a Theme from Body on Halakhic Method.” In Pluralistic Casuistry, edited by M.J. Cherry and A.S. Iltis, 107-28. New York: Springer, 2007c. ———. “The Family in Transition and in Authority: The Impact of Biotechnology.” In The Family, Medical Decision-Making, and Biotechnology: Critical Reflections on Asian Moral Perspectives, edited by Shui Chuen Lee, 27-46. Dordecht: Springer, 2007d. Walzer, Michael. Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Wang, Xiaoying. “The Post-Communist Personality: The Spectre of China’s Capitalist Market Reforms.” The China Journal 47 (January 2002): 1-17.
Completing The Picture: Engelhardt’s Christian Bioethics Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J.
Some readers might think that The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (hereafter Christian Bioethics) represents an about face in the thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. In the field of bioethics, Engelhardt is well known for his arguments in The Foundations of Bioethics (hereafter Foundations), and Bioethics and Secular Humanism (hereafter Secular Humanism), for a thin, procedural ethic in a secular world. In Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt argues for a rich content-full1 Christian bioethics. Christian Bioethics seems to be an abrupt about-face. However, to see Christian Bioethics as a complete change in direction would be a misreading of his work. This essay will argue that Christian Bioethics is not a change in direction but the completion of a journey. Furthermore, I would argue that, to achieve a complete understanding of Engelhardt’s thought, readers need to examine the three books together. While they are independent works, the books are best understood as forming a whole picture. The books are like a triptych in which each painting, though complete in itself, is given greater meaning when viewed with the others. While readers may think that the books are very different works, there are a number of themes that bring these very different works together. One deep and influential theme that runs through each of the works is about moral epistemology and how content-full claims for bioethics can be known. In Foundations and Secular Humanism, Engelhardt argues that public reason in a secular society can establish only a content-thin bioethics based on the necessary conditions for moral discourse. The focus of his concern in Foundations is moral reason in a secular society. In Christian Bioethics, moral reason is set 89 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 89-104) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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within the context of a believing community. In this context, reason can establish much more by way of content. Engelhardt’s exploration of these epistemological questions raises important issues about public reason and the role of faith that can be both religious and nonreligious. While exploring these epistemological questions, Engelhardt argues for a second theme in his writing, about the importance of moral community in shaping moral knowledge and action. It is out of his exploration of moral epistemology that Engelhardt argues for the social construction of moral knowledge. The role of social and communal dimensions for moral knowledge is very important to the positions he develops in the three books. Engelhardt argues that practical reason is always from “somewhere” and never from “nowhere.” A third theme, which builds from the first two themes, concerns the implications of his analysis for understanding moral community, moral knowledge, and the moral authority of the secular state. When discussing Engelhardt’s work, people often begin with his views about the limited state. That is the wrong starting point. His views about the role of the state are not his starting point but rather they are based on his analysis of public moral reason and questions of moral epistemology. Instead of starting with his views about the state, one ought to start with his argument about public reason and its limits. These views set the stage for his conclusions about the secular state and its limited moral authority (Engelhardt and Wildes, 1994). In this essay, I trace each of these themes: moral knowledge, the context of moral reason, and the moral authority of the state. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate how the three different books are best understood in relationship to one another. The essay will begin by tracing out the “postmodern dilemma” for moral thought and its implications for moral epistemology. It is in light of this view about the limits of moral reason that we come to understand the social nature of moral knowledge. This, in turn, leads to views about the secular state and the role of community in moral knowledge and action.
I. The Postmodern Dilemma and Moral Epistemology Engelhardt situates bioethics in the midst of what he calls the postmodern dilemma for ethics. ‘Postmodern’ is a risky term to use since it is used to convey a number of different views in contemporary intellectual discourse. Consequently, the term itself has become a source of controversy in the academy. Engelhardt understands the postmodern dilemma as both an epistemological problem and a cultural problem for ethics. The project for ethics in the Modern Age was to develop morality outside of the context of any particular religion or moral community. A key theme for Engelhardt, developed in both Foundations and Secular Humanism, is that the modern project has failed. On Engelhardt’s account the modern age sought to
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develop ethics by appeal to reason, or some human faculty like intuition or affection, without resorting to cultural or religious beliefs. He sets the modern project in ethics against the backdrop of the Reformation and the wars of religion. The failure of the modern project to find common justification for ethics leads to the postmodern dilemma of how to justify moral choices in a secular society. There are two dimensions to the postmodern dilemma for ethics: the diversity of moral cultures in secular societies and the loss of a common moral culture pose both socio-cultural and philosophical/epistemological issues. These two dimensions—epistemological and cultural—are interwoven. Moral judgments are structured with a context and the contemporary, secular world has many contexts. Moral reason, intuition, or affection cannot stand outside these contexts to determine a right answer. To the degree that there is a shared moral culture, the epistemological questions are not as evident. But as a society becomes more culturally and morally diverse, moral assumptions are less and less common and moral questions are framed in many different ways. Such diversity is a particular problem for health care and bioethics in that actions in medicine and health care are often understood and evaluated within a framework of moral commitments. Engelhardt argues in Foundations and elsewhere against a model of medicine as “applied science.” Health care and medical care are delivered within the context of people’s moral frameworks which often shape our views of what is in the “best interest” of patients. Furthermore, the delivery of medical care requires the cooperation of patients, professionals, and organizations who frequently have different moral views. Engelhardt understands that one of the key challenges for bioethics is resolving the moral dilemmas in a morally and culturally diverse society. Secular bioethics must seek to resolve shared moral controversies in the midst of the limits of moral epistemology and the diversity of secular societies. Bioethics has tried to resolve moral controversies in a number of ways. It has followed the road of modern moral philosophy. Notably it has often appealed to sound argument, or to a set of normative principles, or a set of normative cases. To understand why the only closure possible in a morally pluralistic society is a procedural closure, one must understand why appeals to arguments, principles, or cases inevitably are limited. The appeal to rationality seems at first to be especially promising. If one is able to provide a definitive rational account of a moral issue, this should resolve all the rational questions advanced by rational individuals. In short, rational individuals could not protest a definitive rational answer to a rational question without declaring their own irrationality. Moreover, if one imposes a definitive rational solution on those who rejected it, this imposition would not be untrue to the real nature of those individuals as rational beings. After all, insofar as humans are rational animals, one would realize their true nature by the imposition. The appeal to rationality comes with great promise.
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This approach to closure of moral controversies has been central to Western culture since Plato and Socrates. It has deep historical roots in the natural law tradition of the West. Roman law, while acknowledging the practices and customs of different cultures, was shaped under the influences of Cicero, Ulpianus, and Justinian by a belief in the jus naturale, which was known to all animals, and the jus gentium, which embodies what reason commands of any rational agent. Gaius speaks of “the law that natural reason establishes among all mankind [and which] is followed by all people alike, and is called jus gentium [law of nations or law of the world]” (de Zulueta, 1976). This point is repeated in the Institutes of Justinian (Book I.2). Centuries later, William Blackstone picks up this same theme when he writes of one of the purposes of the law as supporting the moral law common to all (1979, pp. 42-55). More recently Lord Patrick Devlin argued that the state should “compel a man to act for his own good” (1996, p. 136). It is interesting to note that there is an interest among contemporary philosophers and bioethicists in developing some account of “common morality.”2 There are several risks to such a search. One risk is that the genuine nature of diversity in moral cultures will be overlooked. Another risk is that this search for moral ecumenism will stress common points while overlooking real differences. The risk in seeking to find common moral ground is that we will downplay or ignore important moral differences. One example of this challenge already in bioethics is the priniciplism of Beauchamp and Childress (Beauchamp and Childress, 2001). Both authors, for example, cite and use a principle of autonomy. While it appears that they have common ground (i.e., they use the same word), the theoretical backgrounds, which ought to frame the principle, should lead to very different interpretations of the principles (Wildes, 2000) The fundamental conceptual difficulty for the project of resolving moral controversies on the basis of rational argument is that one needs a shared moral view expressed in some set and ranking of moral values, rules, principles, virtues, or narratives in order to give content to the argument. Such standards have been sought in (1) the very content of ethical claims, or in intuitions, as self-evidently right; (2) in the consequences of actions; (3) in the idea of an unbiased choice made by an ideal rational observer or group of rational contractors; (4) in the idea of rational moral choice itself; or, (5) in the nature of reality. None of these strategies can, however, succeed because there is no way uncontroversially to select or discover the right or true moral content in reason, intuitions, consequences, or in the world. The appeal to intuitions is limited because for any intuition which is advanced, a contrary one can be advanced with equal ease. The same can be said with regard to compositions or systems of intuitions. What for one individual will appear to be a corrupt or deviant moral intuition can for another appear correct, wholesome, and self-evident. For some, for example, assisted
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suicide is a horrible sin, while others will think that it is often noble. There is no way to sort out and rank the intuitions without begging the question. Nor can more success be achieved by appeal to the consequences of one’s choices. The appeal to consequences faces the problem of how to assess and evaluate different consequences. For some, living a while longer after chemotherapy is a better consequence, even with side-effects, than dying. For others, however, living a life unimpaired by treatment is a more important outcome than extending the quantity of life. To make a judgment, one needs a way to rank the outcomes. A consequentialist will have to build in some presuppositions about the ranking of values in order to evaluate possible outcomes and to know which outcomes are more important and which preferences are to be given priority. One might agree, for example, that the proper goals of political life include liberty, equality, prosperity, and security. Though one may be in agreement with regard to these major goals, one cannot assess consequences until one has decided how to rank or weigh these goals. Different rankings will give decidedly different outcomes. Each may hold commitments to the same values but rank them in different ways. Consequentialist accounts are no better advantaged than intuitionist accounts with regard to being able to demonstrate which set of outcomes is to be preferred since such a judgment requires an authoritative means of ranking benefits and harms. We are left in a position that one way of weighing consequences can always be countered by another way of weighing consequences with no way to judge between them except by appeal to our own moral sense. Others have attempted to develop content-full, authoritative moral conclusions by employing some variety of hypothetical-choice theory. In such theories an Ideal Observer, or set of choosers, needs to be informed of the various possible choices and be impartial in weighting everyone’s interests and siding with none of the parties involved. But if the observer is impartial how will decisions be made? The observer cannot be so impartial or dispassionate as not to favor certain outcomes over others. Therefore, despite the guise of impartiality, proponents of hypothetical-choice theories must build into the observer some particular moral sense or thin theory of the good in the order of choice. Like the intuitionist account or the consequentialist account, one needs a way to rank the choices. One can see this situation in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). By imposing particular constraints on his hypothetical contractors, Rawls builds into his contractors a particular moral sense. They must (1) rank liberty more highly than other societal goods, (2) be risk aversive, (3) not be moved by envy, and (4) be heads of families or concerned about the members of the next generation (1971, pp. 152-158). Again the problem is that the description of the contractors is one that presupposes a particular moral point of view. But one is given no independent reasons which argue for one particular view of the contractors over any other.
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Attempts to discover a concrete view of the good life, or justice through analysis of the concepts themselves suffer the same difficulty as hypotheticalchoice theories. One must know, in advance, which sense of rationality, neutrality, or impartiality to use in choosing among different accounts of the good life, justice, or morality. There is no content-full moral vision which is not itself already a particular moral vision. One cannot choose among alternative moral senses or thin theories of the good without already appealing to a moral sense or thin theory of the good. Finally, one is not able to resolve moral controversies by appealing to the structure of reality. This model is known as an appeal to the natural law. It assumes that nature is morally normative and that there is a moral law in the structure of the world and men and women (see e.g., Finnis, 1981). The difficulties here are twofold. First, in order for the structure of reality to serve as a moral criterion nature must be shown to be morally normative. But in the absence of some metaphysical account of reality it will be impossible to conclude whether the structure of reality is accidental or morally significant apart from the concerns of particular persons or groups of persons. This is especially the case with regard to human nature, which appears in scientific terms to be the outcome of spontaneous mutations, selective pressures, genetic drift, constraints set by laws of physics, chemistry, and biology as well as the effects of catastrophic events. Human nature is, as such, simply a fact of reality without direct normative significance. The second difficulty with appeal to nature is that even if one thought that one could find moral significance in human nature, this would be possible only if one already possessed a canonical understanding of nature. Even if one accepts the normativity of nature, the structure of reality is open to many descriptions and interpretations. The natural law appeal, like others, must build in some particular moral sense that determines which description of nature is to be normative. However, we have no rational way to demonstrate that one description of nature should trump all others. Furthermore, contemporary philosophers, like W. V. O. Quine, have argued that reason can only be understood within a context. Many “reasonable” judgments lose their reasonableness when the context is changed. Engelhardt argues that in spite of its attractiveness and historical importance the appeal to reason for content-fully resolving moral disputes has been a failure. Unless men and women share a common understanding of the moral world or moral rationality, they will be unable to resolve moral disputes in a content-full way. Even if men and women could agree on a particular theoretical approach (i.e., an appeal to consequences, or duties, or intuitions) the problem still remains of selecting a particular guiding moral content (e.g., does one rank liberty over equality or equality over liberty; what discount rate for time does one choose?). To produce a secular bioethics that can give
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content-full guidance, one must already have in hand that which one is seeking to discover, namely, a content-full moral vision. A view from nowhere will not give content-full guidance, because it carries with it no particular ranking or account of values. On the other hand, any particular moral view already presupposes what one needs to secure: guiding moral conduct. Generality is purchased at the price of content; content is purchased at the price of generality. This project of justifying a secular bioethics from a single theoretical starting point thus appears impossible. Every argument that will lead to a content-full moral conclusion must start from certain particular assumptions. It is just that they will intractably be at dispute in a secular moral society in which there are communities with different moral visions, moral senses, and moral narratives. The appeal to reason may be even more troubled than Engelhardt claims. One can ask the very basic question about how different methodologies and thinkers understand the notion of moral, practical reason. There are, for example, very different interpretations of practical reason between those who are natural law theorists and those who are consequentialists. Quine argues correctly for the relationship of reason and its context. If this is so, one might ask, why has the project of modern moral philosophy appeared to work? One could argue that the project has worked because there has been a shared moral, cultural context. But, in an age that celebrates multi-culturalism, there will be no reason to assume that the project will work any longer. The depth of the problems of epistemology and justification become more evident in a culturally diverse society.
II. Bioethics and the Hopes of the Past Engelhardt has applied the problems of epistemology and justification to bioethics. The limitations of modern, secular moral philosophy have not deterred bioethicists from appeal to reason for content-full solutions to the moral controversies in bioethics. There has been a variety of methods deployed in bioethics (Wildes, 2000). Each of these approaches encounters two basic difficulties. First, each must build in content to its premises in order to resolve moral dilemmas. Second, each must presume a particular account of the nature of moral reason. For example, Peter Singer defines the most basic element of moral reasoning to be that of a concern for “interests” (1994). However, one might argue that moral reasoning is based on a notion of natural “duties,” as Grisez and Boyle do, rather than on a notion of interests (1979). Furthermore, in defining the very concept of “interests” Singer has built in a basic moral commitment. Robert Veatch experiences similar difficulties in his account of the contractual structure of medicine, patient, and society (1981). His argument that medical practice should be understood in terms of hypothetical contracts contrasts sharply with others such as Edmund Pellegrino
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and David Thomasma who understand the nature of moral reasoning through the concept of virtue (1988). Even if one accepted Veatch’ s position, there is no compelling reason to think that one should accept his account of how those contracts would develop. Contractors, with different interests than Veatch’s, would make very different bargains. The foundational problem for any theory of morality is that a theory can only resolve moral controversies to the extent that those involved in the controversy share the same set of moral premises, that is, the extent to which they share the same concept of moral reason and the same set of moral values or intuitions. Absent such similar commitments the disputes will be interminable. As MacIntyre argues, the interminable nature of moral controversies is based on the lack of a shared conceptual framework and values (1984). There have been two different attempts in bioethics to avoid the foundational difficulties which have confronted theoretical models. The best known is that of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress who forward the use of middle level principles in resolving moral controversies (2001). Beauchamp and Childress argue that moral controversies can be settled without reaching foundational agreement. They argue that there are enough middle-level principles which men and women share to allow the resolution of moral controversies. That is, they hold that there is enough overlap of moral theories that controversies can be resolved by appeal to the middle-level principles which are common to different moral theories and viewpoints. These principles are held to be “midway” between the general foundations of a moral theory and the particular moral controversy and its hoped for resolution. They argue for four such principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. These principles are, in their view, an articulation of common morality for health care. They form the most general boundaries of moral commitments and discourse. There are at least three difficulties with the position they have developed. First, there is an insufficient account of why one should accept this list of principles as the list of middle-level principles. Others (e.g., sanctity of life, human dignity, or solidarity) might be added to the list. Second, it is not entirely clear how to specify the principles. While people may speak of “autonomy,” they, in fact, mean very different things. For some, autonomy means the freedom to do whatever one chooses with oneself and consenting others (e.g., assisted suicide), while for others autonomy means the freedom to act within certain moral constraints. For others, it reflects a value assigned to liberty or to acting on one’s own authentic values. There is significant ambiguity in each of the principles which allows them to capture a wide range of interpretations. But such a range of specifications means that while people may be using the same words they may actually be speaking about very different matters. Beauchamp and Childress do not see this as a problem of “meaning” but of specification. The principles are general and need to be specified to the context
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and situation. This also involves a process of weighing and balancing. Finally, even if the principles were shared, and their meanings were clearly defined, it is not evident how they would be able to address particular moral controversies. That is, one could easily imagine cases where different principles would seem to address the same controversy. Since there is no theoretical structure to order the principles, there is no definitive appeal by which to sort out the relationship of the different principles one to the other. For example, in discussing the issue of physician assisted suicide one might appeal to the principle of beneficence in arguing that the physician should assist while another may appeal to the principle of non-maleficence in arguing that the physician must not take part. One comes to understand that the difficulties confronting the appeal to middle-level principles can only be resolved by situating the principles within the context of a moral account by which the principles are defined in their own terms and in relationship to one another. To bring these procedures together—specification, weighing, and balancing— Beauchamp and Childress use a process of reflective equilibrium. Still, one may wonder if all of these difficulties beset middle-level principles, why should they appear to be so successful? The answer lies in the circumstances that many of those who write books on bioethics in fact share one particular secular moral vision. They then attempt to reconstruct their moral vision, along with their moral sensibilities, in terms of different theoretical approaches. For such theoreticians, the point of departure is a common morality in which they share similar moral sentiments. They simply set about the task of reconstructing those sentiments through different deontological or consequentialist approaches. It should not be startling that the middle-level principles they endorse will have similar substance, though different theoretical overtones. It is only when individuals attempt to resolve moral controversies from different ideological understandings (imagine the differences in the understandings of the middle-level principles of justice as given by a Rawlsian versus a Nozickian bioethicist) or different religious understandings (imagine the differences in the understandings of the middle-level principle of non-maleficence regarding abortion as given by an observant Roman Catholic, verses a secular humanist) that one discovers that middle-level principles disclose differences rather than resolve controversies. A second attempt to avoid the conceptual dilemmas of ethical theory is the recent attempt to appeal to some form of casuistry. Perhaps the best known example is that of Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (1988). They argue that the failure of moral philosophy to resolve moral controversies is due to the misconception of moral reason. Moral reason needs to be understood as practical, rhetorical reason not as geometrical or theoretical reason. Jonsen and Toulmin argue that moral controversies are resolved by referring controversies to particular moral paradigm cases. For example, one might resolve the controversy associated with assisted suicide by referring to the paradigm case of murder.
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The conceptual problems for a secular casuistry revolve around the need for a content. Jonsen and Toulmin’s appeal to rhetorical, practical reason cannot resolve moral controversies unless there is content for the structure (Wildes, 1993). However, unless the content is commonly shared there is no way to recognize a moral controversy or its specific character. Furthermore, without a common moral framework there is no way to know the correct set of paradigm cases that should be applied. In the continuing controversy over abortion, for example, some apply the paradigm of killing while others apply the paradigm of privacy and battery. In their exposition of casuistry, Jonsen and Toulmin apply a historical example from a very highly defined moral community. The casuistry of Roman Catholicism, which they explore at length, was set within the life of a community with particular moral understandings and a common juridical structure (confessors, bishops, popes), which could resolve ambiguities when it was unclear as to how a case should be interpreted or which paradigm case should be applied. What Jonsen and Toulmin’s account makes clear is that if casuistry is to work within a secular, morally pluralistic context there will have to be some common moral framework. The problem is to find the correct one. The recognition that a content-full moral framework is necessary has been expressed in various appeals to the existence of consensus. One might think here, for example, of the notion of overlapping consensus in John Rawls’ volume Political Liberalism (1993). There is a recognition that, without a common normative framework, one will not possess the thin theory of the good, the canonical moral intuitions, the correct moral sensibilities, needed to make moral choices and to endorse particular moral judgments. As a result, much is done to manufacture the seeming presence of a consensus. When one impanels national commissions or other bioethics committees to frame public policy or to make bioethical recommendations, one is careful both to choose individuals with much in common and to focus the agenda on issues where common agreement is likely to be attainable. One can only imagine the kinds of principles that would have been endorsed were the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subject in Biomedical and Behavioral Research to have had as its members Robert Nozick, John Rawls, William Bennett, Al Sharpton, and Pat Buchanan. When people talk about a consensus shared in bioethics, they often fail to recall the great range of moral opinions about health care expressed in political campaigns. One can argue that the different Presidential commissions or councils reflect the dynamic of managed consensus. Members are selected not only with a reasonable like-mindedness in mind so that they might work together but also so that they will recommend policy options that are a fit with the views of the current administration. A person could examine the different recommendations made by President George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics and President Clinton’s
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National Bioethics Advisory Commission on stem cell research to find examples of how moral consensus can be managed. Of course, like Richard Rorty, one can accept a particular deliverance of a particular history as normative and speak as “we twentieth century liberals” (1989). When one speaks of oneself and like-minded individuals as inheriting a particular understanding of cosmopolitan and democratic institutions, one accepts a particular contingent history as normative and justified. But that is to return to something like the secular equivalent of a religious faith. For the Christian notion of a consensus fidelium, one substitutes a particular orthodoxy or ideological viewpoint in order to gain content, but with the Holy Spirit. Though it is not a true consensus of all the persons involved, it is considered normative as the consensus of those whose conscience is evoked as if it would have a religious but still secular significance. In examining the history of secular bioethics, one finds that after trying to come to terms with the difficulties and pluralisms of religious bioethics, secular bioethics has in great measure reiterated the character of religious bioethics. It has substituted particular philosophical and ideological communities for what had been found in religious faith. The result has been a recapitulation of the disagreements that shaped religious bioethical disputes, but now couched in secular terms. This outcome is fully understandable. If one wishes to resolve moral controversies by means other than the mere application of force, that is, only with morally authoritative force, one must derive that authority from God, reason, or common agreement. The development of secular bioethics as a response to the diverse ways in which individuals have chosen to hear God led to the attempt to ground bioethics in sound rational argument. But since this cannot succeed without presupposing particular content-full moral premises, that is, without a prior act of faith or common agreement, a common agreement was silently assumed. Part of the hope of modernity, with respect to ethics, has been that reason could overcome the cultural pluralism that is the context of moral thought. But the postmodern age not only represents the fracturing of common moral culture and the celebration of multi-culturalism but it also represents the multiplication of how we think about moral justification. The failure of this project is manifest both sociologically and theoretically. On the one hand, one finds a continuing multiplicity of bioethics, not simply numerous religious bioethics, but secular bioethics as well. The controversies go on and on; they do not appear open to definitive resolution through sound rational argument. As a sociological fact, pluralism has persisted, if it has not been intensified. On the other hand, one can recognize the theoretical basis for the failure. The closure of content-full moral controversies by sound rational argument requires that one employ content-full moral premises. The character of these is exactly what is at issue.
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Engelhardt moves then from the epistemological questions around moral reason to the need for moral reason to have a context. In this he recognizes the limits of moral reason in a postmodern world and the correlative limits on the moral authority of the secular state. He then develops, in Christian Bioethics, his own understanding of the bioethics of his own community.
III. The Turn to Faith: Moral Community and the Social Context of Moral Knowledge In an earlier essay, I argued that to understand Engelhardt’s work in Foundations one had to view him as a communitarian thinker (Wildes, 1997a). While his diagnosis of the postmodern condition in moral theory leads to a libertarian view of the state, it also leads to a focus on moral community. Moral communities shape the context of a person’s moral world. They have a content-full, particular moral view of the world. Moral communities have some particular understanding of moral authority (Who is to decide? How are decisions reached?). Finally, moral communities have views about how they should relate to other moral communities and to secular society as a whole. Not all moral communities are alike, however. In fact, one could argue that there are radically different models of moral community in play in secular society. These different communities vary in terms of the content of the moral life and the understanding of moral authority. There are at least three models of community that can be used in understanding the religious and moral life. One model is the exclusive community. This model lives and works within itself. Moral knowledge is rooted in the community and morality is simply part of its way of life. In thinking about this model, consider communities like the Amish that live coherent moral lives in the midst of a secular society that is morally pluralistic. This is the model of community that I think shapes Engelhardt’s thought in Foundations and Christian Bioethics. An alternative to the exclusive community is the inclusive community. This model might often be associated with many traditional forms of mainline, militant Christianity. Here the religious truth of the community is believed to be necessary for salvation or happiness. All men and women must somehow be brought within the community if they are to be saved. This drive to bring all peoples in has been manifested in a number of ways historically from the Crusades to Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christian,” which brings people into the community whether they realize it or not. A third possible model for moral community is the pluralism model. In this model each community of faith maintains the integrity of its own tradition. Nonetheless, on this model the community is open to what it can learn from others. Unlike either the inclusive or exclusive models a pluralist model of community does not think that it “has” the truth. The pluralist community thinks that its tradition has key and important insights into the moral life.
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But, this model would hold open the possibility that the community can learn from other communities and moral traditions. It also runs the risk that a tradition could be lost in such exchanges.3 These models of community can be helpful in understanding Engelhardt and the development of his thought. In his philosophical explorations, Engelhardt has rejected the inclusive model of community and moral knowledge because of the limits of public, moral reason. The inclusive model assumes the existence of some form of common morality that cuts across different communities and gives them a common framework and language for discussing moral issues. The picture that emerges from Foundations and Secular Humanism is one of secular society with a very “thin” common morality. A culturally diverse secular state for Engelhardt is not a moral community in any thick sense of the term. The secular state might be described as a thin moral community insofar as it is founded on the consent of the governed. The secular state, then, is more of a procedural society with all procedures grounded in consent. His view of a robust moral community works more out of an exclusivist framework as he develops the account in Christian Bioethics. In many ways, Engelhardt’s model of moral knowledge and moral community is along the lines of the exclusive model of community. One needs to be a member of a community. Moral reason only works within the context of a community and its presuppositions. Moral reason is part of a way of life. But, he also believes in the call for active conversion. It will be a conversion of faith not of reason that leads to moral agreement. Only when people work within the same framework can we reach agreement on moral issues in medicine and health care. Engelhardt’s later work in Christian Bioethics is his articulation of the bioethics of a particular community. It is a view articulated as an exclusivist model. In the book, he develops what he takes to be a Christian view of bioethics. He focuses on the importance of transcendence in understanding the human person and God. He examines issues surrounding sexuality, reproduction, cloning, abortion, birth, suffering, disease, dying and death. The views he develops on these different issues may surprise those who only know his work in Foundations. Many people who have read Foundations or Secular Humanism have understood Engelhardt to endorse a wide range of practices that he opposes in Christian Bioethics (e.g., abortion). Examining the three works together yields a much richer sense of each individual work and the complexities of his thought.
IV. Future Directions: Proceduralism and Communal Integrity If you look at the world of bioethics through these three central works of Engelhardt, what kind of direction is there for the future of the field of bioethics?
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Is there a future for the field of bioethics? I think his work points in two very important directions for the field. One is the development of ‘proceduralism’ as a theme for bioethics. Engelhardt develops his argument for proceduralism largely in terms of individuals (patients and professionals). It can be expanded to the realm of organizations in health care. A second, important theme that his work raises is the integrity and identity of moral communities. Following from his work in Foundations, there is a very important step in the development of procedural ethics for a secular society. Proceduralism is a term that often focuses on the ways in which common moral authority can be justified. In democratic societies, for example, moral justification rests in some way on the consent of the governed. Procedures like informed consent have played critical roles in the development of bioethics. Consent to treatment, advance directives, consent for research are all everyday elements in the practice of medicine. Such procedures convey moral authority and allow health care professionals to act. Some thinkers may lament that bioethics has been reduced to empty procedures and mere formalisms. But, are these procedures so empty? It can be argued that procedures are not. Practices like informed consent only make sense if there are underlying moral assumptions about respect for persons. Embedded in procedures like free and informed consent are not only assumptions about respect for persons, but also moral assumptions about honesty, truth-telling, and fraud. Each of these are rich moral concepts that give the procedure of informed consent its moral power. The procedures then are far from “empty.” Rather, they have moral content and provide a place where men and women with moral differences can meet. One can argue that the turn toward procedures is a way to capture moral ties that cut across different moral traditions and communities. The appeal to procedures is a way to identify common moral ground. Procedures have been crucial to the development of bioethics and it would seem safe to guess that they will develop and grow with the field as medical options multiply, as our moral fragmentation continues, and as our resources remain limited. If one understands secular bioethics along the lines of proceduralism then there are two directions for the field to move. One direction is that of organizational ethics. It is important that bioethics move to take a wider account of the importance of institutional and organizational ethics (Wildes, 1997b; 2003). The controversies of bioethics are not just about patients and physicians or even society at large. Many of the areas of bioethics—clinical ethics, research ethics, distributive ethics—are encompassed by questions about the organization of medicine and health care. While institutions and organizations are more difficult to figure out than the choices of individual decision makers, there are important questions to ask about an organization. What is the identity of the organization? Does it fulfill its mission and responsibility to the community? Institutions are not just aggregates; they are actors that, like
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health professionals, have an obligation to enable patients to make as free and rational a choice as possible. This means that organizations will need to return to their fundamental mission and moral commitments. Communities and individuals will need to do the same so they may be clear when questions of compromise and integrity arise. The secular society will allow for diverse visions to have their place as long as they do not involve non-consenting others. There is an underlying legitimacy to informed consent, the free market, and limited democracy that presupposes only the permission of those who collaborate. There is de facto a web of moral authority that can bind individuals of diverse moral understandings as it does in any market, in any war-torn area of the world where members of hostile communities can still trade commodities without sharing a moral vision. There is theoretically the possibility of attending to the ways in which permission suffices to ground general moral authority without concurrence in any particular, content-full moral vision, or the presupposition of a commonality of content-full moral premises. This theoretical possibility offers a basis for the general moral justification of a range of limited collaborations that can legitimate a res publica and health care policy with robust rights to privacy and space for deviant but peaceable consensual undertakings. Something of a secular bioethics can indeed be sustained. This article has argued that Engelhardt’s three principle works, Foundations, Secular Bioethics, and Christian Bioethics gives a complete picture of Engelhardt’s complex thought. There are three themes that run though his work: moral epistemology and justification, the communal context of moral knowledge, and the limited nature of the secular state. He raises fundamental questions about the nature of secular society and public moral knowledge and the difficulty of developing a coherent bioethics in a secular society. In light of these questions and problems he turns to examine bioethics within a particular community. His works also raise important questions for what it is to be a multi-cultural society that takes the views of communities seriously. Engelhardt’s thought gives a direction for secular society and raises important questions for moral communities. He also raises important questions for the field of bioethics and its future direction.
Notes 1. By ‘content-full’ I mean a moral view with some specific moral values and a ranking of those values, or a method by which they can be decided amongst when they conflict. 2. See the thematic issue of Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13, no. 3(2003), as an example of framing a common morality for contemporary bioethics. 3. I am indebted to my colleague Professor Chester Gillis for his thought on these three models of community. These were developed at a conference in Elbow Beach Bermuda in the fall of 2003.
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Bibliography Beauchamp, T.L., and J. Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Blackstone, W., Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Devlin, P. The Enforcement of Morals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. de Zulueta, F. Institutes of Gaius. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Engelhardt, H.T. Jr. Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991. ———. The Foundations of Bioethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. Engelhardt, H.T. Jr. and K. Wm. Wildes. “Postmodernity and Limits on the Human Body: Libertarianism by Default.” In Vol. 3 of Medicine Unbounded: The Human Body, Emerging Issues in Biomedical Policy, edited by R. Blank and A. Bonnicksen, 62-71. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Finnis, J. Natural Law and Natural Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Grisez, G. and J. Boyle. Life and Death with Liberty and Justice. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. Jonsen, A. and S. Toulmin. The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. MacIntyre, A. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Pellegrino, E. and D. Thomasma. For The Patient’s Good: The Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. ———. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Sanders, T.C. Institutes of Justinian. Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970. Singer, P. Practical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Veatch, R. A Theory of Medical Ethics. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Wildes, K. Wm. “The Priesthood of Bioethics and the Return of Casuistry.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 18: 33-49. ———. “Engelhardt’s Communitarian Ethics: The Hidden Assumptions.” In Reading Engelhardt, edited by Brendan Minogue, 77-93. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997a. ———. “Institutional Identity, Integrity, and Conscience.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 7 (1997b): 413-19. ———. “Institutional Integrity in Health Care: Tony Soprano and Family Values.” In Institutional Integrity in Health Care, edited by A.S. Iltis, 7-28. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. ———. Moral Acquaintances: Methodology in Bioethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.
Part II
Challenges to Engelhardt’s Orthodox Christian Theology
Desire for the Transcendent: Engelhardt and Christian Ethics Gerald McKenny
To appreciate the achievement of H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.’s articulation of Christian bioethics from the standpoint of the Orthodox Christian tradition, one must look well beyond the limited horizon of bioethics itself.1 Part theology, part moral philosophy, part intellectual history, part cultural criticism, Engelhardt’s project shares the scope and ambition of the projects of thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre (1984; 1988; 1992) and John Milbank (1990). Like their work, his is both erudite, in a nonspecialist sort of way, and idiosyncratic. Like theirs, his work is at once a moral argument, a genealogy of modern ethics, and the articulation of a concrete ethical vision as an alternative to modern ethics. And like theirs, his work is an audacious indictment against the entirety of modern Western ethics and politics. While Engelhardt addresses a familiar set of conditions—the fragmentation of ethics under the hegemony of modern reason, the immanent horizon of modern religion, and the crisis of moral and political authority following the loss of confidence in Enlightenment successors to Christian ethics and politics—he speaks in a strange voice. It is the voice of a tradition with roots outside the West, an origin that explains why the ambiguity towards the modern West in Engelhardt’s thought is nearly the opposite of that in thinkers like MacIntyre and Milbank. Engelhardt is both much more cheerful in the face of such features of modern society as political liberalism, capitalism, 107 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 107-133) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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and pluralism than are MacIntyre and Milbank, and much less willing than they are to concede to modern conditions for the expression of theological claims. The cheerfulness is due to Engelhardt’s conviction that political liberalism (albeit in its libertarian form), the free market, and pluralism create a space for a minority tradition such as his to thrive, while the social and cultural climate they generate constitute a challenge to the Orthodox Christian tradition but not (as with MacIntyre and Milbank) the loss of the very conditions under which a robust tradition or a favored theologico-political vision can survive. Meanwhile, the unwillingness to concede to modern conditions for theological discourse stems from Engelhardt’s conviction that, prior to the modern era, Western Christianity had already departed fatefully from the East in treating theology as primarily a field of academic inquiry. As a result, Engelhardt feels free to ignore the entire set of problems posed for Western theology by modern rationalism, naturalism, historicism, and other products of the modern university. To those steeped in these inquiries—and even those Western theologies most determined to shake off their constraints nevertheless manifest the effects of their discipline—Engelhardt’s theology may appear naïve. Yet, his determination to ignore this entire set of problems is deliberate: it follows from a conviction that theology in the most proper sense is undertaken by adepts who experience God, and that academic theology, while legitimate, is simply the conceptual articulation of what they experience. This principled refusal to concede to the conditions under which modern Western theologies labor, combined with the refusal to write off modern cultural and institutional life as such as hostile to true Christian faith and practice, makes Engelhardt something of an anomaly—a transplant from the fourth century curiously functioning in its twentieth-century host. This essay considers Engelhardt’s work in relation to Christian ethics. On the one hand, his work intersects with major controversies in contemporary Christian ethics. These controversies include disagreements over whether Christian ethics articulates a natural moral order or a particular way of life; whether it primarily involves norms or virtues; whether its sources are reason, revelation, or some complex relation between the two; whether it focuses on the Christian community, society in general, or human nature as such; and how it treats the natural in relation to the supernatural and the minimal requirements of human community in relation to the quest for perfection or holiness. Yet, on the other hand, cutting across all of these divides in Engelhardt’s thought is a more fundamental one: the contrast between a transcendent ground and object of ethics with its “noetic” (i.e., mystical, nondiscursive) epistemology, on the one hand, and the immanent horizon to which, according to Engelhardt, ethics is confined by its reliance on discursive reason, on the other hand. For Engelhardt, this contrast marks a deep and irreconcilable divide between two forms of Christian ethics, one practiced in
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the Eastern Christian communions and the other in the churches of the West, Catholic, and Protestant alike. Engelhardt’s most controversial move has less to do with his articulation of the Orthodox position than with his characterization of the West. He treats Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard as the three thinkers in whom the Western history of discursive reason, with its implications for religion and morality, comes to its paradigmatic expression. With what Engelhardt takes to be the discovery by Kant of the limitation of reason to immanence, the account of reason in immanent terms provided by Hegel, and the unsuccessful effort of Kierkegaard to reformulate a relation to the transcendent, the West reaches the inevitable result of its initial turn to discursive reason. With the help of these thinkers, Engelhardt offers a picture of Western Christian ethics as committed to a rational enterprise destined to end up with an immanent ethic that is incapable of resolving, and which in fact has contributed to, modern moral fragmentation. For him, Kant and Hegel are the great diagnosticians of the West; they understand how discursive reason winds up in immanence and what implications follow. It is Kant who completes the process by which discursive rationality brings Western Christianity to its culmination in secularism; his thought marks the end of the hope of reaching transcendent truth through discursive reason. In this respect, Engelhardt’s philosophical argument is undertaken in a Kantian spirit. Like Kant, he seeks to demonstrate the limits of reason—its inability to reach the transcendent—in order to make room for faith. But unlike Kant, the faith for which Engelhardt makes room is not subordinate to reason. Similarly, it is Hegel who grasps both the need for concrete moral content and the inability of discursive reason, confined to immanence, to provide it, and who finds the solution to the problem in the contingent sphere of custom. It is also Hegel who gives reason a history, one that culminates in immanence. In this respect, Engelhardt’s genealogy of Western reason is undertaken in a Hegelian spirit. Like Hegel, his argument traces the fate of reason in history to its culmination in immanence. But unlike Hegel, Engelhardt’s narrative does not endorse this actualization of reason in history, and the moral content he seeks is not found in the immanent sphere of custom. Thus, while Kant and Hegel are the great diagnosticians, their therapies only contribute to what, for Engelhardt, is the disease. The only genuine therapy is one that will deliver us from immanence. It is Kierkegaard who, for Engelhardt, understood this. Coming after Kant and Hegel, Kierkegaard both sought a way back to the transcendent and understood the impossibility of arriving at it through discursive reason. In this respect, Engelhardt’s turn to the transcendent in recognition of the immanence of discursive reason is undertaken in a Kierkegaardian spirit. Like Kierkegaard, he identifies the transcendent with a passionate faith in a personal God. But unlike Kierkegaard, Engelhardt finds this faith in noetic knowledge of God, and in the beliefs and practices of Orthodoxy as the most ideal conditions for attaining this knowledge.
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A critic will protest that this entire picture is both narrow and exaggerated: narrow because there is more to Western Christian ethics than is represented by a history of discursive reason and its aftermath culminating in Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, and exaggerated because its disjunctions—discursive reason or noetic knowledge, transcendence or immanence, East or West—obscure as much as they illuminate. We will see that the critic is often right. But for all its narrowness and exaggeration, Engelhardt’s work articulates a more direct reference to a God who transcends nature, reason, and history than is characteristic of much modern Western Christian ethics. Engelhardt’s articulation of this relation of ethics to the transcendent God in the Orthodox tradition is at bottom a call to conversion.2 We do him justice only if we read him in that spirit. But the call is issued in the threefold form of an argument, a genealogy, and an explication of a moral vision. As such, it demands a critical analysis as well as an existential response. This essay is a critical analysis of that threefold call. To the extent that it is critical, it is a refusal of the call—the essay will not end with a conversion. But it is no simple refusal. What Engelhardt issues as a call to conversion can be received as a call to bring to the center a desire for the transcendent that too often lies on the margins of modern Christian ethics or to reawaken a desire that is now dormant. If the critical aspects of this essay are a refusal of the call in the first sense, the general agreement with Engelhardt that lies behind the criticisms is a reception of that call in the second sense. In this second sense, Engelhardt’s work is indispensable to Christian ethics.
I. The Argument In the very first paragraph of the Preface, Engelhardt informs readers of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (hereafter FCB) that the book is about both a philosophical puzzle and, above all, a religious quest. The puzzle is whether moral claims can be grounded at all apart from genuine knowledge of transcendent moral truth. The quest aims at experience of a personal, transcendent God through mystical or noetic knowledge. Readers of Engelhardt know that the puzzle and the quest are not unrelated: the point of his ethics, in a nutshell, is that in the absence of a veridical experience of a transcendent ground of morality, there is no way to adjudicate conflicting substantive moral claims; as a result, the merely procedural principle of permission is all that is available on purely rational grounds for a moral basis of a society characterized, as modern societies are, by deep moral disagreement, while true moral content as a basis for morality can be found only in a genuine experience of a transcendent reality. The puzzle and the quest converge in the experience of the transcendent God: here the veridical experience that grounds a canonical ordering of goods and principles is precisely the experience of a personal, transcendent God.
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This section examines this convergence. To begin, we note that there is a kind of heterogeneity in this pairing of a puzzle and a quest—a heterogeneity that lends Engelhardt’s project both its distinctive character and its pathos. A philosophical puzzle seems to demand a philosophical inquiry, not a religious quest, while for its part the religious quest on which Engelhardt has embarked exceeds reason and can only be expressed in homiletical terms. In FCB, this heterogeneity is marked by a sudden shift in genre: from the philosophical argument and philosophico-historical genealogy that characterize the first three chapters of FCB to a description of the Christian life that is part homily and part spiritual manual beginning with the fourth chapter—a shift for which Engelhardt offers an eloquent defense (2000, pp. 161f). Arguing that the puzzle cannot be solved on its own philosophical terms, Engelhardt presents the goal of the quest as the solution to it. The juxtaposition of these two heterogeneous orders is, therefore, not an arbitrary one. Meanwhile, the rupture between the two orders, marked by the shift in genre, is real; the puzzle can be solved only by a turn from the immanent horizon of philosophical reasoning to the transcendent God Who is known only noetically. The solution to the philosophical puzzle comes from outside philosophy, articulated in the form of a genre and content that is heterogeneous to philosophy itself. The heterogeneity enables Engelhardt to present what he calls traditional Christianity as the solution to the philosophical puzzle, while leaving it free from determination by philosophy. Faith and reason remain distinct, yet reason leads to faith—but only at the point where, conscious of its own limit, it acknowledges its need for something that is and must remain beyond it. In principle, then, the quest is carried out independently of the puzzle and the puzzle can be formulated independently of the quest. Yet, in reality neither the puzzle nor the quest is what it is without the other. We will see that the puzzle itself arises within the quest, and the quest is determined in certain respects by the puzzle. This interpenetration of what initially appeared to be heterogeneous orders raises questions about Engelhardt’s argument. The power of that argument, and what distinguishes it from standard apologetic arguments, is that the heterogeneity of the two orders avoids certain problems with many apologetic arguments, namely, that what they attribute to reason or common human experience is already determined by Christian content, while they distort what is genuinely Christian by presenting it in terms dictated by reason or experience. Engelhardt’s argument at least appears to avoid this twofold problem. But it does so only if the heterogeneity prevails; i.e., if the philosophical puzzle really is purely philosophical and if the religious quest really is articulated on its own terms. We will see, however, that this is not the case. The philosophical puzzle is the one to which Engelhardt has devoted his career as a philosopher. If different moral perspectives each identify and rank goods and principles in accordance with a distinct moral sense, disagree-
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ments between these perspectives can be resolved only if one can appeal to a standard which can adjudicate these conflicting moral senses. The problem is that unless one can identify a genuinely transcendent standard, any standard to which one might appeal to adjudicate the conflict will itself presuppose a particular, contingent moral sense. Therefore, any rational justification for one or another perspective will either beg the question (by already presupposing the moral sense from which a standard is derived) or be involved in an infinite regress (by always having to appeal to a further standard to justify the moral sense from which a standard is derived). Discursive reason is, therefore, unable to resolve disputes between diverse moral perspectives. Only a transcendent moral truth can establish an ordering of goods and principles as canonical, but discursive reason is confined to immanence and so is unable to arrive at such a truth. Engelhardt concludes: “The content of any particular morality and its bioethics could always have been otherwise unless one can establish a particular moral rationality as content-fully canonical and transcending history” (2000, p. 35). Actual moral content, then, can be derived from only two possible sources: an admittedly contingent ordering of goods and principles based on a particular moral sense, on the one hand, or a transcendent good that exceeds reason, on the other hand. In neither of these cases is moral content rationally grounded. We are left, therefore, with the purely procedural, “content-less” principle of permission as the only rational ground on which those who hold diverse moral perspectives can cooperate.3 Two points can be made about this philosophical puzzle. The first point is that the principle of permission itself is not capable of providing a rational ground on which persons holding different moral perspectives can agree, because any formulation of this principle itself presupposes a particular moral sense. What is to count as having given permission? Any answer to this question will have to formulate criteria to distinguish permission from coercion and to determine to what extent one must know what one is permitting. There are thin notions of permission that require minimal thresholds of knowledge (e.g., that one not have been lied to before agreeing to a transaction or to being treated in a certain way) and of non-coercion (e.g., that one could have acted otherwise). There are also thick notions of permission that set more robust requirements for knowledge (e.g., that one be given all the information a hypothetical reasonable person would wish to have) and for non-coercion (e.g., that one be capable of acting autonomously). And, of course, there are many degrees of thinness and thickness. The point is that any conception of permission, however thin or thick, presupposes particular conceptions of the relevance of these conditions of voluntary action and, therefore, to use Engelhardt’s terms, presupposes a particular moral sense. It follows that any such conception is subject to the same problem that, for Engelhardt, faces every substantive moral claim: namely, that it either begs the question or is involved in an infinite regress. Engelhardt cannot evade this problem by relying,
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as he does, on a very thin conception of permission. For even thin conceptions have content, however little. There is no concept of permission which itself is purely procedural, lacking content, and therefore available as a default position when all substantive conceptions turn out to have relied on a particular moral sense. And if there is no “content-less” default position then Engelhardt’s choice of a thin conception over thicker conceptions follows from a particular moral sense; it, therefore, either begs the question or is caught in an infinite regress. The philosophical puzzle is, therefore, even less resolvable than Engelhardt thinks. Engelhardt believes that insofar as this puzzle leaves us with no rationally grounded moral content, it brings us to the very brink of nihilism; we now see that with the failure of the procedural principle of permission, it in fact pushes us over that brink. Engelhardt’s theory is no exception to Nietzsche’s observation that rationalistic approaches to ethics end in nihilism. But if this is so, why keep trying them? Why not recognize, with Aristotle, that it is inappropriate and indeed futile to bring rationalistic expectations into moral and political matters? This brings us to the second point that can be made about Engelhardt’s philosophical puzzle, namely, that it is a puzzle only for those who retain the sense that, in Engelhardt’s terms, “a final and enduring truth must exist in these matters” (2000, p. xiii), for those who hunger for the unity provided by a canonical ethic (2000, p. 93). Engelhardt realizes that this lingering sense and hunger are themselves remnants of a Christian culture. But if this is so, what force do they have in a culture Engelhardt admits is post-Christian? Why should we not treat them as merely nostalgic? A genuinely post-Christian culture would be one devoid of expectations regarding ethics that reflect Christian convictions, whether in their proper form or in rationalistic moral theories as their secular successors—that is, a culture in which, among many other things, the sense of a final and enduring truth in moral and political matters would cease to function as an expectation for moral and political theory.4 We can now understand the sense in which Engelhardt’s philosophical puzzle expresses his religious quest. This puzzle itself arises because Engelhardt is a Christian who believes that there must be a final and enduring truth in moral matters—a Christian, moreover, for whom this truth must transcend history. It is precisely for this reason that Engelhardt holds moral reason to such high standards, requiring it either to produce the transcendent ground morality requires in order to justify its content (which it cannot do) or to settle for a merely procedural morality of permission (the validity of which we have just questioned). And it is the failure of reason to secure the transcendent ground in place of the religious context in which it was once secured that, in Engelhardt’s scheme, brings the disillusioned rationalist back to the place from which discursive reason took its departure. The disillusionment betrays
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the hope entertained in the form of the philosophical puzzle. That puzzle is itself an expression of a particular desire: the desire for the transcendent. Engelhardt argues from the requirements of morality to a realization that reason cannot fulfill those requirements, and thus to an acknowledgment of the need for a transcendent ground for morality. He offers a kind of moral argument not for the existence of God but for the necessity of the transcendent. Moral reason, taking itself to its limits, must acknowledge the need for faith in order to complete its own project. But the argument works only if the need for a transcendent ground arises out of morality itself. We have just seen that the argument fails on this account because the first premise—the assumption that there must be a final and enduring truth in moral matters—presupposes a particular conception of morality, in this case one that is Christian either in a classical or (more likely) in a secular, derivative sense. The argument is powerless against those who simply reject the particular moral sense that lies behind this premise, whose conception of morality is such that it would be a mistake to expect a moral theory to ground itself in these rationalistic terms. Still, the argument, if sound, does succeed against one group, namely, rationalistic Christians and those successors to Christianity who think that discursive reason alone can do what Engelhardt insists only noetic knowledge can do, i.e., ground morality. This is a not inconsiderable group. But what does the argument prove against these rationalists? It proves that discursive reason is bound to immanence and that the ground morality requires must be transcendent and, therefore, must be reached in some other way than by discursive reason. But the argument does not pick out any one version of the transcendent or any one path to it as true. Of course, Engelhardt is well aware of this. This is precisely why in FCB the shift from a rational argument for the necessity of the transcendent to the exposition of Orthodox Christianity as transcendent truth is in fact a sharp break, marked, as noted above, by an abrupt shift from the discourse of argumentation to that of invitation (2000, pp. 161, 170). This is how it must be if transcendent truth can be known only noetically. But, as Engelhardt also realizes, this means that there are no criteria external to Orthodoxy itself by which the now disillusioned rationalist can choose which invitation to the transcendent to accept as an invitation to truth. Even where the argument succeeds, then, it brings one not to Orthodoxy but only to a notion of the transcendent as such. At best, Engelhardt’s exposition of Orthodox Christian ethics will appear to an outsider as “a possible sufficient condition for a canonical, content-full morality” (2000, p. 170). The disillusioned rationalist looking outside of discursive reason for a ground of morality will no doubt receive multiple invitations. How is he or she to determine which one is genuine? Engelhardt’s approach thus exhibits what was said above about the general plight of apologetic arguments in the post-Christian world, at least to the extent that those arguments are intended to lead a non-Christian
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interlocutor to accept the truth of the Christian faith. On the one hand, to the extent that the religious convictions to which such arguments bring the interlocutor are determinately Christian convictions, the apologist incurs the suspicion that the premises were selected or formulated in a way that favors the Christian conclusion in the first place. This is the case insofar as the need of morality for a transcendent ground arises out of (allegedly) Christian expectations about morality. On the other hand, to the extent that the premises do not implicitly favor Christianity, they may just as readily lead to other determinate convictions or to no determinate convictions at all. This is the case insofar as Engelhardt’s argument leads only to a need for the transcendent as such. Again, Engelhardt recognizes this. There is no point from outside Orthodox Christianity from which one can know that it is true. In the end, the outsider must respond to the invitation to “enter in and experience so that you will see” (2000, p. 190). This twofold limitation of Engelhardt’s argument takes on more urgency when we go on to ask whether that argument obscures or distorts the very character of Orthodox ethics as Engelhardt describes it. This brings us to the question of whether the religious quest, or at least Engelhardt’s presentation of it, is determined by the philosophical puzzle. Engelhardt first introduces the Orthodox vision of ethics grounded in a noetic knowledge of transcendent reality as an answer to the inability of discursive reason to secure a ground for morality (2000, pp. xi-xiii). Christian ethics is established on the basis of a need arising out of morality in general, so that “the possibility of a Christian bioethics must be gauged through exploring the possibility of a secular bioethics” (2000, p. 2). This suggests that the religious quest arises out of the philosophical puzzle: that it is the failure of rational morality that drives one to seek the transcendent in order to ground morality. If so, it is appropriate to inquire into whether the philosophical and religious conceptions of the transcendent are the same, and, if not, whether the former exercises an undue influence on the latter. Here we confront another problem facing apologetic arguments; namely, that by showing how one or another aspect of Christian faith fulfills a general cognitive or other need, they risk presenting the Christian faith in terms of something outside itself. This point should not be understood to mean, as some proponents of the particularity of the Christian tradition imply, that Christian faith and practice constitute their own internal world of discourse. It is not only inevitable but also appropriate that the Christian faith present itself in terms shared by others; no sooner is Christian faith formulated in language than it is involved in general modes of discourse. However, it is possible in principle to distinguish between apologetic arguments that attempt to reinterpret general human or cultural realities in light of Christian truths, from those that reinterpret Christian truths in light of those general human or cultural realities. In Engelhardt’s case, Orthodox Christianity is
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initially presented as that which answers to a need for the transcendent as such—i.e., as that which offers moral unity, certainty, and authority in the midst of modern anxieties about morality. But is Christian ethics best understood as a cure for these anxieties? After pointing out how a particular religious conception of the transcendent gives rise to the entire problem formulated in terms of the philosophical puzzle, it may seem ironic to claim now that Engelhardt’s quest for the transcendent is in part determined by his philosophical puzzle. But in fact these are two sides of the same claim. Just as modern moral philosophy in its rationalistic forms can be understood as a successor to a certain Christian conception of moral truth, so that philosophical conception of moral truth can have a recursive effect on its Christian predecessor. When this happens we begin to treat Christian ethics as the answer to a problem regarding moral truth whose terms are set by modern philosophy. In Engelhardt’s case, anxieties about morality expressed in a philosophical idiom set the terms for the meaning of the transcendent in Christian ethics. How is this so? Orthodox Christian ethics as Engelhardt describes it understands the Christian life, in whole and in its details, as oriented to holiness, i.e., to the love of God and neighbor; Engelhardt’s greatest achievement is to show, at every point of his treatment of concrete issues, how the ethical content of the Orthodox tradition is designed to lead one to this twofold love. Yet, it is notable that the concept of the transcendent, in the sense it has as the solution to the philosophical puzzle, figures little in his description of the Christian life itself. In the Christian life as he describes it, ethics is not understood as an ordering of goods or principles in search of a non-contingent ground. Instead, ethics is understood as a means for union with God (2000, p. 167) or as the requirements for orienting one’s heart to God (2000, p. 169). This orientation, as Engelhardt presents it, begins when one turns one’s heart to God, and Christian ethics per se seems to be comprehended entirely within the context of that orientation; namely, as that which keeps one moving toward its goal. In the context of this description of the Christian life, ethics has a transcendent ground in a twofold sense: first, it consists of the requirements for rightfully orienting oneself to the love of a personal, transcendent God; second, these requirements derive from the noetic knowledge of the apostles and their successors. Insofar as this ethics is grounded in the transcendent in these two senses, it can be said to be a “canonical” morality. But what does this mean? It means precisely that one can rely on this ethics as a genuine condition of attaining union with God. This is a very different context from that of the philosophical puzzle, in which someone asks which of the many moralities present in a pluralistic society is genuinely binding. The point is that it is not clear how the desire for a transcendent ground of morality is the same as the desire for union with a transcendent God. In the first case, the transcendent fulfills a
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need grounded in morality. In the second case, morality fulfills a need grounded in the pursuit of the transcendent. In the first case, the transcendent meets a threefold yearning: for unity in the face of moral fragmentation, for certainty in the face of nihilistic denials of the possibility of truth in moral matters, and for authority in the face of the discovery of moral traditions as contingent human artifacts. These yearnings express a certain conservative anxiety over the modern moral context and it is in relation to them that he characterizes his quest as a search for a “canonical” morality. In the second case, one suspects, the transcendent meets a deeper yearning than those expressed in this conservative anxiety. It may well be that immanent morality leaves us restless and that only a transcendent ground can fulfill our deepest moral yearnings. But these yearnings have less to do with unity, certainty, and authority than they do with what is the ultimate meaning and purpose of our action. Engelhardt himself is an eloquent witness to the latter. All the more puzzling, then, is that he expresses the religious quest in an idiom that can only distort it. To identify the transcendence of God with the transcendence to which one looks to guarantee unity, certainty, and authority amid late modern anxieties about morality is to misrepresent the very relation of ethics to the transcendent Engelhardt so carefully establishes in the first place.5 If this mutual interpenetration of the philosophical puzzle and the religious quest generates these opposite yet complementary problems, why not simply articulate the desire for the transcendent in what for Engelhardt is its true form, given expression in Orthodox Christianity? Why does he insist on keeping the specter of transcendence alive to haunt moral philosophy? After all, Engelhardt has no need, as some natural law theologians do, to argue for the inseparability of moral philosophy and Christian ethics. Perhaps the answer to these questions lies in his moral and political philosophy rather than in his theology. If moral and political philosophy no longer recognize the need to ground themselves in a way that, according to Engelhardt, can be met only by a transcendent ground—if, that is, those who argue that we should simply dispense with this kind of expectation prevail—then Engelhardt’s libertarian default position is no longer necessary. The assumption that moral content must be grounded in this way in order to be binding will no longer hold; it will follow that the inability of any theory to ground ethics in this way will no longer be recognized as a reason for turning to a morality that is capable of binding persons in the absence of any such ground. We saw above that for Engelhardt there are two ways to secure moral content following the failure of discursive reason to ground moral content: one must either accept an admittedly contingent ordering of goods and principles based on a particular moral sense, or one must appeal to a transcendent ground for such an ordering.6 “Liberal cosmopolitanism” is Engelhardt’s name for a way of life in modern liberal societies that is theorized by a wide range of contemporary thinkers who take the former route. John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and
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Michael Walzer would all qualify as liberal cosmopolitan theorists in Engelhardt’s description. They eschew the need for foundations, appealing instead to democratic traditions, common background assumptions shared in modern liberal societies, or widely shared intuitions. While Engelhardt’s portrait of them verges on caricature at certain points, he correctly points out: 1) that the content of their ethics differs rather profoundly from that of the Orthodox Christian ethics, 2) that the confidence in which they represent a genuinely common morality is exaggerated, 3) that their toleration is less encompassing than they claim, and 4) that these false assumptions regarding their representation of a genuinely common morality and their toleration have at least in many circles legitimized them as the moral custodians of our public institutions. As a member of a moral minority, Engelhardt worries about whether his tradition can survive in a liberal cosmopolitan order in which, as he repeatedly asserts, it will inevitably be deemed “politically incorrect” at many points. This is a legitimate worry. Unlike some who harbor similar worries, Engelhardt’s libertarianism does not respond by seeking to impose its own or any other concrete moral content on others without their permission. Under his libertarian polity, grounded in the principle of permission, neither the fundamentalist Christian in San Francisco nor the gay or lesbian person in the Bible Belt would be bound by the prevailing moralities of their respective communities (unless, as we have shown, the principle of permission itself is not neutral). If the expectation of a final truth in moral and political matters is itself the legacy of a particular tradition, the appeal to the need for a transcendent ground of moral claims is unlikely to accomplish what Engelhardt wants it to accomplish in the political realm.7
II. Genealogy When did ethics become modern? For two decades this question has been a minor obsession in both Christian ethics and moral philosophy. In Christian ethics, at least, the obsession is not attributable to any sudden interest in the history of ideas or to any genuinely historical turn. Christian ethicists, with few exceptions, remain focused on the present even in the recent trend toward treatment of historical figures and periods. The attention to the origins of modern ethics is genealogical rather than historical in the proper sense; it aims to de-legitimize contemporary approaches to ethics by showing how their fundamental assumptions belong to now discredited modern theories rather than to Christianity proper. Engelhardt belongs to the company of these genealogists. He seeks to de-legitimize forms of Christian ethics that rely on reason by showing, via Kant and Hegel, how they remain in an immanent horizon. If the genealogy is designed to show how efforts to ground ethics in discursive reason end up in immanence, the philosophical
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argument just examined is designed to show that the genealogy is not the narration of a historical accident—that any effort to ground ethics by discursive reason must meet the same fate. A common Protestant narrative locates the origin of modern ethics in Kant’s articulation of a rational morality, which required religion neither for the formulation and justification of its principle nor as an incentive to do what that principle requires. As early as Schleiermacher, a rejoinder to Kant appeared in the form of a Christian ethics (christliche Sitte) distinct from rational morality, an ethics grounded in the concrete reality of the church as a historical and cultural form. Much of modern Protestant ethics can be understood in terms of a competition between these two approaches.8 By contrast, many Catholic and Anglican thinkers, including MacIntyre (in his later work), Milbank, and Oliver O’Donovan, trace modern ethics back further, to late medieval nominalism and voluntarism. For MacIntyre, the seeds of modernity were sown by Duns Scotus, who in his zeal to preserve the notion of morality as obedience to God made moral norms radically dependent on the will of God, prompting the rationalist Enlightenment response.9 For Milbank, nominalism is again the culprit; it marks the point at which voluntarism destroys Thomistic participation and thereby ushers in the secular (1990, pp. 14f). For O’Donovan, voluntarism and nominalism undermine the generic and teleological orderings that constitute the cosmos as a divinely created order and usher in an era in which nature and history open up as arenas for human beings to produce their own order and create their own value (1994, pp. 39f, 45f). Of these Catholic and Anglican genealogists, only O’Donovan raises suspicions about the role given to human reason in high scholasticism, and particularly in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Yet, one could argue that the seeds of modern ethics are planted here, specifically in the extent to which (and the grounds on which) Aquinas thought that a natural morality could be articulated on its own terms (in spite of his conviction of its actual inseparability from the supernatural end), and in his portrayal of fallen reason as capable in principle (though with difficulty in practice) of knowing the morally good apart from divine revelation. This suspicion brings us to Engelhardt’s genealogy. For Engelhardt, both late medieval nominalism and voluntarism and Kant’s articulation of a morality whose principle and motive are independent of religion merely draw out the implications of the general scholastic belief in the capacity of discursive reason to formulate a common morality binding on all. Engelhardt concedes that Aquinas recognized the necessity of grace as a prior condition of the exercise of reason and also understood the effect of disordered passions on the exercise of reason. Aquinas, then, placed moral reason in a context of grace and ascetic practice; for him, discursive reason was not, strictly speaking, independent of the holiness of life needed to exercise it correctly. Nevertheless, Engelhardt insists, “emphasis came to be placed on moral truths that discursive reason could disclose by examining
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human nature” (2000, p. 18). The vagueness of the expression “came to be placed” leaves it unclear exactly when and in whom Engelhardt thinks this emphasis actually took hold.10 But there is no doubt that he thinks that Aquinas held to certain convictions—presumably the ones identified in the previous paragraph— that prepared the ground for a rational morality whose content can be articulated and grounded on the basis of discursive reason alone. Engelhardt narrates the history of the search for a ground for ethics through discursive reason as a double tragedy. First, reason, confined to immanence, failed to unite the West under a single, canonical morality. Second, in its turn to discursive reason, Western Christian ethics abandoned the understanding of ethics as part of the process by which human beings come to know a personal God, breaking decisively with the mystical, noetic form of knowing which, according to Engelhardt, retains its primacy only in Orthodox Christianity. We will say more about this conception of ethics in the final section. Here, the focus is on the history of discursive reason Engelhardt narrates. The most significant point here is that discursive reason has a history. The discursive reason described by Engelhardt is characterized by a gap between its aim (to supply a ground for morality that is not merely contingent) and its inability to fulfill this aim. This gap is the space within which a history can unfold, first in the form of a succession of diverse (and necessarily unsuccessful) attempts to fulfill the aim and then as a gradual recognition by discursive reason of its own immanent character. With this recognition, reason not only has a history but also is its history and must be expressed as such—as Hegel above all understood. By contrast, noetic knowledge has no history at all in this sense. Its object is outside history and its relation to its object is immediate. There is a history of discovery and articulation of its content, but that content itself is not historical. For Engelhardt, the shift to Orthodoxy is a shift from a tradition of ethics that must be narrated as a history because it is confined to immanence, to a tradition of ethics that cannot be narrated as a history because it is rooted in the transcendent. Against this relegation of discursive reason to immanence, a Thomist might protest that Engelhardt has simply read Kantian and Hegelian reason too far back into history and has thus obscured an alternative account of moral reason. The traditional Thomistic claim is that while God is transcendent, the divinely created moral order is accessible in principle to human reason. Moral reason is, therefore, not locked into an immanent horizon but participates in the divine moral governance. Engelhardt says surprisingly little about this claim and so ignores the strongest theological objection to his view of moral reason as immanent. Still, at least two replies are open to him. First, he could reply that the late modern fragmentation of moral reason creates problems for this account. Natural reason appears to arrive at multiple versions of morality, many of which are incompatible with one another. While moral diversity itself does not invalidate the Thomistic claim, it does place a
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strong burden of proof on it. The more people arrive at mutually incompatible conclusions through what, to all appearances, seems to be the exercise of reason in independence of scripture and Christian tradition, the stronger must be the error theory that is capable of explaining how this can be so given the capacities of moral reason; yet, the stronger the error theory is, the more modest must be the claims for what moral reason is capable of doing on its own. Second, and more in the spirit of his genealogy, Engelhardt could reply that the capacity of natural moral reason to arrive at what Christians know from other sources (e.g., noetic knowledge or biblical revelation) to be the divinely created moral order is only apparent, an illusory effect of centuries of tutoring of reason by Christian tradition. Now that the tutorial is over, natural moral reason shows itself in its true light as the source of diverse, mutually incompatible claims. It only appeared that natural moral reason arrived at the same destination as noetic knowledge or biblical revelation on its own ticket; in reality, it was all along being escorted by Christian tradition. Meanwhile, the claims made on behalf of natural moral reason were preparing the way for the oscillating forces of voluntarism and rationalism which struck, from opposite sides, against the possibility of articulating a notion of moral reason under the tutelage of Christian tradition. Engelhardt’s actual position is somewhat different from both of these hypothetical replies. This position holds that any moral order known through discursive reason is not the moral order as God created it but is only a broken form of that order, the order of a world that is no longer a window to the transcendent God. What discursive reason is capable of grasping is only nature as it is after the fall, and nature in this post-lapsarian form is enclosed within its own immanent horizon. Here, Engelhardt will likely meet another objection. This confinement of discursive reason to immanent nature sounds similar to the older Catholic notion that reason unaided by grace apprehends moral order in terms of a “pure nature” which can be characterized apart from any effects of grace. In recent decades, Catholic thought has shifted away from this conception of pure nature to the view expressed in the nouvelle théologie of the mid-twentieth century that nature is integrally related to the supernatural. Again, Engelhardt largely ignores this important movement, leaving him open to the charge that his characterization of the difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism on the normative status of nature is based on an outdated Catholic paradigm. However, Engelhardt could point out that while the newer Catholic understanding of natural order recognizes an integral relation of nature and grace, it remains the case that the nature it identifies with the divinely created moral order is still nature as it is known through discursive reason rather than nature as grasped in noetic knowledge. The issue, then, is not simply the difference between an Orthodox understanding of nature as a window to God and an older Catholic understanding of a “pure nature” apart from any effects of grace. Rather, the issue is whether,
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after the fall, nature as grasped through empirical or rational investigations can have normative significance in Christian ethics or only nature as known noetically, through prayer and asceticism. From Engelhardt’s perspective, Catholic natural law theories—whether physicalist (identifying natural law with inclinations or with ends inherent in biological capacities grasped rationally), naturalist (identifying natural law with requirements of natural human flourishing grasped empirically or with some combination of empirical and rational investigations), or rationalist (identifying natural law with rational moral constraints)—all deal with nature in a broken state, treating as normative an order that no longer is a window to God but is rather an immanent sphere closed off to the divine, and is thus unnatural with respect to God’s intent in creating it (2000, pp. 172-176). From this perspective, it is not sufficient to claim that nature is already permeated by grace and integrally related to the supernatural. Nature as we now encounter it through our ordinary knowledge and experience—as often hostile to humans, as explicable apart from the miraculous, as the source of profound obstacles to spiritual growth—obscures its divine source and end. It remains the good creature of God, but in its broken form we experience it as closed to God and locked in its own immanence. It follows that versions of natural law that rely on our ordinary experience or reason remain within immanence. Given this view of the immanence of discursive reason, for Engelhardt it was inevitable that with the commitment to the latter beginning in the scholastic period the subsequent history of Western Christian ethics would play out as a struggle between moral reason and traditional Christianity—and just as inevitable that traditional Christianity would lose. It is odd, then, that Engelhardt, who places the Council of Trent at the origin of the modern era in the West while also stressing its continuity with scholasticism (and thus with the turn to discursive reason), commends post-Tridentine Catholic medical ethics as a coherent and unified tradition of moral guidance, capable of absorbing new scientific and technological developments within a continuous conceptual and methodological framework (p. 8f). It is the fracturing, by the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath, of the moral unity and moral certainty he finds in the post-Tridentine “manualist” tradition that disturbs Engelhardt. Moreover, Engelhardt attributes the moral fragmentation and confusion that, for him, followed the Council not to the rationalism of the manualist tradition, but to the attempt on the part of the Church to conform to a rapidly changing social and cultural order that in its moral orientation as in other respects was becoming increasingly less Christian. This brings us to a problem. Engelhardt’s own description of post-Tridentine moral theology presents the latter as an exemplary case of a unified, continuous tradition. At the same time, this tradition continues the scholastic emphasis on discursive reason. By his own account, then, post-Tridentine
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moral theology seems to constitute a strong argument against Engelhardt’s claims about the limits of discursive reason. For here is a tradition that maintained its unity and continuity while relying on discursive reason to resolve moral questions. The fragmentation and confusion following Vatican II were due, in Engelhardt’s view, not to reliance on discursive reason but to the decision to conform to new social and cultural circumstances. It, therefore, seems questionable—precisely on Engelhardt’s own terms—to reject all approaches to ethics that rely on discursive reason on the grounds that they are incapable of sustaining traditional Christian ethics. Perhaps Engelhardt is not inconsistent here if we keep in mind two points that are at least implicitly made in his account. One is that the postTridentine tradition was committed in principle to providing by discursive reason an account of morality that is binding on all. For Engelhardt, when the tradition retains this commitment under circumstances where the morality of a society is no longer even nominally Christian, moral theology makes itself indistinguishable from secular rational morality. It is only at this point that moral theology begins to pay the price for its confidence, articulated during the scholastic period, that a common morality, binding on all, can in principle be grasped by discursive reason apart from knowledge of God through revelation and faith. The other point is that, as Engelhardt sees it, up to Vatican II both the liturgy and ethos of the Catholic Church retained much of the substance Engelhardt ascribes to the common heritage of Christians prior to the schism. The implication seems to be that post-Tridentine moral theology owed its coherence, its unity, and its continuity to the remnant of traditional (i.e., pre-schism) Christianity that had not yet been eliminated from the Roman Church despite seven centuries of discursive reason in moral matters. To put it in another way, only in the aftermath of Vatican II, with the stripping away of many vestiges of preschism Christianity, did the commitment of the Catholic moral tradition to discursive reason stand exposed; at precisely this point the limitations of discursive reason, made clear by Kant and Hegel, became clear. Still, questions remain. A history of Catholic moral theology might suggest that Engelhardt has exaggerated the unity and continuity of postTridentine moral theology and the absence of crisis during that period. More relevant to our concerns is that what Engelhardt values about the post-Tridentine tradition are the unity, stability, and certainty it offered. We have already suggested that Engelhardt’s understanding of the transcendent confuses the need for moral unity, stability, and certainty in the face of modern anxiety about morality with the relation to a personal God; we must now wonder whether this need has alienated him from the modern West and led him to a mythical, timeless Orient. With this question in mind it is time to examine Engelhardt’s turn to the transcendent.
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III. The Turn to the Transcendent Is there any light of the transcendent at the end of the tunnel of Western reason? Can the West reconstitute a relation to the transcendent once it is clear that discursive reason ends in immanence? Or will it be necessary to step outside the history of Western reason altogether? Before turning to the East, Engelhardt must address the possibility of a rebirth of transcendence in the West, a possibility that emerges in the figure of Kierkegaard. According to Engelhardt, Kierkegaard sought a genuine relation to the transcendent personal God yet inherited the view that the temporal world is fully immanent and thus unable to manifest God who, as transcendent, must remain invisible in the world even in his incarnation in Christ. It is this rejection of an immediate experience of the transcendent in the historical encounter with Christ, Engelhardt argues, that ultimately kept Kierkegaard tethered to immanence despite his desire for the transcendent. For him there can be no immediate experience of God; immediate experience of the divine occurs only in pagan immanence, not in relation to a transcendent God. But for Engelhardt, this denial of immediate experience of God left Kierkegaard unable to account for a genuine experience of the transcendent God, while it also alienated him from the apostles, who directly experienced God incarnate in Christ, and from the Church, which is the visible continuation of the incarnate God in the world (2000, pp. 97-109). Kierkegaard’s failure is emblematic for Engelhardt; it represents the necessary failure of any quest for the transcendent that: 1) holds no more illusions regarding the immanence of reason, yet 2) is alienated from the more ancient tradition of noetic experience. Kierkegaard, in other words, is the paradigmatic late modern Western seeker. It is critical that Engelhardt both treat Kierkegaard as the sole option left in the West and pronounce his project a failure. For if there is a post-Kantian and postHegelian quest for the transcendent which takes a different form than that of Engelhardt’s Kierkegaard or if Kierkegaard’s quest could be interpreted as a success, then Engelhardt must reckon with another way to the transcendent aside from Orthodoxy. Rather than ask whether Engelhardt has rightly understood Kierkegaard—a question whose difficulties would take us far afield11—we might ask whether there is a broader context regarding immanence and transcendence in which to place Kierkegaard even if we follow the basic lines of Engelhardt’s reading. This context involves worries similar to Engelhardt’s own, namely, that the Western metaphysical tradition as a whole or (more plausibly) in its modern variations reduces the transcendent to immanence by placing it at the disposal of a knowing subject. At the same time, to protect the transcendent from this fate by placing it beyond all possible knowledge and experience of it is to render it empty and abstract. It is possible to understand not only Kierkegaard but a long tradition of thought beginning with Hegel as
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an effort to deal with this problem; namely, that to grasp the transcendent conceptually or in an experience of it is to make it immanent, while transcendence apart from any capacity to know or experience it is purely abstract and inaccessible, and therefore devoid of any moral or religious significance. From this perspective, Kierkegaard’s second immediacy of faith can be understood as an effort to account for an experience of the transcendent which avoids both the reduction of transcendence to immanence in an immediate experience of it, on the one hand, and a purely abstract, inaccessible transcendence, on the other hand.12 Engelhardt is correct to argue that the challenge here is to show how a relation to a personal God can be a genuine one without being direct or immediate—in other words, how faith avoids the “bad infinity” of the abstract, inaccessible transcendent. But Engelhardt himself faces the challenge of showing how one can have a direct or immediate relation to a God Who remains genuinely transcendent—in other words, how noetic experience avoids reducing the transcendent to immanence. The point here is not to pronounce Kierkegaard a success where Engelhardt finds him a failure, or to defend one or another modern Western version of the transcendent. Rather the point here is twofold: 1) there are modern Western versions which attempt to understand transcendence in light of the problem identified above, and 2) from the standpoint of this problem, Engelhardt needs to show how the immediate experience of God involved in noetic knowledge is compatible with the transcendence of God. At the very least, these remarks indicate that Engelhardt’s dichotomy between a West locked in immanence and an East in communion with the transcendent is a gross oversimplification. Of course, Christian theology is not interested in any discourse about transcendence as such but in the extent, if any, to which such a discourse helps to express the encounter with God in Jesus Christ. Engelhardt is, therefore, right to focus on Kierkegaard’s Christology, or rather that of his pseudonym, Johannes Climacus. In this context, he contrasts the latter’s conviction of the invisibility of Christ’s divinity in his human presence with the Orthodox conviction that the Gospels attest the immediate experience of God in Christ’s humanity. Engelhardt adduces, among other things, the story of the transfiguration of Christ in the synoptic Gospels in support of the Orthodox view. However, as narrated in the synoptic Gospels the encounter of Peter, James, and John with the transfigured Christ conforms neither to the view of Kierkegaard’s Climacus nor to that of Engelhardt. The encounter seems to overwhelm the disciples’ capacity to comprehend it; in Mark and Luke, Peter’s verbal response indicates confusion, while in all three Gospels reference is made, at slightly different points in the episode, to the disciples’ fear. It is, to be sure, a vision according to Matthew 17:9, and the disciples, as Luke 9:32 reports, beheld Christ’s glory. But their confusion and fear indicate the extent to which this transcendent glory overflows their understanding and their receptivity. Moreover, in all three Gospels the moment of vision is
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eclipsed by cloud; in Matthew and Luke this occurs while Peter is still speaking. Disclosure is immediately followed by concealment; the transcendent withdraws its presence even as it gives it. Finally, the moment of intelligibility, if there is one in this event, comes not with the sight of the transfigured Christ but with the divine voice, which, speaking from out of the cloud, pronounces Christ to be the beloved Son and enjoins the disciples to listen to Him. The word of God from the concealing cloud reveals the divine Sonship of Christ and places the disciples in the position of its addressees, enjoining obedience to the Christ—here the transcendent ground of Christian ethics involves neither Engelhardt’s first immediacy nor the second immediacy of Kierkegaard’s Climacus. On this view, Christian ethics is grounded neither in an invisibility of God that is overcome in faith nor in a noetic experience that comprehends God but in a more complex encounter with Christ, of which these two alternatives are opposite exaggerations—one which by leaning towards an abstract transcendence is on the way to becoming secular, the other which by emphasizing the immediacy of the encounter with the transcendent still retains elements of the pagan.
IV. Ethics as Therapy of Desire “Christian bioethics is not a set of rules. It is integral to a liturgical life leading to union with a fully transcendent God” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 236). By repeatedly issuing declarations like this one, and above all by his rich descriptions of the Christian life in these terms, Engelhardt portrays Orthodox Christian ethics as a therapy of desire. Ethics is a process of healing and restoring the capacity to experience the transcendent God rather than conforming to a natural order characterized in terms of law. It follows that the focus of ethics is not on what must be done to avoid or remove guilt but on what must be done to avoid or remove what prevents one from pursuing union with God or detracts from that pursuit. Two aspects of Christian ethics understood in these terms distinguish Engelhardt’s Orthodox ethics from much of Catholic and Protestant ethics. The first is that different levels or categories of ethical injunction are determined not on the basis of a legal or judicial regime but by the relation of the behavior they regulate to the pursuit of holiness in a broken world. This makes room for a broad category of actions that are not ideally oriented to holiness, yet are not significantly inimical to its pursuit—actions that, in Engelhardt’s terms, fall somewhat short of the mark but not wide of the mark. These actions fall somewhere between the permissible and the forbidden; they comprise an indeterminate danger zone, which those who pursue holiness enter at varying degrees of risk. There appear to be two criteria for such cases. One is that the actions involved are directed to a good that is positively related to the pursuit of holiness. The other is that these actions do not violate
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a norm that marks the boundaries of what is compatible with that pursuit. Perhaps as significant as Engelhardt’s efforts to categorize kinds and degrees of spiritual danger in this zone, or the fact that it has principally to do with efforts of married couples to conceive children, is that there is such a zone at all. Its very existence indicates the character of Orthodox ethics as Engelhardt describes it, shedding light, in turn, on the meaning of the permissible and the forbidden and thereby on the nature of Orthodox ethics generally. Because actions are evaluated ethically with regard to whether they contribute to or detract from the pursuit of holiness, the permissible and the forbidden are insufficient as categories for the evaluation of actions; there are many cases in which a prohibition would be too strong while permission would wrongly signal that an activity involves no spiritual harm. The impossibility of characterizing the intermediate zone in the legal or judicial terms of prohibition and permissibility indicates the sense in which the entirety of ethics for Engelhardt is a therapy of the desire for the transcendent. A second aspect of Christian ethics understood in this therapeutic sense is also worth noting. When ethics is oriented to the avoidance and removal of guilt, the question of the voluntary and involuntary is decisive: the voluntary character of an action is a necessary condition of its susceptibility to moral evaluation. Conceptions of involuntary sin are thus incomprehensible, and to require penance in cases of involuntary action appears cruel. But of course, for Engelhardt, Orthodox ethics is instead grounded in the pursuit of holiness, which is not moral goodness but union with God. In this context, the situation regarding involuntary action is different; the notion that certain things, which befall us apart from our volitional capacities, hinder our pursuit of holiness is not incomprehensible, nor is it cruel to require those affected by such things to undergo practices aimed at renewing this pursuit. However, we may ask whether in some cases the set of such things recognized by the Orthodox tradition is in fact a product of the cultures in which Orthodox Christianity has flourished. We may suspect that this is the case at certain points where this tradition attaches significance to bodily penetration. Engelhardt’s analysis indicates at least two senses in which bodily penetration is ethically significant. Whether or not penetration has occurred is definitive in determining which sexual activities engaged in by persons not married to one another are classified as adulterous in the strictest sense and which are classified as masturbation, a lesser though still very serious sin (2000, p. 247f). According to Engelhardt, penetration is significant for Orthodox Christianity because it constitutes the carnal union in which husband and wife become one flesh. It follows that sexual activities with a partner other than one’s spouse which do not involve penetration do not violate this union to the same degree—though of course they do violate it and are considered a form of adultery. This apparently has the implausible implication that because it involves penetration, the introduction of semen into the wife by a third
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party in the course of assisted reproduction is a more serious form of adultery than is masturbation sans penetration with a third party solely for the purpose of mutual sexual pleasure (2000, p. 253). In any case, the significance of penetration also appears in a second sense, namely, under the category of defilement. Engelhardt points out that the Orthodox tradition excludes from the priesthood those who have been anally penetrated. In part, this is related to the significance of carnal union just described; anal penetration is the “antiicon” of vaginal penetration and thus of the proper carnal union of marriage (2000, p. 248). But Engelhardt also refers to anal penetration in terms of defilement; to undergo such a bodily violation, despite one’s lack of assent (nonconsensual instances are assumed, though it is not clear that only these are meant), is to incur “an injury that can have an impact on one’s heart” even without one’s volition (p. 248). The same attitude toward defilement leads the Orthodox tradition to permit (and even praise) leaping to one’s death to avoid penetration (p. 249). Why does penetration have a degree of significance in the East that is apparently greater than that in the West? With respect to the first sense in which penetration is significant, the answer seems clear; it follows from the importance of carnal union in constituting the proper place of sexual activity in the pursuit of God. It makes sense that vaginal penetration is more deeply implicated in becoming one flesh than are acts, such as masturbation, which do not involve penetration. But what about the second sense in which penetration is ethically significant? We are told that anal penetration has a permanent effect on the heart—an effect that, apparently, no spiritual or ascetic practice can finally erase. But why does this particular form of defilement have such an ineradicable effect? Because we are dealing with the category of defilement we may safely rule out a modern explanation that it is because of the psychological scar such a violation leaves. In the absence of another answer, we must ask whether exclusion from the priesthood on these grounds simply carries into the Church the ancient Greek view that anal penetration is incompatible with the social status appropriate to a male citizen. Is the notion of penetration as defilement a genuinely Christian notion or simply a survival in Christianity of what we know was a specifically (though not uniquely) Greek obsession?13 This question brings us to a final problem with Engelhardt’s understanding of the transcendent. For Engelhardt, Tradition (capital “T”) is the continuation into the Church of the presence of the transcendent God in the humanity of Christ. It is characterized by its timeless, unchanging uniformity in contrast to mere tradition, which is a purely immanent, historical continuity. To identify this sharp contrast between Tradition and tradition with the contrast between transcendence and immanence is doubly problematic. First, the sharp contrast leaves Engelhardt with an overly simplified scheme that is incapable of grasping versions of transcendence for which the transcendent is
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related in complex ways to what is historical and changing. This is most notably the case in Engelhardt’s stance toward biblical revelation.14 Second, and more relevant to the present point, the sharp contrast forces a choice between denial of the historically and socially conditioned character of what is ascribed to Tradition and a radical suspicion of the very notion of Tradition itself. Consider again the case of defilement by anal penetration. When matters such as these, which at least seem to suggest a particular socio-cultural origin, are identified with unchanging Tradition the effect is either to remove them from critical interrogation as to their place in Christian tradition or to threaten the very status of Christian tradition itself by raising suspicions about the notion of Tradition. Engelhardt forces us to choose between denial of the social and historical nature of beliefs and practices, on the one hand, and their complete immanence, on the other hand. Once again, this seems to confuse a reliance on the transcendent as an escape from anxiety over contingency with a relation to the transcendent God. In recent decades, Christian ethics has been largely divided between two approaches: one based on the notion of a natural human flourishing known by reason and another based on the convictions and practices of the Christian community grasped through a narrative construal. Both claim to be ultimately grounded in a transcendent, personal God, but with respect to actual ethical content this relation is usually indirect. The forces of rationalism, naturalism, and historicism continue to exert their effect even when they are overtly rejected. In this context, Engelhardt’s work should inspire Christian ethics to a more direct grounding in the relation to the God who transcends reason, nature, and history. At the same time, Engelhardt’s conception of the transcendent reflects a desire for timelessness, uniformity, certainty, and authority in the face of change, multiplicity, complexity, and human autonomy as much as it reflects a desire for union with a personal God. The problem is not that the relation of ethics to the transcendent God does not cure the anxieties reflected in the former desire but that it does not cure them by offering an escape from reason, history, and nature. When desire for the transcendent takes this form, it invites the kind of criticism that ends up casting suspicion on transcendence as such and reducing everything to immanence. We began by observing that Engelhardt’s Christian bioethics is a call to conversion. It is also the intellectual articulation of a spiritual journey, one that begins with the pre-Vatican II confidence in discursive reason, continues through the upheavals of Vatican II with a sobering and disillusioning experience of the limits of discursive reason, finds in Kant and Hegel an account of those limits but no path to what we had once hoped to attain through reason, and finally ends in a fulfillment of the desire for the transcendent in a turn to Orthodox Christianity. We have questioned whether this journey is inevitable for Western Christians who desire the transcendent, and have suggested that at various points, Engelhardt confuses the desire for
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union with the transcendent God with the desire for release from certain modern anxieties. We have denied that the relation of ethics to the transcendent, personal God forces choices between a transcendent ground and nihilism, between immediacy and inaccessibility, between Tradition and tradition, and between noetic knowledge and discursive reason. However, we have not questioned whether Christian ethics must be based on a relation to the transcendent, personal God. Engelhardt’s is the most articulate and passionate voice we currently have for Christian ethics in that form. For this reason, this articulation of a remarkable journey has much to teach even those who have never entertained such confidence in moral reason, who have never felt such an unqualified need for moral unity, certainty, and authority, and whose relation to the transcendent, personal God is not polarized between inaccessibility and immediacy.15
Notes 1. The primary source of Engelhardt’s Christian bioethics is The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (2000). 2. The call seems most explicitly directed to Roman Catholics. Engelhardt barely engages Protestantism. Protestant thought is represented not by Luther, Calvin, Menno Simons, Edwards, Hooker, Wesley, Schleiermacher, and Barth but, remarkably, by Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. For Engelhardt, the Protestant Reformation occurred in three phases: a first phase which fragmented Western Christianity and created the conditions for the emergence of a liberal polity, a second phase characterized by pietism, and a third phase, marked by Kant and Hegel, which transformed Christianity into the secular, rationalized religion against which Kierkegaard unsuccessfully rebelled. The first two phases are superficially treated while if the third phase concerns a genuine form of Protestantism at all, it is a thoroughly non-ecclesial form. 3. The most thorough exposition of this position is found in Engelhardt, The Foundations of Bioethics (1996, pp. 35-72). What appears in this paragraph is a summary of the argument Engelhardt presents there with much more nuance and detail. 4. In this context, the twofold significance of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Bernard Williams is that they: 1) understand the extent to which rationalistic moral theories can be treated as contingent survivals of a Christian culture, and 2) make it possible to envision a form of ethics which (with respect to the expectation of a final and enduring truth in moral and political matters) breaks not only with Christianity but also with its continuation in modern rationalistic moral theories. 5. This does not mean that Christian ethics is not concerned with unity, certainty, and authority. Quite the opposite is the case. But it is far from clear that the kind of unity, certainty, and authority it offers is the same as that sought by many in their modern anxieties about morality. It is far from clear that these modern anxieties are the anxieties Christians have in their sinful separation from God, a point that is brought home by the fact that in the face of these anxieties appeals to the transcendent often take on a problematic and sometimes even a demonic form.
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6. At several points, Engelhardt asserts that contingent moral content is insufficient to ground morality because it would be binding only on those who agree to accept it; we are, therefore, thrust back again on the merely procedural principle of permission. However, this begs the question: opponents of Engelhardt’s requirement of permission would most likely reply that morality is not the kind of thing that can be agreed to in that way, that the very features of morality that constitute its contingency make it a mistake to require individual permission of the kind Engelhardt requires. Engelhardt would likely reply that their contingent morality involves force to the extent that it is imposed on those who do not consent to it and that he is only offering a morality for those who are interested in resolving moral disagreements without appeal to force. 7. The most persuasive aspect of Engelhardt’s political philosophy is its exposure of the inevitability of force under a moral or political order that can no longer pretend to ground morality or politics in an end or ends inherent in human nature, in universal senses of benevolence or justice, in a faculty of reason with which each person is ultimately identified, or in a form of practical reason which all moral discourse presupposes. To the extent that a moral and political order is contingent, it inevitably coerces those who fall under that order but do not identify with the community, tradition, or form of practical reason from which the moral and political norms that comprise that order are derived. Engelhardt’s libertarian theory sets the transcendental conditions of possibility of a morality for those who seek to resolve moral and political disagreements without recourse to force. Measured against this standard, we can see to what extent actual liberal orders are based on coercion despite their frequent claims to the contrary. In this sense, Engelhardt offers us a very useful critical theory. Of course, he intends it to be much more than that. At the same time, the least persuasive aspect of Engelhardt’s political philosophy is that it responds to this situation by proposing a single, abstract principle (that of permission). Those who reject this principle plunge into an abyss in which there are no principled limits on the violence that may be done to them; they place themselves outside any moral order. Either a single, abstract principle or utter nihilism: surely we saw enough of this kind of theory in the twentieth century. 8. This is to say that much of Protestant ethics is a conflict between largely un-avowed heirs of Kant (who qualify the latter’s rationalism but for whom Christian beliefs and practices are meaningful primarily as figurative expressions of a morality whose content can at least be articulated, if not grounded, apart from Christian beliefs and practices), and unwitting heirs of Schleiermacher (who reject the latter’s assimilation of the church to its culture as well as his recognition of the validity of a rational ethic apart from Christian ethics, but who repeat his fundamental characterization of Christian ethics as the normative description of the convictions and practices that distinguish the church as a distinct community). 9. This is the critical point in MacIntyre’s narrative of the loss of Thomistic tradition in Three Rival Versions (1992). 10. Engelhardt distinguishes the intertwining of faith in reason with faith in faith characteristic of even the late middle ages, from the faith in discursive rationality characteristic of the Enlightenment. This places the transition to modern ethics in
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the aftermath of the seventeenth-century wars. See Engelhardt, 2002, p. 214. 11. At the very least we would have to ask whether Engelhardt is sufficiently aware of the stances of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms and their differences from the stance(s) articulated in his signed texts, and whether he takes sufficient account of the kind of argument these pseudonyms undertake when they try to ask what kind of belief or attitude regarding Christ is possible from their stances. 12. Kierkegaard would thus be the first in a line of thinkers who include Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1969, pp. 33-52) and Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (2002). 13. We may suspect that something similar is the case in the emphasis placed by the Orthodox tradition on the lordship of man over woman. The grounds for this hierarchy in the Genesis text on which Orthodoxy bases it makes this case more complex than the case of anal penetration; nevertheless, one can question whether the importance this hierarchy has in Engelhardt’s description of that tradition owes more to the strongly patriarchal societies in which Orthodoxy developed than to the biblical tradition itself. 14. Engelhardt dismisses biblical revelation by first identifying it with the biblical text and then arguing that the biblical text is conditioned by its historical and social circumstances and thus remains in immanence (2000, pp. 167, 181). However, while the biblical text is subject to historical and other forms of criticism, nothing in its socio-historical character precludes it from also being the bearer of divine self-revelation, an inspired and authoritative human witness through which God speaks. It is true that seventeenth century Protestant orthodoxy identified divine revelation with the biblical text and thereby held revelation hostage to critical methods, which for two centuries have drawn attention to the human medium as a product of immanent forces. But these methods do not count against the claim that it is God who speaks through that medium and that an explanation of the Bible in critical terms fails to grasp its true character and content. There is, therefore, no theological reason for concluding that a biblically grounded Christian ethics is confined to immanence simply by virtue of the socially and historically conditioned nature of the biblical text. Properly understood scripture is a window to the transcendent personal God, or more properly the medium in which the transcendent personal God speaks to human creatures. Rather than treat this version of transcendence on its own terms Engelhardt rejects it because it fails to conform to his rigid contrast between transcendence and immanence. 15. The lessons to be gained from this articulation of his journey are among the many unpayable personal, professional, intellectual, and spiritual debts I owe to H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. These debts, too plentiful to enumerate here, prove what Kierkegaard understood and Derrida did not: that a genuine friendship can be based on an unpayable debt.
Bibliography Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Bioethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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———. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. ———. “Medicine and the Biomedical Sciences after God: Do Right-Worshipping Christians Know More than Others about the Content of Morality?” Christian Bioethics 8 (2002): 209-214. Levinas, E. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. MacIntyre, A. After Virtue. 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. ———. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. ———. Three Rival Versions: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. Marion, J.-L. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Milbank, J. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1990. O’Donovan, O. Resurrection and Moral Order. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.
Down By Law:1 Engelhardt, Grisez, and the Meanings of “Legalism” M. Cathleen Kaveny
In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. observes that the term “fundamentalism” now functions as a general term of opprobrium, used against those holding “firmly to their transcendent religious commitments, contrary to the prevailing secular and post-traditional conceits of the age,” rather than as a label for a clearly defined position regarding biblical interpretation within the Christian community (2000, p. 212 n. 4). He writes that “for those of modernist, post-traditional, revisionary commitments, the term fundamentalist is often used as a conversation-stopper. The implication is that no one in his right, or at least enlightened, mind would admit to being a fundamentalist” (p. 212 n. 4, emphasis added). The presupposition of this paper is that the term “legalism” functions much the same way for a broad range of Christian moral theologians. It seems inconceivable that any contemporary Christian moralist, in his right, or at least his enlightened, heart would admit to being a “legalist” or uncomplainingly accede to a description of his moral theological framework as “legalistic.” Nonetheless, just as the term “fundamentalism” continues to be freely used in secular academic discussions to gesture to an object of polemic and scorn, so too does the term “legalism” in Christian theological discussions. In fact, Engelhardt frequently takes Christian legalism as the proximate object of his own polemical attacks against Western Christianity. He also maintains that one virtue of his “traditional Christian” approach, which is rooted in the theological and liturgical traditions of Eastern Christianity, is that it avoids legalism. According to Engelhardt, Western Christian moral 135 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 135-163) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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thought, particularly Roman Catholic moral thought, has long been plagued by legalistic modes of analysis. More specifically, his prototype of legalistic thinking seems to be the “manualist” model of moral theology that predominated in the Catholic Church from the time of the Council of Trent until the mid-twentieth century, and which was designed to allow confessors to evaluate the seriousness of the sins confessed by members of their flock and to set an appropriate penance. But as Engelhardt repeatedly observes, Catholic moral theology underwent a sea change after the Second Vatican Council. The moral manuals have all but disappeared from the scene. Are there any intellectually respectable, cardcarrying legalists left within mainstream Roman Catholic thought? Or is Engelhardt’s polemic against legalism nothing more than a quixotic battle with authoritarian ghosts of the past? It is hard to say, because Engelhardt does not support his accusations of Catholic legalism with citations to any contemporary Roman Catholic thinkers. One plausible candidate for the role of intelligent, contemporary, card-carrying legalist is Germain Grisez, the Flynn Professor of Christian Ethics at Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Strongly supportive of the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council, he nonetheless also has been concerned to promote and defend aspects of Catholic moral and spiritual life that have fallen into desuetude in its wake: the desirability for frequent use of the sacrament of penance, the importance of penitential practices, and even the usefulness of indulgences in deepening one’s spiritual life. Moreover, for nearly thirty years, Grisez has been a tireless defender of the Roman Catholic magisterium’s affirmation of the existence of exception-less moral rules, including an absolute prohibition against the use of drugs, devices, or surgical procedures for the purpose of preventing conception. At first glance, therefore, Grisez seems as likely as any post-Vatican II Catholic moralist to defend an explicitly and self-avowedly legalistic approach to moral theology. Nonetheless, he does not do so. In fact, in his magisterial three-volume work, The Way of the Lord Jesus (1983; 1993; 1997), he devotes a great deal of explicit attention to combating what he defines as legalism and the abuses and distortions it introduces into the moral life of Christians. In my view, illuminating Engelhardt’s view of legalism by putting it into conversation with the reflections of Germain Grisez will be fruitful for a number of reasons. First, both theorists have reason to distance themselves from legalism, because the nature of their writings renders their work casually susceptible to that very charge. More specifically, Engelhardt and Grisez both maintain that moral theological reflection ought not to remain at the level of abstraction; it should provide sufficient detail to help people address the issues that arise in their day-to-day lives.2 The writings of both men, therefore, include finely nuanced analyses of particular classes of cases, which achieve substantial definiteness regarding acceptable and non-acceptable
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courses of action. As Engelhardt and Grisez surely know, the refusal to limit one’s moral theology to the articulation of abstract ideals or principles can render a theorist vulnerable to the charge of legalism by those inclined to think that any effort to reach a definite judgment on specific questions threatens to constrain Christian freedom. Second, despite the fact that Engelhardt is Orthodox and Grisez is Roman Catholic, they share a significant number of basic judgments regarding the shape of the Christian moral life. For example, although Grisez is a natural law thinker (and, therefore, believes that a significant amount of moral truth is accessible in principle both to believers and nonbelievers), he and Engelhardt would agree that Christian revelation affects both the accessibility and the substantive content of moral norms. Engelhardt and Grisez also both maintain that prayer and spiritual guidance can significantly contribute to moral discernment. Neither man believes that the Christian moral life can be lived without participation in the liturgical practices that have marked the Christian community from its beginnings. Third, their commonalities are punctuated by important differences. While they are equally adamant in their condemnation of “legalism,” Engelhardt and Grisez in fact mean significantly different things by the term. By exploring their differences within the broader context of their respective theological commitments, I hope to shed some light on the more general question of when and how it is appropriate to understand Christian morality as a type of “law.” My plan for this essay is as follows. In Section I, I will attempt to flesh out what both Engelhardt and Grisez mean by “legalism,” drawing upon the five components of the definition of law offered by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae to serve as a framework for my analysis. In Section II, I will examine some of the deleterious consequences that Engelhardt and Grisez believe a legalistic approach to morality entails for moral life and pastoral practice. In conclusion, I will offer some brief reflections on the usefulness of the term “legalism” in contemporary discussions regarding the methodology and content of Christian ethics.
I. What is Legalism? A. General comments on Engelhardt’s theory The title of Engelhardt’s book, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, needs some interpretation. It is not a book about biomedical ethical questions—or their foundations—narrowly construed; it is rather a book that situates biomedical questions within a broad articulation of an Orthodox Christian approach to the meaning and purpose of human life. Engelhardt clearly frames his objectives in the preface to his work:
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Engelhardt, a former Roman Catholic, objects to the Christianity of the West on both political philosophical and religious grounds. Following MacIntyre, Engelhardt argues that the Western tradition in political philosophy has failed in its objective of identifying foundations for a common morality in a religiously pluralistic world (pp. xi-xii). Second, he maintains that Western Christianity has not even succeeded in providing a coherent, content-full morality that is uncontroversially acknowledged to be true by its own adherents (p. 127). What approach does Engelhardt adopt in this situation? Because all attempts to formulate a substantive, rich common morality have failed, he argues that the attempt to do so must be given up as impossible. He maintains that in a secular society whose members do not agree on the nature and purpose of human life, the only justifiable morality is based on autonomy, consent, and contract; in his terms, the only justifiable public morality is a libertarian cosmopolitan morality of strangers. Such a morality will, Engelhardt admits, allow practices deeply offensive to many Christians (e.g., abortion and assisted suicide) to proceed without legal impediment. It will also tolerate a great deal more disparity in the distribution of health care resources than most Christian theorists of social justice would deem permissible. At the same time, however, Engelhardt emphasizes the creative possibilities of a libertarian cosmopolitan public ethos for religious believers. In his view, it will leave room for traditionally minded believers, such as Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims, to create communities free from interference by the larger world. He believes that this community-based freedom from interference constitutes a far preferable alternative for religious believers than the adoption of a cosmopolitan liberal morality, which would impose contemporary ideas of liberty and equality upon non-liberal religious communities that endorse sexist or homophobic practices (pp. 138-144). Engelhardt suggests that a cosmopolitan libertarian morality would also support the creation of a number of different value-based health care systems, among which individuals could choose according to their own moral commitments. For example, abortion and euthanasia would be freely available in the secular liberal health care system, but not within the traditional Christian or the Roman Catholic health care systems (p. 382). Engelhardt objects to the theological and liturgical commitments of Western Christianity no less than to its political morality. For him, the problem with Western Christianity is that it never moves beyond an immanent understanding
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of reality to touch the transcendent. Roman Catholic thought emphasizes the priority of discursive reason, which remains trapped within the immanent; it, therefore, cannot find itself a secure foundation in unchanging, transcendent truth. Protestant thought, with its emphasis on private study of scripture, apart from the liturgical life of the worshiping community, generates a historicalcritical approach to sacred writings that obscures their value as a gateway to transcendence. “If God is available to us only through arguments, texts, and oral traditions, God is obscured by the immanent, the finite, the contingent, and the historically conditioned” (p. 127). In contrast, Engelhardt maintains that traditional Christianity is enabled, by the grace of God, to reach beyond the immanent in order truly to touch the transcendent—to touch the energies of God Himself through a type of noetic experience. The marks of a life formed by such an experience do not change with the passage of time throughout the ages. He writes: Orthodox Christianity interweaves theological experience and reflection through liturgical texts and ascetical practices that have firm roots in the work and the sentiments of the Fathers, thus making the Fathers of the Church and their lives present to the contemporary community of believers. By sustaining religious life in the spirit of the first millennium, a framework for moral theology is engaged so that the contemporary believer can engage the moral reflections of early Christians with little conceptual opacity or distance. (p. 160)3
Consequently, according to Engelhardt, a traditional Christian bioethics, rooted in the Orthodox tradition, can escape the foundational problems plaguing secular ethics and most forms of Christian ethics in the contemporary world. It is, he claims, beyond challenge, because it is anchored in a noetic experience of the transcendent God. It provides, he asserts, a canonical content-full morality, which can be received and appreciated as true by the community of believers whose liturgical life and ascetic practices enable them to have that experience, and thereby to grow in participation in divine life (pp. 168ff). In a nutshell, then, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. is an Orthodox Christian libertarian. He has taken Orthodox Christianity’s lack of a social ethic, elevated it to a principled libertarian political theory, and turned it into an advantage in a pluralistic, post-liberal society. At the same time, he invites those alienated by the anomie and rootlessness of liberal individualism to choose to give themselves over to the challenges and possibilities of a tradition whose fundamental commitments he believes have not changed since its inception two thousand years ago.
B. A strategy for pinning down the meaning of legalism in Engelhardt’s thought As I will demonstrate in more detail below, the foregoing sketch of Engelhardt’s basic theological position is crucial to his understanding of
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legalism; in fact, one might even go so far as to say that his criticisms of legalism are integrally intertwined with his articulation of traditional Christianity’s approach to ethics. His book, however, does not include a straightforward discussion of the nature of legalism and its ensuing difficulties. Instead, he uses “legalism” as a general pejorative term, as a negative contrast to the positive aspects of the Orthodox approach to Christian ethics that he wishes to defend on various points. How, then, can we articulate Engelhardt’s understanding of legalism in a more systematic way—in a way that will also facilitate comparison with Germain Grisez’s view of legalism? I propose working with the definition of law given by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. In my view, it is a logical choice for several reasons. First, Aquinas is indisputably a major source of the later Catholic scholasticism which Engelhardt criticizes. Second, it is also indisputable that Aquinas works in close conversation with the Fathers of the Church. For example, more than one contemporary scholar has documented how Aquinas exhibits important similarities with the Eastern Fathers in his view that the fulfillment of human life lies in nothing less than deification.4 Third, while Aquinas’s thought contributed to the scholasticism that characterized Catholic moral thought before the Second Vatican Council, it is also a touchstone for the attempt to renew Catholic moral thought after the Council. Fourth and most importantly, Aquinas’s definition is both concise and comprehensive. It is a straightforward definition of law that ought to be uncontroversial to all parties to this conversation. Consequently, it will allow us to organize our discussion of the various components of legalism in the thought of Engelhardt and Grisez, as well as to identify their similarities and differences in a fruitful way. So what is Aquinas’s definition of law? He maintains that a law “is nothing else than (1) an ordinance (2) of reason (3) for the common good, (4) made by him who has care of the community, and (5) promulgated” (ST, I-II, q. 90, art. 4). In view of this definition of law, what, then, is legalism? My hypothesis is that moralists will label as “legalist” any view of moral norms that they believe gives disproportionate or otherwise inappropriate stress to one of the five elements of the definition of law given to us by Aquinas. As one might suspect, the label functions more as a broad, negative judgment about a rival moral system than as a nuanced, positive statement about one’s own view of the moral life. Furthermore, in using the label, the user objects to a perceived distortion in a rival way of understanding morality, but is not committed to adopting a mirror-image distortion. For example, by saying, negatively, that one objects to the over-emphasis on God’s will in understanding the eternal law at the expense of His reasonableness, one is not asserting positively that God’s will plays no role whatsoever in the legitimate meaning of the eternal law. This way of defining “legalism” has several advantages. First, it makes it clear that one’s definition of legalism is, in fact, a) dependent upon one’s understanding of the nature and function of law; and b) integrally related to
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one’s understanding of the way in which the norms of the moral life can helpfully be understood as laws. Second, it gives us a way to account for the fact that the various people who make the charge of legalism, and those who respond to it, frequently seem to be talking past one another, even while they seem to be loosely talking about the same thing—the moral law. This definition allows us to see how they are indeed talking about the same thing—but about different facets or aspects of the same thing. There are several components to the definition of law, and one or more of them may be the central focus of a charge of “legalism.” Third, this definition makes clear that in some cases, perhaps in many cases, the charge of “legalism” within a Christian context can be more helpfully understood as a charge that a particular thinker or school of thought has incorporated one or more distorted elements into a proffered articulation or application of the moral law, rather than a charge that a thinker has wrongly extended the moral law into a sphere where it does not belong. 1. An ordinance To focus on the aspect of law as an ordinance is to focus on its nature as a command or an order given by the lawgiver to those subject to the law. To someone who concentrates on this aspect of the law, the content of the order is less decisive; it is the fact that it is valid order that is crucial for recognizing its binding legal character. Some Christian theologians have placed almost exclusive emphasis on God’s role as lawgiver, conceiving of the moral life largely as obedience to a series of divine commands. Their heavy emphasis on the sovereignty of the divine will logically leads to the position that even a divine command to perform an evil action must be obeyed.5 In one sense, their approach was not different from that taken by theorists, such as Thomas Aquinas, who also maintained that all divine commands should be obeyed. Aquinas took pains, however, to show that what was apparently a wrongful act (e.g., taking someone else’s life) was not in fact evil (because God was in command of life and death already) (ST, II-II, q. 64, art. 6, rep. ob. 1). Viewed narrowly, this endeavor may seem like an attempt at special pleading, an attempt to escape a difficult moral problem with a clever distinction. When viewed more broadly, however, Thomas’s goal is to ensure that two attributes of God—knowledge and will—are not set against one another. For Germain Grisez, the core mistake of legalism is placing too great an emphasis on the aspect of the moral law as a product of the will of God, rather than as something intelligible in itself, as an aspect of the divine intellect. He writes: In thus tracing the practical force of moral obligation back to God as lawmaker, classical moral theology tended toward voluntarism. Voluntarism in general is a theory which assigns primacy to the will over reason. Classical moral theology assigned primacy in the genesis of moral obligation to God’s will, although it left a subordinate place for human reason. This limited voluntarism, together
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M. Cathleen Kaveny with the isolation of moral from dogmatic theology, led classical moralists to pay less and less attention to intrinsic reasons for accepting Christian moral norms as true. Instead, they increasingly tended to treat moral norms as laws which members of the Church must obey because the Church insists upon them with divine authority. (1983, pp. 12-13)
Grisez identifies four basic consequences of legalism for the moral life. First, it concentrated too much on the “detailed specification of duties,” without clarifying “the meaning of good and bad in terms of the total Christian vocation.” Second, it meant that Catholic moral theology was primarily concerned with “the minimum required to avoid mortal sin.” Third, it largely avoided addressing the responsibilities of personal vocation, because “it tended to suggest that what is not forbidden is thereby permitted, in the sense that one is free to do as one pleases in regard to it; thus it tended to ignore the responsibilities of personal vocation.” Fourth, classical moral theology “tended to liken moral truths to Church laws,” leading to the “suggestion that the Church might or should change its moral teaching, as if it were changeable law rather than unchangeable truth” (Grisez, 1983, p. 13). Engelhardt would agree with Grisez about the undesirability—and the danger—of most of the consequences that Grisez attributes to legalism. He would not, however, be likely to trace their source to an over-emphasis on the moral law as an aspect of God’s will, or of human willing in response to the will of God. According to Engelhardt, the basic move toward God is one of the will, rather than one of reason. “The impact of the Fall is not so much on man’s will as often supposed in the West, but upon his intellect, his noetic capacity for non-discursive knowledge” (2000, p. 174). The knowledge of God’s moral law follows upon, rather than leads to, an experience of God himself, what Engelhardt refers to as a “noetic” experience of God, which begins with a grace-inspired turning to God. He writes: Natural law properly understood compasses the precepts taught us by God through our being and through the world around us, rendering nature a window to God. To see that law, one must take on the faith that turns us from agnosticism to an encounter with God. God then allows us through His energies to grow in knowledge of His commandments. (p. 176)
According to Engelhardt, the fundamental mistake human beings make is to attempt to come to know God through discursive reason before we will to join ourselves with Him by grace. Consequently, as discussed below, for Engelhardt, the key problem of legalism is a distorted emphasis on the powers of human reason to reach the mind of God by proceeding in a discursive manner. 2. Of reason For Aquinas, law is an ordinance of reason; it is not an arbitrary imposition expressing the whim of the lawgiver. In his account of morality, Grisez follows Aquinas in emphasizing the reasonableness of the moral law. In fact, it is in
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this emphasis on the reasonableness of the requirements of morality, and the reasonableness of expecting Christians to follow them, that Grisez locates the antidote to legalism. For example, he charges the “new moral theology” developed after Vatican II with remaining “as legalistic as the old,” because “[i]t provides no account in Christian terms of why one should seek human fulfillment in this life, what the specifically Christian way of life is, and how living as a Christian in this life is intrinsically related to fulfillment in everlasting life” (1983, p. 15). In this situation, Grisez aims to provide an adequate treatise on Christian moral principles, which: ...clarify what a Christian is and how Christian life can be at once and entirely both human and divine. It must explain how human goods determine Christian moral norms and show why a life in accord with the Christian norms is the only life which is really humanly good, while also showing how to live such a life. It should be oriented toward preaching, teaching, and counseling, while providing an adequate basis for studies leading to the formation of confessors. Finally, it must explain the authority of the Church’s teaching. (1983, p. 22)
For Engelhardt, in sharp contrast, reason is not the solution—it is the problem. He believes that legalism results from distorted emphasis on the rational accessibility of divine law. As noted above, the key for Engelhardt is the noetic experience of the uncreated energies of God, which is only made possible by union with God. The goal of the Christian life is “an intimate knowing between persons, most particularly an illumination of the creature by the Creator. It is only through this illumination that true knowledge becomes possible” (2000, p. 163). It is only by repenting of one’s sins, joining with God, and living in accordance with God’s will, that one will be in a position to discern the requirements of the moral life. Engelhardt contrasts “noetic knowledge,” the intimate, immediate, non-discursive knowledge of the transcendent God made possible through this union with God, with “discursive knowledge,” his name for human reasoning as it proceeds more or less autonomously. Discursive reason is helpful in dealing with the world of immanence, but absolutely useless in reaching the transcendent. In fact, by relying exclusively on discursive reason, human beings will move away from God, rather than toward Him. The sad history of Western debates over the establishment of rational foundations for morality demonstrate that discursive reason is not sufficient to produce a morality certain enough to provide a basis for living one’s life. Relatedly, and perhaps more importantly, discursive reason remains trapped within the realm of immanence, according to Engelhardt. He would reject the effort to clarify and systematize the moral norms that constitute the heart of Grisez’s project. He reflects: This is not to deny a place in Christian bioethics for moral rules, commandments, or precepts: properly understood, they indicate real boundaries beyond which one will go very wrong rather than enter into union with God. But they cannot
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M. Cathleen Kaveny be systematized in terms of conceptual foundations. So, too, one should resist the temptation to ground prohibitions against murder or abortion in supposed general principles such as the principle of the sanctity of life, rather than in the pursuit of God. Murder and abortion are wrong first and foremost because they lead us away from union with God. Nor can there be a legalistic rule for dealing with particular cases… (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 209)
A flash point revealing the difference in the approaches of two theologians is their respective attitudes toward the principle of double effect. At its core, the principle states that agents are responsible for the intended effects of their actions (whether they intend those effects as ends in themselves or as merely as means to other intended ends) in a way different from their responsibility for the foreseen-but-unintended side effects of their actions. What is the difference? In mainline Roman Catholic thought, one is never permitted to intend to cause certain effects in one’s acting (e.g., the death of an innocent human being), but under certain circumstances, one may permit such a result as the foreseen-but-unintended side effect of one’s action. This is not to say that agents are not responsible for the foreseen-but-unintended effects of their action. They are required to consider whether permitting such effects conforms to the norms of proportionality and fairness. For example, a doctor may not perform an abortion intending to bring about the death of a child, even to save the life of the mother, but may perform another action (e.g., removing the cancerous uterus of the pregnant woman) foreseeing but not intending the death of the baby, provided it is proportionate and fair to cause that result in that particular case. According to Grisez, this distinction between intended consequences and consequences that are merely foreseen is an essential tool of practical reason. Fundamentally, one constitutes one’s character differently with respect to the intended effects of one’s action (even those intended as means to other ends) than with respect to effects that are foreseen-but-unintended side effects of one’s intentions. Consequently, Grisez believes that it is extremely important for deliberating agents to identify precisely which effects they are intending in their actions, and which effects they are merely permitting as foreseen-but-unintended side effects. This process of clarification requires reflecting upon the path of action proposed by one’s own practical reason, which chooses means in order to achieve ends. For example, an agent may mistakenly believe that a contemplated action is ruled out by the prohibition against intentional killing, when a proper understanding of the situation and the norm at issue reveals that the action in question will involve permitting, but not intending, the death in question (Grisez, 1983, pp. 295-300). Once an agent has reached this understanding of her action, she is not required to rule it out ab initio, but is permitted to go on to consider whether it is proportionate and fair to cause such a side effect in the case at hand.
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In contrast, Engelhardt rejects the principle of double effect, and its basic distinction between intended effects and side effects that are foreseenbut-unintended by the agent, as the tool of a legalistic, rationalist mentality. First, he believes that by exonerating certain types of unintentional killing, the distinction ignores the need for spiritual treatment in this type of case. He notes that in the Church of the first millennium, even involuntary homicide required penance and purification. “One can become involved in an evil such as the death of a person, which even against one’s will can have an effect on one’s heart” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 278). Second, he argues that the distinction is wrongly used to draw absolute distinctions between cases that should be treated as different in degree, not in kind. One must fully recognize how far a choice to kill in order to save life falls short of the mark and that this is the case whether the abortion is undertaken “indirectly” (i.e., the abortion as a side effect of another intervention), as when one removes a cancerous uterus containing a child, or when one performs a “direct” abortion (i.e., acts to abort) for a woman with severe congestive heart failure. (2000, pp. 279-280)
Engelhardt notes that according to traditional double effect analysis, the indirect abortion should be justified and the second should be prohibited. In his view, both abortions can be permitted and both must be repented, in the sense that the spiritual harm they inflict upon both the physician and the mother should be recognized and treated in the context of spiritual direction. How should we understand the difference between Engelhardt and Grisez on double effect? From one perspective, that difference may not be as great as it initially appears. Like Grisez, Engelhardt acknowledges that “differences in willing make a difference to the human heart” (2000, p. 279), although obviously for him the difference is not as decisive as for Grisez. Moreover, although Engelhardt’s approach might seem to be more permissive in theory, in practice, the only cases of abortion that Engelhardt seems willing to allow are those designed to save the life of the mother. He categorically rules out other abortions, including in the stereotypical “hard cases” of rape and incest, although this position does not seem to be required by his theological commitments. For his part, Grisez’s reformulation of the principle of double effect in order to focus on the purpose of the acting agent would likely permit the narrow range of actions permitted by Engelhardt but prohibited by the Catholic manualists (e.g., early delivery of a nonviable baby in the case of the mother’s congestive heart failure) (1983, p. 299).6 Yet, significant divergences in opinion do remain. At bottom, Grisez believes that the distinction between intended effects and effects that are merely foreseen by the agent is an illuminating tool of moral discernment, separating unjustified actions from those which may, other things being equal, be justified
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for an agent to perform. For Engelhardt, this distinction, the core of the principle of double effect, functions to obscure more than it reveals. More specifically, it threatens to occlude the spiritual harm to an agent that can result from foreseeably causing certain effects, in particular the death of another human being. More generally, in identifying similarities and differences between Engelhardt and Grisez, it is important to avoid creating the impression that the two thinkers are as far apart as one might initially judge them to be on the basis of their rhetoric. Engelhardt, for his part, does not deny the usefulness of reason—it would be foolish for him to do so, given the analysis and argument that is the backbone of his 400-page book. In fact, he emphatically denies that “a Christian bioethics should eschew clear expression, analytic explication, or systematic reflection in favor of contradictory statements and deliberately ambiguous claims” (2000, p. 180). Engelhardt’s overriding goal is to downgrade the importance of discursive reason relative to the moral wisdom stemming from the noetic experience of God, which is more properly a property of the holy than of the analytically brilliant. More generally, he wants to affirm that the recognition and appreciation of moral norms are only possible within a life shaped by the liturgical and ascetic practices of the Orthodox Church. Grisez is also sensitive to the need to situate morality within a well-lived Christian life. Moreover, he explicitly describes the moral life as leading to union with God, as God’s decision to offer us divine life within the divine unity (1983, pp. 580-586). He notes, as well, that his position on this point “is very similar to the view of some theologians of the Eastern Church” (p. 597 n. 24). Furthermore, like Engelhardt, Grisez recognizes both that Christian morality is true morality, appropriate for all persons, and that a full account of that morality is only accessible with the help of the grace divinely provided to the Church. He also acknowledges, like Engelhardt, that Christian commitment generates additional, specific norms binding only upon Christians (pp. 606-609). Nonetheless, there are significant differences in their respective understandings of the role of reason in identifying moral norms. Beyond the general claim that Grisez has more confidence than Engelhardt does in the power of a reasoning person, working with all the resources that the Church has to offer, to identify moral norms and courses of action that correspond to them, it is hard to press further with the texts at hand. It is not difficult, however, to identify the point at which further conversation would need to begin. In describing his methodological approach, Grisez cites a passage from the First Vatican Council about the role of reason in the context of faith: It is, nevertheless, true that if human reason, with faith as its guiding light, inquires earnestly, devoutly, and circumspectly, it does reach, by God’s generosity, some understanding of mysteries, and that a most profitable one. It achieves this by the similarity [anologia] with truths which it knows naturally and also from the interrelationship of mysteries with one another and with the final end of man. (1983, p. 31)7
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Grisez maintains that Vatican I should be understood here as implying that the appropriate method for theology is “dialectic,” in Plato’s sense of the term. “By this method, one considers truths of faith by comparison (anologia) with truths of reason, with one another, and with the ultimate fulfillment to which God calls us in the Lord Jesus” (Grisez, 1983, p. 31). In broad terms, this method strikes me as one advocated by nearly all post-Vatican II Roman Catholic moral theologians, both liberal and conservative. Does Grisez’s dialectical method qualify as “discursive reason” in the sense condemned by Engelhardt? I am not sure. On the one hand, Engelhardt never gives a clear account of what he means by “discursive reason.” At times, he seems to mean a process that stresses conceptual analysis as opposed to reflection on experience, an excessive concern for logical consistency, a desire for immediate certitude as opposed to dynamic progress in understanding eternal truths, and a total prioritization of unchanging human nature rather than the changing conditions of history. His account of discursive reason, in short, significantly resembles the “rationalism” of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church that Grisez criticizes (Grisez, 1983, pp. 27-31).8 Moreover, admittedly with some glossing, Engelhardt’s account of the practice of noetic theology, within the context of the ecclesial community of Orthodox Christians, could be encapsulated in Grisez’s summary of the use of the dialectic method in Catholic thought. The use of that method “means that, accepting the truth of Catholic faith present in the living Church of which one is a member, one seeks a better understanding of this truth in which one already lives” (Grisez, 1983, p. 7). On the other hand, my sense is that Engelhardt might argue that the method that Grisez actually practices in The Way of the Lord Jesus not infrequently seems more akin to discursive reason—or rationalism—than to dialectical reason. For example, he might suggest that the rhetorical tone, together with the exhaustively pursued question-and-answer format of Christian Moral Principles, overwhelmingly convey the impression of the author’s certitude with regard to the answers he provides, rather than inviting the reader to engage in a dialogical pursuit of truth. One largely sympathetic review of Difficult Moral Questions was titled “Germain Grisez Explains It All (Well, Almost)” (Brumley, 1999). In addition, Grisez’s work bears more than a trace of the rationalist concern with true propositions. His most extensive and explicit discussion of truth in Scripture in Christian Moral Principles, for example, focuses largely on its role in transmitting true moral propositions to the faithful (1983, pp. 831-835, 861-863). 3. For the common good According to Aquinas, the purpose of law is to advance the common good. But what, exactly, is the “common good”? This is a notoriously elusive question. In Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on
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the Church and the Modern World, the common good is defined as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” (1965, § 26). In defining the common good, the precise relationship of the good of the individual person and the good of the community is a key issue. Christian thought has generally resisted the temptation to choose between the two, asserting that the common good is the good of all persons, who are by nature social creatures designed to flourish in community. According to Jacques Maritain, the common good “is therefore common to the whole and to the parts, which are themselves wholes, since the very notion of person means totality; it is common to the whole and to the parts, over which it flows back and must all benefit from it” (1943, pp. 8-9). On this basis, mainstream Christianity has rejected, for example, the idea that the community can sacrifice one innocent person to save many; the argument would be made that any community which did so would actually be undermining its own common good, not merely the good of the sacrificed individual.9 Nonetheless, many of the debates within Christian ethics can be fruitfully understood as rooted in a disagreement about appropriate balance between protecting the good of the individual and safeguarding the good of the many in promoting the common good. In his articulation of the requirements of Christian morality, Engelhardt tends to emphasize the good of the individual over the broader concerns of the community. This emphasis appears first and foremost in his understanding of the point of the moral law: it is therapy for diseased souls, a way of preparing us to experience God. The moral law is intimately connected to a regime of personal asceticism, quelling our passions and enabling us to make life-giving contact with the energies of the divine being. For Engelhardt, therefore, “the moral law is thus a means for the growth of an intimate connection between the creature and the creator” (2000, p 171). In his view, “[m]orality must be lived so as to cure our souls from passions, to make us whole, and to unite us with God” (p. 171). Like medicine, like therapy, the application of the moral law must be intensely personal, applied with discretion and judgment to each patient, taking into account their own particular strengths and weaknesses. Engelhardt contrasts the notion of the moral law as therapy with a more “legalistic notion” of morality, which is not concerned with promoting the well-being of the individual, but with enforcing the requirements of “an impersonal codebook of divine law” (2000, p. 169). While he does not expand systematically on this contrast, it seems to me to include the following three components. First, according to Engelhardt, the moral law should be applied and interpreted with the mindset of a healer—a spiritual physician, if you will. In contrast, he seems to believe that a legalistic conception of morality is applied and interpreted with the mindset of a judge. The healer is first and foremost
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concerned with the well-being of the individual patient, while the judge is more concerned with protecting the well-being of the community as a whole, by maintaining the structure and authority of the rule of law. Second, of crucial importance for Engelhardt is his understanding of morality as intensely personal—grounded in and facilitating the relationship of a personal God with the persons created in his image and likeness. To subordinate the well-being of particular persons to the inexorable requirements of law is an aspect of what he means by “legalism” (p. 209).10 Third, by combining his notion of the purpose of morality as a type of healing with his understanding of morality’s ground as a relationship between persons, Engelhardt develops a pastoral approach that gives great discretion to spiritual advisors to tailor moral advice to particular situations. “The appropriate response will not be found in a casuistic literature, or at least in a formalized casuistical approach. In each particular case, the appropriate response must be drawn from prayer and grace. A formal casuistry that provides recipes for responses to particular cases would confront the Spirit with our dead letters” (p. 209). Germain Grisez tends to focus more than Engelhardt does on morality’s role in contributing to the well-being of the community as a whole, by providing a basis on which human beings can rightly structure their interactions with one another. In this vein, a striking difference between the two theorists is the way they conceptualize paradise and the human path to it. Engelhardt emphasizes the personal relationship between God and the believer, characterized by the communication of the divine energies to the human person. The social dimension of paradise is not developed in his analysis, which concentrates on the individual believer’s union with God. In contrast, Grisez’s notion of heaven, and our path to it, is much more essentially social—one could even say political, in the sense of having to do with a polis. He sees the task of earthly life as nothing less than building up the kingdom of God. Quoting the Second Vatican Council, he writes “after we have obeyed the Lord, and in his Spirit nurtured on earth the values of human dignity, brotherhood and freedom, and indeed all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise, we will find them again, but freed of stain, burnished and transfigured” (1983, p. 1). Although the kingdom can only be brought to fruition with the second coming of Jesus Christ, Grisez maintains that believers are contributing to its construction here and now. In fact, each and every one of our morally acceptable actions contributes to the building up of the kingdom of God (1983, pp. 1-2).11 Now a theory that sees morality as identifying the actions that contribute to the construction of the kingdom of God will have a significantly different understanding of the role of moral principles and rules than does a view of morality as a type of therapy for sick souls. Grisez emphasizes that free choices are constitutive of both self and community (1983, pp. 56-57). So his
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act analysis focuses on principles and rules, which pick out not the unique circumstances of agents and their lives, but the generalizable features of action that are repeatable in a number of cases. Furthermore, he expresses far more concern than does Engelhardt for the maintenance of social practices in which large numbers of people may find individual flourishing. For example, in analyzing the prohibition against divorce and remarriage in the Catholic Church, he stresses the importance of being able to make an absolute commitment for the creative unfolding of the lives of many Christians. In responding to proportionalists—those who would make exceptions to some moral prohibitions in difficult circumstances for proportionate reason (e.g., prohibitions against contraception, adultery, and divorce), Grisez is extremely concerned with the impact of such exception-making upon moral and social practices in general. Proportionalism also undermines unconditional commitments, which are essential to Christian personal vocation. Those who have lived in any state for a few years have a very different awareness of its good and bad points than they had upon entering it. Marital and religious vows often are set aside today with the encouragement of proportionalist theologians, who suggest that in some cases the choice to set them aside is a lesser evil than continuing fidelity without any apparent benefits. (pp. 155-156)
This is not to say that Grisez is insensitive to the needs of human beings who experience themselves constrained by the rules and principles. A bedrock assumption of his approach is the ultimate compatibility of the flourishing of the individual with compliance with exceptionless moral rules, even in difficult situations. First, Grisez emphasizes that such situations provide tremendous opportunities for evangelization. He notes that a woman who refuses a potentially life-saving abortion “can bear outstanding witness to her faith and hope in God: faith if her refusal is based on her willingness to live by the Church’s teaching and to leave in God’s hands the risk of the disaster which might occur; hope if her choice shows her confidence that disaster accepted in Jesus is not final” (p. 155). Second, he emphasizes the self-constituting character of actions. “Human action is soul-making. Moral acts are ultimately most important insofar as they make a difference to the self one is constituting by doing the act. Ultimately, it would profit nothing if one saved the mortal lives of everyone in the world by committing one mortal sin” (p. 155). Third, he believes that every Christian, by grace, has the power of avoiding mortal sin. Grisez rejects as incoherent the idea that there might be some circumstance under which one is required to commit a mortal sin. Fourth, and most generally, he believes that complying with the Church’s moral teaching is the only way to achieve genuine human fulfillment. “To sin is not to break a law (taking ‘law’ in any ordinary sense); to be punished for sin is not to experience the sanction imposed upon lawbreakers. Rather, to sin is to limit oneself unnecessarily, to damage one’s true self and block one’s real fulfillment. . .” (Grisez, 1983, p. 329).
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Nonetheless, Engelhardt, in my view, would consider this analysis as verging dangerously close to his understanding of legalism. First, he would not accept the Roman Catholic tradition’s clear division of sins into the categories of mortal and venial; he would argue that the failures of the human heart are deeper and murkier than that division permits. We all sin; in his terms, we all “fall short of the mark” and stand in need of some form of spiritual therapy. Engelhardt would likely consider any attempt to distinguish so sharply between fatal and non-fatal “falling short of the mark” to exemplify the rationalism he associates with legalism. Second, he would argue that it is simply unjustified to say that every human being is strong enough not to be morally or spiritually destroyed by bearing the burdens associated with acting in a morally courageous way. Third, he would contend that the Orthodox tradition allows for the possibility of maintaining the ideal, while allowing for merciful exceptions to be made in individual instances. He could point, for example, to the Orthodox practice of allowing for divorce and remarriage in cases where the first marriage is simply impossible to carry on for the two parties. These exceptions do not endorse the less-than-optimal course of action tout court. They simply constitute a merciful recognition that the agents involved are not capable of doing more at the present time (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 237).12 Grisez would likely respond that Engelhardt’s view of morality is simply a logical muddle, particularly in its attempt to recognize that there are some acts that are both permissible and morally forbidden. Engelhardt, in turn, would argue that Grisez’s approach simply places too much emphasis on logical coherence. At some point, theological sources would become an issue. Grisez would likely observe that Engelhardt’s view of morality is inconsistent with the teaching of the Roman Catholic magisterium, which is divinely assisted in its identification and proclamation of moral norms, including the acceptance of negative moral norms (such as the norm against adultery) which bind absolutely.13 Engelhardt would obviously not find this a telling point, given his own view of ecclesiastical teaching authority as a member of the Eastern Church. This response, of course, would lead to a discussion of the next two elements in Aquinas’s definition of law: it must be made by one who has care of the community, and promulgated. 4. Made by one who has care of the community Both Engelhardt and Grisez are in agreement that the source of the moral law is ultimately God, Who has care of the universe. Both Engelhardt and Grisez are worried, in some sense, that the moral law will be wrongly perceived as independent of the divine lawgiver. But the shape of that worry is very different in the two cases, which difference reflects back to other differences in their views of morality. Engelhardt worries that the Roman Catholic tradition depicts the moral law as a constraint independent of God and, therefore, binding upon God in
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a way analogous to the way it binds human beings (p. 173). For him, the basic problem with this approach is that it will lead to an application of the moral law that does not take into account God’s overriding purpose for it as a type of therapy for sinful and diseased souls. In contrast, Grisez worries that people will think of the law as independent of the divine lawgiver for a different reason. If it is merely a product of divine will, then God, or divinely authorized representatives, can simply change the law, or discount it as an arbitrary imposition by a divine bully. For Grisez, the basic separation at issue is divine will from divine intellect. The moral law is not an arbitrary imposition, but a constitutive element of God’s rational plan for building the kingdom of God with the cooperation of human beings. 5. And promulgated Finally, of course, the different ecclesial commitments of Engelhardt and Grisez affect their assessment of legitimate and illegitimate moral law. For Engelhardt, as an Orthodox Christian, God’s moral law is revealed preeminently in the theological reflections, liturgical practices, and ascetic disciplines that have been handed down by the Fathers of the Church (2000, p. 159). The true meaning of that law in difficult cases is revealed primarily to the holy, not primarily to those skilled in discursive reasoning. The application of the law to one’s own difficult case is to be done by engaging in prayer and appropriate liturgical and ascetic practices, and by consulting one’s spiritual father or mother. For Engelhardt, therefore, the moral law of God is not definitively promulgated through the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, he argues that the widely secular culture that we have now has its roots in the rationalist understanding of the natural law perpetuated by the Catholic Church (p. 6). To Engelhardt’s mind, the Roman Catholic moral tradition before the Second Vatican Council at least had the advantage of being coherent. Now, much of it simply follows the latest intellectual fashions, dictated by the concerns for liberal equality animating secular Western culture. It is post-traditional Christianity, which is nothing short of blasphemy to the traditional Christian (pp. 144-148). In contrast, for Grisez, the mind of Christ is closely identified, and at points virtually equated, with the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church: “One ought to proceed with personal obedience of faith; one must submit one’s experiences, insights, and wishes to the judgment of the Church’s teaching, prepared to reform oneself according to the mind of Christ” (1983, pp. 18-19). While the Catholic tradition includes the possibility for the development of doctrine, and the revision of non-infallible Church teaching, it is not a possibility upon which Grisez dwells. Instead, he emphasizes the need to bide one’s time while living in a spirit of docility with respect to Church teaching: Catholics who wish to be faithful and consistent will attempt to conform their consciences exactly to the Church’s moral teaching. There is a substantial body of received moral teaching which deserves recognition as infallibly accepted and handed on by the Church. Moreover, even teachings which are not
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proposed infallibly must be accepted with religious assent; this obligation admits of exception only if there is some superior theological source for a contrary judgment. (p. 871)
Consequently, for Grisez, when the Church teaches authoritatively it is not legalistically imposing an arbitrary norm on the faithful; instead, it is communicating the will of God, which is ultimately inseparable from the mind of God. The point of the norm will therefore be accessible, in principle, to the mind of the believing Catholic “thinking” with the mind of the Church.
II. Legalism and the Moral Life The charge of legalism is not a solely theoretical charge, lodged against the plausibility or internal consistency of a moral theory in the abstract. It is a charge with a fierce practical bite; it is made with deep concern about the ramifications that the legalism identified will have for the moral life of Christians. What are the consequences of legalism for the moral life? It is helpful, I think, to look at this question from two angles: how people apply the moral law to themselves in a legalistic framework and how people in authority apply the moral law to others in such a framework.
A. How people apply the moral law to themselves One concrete problem often identified with legalism is the equation of the contents of the moral life with the application and extension of a discrete set of rules or principles—moral “laws,” so to speak. This equation can have two consequences: moral minimalism and/or laxism, or moral maximalism and/ or rigorism. One could fear that a view of the moral life as a collection of rules or principles illegitimately reduces it to a small set of moral rules. Those who worry about this consequence focus on two aspects of legalism’s effect on moral agents, reasoning in the following manner. First, they fear that a legalistic account of morality will create the impression that there are no moral norms applicable to situations falling outside these rules; if an agent follows the rules, then all other aspects of his or her life are matters of unfettered freedom. Second, it will create the impression that the more difficult rules can be changed, provided enough pressure is exerted on the rule maker. Conjoined with the factual judgment that the most dangerous temptation in the contemporary world is to minimize the requirements of morality, a moralist could come to the conclusion that these two features of legalism will generate moral minimalism and/or laxism.14 In fact, this reasoning process encapsulates Grisez’s most pressing worries about the practical consequences of legalism for the moral life in the contemporary era.15 At the end of his most extensive section discussing
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legalism at the beginning of Christian Moral Principles, he summarizes his concerns: Legalism often causes the faithful to view the Church’s moral teaching as an imposition. The suspicion grows that the Christian life itself is a kind of arbitrary test for which different rules could well be devised if only the test maker chose. In these circumstances, the desire increases to do as one pleases as much as one can. Thus, while setting stringent requirements concerning a few matters, classical moral theology offers little or no helpful guidance for much of Christian life. The temptation to rebel against received teaching is nourished by its seeming arbitrariness, as well as by interests cultivated without reference to Christian faith. (1983, p. 13)
In opposition to legalism, Grisez’s major concern is to emphasize that every decision we make, every path we choose, is fraught with moral implications. We are never free to do as we choose in the sense that there are aspects of our lives that are unrelated to our overarching task of building up the kingdom of God, by following “the way of the Lord Jesus.” But we are generally free to do as we choose in the sense that every choice we make is an opportunity freely to constitute ourselves as the children of God that we are called to be. In his view, the purpose of his book is to provide guidance to Catholics who realize, as adults and as believers, that “[i]n this passing world we make the selves and relationships which will endure forever” (1983, p. xxix). Like Grisez, Engelhardt also wants to emphasize the radical, all-encompassing claim of Christianity on the lives of those who profess their faith in it. The goal is nothing short of holiness, which he repeatedly emphasizes cannot be achieved within the framework of a legalistic account of morality. For example, in articulating how a Christian should approach beginning of life ethics, he writes: “This focus on holiness transforms the question of how correctly to make reproductive choices from a merely legalistic engagement to the ascetic task of finding spiritual wholeness in a morally broken world” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 6). In contrast with Grisez, however, Engelhardt seems to be more worried about the maximalist rather than the minimalist tendencies of legalism. How can this be the case? Here it is important to remember that Engelhardt’s fundamental definition of legalism concentrates on an excessive rationalism, rather than an excessive voluntarism. If we expand the sphere of operation of moral principles and rules, and the demand for rational discernment, to cover the whole of our lives, we will, in his view, lose the forest for the trees. More specifically, we will begin to think that holiness is virtually identical to, if not actually constituted by, the requirements of discursive rationality. Engelhardt, in my view, would say that a rationalist approach, even one as nuanced as Grisez’s (or perhaps, especially one as nuanced), simply expands the requirements of immanence, when what is required is a turn to the transcendent. An analogy may be helpful here. The requirements of practical
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reasonableness are like a map. One can continue to mark landmarks, to fill in details, to add color and some texture to the map. Nonetheless, no matter how elaborate it becomes, the map remains two-dimensional. Finding the transcendent in life is fundamentally a matter of breaking the confines of the map itself; it requires a new movement into a third dimension, which transcends the map entirely.16 While rational argumentation has its place for Engelhardt, as do rules and principles, it is not fundamental. Instead, as I noted above, the fundamental source of knowledge is grace-filled participation in the liturgical rites and way of life of traditional Christianity. The moral life and its rational regulation are preparatory means for the noetic experience of God.17 Indeed, his major complaint against Roman Catholic thought is precisely that it has lost the forest for the trees: “In this century of intellectual energy [the thirteenth century, which saw the rise of the medieval university], theology came no longer to be regarded primarily as the fruit of holiness. Theology came instead to be understood more centrally as the fruit of scholarship” (2000, p. 203).
B. How people apply the moral law to others We do not only apply the moral law to our own actions, both prospectively and retrospectively, we also apply it to the actions of others. Many times, people do so informally, with respect to friends and acquaintances who seek their advice, with respect to the actions of public figures whose activities are reported by the media, and with respect to the actions of strangers who cross their paths. Some situations, however, present more formal occasions for evaluating the past acts of other persons, or of giving counsel to them with respect to future acts. In Roman Catholicism, these occasions are most frequently associated with the priest-penitent relationship in the sacrament of Confession; in Eastern Orthodoxy, they are found in the relationship between a spiritual father or mother and his or her spiritual children. What special concerns arise in contexts where people apply the moral law to the lives and choices of other people? Here, John Noonan’s Persons and Masks of the Law provides a good perspective on the problem, although he is discussing law as it is treated in the legal system, not the moral law per se. Standing at the heart of any system of law are two entities: rules and persons. For Noonan, the legal “process is rightly understood only if rules and persons are seen as equally essential components, every rule depending on persons to frame, apply, and undergo it, every person using rules” (1976, p. 18). Grave dangers arise from letting go of either component. On the one hand, the subsuming of persons into the inexorable impersonality of rules can be ruthless, creating masks (“personae”) that obscure the faces of persons. On the other hand, the abandonment of impartially formulated rules can produce “monsters” which strangle justice with favoritism and arbitrariness (see Kaveny, 1994-1995).
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Not surprisingly, Engelhardt is very concerned about the former possibility. His core concern, in my view, is rooted in his conception of morality (and spiritual direction regarding moral concerns) as being a kind of therapy, designed to heal the soul and enable union with God. The task of the spiritual father or mother is always to keep this ultimate purpose of the moral law in sight when dealing with individual spiritual children (Engelhardt, 2000, pp. 283-284). Consequently, the spiritual parent has a significant amount of discretion in dealing with individual cases—dealing with them as a guide and a healer, not as a judge. Fulfilling this role entails refusing to constrain one’s evaluation of a spiritual child’s actions within the law-oriented framework of “justified” or “unjustified,” “innocent” or “guilty.” Sometimes, a spiritual father or mother must identify problematic aspects of situations, which would not raise any question from the perspective of a more law-oriented framework focused on the culpability of the agent. Engelhardt recognizes, along with the Eastern tradition, the possibility of “involuntary sins,” a manifestation of the brokenness of original sin in our lives. An example would be a woman who suffers a miscarriage, and who may face feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and despair because of it. Once repentance and spiritual therapy are seen to be applicable outside the narrow context of individual moral responsibility, the Orthodox practice of providing for purification in such cases can be seen as a humane way of dealing with a situation that manifests human brokenness on a bodily level (p. 277). Furthermore, he argues that some actions that may be morally justified from a legalist point of view (e.g., abortion to save the life of the mother)18 are nonetheless fraught with spiritual danger. Persons who engage in these actions are at risk of spiritual harm, for which they should receive spiritual treatment (pp. 278, 325-326). In other situations, Engelhardt believes that the strict requirements of the law are modified to take into account the exigencies of the particular situation. Sometimes those modifications are designed to recognize that the application of the moral law in its full force will break a morally weak person, causing them to turn their backs on the Christian message, or cause harm to innocent third parties.19 In some instances, a gradualist approach to Christian holiness is possible. For example, Engelhardt contends that prophylactics (and contraceptives) might be provided to unmarried persons “with regret, admonition, but without impropriety” (p. 274). Sometimes those modifications involve tailoring general moral concerns to the specific situation. While Engelhardt recognizes the validity of many of the concerns identified in Humanae Vitae about the consequences of widely available contraception (p. 267), he does not believe that these concerns justify an absolute prohibition against its use, even by married couples (pp. 267-287). In these situations, the Orthodox tradition assigns the responsibility to spiritual fathers (or mothers) to help married persons make decisions regarding
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contraception in a way that will facilitate their journey to holiness. In some cases, that may mean abstaining from artificial contraception; in other cases, it may not (p. 299 n. 101). Engelhardt writes: “The differences between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic views regarding contraception lie in the first being primarily articulated in terms of an asceticism directed toward approaching holiness and the second being directed to conforming to impersonal norms, including those rooted in a highly biological interpretation of natural law” (p. 300 n. 102). He notes as well that the Orthodox Church has a highly developed notion of married asceticism (p. 244), which: …requires married persons regularly to abstain from sex at certain points in the liturgical calendar. In his view, this integration of moral norms with liturgical practices is the key to understanding the holistic aim of Christian ethics: to enable a life of holiness in union with God. (See especially p. 292 n. 43.)
Engelhardt’s general position on these matters, I believe, is encapsulated in his discussion of the Orthodox understanding of canon law as it bears on moral discernment: The result is a collage of canons without systematic order, making their legalistic application nigh unto impossible. The canons are not a set of laws to be applied, for example, to bioethical issues. The canons have not given rise to a systematic casuistry, but to an invitation to approach each case guided by the relevant canons and the Holy Spirit. This is surely one of the great strengths of the canons. The canons must be understood not as a law that must be applied following its letter, but as a set of very important spiritual signposts directing Christians toward salvation. (p. 224 n. 112)
Particularly important to him is the difference between the notion of “economia” in the Orthodox Church and the notion of “dispensation” in the Western Church. A dispensation lifts the law for a particular person or class of persons. An economia recognizes that the purpose of the law, namely, to bring salvation, is best achieved by something other than the strict application of the law. An economia thus should not violate the spirit of the law; rather, it should focus better on the goal of the law by setting aside its letter. It is important to note that the notion of economia includes not only applying a canon less rigorously, but also applying it more rigorously, thus achieving the true purpose of the canon. At times, the spirit of the law is best served by acrivia, the strict application of the law. (p. 224 n. 112) 20
Grisez’s concerns, in contrast, seem to be clustered more at the other end of Noonan’s polarity; he is primarily worried about the monsters that strangle justice with arbitrariness and favoritism. Because Grisez does not conceive of his approach to the moral life as the imposition of an arbitrary set of norms, but as the fruits of the deliberation of practical reason (aided by the Roman Catholic magisterium) about acts to be done and to be avoided, he would not share the worries about the impersonal application of the moral
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law expressed by Engelhardt. The idea that the requirements of practical reason should be bent to conform to the exigencies of particular situations would likely strike him as a deeply misguided claim. Within his framework, the danger that looms largest in our time with respect to the application of the moral law to others is precisely the temptation to distort the requirements of the moral law for irrational reasons (e.g., sympathy with the plight of a particular person). Like Engelhardt, Grisez believes that Christians and the Christian community are called to perfect holiness, an ideal that is not possible immediately to achieve. At the same time, he firmly rejects any interpretation of Christian morality as an ideal that would reduce the claim that binding moral norms have upon us here and now (1983, pp. 684-685). While acknowledging that complying with some of those norms is difficult, he does not believe it is ever impossible, in congruence with Catholic belief that it is never impossible to refrain from sinning mortally. Consequently, moral gradualism, in the sense of only gradually bringing oneself to comply with difficult moral teaching (e.g., the teaching that using contraception is always wrong) is not acceptable to Grisez. Unlike Engelhardt, Grisez struggles hard to demonstrate that there are no true moral dilemmas (situations in which one has no choice to commit a wrongful act), at least for the morally upright, and sometimes even for those who have sinned. He emphasizes the possibility of always complying with the negative absolute norms, which by definition trump positive norms. He is less concerned about the specific effect of compliance with moral norms upon individuals, and more concerned with upholding the validity of the norm. In arguing that there are fewer moral conflicts than initially appears to be the case, Grisez writes: In many cases, apparent conflicts are removed when the morally right course, previously ignored because it is unappealing, is accepted as a practical possibility. For example, persons who have divorced and remarried need not really choose between committing adultery and renouncing their responsibilities to their second family. They can choose instead to live together in celibacy, in accord with the moral truth that they have no marital rights but do have familial responsibilities. (p. 297)
In Engelhardt’s view, this response would likely epitomize an “impersonal” concern for the preservation of the moral law, rather than a “personal” concern for the well-being of the two parties. In some cases, a celibate marriage is likely to suffer immense strain, leading to a second divorce. In line with the Orthodox view, second marriages are regrettably permitted as a concession to the lingering effects of sin in human life. For Grisez, however, for a confessor to distort the requirements of practical reason by inappropriately responding to the emotionally appealing aspects of a particular situation would be triply wrong. First, the priest would be conveying only illusory comfort to the penitent.
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Because the moral principles and rules at issue are rooted in reason, not in arbitrary will, they cannot be set aside in individual cases. Second, he would be weakening the social and religious fabric that allowed the faithful to recognize the truth. Third, he would be weakening his own moral character, by choosing in a way that reflected and confirmed a distorted perception of the goods at stake (1983, p. 154). In this long essay, I hope to have demonstrated that “legalism” is not a straightforward concept. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. and Germain Grisez both condemn legalism, but mean significantly different things by the condemnation. Why is that the case? I have argued that the concept of legalism is a derivative concept, drawing its meaning from a theologian’s conception of the nature and proper function of the moral law in the Christian life. “Legalism” is a pejorative term, with which theologians gesture to what they believe are distorted elements in a competing understanding of the nature and function of the moral law for Christians. As defined by Aquinas, the concept of law includes a number of components. Consequently, there are a number of trigger points tracking these components, each of which can attract a charge of legalism from one critic or another. These trigger points touch on basic issues in Christian ethics, such as whether morality is more appropriately seen as an aspect of God’s will or God’s reason, what relationship obtains among the individual, the community and the common good, and what role various ecclesiastical authorities and theologians play in interpreting Christian moral teaching. Moreover, they have significant practical implications for how one addresses questions such as whether true moral dilemmas occur in the Christian life, and whether some moral norms can be tailored to the exigencies of particular circumstances. What does this mean for future conversation among Christian ethicists? In my view, it suggests that the charge of “legalism” generates more heat than light. To understand what precisely is meant by the charge, one has to understand the fundamental moral framework used by the theologian making it, in comparison to the framework against which the charge is being lodged. Once one understands the relevant frameworks, the charge itself loses its sting: it becomes situated within broader and more fundamental disagreements about the nature and purpose of Christian life, and the role of the moral law within it. Speaking more broadly, it is not surprising that Christians would have different views of the use and misuse of the law, including the moral law, in the way of discipleship. After all, Christ himself expressed different attitudes toward the law on different occasions in the Gospels. On the one hand, in the Gospel of Mark, he chastises the Pharisees, with the admonition that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). On the other, in the Gospel of Matthew, he says, “Think not that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, until heaven and earth pass, one jot or one title shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (5:17-18).
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From the earliest times, beginning with James and Paul, there have been disputes among faithful followers of Christ about the proper way to reconcile the seemingly conflicting attitudes toward divine law that these statements reflect. So it is not surprising that the debates continue to this day, whether we give primacy with Engelhardt to the first millennium of the Church’s witness in the East, or honor with Grisez its continued development in the West under the headship of the Bishop of Rome.
Notes 1. Down by Law, a film described by writer-director Jim Jarmusch as a “neo-beat noir comedy,” chronicles the lives of three men who meet in a Louisiana prison and who try, in very different ways, to overcome their fateful encounters with the penal system. 2. This is not to deny that Engelhardt wants to distance himself from the practice of casuistry, at least as it is usually understood (2000, p. 209). 3. Obviously, this claim is susceptible to vigorous challenge by sociologists of knowledge who view the appropriation of texts as conditioned by the presuppositions of the reader. 4. If Engelhardt had wished to be somewhat less polemical toward the Roman Catholic tradition, he might have probed the common ground he has with Thomas Aquinas. He charges that, “The West became theologically underdeveloped. Rather than encouraging theological union with God, it focused instead on developing the intellectual framework that became scholasticism. The West lost the central mystical focus core to traditional Christianity” (2000, p. 203). He notes in a footnote that Denis Bradley (1997) “places Thomas Aquinas closer to the Orthodox and further from the Scholastics who followed him” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 220 n. 58) but does not pursue this insight. If he had done so, he would have discovered that the goal of human life for Aquinas, no less than for the doctors of the Eastern Church, was union with God. See Williams (1999). 5. For an overview, see Idziak (1979) and Helm, ed. (1981). 6. The manualists tended to describe the object of the agent’s action from a purely external perspective. They also considered the timing of the two effects to be significant; if the undesired effect preceded the desired effect, it appears that they considered it a means to the desired effect. 7. Grisez is citing Denzinger and Schönmetzer (1967, 3016/1796). 8. See especially Grisez, 1983, p. 29: “A rationalist philosophy, even if it need not contradict essential truths of faith, has a number of limitations and tendencies which render it less than ideally suited for the work of theology. The rationalist stresses certitude as an objective: this objective does not fit well with the ideal of theology as a work faith seeking constantly growing—but only gradually growing—understanding. Also, the rationalist emphasis on clear and distinct ideas tends to distract users of the method from the complexity and richness of human cognition, and thus leads them to overlook the many ways in which linguistic expressions have meaning. As a result, rationalists almost inevitably misunderstand the relational character of the language used to talk about God. Moreover, rationalist often overlook
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the need for careful interpretation of the witness of faith. They generally oversimplify the problem of interpretation even when they realize the need for it. Rationalist philosophers focus on the intellectual knowing subject; they tend to identify the human person with the mind, the thinking self. Embodiment and other dimensions of the person are insufficiently appreciated. A theologian using rationalism tends for this reason to ignore many aspects of revelation and to stress almost exclusively the communication of propositional truths. At its extreme, this tendency leads to a conception of faith as acceptance of a certain amount of correct information rather than as a personal relationship of hearing and adhering to God revealing himself. Rationalist philosophy also makes a very sharp distinction between the knowing subject and the thing known. It tends to be unsuited to practical reflection, in which one thinks about oneself and shapes one’s becoming by one’s thought. A rationalist approach tends rather to look at what is known as if it were a detached object. Any practical problem tends to be looked at on the model of the application of mathematics in engineering. This approach also takes insufficient account of history, which can hardly be so easily ignored when one begins practical reflection about the lives of real, bodily person who have diverse abilities and opportunities, and who exist in actual relationships with one another. This aspect of rationalism had the result that the more it became accepted as a method for Catholic theology, the less Christian life could be treated integrally by the same theological inquiry which considered the central truths of faith. The latter were considered much more as dogmas or theoretical truths to be proved from the witness of faith than as normative truths shaping Christian life. Aquinas does come disturbingly close to the notion of sacrificing one to save many in the case of a guilty person, by analogy to the situation in which one cuts off a gangrenous limb in order to save the body as a whole (ST, II-II, q. 64, art. 3). His analogy fails, because it would actually justify killing an innocent person to save the broader community: in extremis, a rock climber could, for example, cut off a healthy limb hopelessly entangled in a rope in order to save his own life. Catholic moral thought does not allow intentional killing of an innocent person for any reason. “Persons are central. Moral principles are at best chapter headings and rules of thumb. Too much attention to general principles can even divert attention from the personal character of the communion with God to which all theology and all bioethics should lead” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 209). “We can do this by respecting and defending the human goods of the kingdom insofar as they are goods of our nature, and pursuing and promoting them insofar as they can be good fruits of our work. It is God’s wish that our daily contribution to the building up of Christ, made in obedience to him and in the power of his Spirit, have eternal worth. Every morally good act of Christian living through the grace of the Spirit is therefore an act of cooperation in the work of the Trinity” (Grisez, 1983, pp. 1-2). I am extrapolating from Engelhardt, 2000, p. 237. To my knowledge, Grisez has never addressed the question whether the mode of moral thought associated with the Eastern tradition is also subject to the charges he makes against proportionalism.
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14. Grisez would no doubt acknowledge that in other circumstances, of course, these features of legalism could generate rigorism: the web of rules fixing the moral life could conceivably be large, not small; changes in the teaching of the Church could be more restrictive, not less restrictive. Yet, his discussion of “how can the requirement that Christians live according to the modes of Christian response escape rigorism” (1983, pp. 695 ff.) would no doubt be deeply unsatisfactory to Engelhardt. Grisez’s first point is that many people are not subjectively culpable for living according to the modes of responsibility. His second point is that “[r]igorism is relative” (p. 697)—the moral framework he outlines does not ask too much of God’s adopted children, although it may ask too much of fallen human beings. His third point is that love, the gift of the Holy Spirit, makes all things possible—and even “easy and joyous” (p. 697) (although Grisez does recognize the concrete need for the Catholic community to provide more support for those facing difficult situations). In my view, Engelhardt would likely respond that Grisez is simply defining the problem away, by failing to recognize the degree to which God’s adopted children are still marred by sin. 15. On the idea that legalism leads to the idea that the basic question is whether the person is bound by law or free to do as one pleased, see, e.g., Grisez, 1983, pp. 13, 86-87, 293-94, 304-05, 370, 375, 514. See also, Grisez, 1993, pp. 9, 34, 250, 251, 514, 535, 544, 672, 876. In Grisez, 1997, see pp. xvii, xxv, 44, 250, 452, 607, 645. On the idea that legalism leads to the idea that moral rules are changeable laws rather than unchangeable truths, see, e.g., 1983, pp. 13, 21-22, 74, 85, 101, 107, 154, 283, 382. See also 1993, p. 249. Grisez believes that many people today pick and choose from a legalistic world view, in order further to minimize their moral responsibilities. “It is ironic although not surprising that in the present new, and still transitional, situation many—among theologians, priests, teachers, and the ordinary faithful—both gladly reject legalism insofar as it is restrictive and cling to it insofar as it limits responsibility” (1983, p. 307). By contrast, I have found only two places where Grisez interprets legalism as the use of authority to impose a morally unjustified burden: 1983, p. 535 (discussing Jesus’s interaction with the Pharisees), and 1997, p. 64-68 (tithing). 16. See, e.g., Engelhardt, 2000, p. 170: “Only if truth veridically communicates with us can we break out of the horizon of immanence.” 17. See, e.g., Engelhardt, 2000, pp. 179-180: “Because the goal par excellence of human life is holiness, union with God, then the moral life, the keeping of the commandments, the acquisition of virtue, along with the articulation of a Christian bioethics, are not ends in themselves. They are means to carry us to the other side of natural knowledge.” Grisez would not deny that they are means to that end; he would emphasize that they are constitutive means, and not instrumental means. Consequently, we cannot legitimately decide to follow them or depart from them on a case-by–case basis. 18. Grisez would say that no action taken with the intent of destroying the baby is ever justified, even to save the mother. However, some actions which foreseeably result in the death of the baby are allowable for this purpose, if the purpose is not to kill the baby, under the principle of double effect (1983, pp. 499-507). As noted above, Engelhardt rejects the principle of double effect as a legalistic strategy used to evade responsibility.
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19. “The Church is uncompromising in her demand that we open our hearts to God, that we become perfect, that we become saints. She is therapeutic in her approach to making us perfect. She recognizes that she must begin by treating us where she finds us in our sins” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 284). 20. Engelhardt clearly thinks that some moral prohibitions function as “real moral boundaries,” while others are more flexible. Grisez would no doubt press him to articulate more fully the distinction between the two categories.
Bibliography Aquinas, T. Summa Theologica, translated by Benzinger Brothers. Ethereal Library, www.ccel.org. Bradley, D. Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1997. Brumley, M. “Germain Grisez Explains It All (Well, Almost).” Catholic Faith (March-April): 1999, www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Faith/MARAPR99/books.html. Denzinger, H. and A. Schönmetzer. Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum. 34th ed. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1967. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. Grisez, G. Vol. 1 of The Way of the Lord Jesus: Christian Moral Principles. Quincy: Franciscan Press, 1983. ———. Vol. 2 of The Way of the Lord Jesus: Living a Christian Life. Quincy: Franciscan Press, 1993. ———. Vol. 3 of The Way of the Lord Jesus: Difficult Moral Questions. Quincy: Franciscan Press, 1997. Helm, P., ed. Divine Commands and Morality. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Idziak, J.M. Divine Command Morality: Historical and Contemporary Readings. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1979. Kaveny, M.C. “Listening for the Future in the Voices of the Past: John T. Noonan, Jr. On Love and Power in Human History.” The Journal of Law and Religion 11, no. 1 (1994-95): 203-28. Maritain, J. The Rights of Man and Natural Law. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943. Noonan, J.T., Jr. Persons and Masks of the Law. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Vatican II. Gaudium et Spes, Vatican Official Site. www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html. Williams, A.N. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Missing Persons: Engelhardt and Abortion Christopher Tollefsen
No orthodox (small ‘o’) Christian would contend that, as to the authoritative and specific position held by Christianity on the morality of abortion, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. was in error. In The Foundations of Bioethics, Engelhardt writes, with characteristic élan, that he is more in doubt as to the nature of the relevant kindling—mesquite? live oak? trash cedar?—than he is of the fact that the fires of hell await those who procure or provide abortion on demand, in the absence of God’s saving grace (1996, p. xi). More soberly, in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, he cites Father Pilotheos Zerkavos, who held that “there is no worse crime than abortion. It surpasses all heresies and evils” (2000, p. 304 n. 133). In short, Engelhardt holds, correctly, that the constant teaching of the Christian Church is to reject abortion, and Engelhardt accepts this teaching himself. However, Engelhardt’s position is, in at least certain particulars, deliberately the position of the first millennium or more of Christianity, rather than the position of, to take the most prominent recent Christian opponent of abortion, Pope John Paul II. For Engelhardt, like some thinkers in that early tradition, holds that “the position regarding abortion is independent of concerns regarding personhood, ensoulment, or distinctions in utero between human personal and human biological life” (2000, p. 305). This traditional position is further to be understood adequately only “outside a language of rights, even of a right to life” (p. 279). And while Engelhardt, like some early Church fathers, is willing to use words such as homicide and murder, it does not seem that he uses such words in ways that would be uniformly acceptable to one who follows John Paul II on these matters, in at least three ways. First, Engelhardt opts for the language of “taking the life of a human being,” rather than “taking the life of a person,” in describing the wrongfulness of 165 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 165-179) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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abortion. Second, that abortion is an injustice to someone seems little part of Engelhardt’s objection to abortion and related procedures. Third, from a rather different angle, Engelhardt writes that the “traditional approach to abortion… does not draw a crisp line between abortion and miscarriage” (2000, p. 277). It appears to be true that a significant strand of thought in the early Christian Church did not primarily address abortion in terms of the language of personhood, and the killing of persons. Indeed, in the early Church, there is sometimes no sharp distinction drawn between contraception and sterilization, on the one hand, and abortion on the other. This was neither because the Church wished to downgrade the evil of abortion, nor necessarily to elide the distinction between contraception and murder in the sense in which the fifth commandment prohibits it. Rather, both contraception and early abortion were looked upon as grave contra-life sins. Practically speaking, however, there could have been little profit, as the work of Aristotle and Aquinas inadvertently reveals, in speculation about the nature of the early embryo or even fetus, given the paltry biology at hand. When, in the Middle Ages, the Thomistic position on delayed ensoulment became the norm, a distinction was subsequently drawn between the sin involved in killing an early embryo and that involved in killing a later embryo.1 Engelhardt rejects this approach, in favor of the earlier tradition, unconcerned, as it apparently was, with the issue of personhood or ensoulment. The Catholic position as promulgated by Pope John Paul II, at any rate, no longer fails to draw a sharp distinction between contraception and abortion. In Evangelium Vitae, for example, the Pope clearly states that, although intimately linked in their nature and consequences, the evils of contraception and of abortion are different: …from the moral point of view contraception and abortion are specifically different evils: the former contradicts the full truth of the sexual act as the proper expression of conjugal love, while the latter destroys the life of a human being; the former is opposed to the virtue of chastity in marriage, the latter is opposed to the virtue of justice and directly violates the divine commandment ‘You shall not kill.’ (1995, p. 24)
Lest anyone think that the Pope here, in referring to “the life of a human being,” is abstaining from judgment about whether the early human being is also a human person, John Paul II reiterates tirelessly throughout the encyclical what he states in its introduction, that opposition to abortion is linked to recognition of “the incomparable value of every human person” (1995, p. 5). The Pope further articulates that this value is the foundation of “the right of every human being to have this primary good [of life] respected to the highest degree” (p. 5). So both persons, and their rights, are foundational for an understanding of the wrong of abortion, and, as well, of the various abuses of early embryos in scientific research.2 In this paper, I intend to argue that this move towards a differentiated position on the specific evils of contraception and abortion is not only reasonable
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but, in this third millennium of Christianity, necessary for all Christians who hope to be pleasing to God, and to obey the commands of Jesus Christ. Thus, there can be no separation, of the sort proposed by Engelhardt, between the “language of rights and persons” and the language which he favors, which is “preeminently that of commands, proscriptions, and invitations to holiness, which direct to a life aimed at the pursuit of the kingdom of heaven” (2000, p. 279). In the world in which we live, the invitation to holiness must include a command to understand, recognize and protect the personal status of all unborn human life. Moreover, a proper understanding of this issue, and of the way in which obeying God where matters of abortion are concerned is pleasing to Him, has inevitable consequences for our understanding of what may be permitted in the political sphere, and indeed, of what sort of moral understanding is available to us as rational agents. Engelhardt, as the first two quotations in the first paragraph indicate, has written two different books on the foundations of bioethics—one depicting a secular ethics for moral strangers, the other a content-full traditional ethic for Christians. Famously, the former ethic permits abortion, while the latter condemns it. But practitioners of the Christian bioethic are nonetheless expected by Engelhardt to accept, in the legal and political realm, the secular morality of consent which permits abortion at will, as well as privately funded embryo creation and research. I shall argue that such acceptance is itself unacceptable to a Christian with a proper understanding of the evil of abortion.
I. Engelhardt on Procreation Engelhart’s procreative ethics is set in the context of God’s call, to each individual, to a life of holiness. Moreover, the specific arena in which men and women are called to holiness where issues of procreative ethics are concerned is, naturally enough, the arena of marital sexuality. Thus Engelhardt writes, in all such matters: …concerns with sexual morality must be judged in terms of the struggle to God, the pursuit of the kingdom of God. The beautiful, the thrilling, the pleasing, the satisfying, and the completing elements of sexual experience must be relocated within the mutual love of husband and wife in their companionship in loving God. Human sexual fulfillment can only be judged through and in terms of a turn through asceticism toward holiness and away from self-love. (2000, p. 235)
From within this perspective which views marital sexuality as normative for sexuality in general and sees marital sexuality as appropriately ordered only when ordered to salvation, procreation is given a special place as pleasing to God, in accordance with his injunction to “be fruitful and multiply.” Reproduction is not the whole of marriage, nor even its sole purpose; the union of
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two in one flesh by which marriage symbolizes the union of Christ and His Church is established even in non-fruitful marriages. Still, as the natural fruit of such a union, and as a response to a specific command of God to Adam and Eve, the generation of children is crucial to a normative understanding of human sexuality. This understanding then provides the framework from within which specific issues of reproductive ethics may be addressed. Certain forms of assisted reproduction, for example, such as maternal surrogacy, artificial insemination by donor, or cloning, constitute ruptures in the marital union; they are instances of reproductive adultery albeit without adulterous intercourse. There must be no third party involved in either genetic parenthood, or in the sexual act itself by which parenthood is achieved. In this context, Engelhardt first addresses issues concerning the treatment of early human life: what are we to make of the destruction or wastage of embryos often associated with in vitro fertilization, or with the destruction of embryos, created or otherwise, used in scientific research? Many such procedures involve “direct actions against an instance of human life” (2000, p. 261).3 It is not clear, Engelhardt writes, if such early embryos are to be accorded the status of embryos in the womb, given the natural wastage rate of early embryos. But: …even if such action against human life before it is or could have been in the womb may not clearly be equivalent to abortion and therefore murder, one should not act destructively against such zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. To take a different position is to step outside of the spirit of the Fathers. In the use of zygotes and embryos for non-therapeutic research, there is an intimate involvement in non-benevolent actions against early human life. (2000, p. 261)
It is, further, in this context that Engelhardt introduces the notion of “being a person,” albeit briefly. “To be a person is to be a being whose proper destiny is theosis” (2000, p. 255). Engelhardt’s hesitation here to claim that early embryos created and maintained outside the womb are persons does not lead him to doubt the wrongfulness of their active destruction, since they are still early human life. But the hesitation here leads one to expect something that does not really materialize later in the discussion, namely, that destruction of life within the womb, at least after a certain time, is wrong precisely because it involves the destruction of a person, rather than simply early human life. Engelhardt’s first sentence in his discussion of “Abortion, Miscarriage, and Birth” corrects this misunderstanding: “From the early Church, intentionally killing embryos has been acknowledged as a radical failure of love, as one of the worst of actions, whether or not the embryo is yet a person” (2000, p. 275). And more strongly, later in the section, “the evil of abortion [is] not dependent on having taken the life of a person” (p. 281). Rather, in keeping with the focus on marital sexuality as open to God’s commandments, “Christians are called to engage in reproduction with love, with humility, and
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without taking human life” (p. 275). Obedience in these matters is sufficiently justified by appeal to the demand for ascetic holiness, without the necessity of bringing in the Western Church’s baggage concerning personhood and ensoulment. Indeed, Engelhardt believes that to focus on the person—the individual with a right to life who is wronged by abortion—may: …obscure the integral character of the Christian life by suggesting that there are ultimate reference points for the moral law outside the pursuit of the kingdom through Jesus Christ. Fully discursive understandings of natural law can dangerously mislead in suggesting that morality can be adequately understood outside of a life appropriately directed to God…[O]ne must not lose sight of the real significance of this evil. The appreciation of evil, as well as of the good, must always be situated in terms of the pursuit of holiness. (2000, p. 279)
Now it is precisely this claim—that our approach to God and holiness is potentially obscured by a focus on the person wronged in abortion—which I shall attempt to challenge in subsequent parts of this paper. One more aspect of Engelhardt’s discussion of abortion needs mentioning, however, namely, his refusal to draw a sharp distinction between abortion and miscarriage. Engelhardt discusses miscarriage in the context of his discussion of abortion because he views it as a kind of “involuntary homicide.” One’s involvement in the death of one’s fetus, even though involuntary, requires repentance, and Engelhardt includes a prayer from his church of absolution for one who has suffered a miscarriage. While there is much to say about the very notion of involuntary sin, my point here is that this treatment of miscarriage seems to be of a piece with the non-person-centered discussion of abortion. For in a context in which it is recognized that we are dealing squarely with full moral persons, it would be inconceivable for us to fail to draw a crisp line between premeditated murder, for example, and a car accident for which one was entirely not at fault, but which resulted in the death of a pedestrian. It must be granted that one might accuse oneself and feel guilt, having non-culpably struck a pedestrian. But to reorient our entire framework of normative response—the reactive attitudes discussed by Strawson, for example—so that murder and accidental death were viewed similarly, would seem to involve a refusal to see murder as an affront against persons, whereas accidental death was a tragedy for persons; and it would fail to do justice to the persons who had in radically different ways done the lethal deed.
II. Love, Justice and Abortion As we have seen, Engelhardt believes that a focus on the personhood of the fetus threatens to draw our attention away from Christ and the pursuit of holiness. But it is not clear that such a focus must inevitably do so; indeed, it is difficult to see how the opposite is not true.
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What is it that must occupy the attention of a moral agent who wishes to be pleasing to Christ? It is insufficient, on Christ’s own testimony, as well as that of his disciples, to love God without also loving others. When the Lord is asked what must be done to inherit eternal life, he commends the scholar of the law for his reply: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27-28). Moreover, in this same discussion, which concludes with the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus is at some pains to extend the notion of being a neighbor beyond the boundaries of tribe or nation. As Germain Grisez summarizes: Jesus teaches that everyone should be counted as a neighbor. Instead of making this point by proposing an argument in general terms, however, he uses a parable. Faced with a suggestion that the responsibility to love might be limited by restricting neighbor to some particular class of people, Jesus teaches that even a despised Samaritan makes himself a Jew’s neighbor by acting toward him with love. Thus, Jesus rules out using some predefined notion of neighbor as an excuse for limiting the circle of those whom one is prepared to love; he teaches instead that love of God calls one to act as a good neighbor toward any person found to be in need. (1993, pp. 308-309)
Moreover, Jesus makes it clear that the love of others, including, but not necessarily limited to, their appropriately just treatment, is intimately linked to love for Him: “When the righteous ask ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?’ the Son of Man will say to them ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of the least of my brothers, you did for me’” (Matt. 25:37-40). Likewise, the author of the Letter of John writes that, “If someone who has worldly means sees a brother in need and refuses him compassion, how can the love of God remain in him” (3:17)? Nor, finally, can the requirements of love be understood apart from the requirements of justice. Although love goes beyond justice, Christ makes it clear that failures of justice are themselves failures of love. Such failures include generically a failure with regard to the Golden Rule, and more specifically, particular harms committed against persons. So the love of Christ requires that one not harm persons, that one seeks the good of persons, that one aids persons in their distress, and that one considers one’s neighbor to be potentially anyone in grave distress. As St. Thomas argues, this does not mean that every agent has an equal obligation to provide aid to every other agent, an unworkable command, incompatible with the true order of charity. Still, an important lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and of the Letter of John, is that those in great need make a legitimate demand on us, a demand that ultimately is made by Christ Himself. Presumably, none of this is unfamiliar to Engelhardt, or to any orthodox Christian. But what I wish to focus on now is the way that demands of love
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and justice can become, in certain ways, more stringent through time, in light of changing social facts and circumstances. Two examples will suffice. First, consider duties to persons in need, but at a great distance. Prior to the advent of mass media of communication, the duties of many Christians to such persons were considerably different than they are now. Today, because all moderately prosperous Christians in the West are capable of knowing about, for example, starvation or AIDS in Africa, and are also capable of providing aid, many of those Christians, perhaps the great majority, will have some obligation to contribute to the aid of such suffering Africans. Their plight now is practically relevant to Christians in the West in a way that it simply was not two hundred years ago. For a second example, consider the argument of Joseph Boyle to the effect that there is now in the West a right to health care in a way that there was not in the past and that does not exist in some less developed societies (2002). All agents have Good Samaritan duties to those in great need, as pointed out already, and these duties include duties to provide health related assistance when possible. I must help you if I find you bleeding on my doorstep, or about to choke to death from a fish bone. In societies with few resources, or an undeveloped system of social coordination, these duties are more or less one-off, to be recognized and met individually as they arise. But in advanced societies, in which it is possible to pool resources and to rely upon advanced communications, and other technologies, as well as the widespread power of the state, then it is irresponsible not to create mechanisms by which those in grave health related need are aided and served. Corresponding to this social responsibility to provide health aid is the corresponding right to health care, a right that it would be nonsensical to assert in various other social and historical contexts. What I want now to argue, then, is that the current day and age likewise makes certain new demands on Christians where matters of early human life are concerned, demands that did not need to be met with the same sort of specificity or urgency in an earlier day.4 The three following points will help to establish the argument. The first reason concerns abortion’s role in our social world. Abortion is now common in a way it never was previously. An estimated 1.3 million abortions are performed in the United States alone each year, and many millions more are performed in other parts of the world. Moreover, abortion is linked, practically and conceptually, to a number of other phenomena: sexual immorality, the failure of the family, and various additional forms of anti-life attitudes, collectively referred to by the Pope as the Culture of Death, and including, prominently, a new interest in euthanasia. Finally, abortion is now a part of the everyday consciousness of millions of young people, who take it for granted, and in many cases obtain abortions without a great deal of thought. Abortion is not, in short, an insignificant feature of our contemporary cultural landscape. It is, arguably, the single most important and culturally defining feature of our world.
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Second, abortion at least potentially involves a failure of justice, and if so, then also a radical failure of love. Why “potentially” a failure of justice? Primarily because justice, and love, can only be directed at persons: persons, not living beings, and not human beings, if human beings are not persons, are the only created beings who can be treated justly and unjustly, loved or hated, in the morally relevant ways. So abortion is a failure of justice only if those human beings whose lives are taken are also persons, but it is also a failure if those human beings are persons. This is not to deny that abortion can, like contraception, reasonably be held to be morally impermissible even if does not involve taking the life of a person. Some, at least, of the arguments against contraception would likewise rule out abortion. But the wrong of abortion would be fundamentally different if it did not involve an assault on a particular human person than if it did. As mentioned above, some of the early Christian fathers not only did not draw a fine line between abortion and contraception, but they also blurred the distinction between homicide and sterilization.5 From one point of view, this underscores the significance of both abortion and contraception, and, further, underscores that both involve a contra-life will; hence, it is no wonder that the will to one can lead to the will to the other. But from another point of view it is unfortunate: homicide is a violation of particular persons, particular children of God. It is a radical failure of justice and of love. The third point to make is that the biology necessary for understanding the nature of the zygote, embryo, and fetus, which was missing through eighteen hundred years or so of the Church’s existence, is now available. It is not idle speculation, doomed from the start, to consider with biological accuracy when a particular human being begins, and to consider this evidence in light of some basic reflections on the nature of persons. We are in a radically different epistemic position with respect to the embryo or fetus than were the early Church fathers, Albert and Aquinas, and even more modern thinkers, such as those who imagined that they saw homunculi in sperm when looking through a microscope. In consequence of these three points, plus the earlier reflections on Christ’s call for us to love one another as ourselves, and His linkage of this call to the call to love Him, it does not seem to me morally acceptable to address the question of the morality of abortion without consideration of the personhood of the early human being. For it does not seem available to us to aspire to fulfill Christ’s demand on us to love one another without ascertaining whether or not that demand is being radically violated every day, 1.3 million times a year, all around us. To refuse to address the question of the personhood of the early human being is itself a radical failure of love for all those human persons if indeed they are human persons, in two ways. Consider first the familiar analogy between abortion and slavery, and a different analogy between mistreatment of animals and mistreatment of persons. It is a common argument of the Western tradition that certain ways of treating
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animals should be avoided, not for the sake of the animals themselves, but because these ways of treating animals are degrading for the humans involved, and could potentially lead to other forms of ill behavior. Kant articulates the first sort of claim, and Aquinas the second.6 My sense is that many animal rights activists find such arguments profoundly disturbing, and well they should given their premises. Consider what we would think of a similar, albeit different in some particulars, argument about slavery. Suppose we were offered an argument that addressed the morality of slavery only in terms of the ways our treatment of animals can be wrong. Slaves look sufficiently like us, the argument might go, that ill treatment of them might lead to a diminished moral sensitivity to other persons, and might lead us to treat other non-slaves poorly. Further, cruelty to slaves might be dehumanizing to the slaveholder; so, slaves should be released. We might even add that no part of God’s creation should be treated with wanton cruelty, regardless of whether it is a person or not.7 Such arguments would disturb us in the way that Aquinas’s argument about animals disturbs animal rights activists. We would think that an injustice was being done to human slaves in the very presentation of these arguments, for the greatest wrong of slavery was being overlooked, namely the injustice being done to each enslaved human person by their being kept in slavery. Similarly, no amount of gentle treatment of animals will be pleasing to the animal rights activist who believes that what is most fundamentally at stake is the need to recognize that it is the animals themselves who must be morally acknowledged. By the same token, we risk a grave injustice to the unborn by addressing the evil of abortion on grounds that fail to take into account the possibility that the evil involves a radical injustice. This was not an injustice risked by earlier Christians. Abortion was sufficiently rare, happiness in pregnancy and childbirth sufficiently common, and ignorance about the biology of human beings sufficiently inevitable that it seems not to have been incumbent upon earlier Christians to condemn abortion in more specific terms than they did. The spirit of our day, however, does not permit this. There is, however, a second reason that we must consider the personhood of the early human being and this is simply the obvious reason that the Christian response to 1.3 million violations of chastity a year must be considerably different from the Christian response to 1.3 million homicides a year. Love of neighbor clearly makes certain demands on Christians vis-à-vis a culture that flouts the moral demands of chastity regularly. But much of what is demanded is surely of a non-interventionist sort: Christian families should set good examples of marital chastity, Christian parents should teach their children, and all Christians should work together to strengthen the family, and to promote a sound moral ecology. But it is not clear that people should be legally restrained from unchaste behavior in the large majority of instances.
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By contrast, love of neighbor surely makes strongly interventionist demands in the face of 1.3 million persons condemned to an unjust death. If the unborn are persons, then Christians cannot meet Christ’s demands by simply being a good example when they become pregnant in a difficult situation: Christians must work, in various ways, to bring an end to abortion. The unborn are presently that part of God’s children who are radically denied the status of neighbor; Christians have an obligation, if the unborn are persons, to be neighbors to them. This, in turn, means that they have an obligation to discover whether the unborn are the sorts of beings for whom we are required to become neighbors. Another way to put this is to say that abortion is the foundational problem for any Christian bio and social ethics. So how is that question of personhood to be answered? I cannot, in this paper, go through all the reasons that seem utterly convincing to me that from conception, the human being is a person. Suffice it to point out that modern biology makes clear that a new human individual is present from conception— this is the crucial bit of knowledge unavailable to earlier Christian thinkers. But then any attempt to attribute personhood to some human beings and not others will be radically arbitrary and will have various counter-intuitive consequences for our assessment, for example, of the personhood of the unborn, the infirm, and indeed, of the sleeping. The conclusion reached by the Pope, by philosophers, theologians and faithful Catholics, that it is human persons who are wronged by abortion and by embryo disposal and experimentation, seems to me irrefutable. I conclude this first part of my argument, then, with the claim that Engelhardt’s refusal to address the evil of abortion in terms of the issue of the personhood of embryos and fetuses is incompatible with the demands of Christian love and justice; when that issue is appropriately addressed, the scope of the injustice may be seen to be even more significant. In the next part of this paper, I argue that this conclusion is itself corrosive of many of Engelhardt’s claims about the morality and politics which must be mutually accepted by moral strangers.
III. Abortion and the Morality of Strangers Engelhardt’s two foundations for bioethics—the foundations for a secular bioethics and the foundations for a Christian bioethics, could not be more different. Engelhardt writes at length, in the Foundations of Bioethics, of the failure of the Enlightenment to establish a rational ethics universally binding on all from premises equally available to all rational agents. Engelhardt criticizes intuitionist views, natural law views, Kantian views, utilitarian views and others, all on the ground that to adopt the premises of one or another of these rivals is already to presuppose allegiance to the normative content of that view and hence to beg the question. (While it is not the point of this essay specifically to criticize this claim, I
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would point out that there is at least one instance, not discussed by Engelhardt, in which adoption of a set of premises, and allegiance to the normative standards expressed by those premises would not be question begging, namely, if the agent in question really recognizes those premises as true.) Nonetheless, given the failure of the Enlightenment attempt to establish normative standards for all rational beings, what remains? Engelhardt moves in two directions. First, the inevitable question begging is the result of any attempt to establish for ethics a substantive normative content: it is precisely insofar as ethics attempts to do this that it must smuggle in normative standards. Thus, the only available route to thick normative standards lies not through detached and universal reason, but through allegiance to the various thick moral communities that can provide the shared substantive content of a morality for friends. Here Engelhardt has in mind communities of Orthodox Christians or Jews, or Buddhist or Confucian communities. By contrast, to the extent that any universal claims are made, they must be evacuated of moral substance. But the absence of any universal moral authority is unacceptable to Engelhardt: there will be no peace, and hence no thick moral communities, if there are no minimal normative standards granted authority across such communities. What emerges for Engelhardt is that in the absence of any real normative authority, and given the only alternative of coerced agreement, an ethics of permission must rationally be accepted by all agents as the minimal condition necessary for entering into moral conversation with others. Engelhardt writes: The appeal to permission as the source of authority involves no particular moral vision or understanding. It gives no value to permission. It simply recognizes that secular moral authority is the authority of permission. This appeal is a minimal condition in relying on what it is to resolve issues among moral strangers with moral authority: consent. It establishes a secularly acknowledgeable authority for its conclusions: agreement. By appealing to ethics as a means for peaceably negotiating moral disputes, one discloses as a necessary and sufficient condition…for a general secular ethics the requirement to respect the freedom of the participants in a moral controversy…as a basis for common moral authority. (1996, p. 69)
An ethics of permission, however, can extend only to those who are capable of giving or refusing permission. Thus secular bioethics has a bias in favor of “persons,” where “person” is understood in terms of this prior notion of permission: persons are all and only those beings capable of entering into, or refusing to enter into agreement with others. One obvious consequence of this is that there can be no secular restraints on the morality of abortion: embryos and fetuses cannot enter into agreements, and so are left unprotected from those who would do them harm. The unborn are radically outside of the secular moral community.
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Of course, the interests of the unborn may be recognized, and protections offered, from within the more thickly constituted moral communities that are capable of providing content-full ethics. Roman Catholics may be forbidden by their Church authorities from having or performing abortions, for example, and Catholic hospitals should be left free by the state to refuse to provide abortion services. But neither Catholics nor any other members of thick moral communities can make moral demands regarding abortion on those outside of their communities. In conversation with moral strangers, and in the politics of the secular communities, Catholics and others must accept what Engelhardt calls, in the Foundations of Christian Bioethics “libertarian cosmopolitanism.” I wish to make two points in passing about this conception of libertarian cosmopolitanism. First, Engelhardt contrasts this with “liberal cosmopolitanism.” The latter moves away from allowing the various thick moral communities to maintain their own standards, and from the refusal of libertarian cosmopolitanism normatively to endorse anything at all, to the claim that the liberty rights of modernity are something more like entitlement rights, grounded in their own goodness. So tolerance of abortion, of sexual license and of alternative lifestyles, ceases to be sufficient to the liberal state; such practices and liberties must be viewed as goods and entitlements, deserving of more than just tolerance, and rather of something like moral recognition. This appears to me a more or less accurate description of the recent course of history. Secondly, it is not obvious to me that the seeds of liberal cosmopolitanism are not present in libertarian cosmopolitanism. Those who pursue abortions, or sexual experiences at will, must do so under the aspect of good—they, at any rate, cannot see such activities and practices as matters of indifference. If it is unavailable to, e.g., Catholics, in the public sphere, to argue that such activities and practices are bad, morally unacceptable, then the natural telos of the permissive state will be the view that these are in fact goods to be pursued by all with an interest in them, and those who, in their thick communities, find these practices repulsive, will increasingly be looked upon as obstacles in the way of progress. Should Catholics, and other Christians, accept Engelhardt’s claims that they may expect no more than the morality of strangers—i.e., the morality of permission and consent—in their dealings with moral strangers? The argument of the earlier parts of this paper were to the effect that Catholics and others who recognize the nature of the evil of abortion for what it is, can only see abortion as a problem to be addressed publicly. We cannot be neighbors to the unborn unless we address the question of abortion persistently and publicly, with a view to the legal enforcement of the rights of the unborn. What I am attempting here, then, is a kind of end-run around Engelhardt. Engelhardt begins from the premise that reason cannot deliver a content-full morality, and that accordingly, all parties to moral discussion and disagreement
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must accept the morality of consent, regardless of whatever thicker moral norms they accept as members of a robust moral community. One could address Engelhardt head-on, by attempting another defense of some foundational position in moral philosophy. On the other hand, one could show, as I have, that from the standpoint of some thick moral community, it would be intolerable to accept Engelhardt’s conclusions. But if those conclusions are indeed implied by his premises, then to reject the conclusion is also to reject the premise that reason cannot deliver a content-full morality. This is surely the only acceptable view for a Catholic on a variety of grounds well established in Catholic tradition, but it is also the view one should expect if the earlier arguments about abortion are correct. Earlier, I argued that abortion should be considered the foundational problem of bioethics for Catholics, and indeed, for all Christians. Catholics and all Christians are thus called to be neighbors to the unborn in this grim time. But the call of God is always answerable: God calls no one who is otherwise unsuited or unable to be a priest to be a priest, nor does he call anyone otherwise unsuited or unable to be married to be married. As Grisez writes, “God calls no one to do what is impossible” (1983, p. 120). Yet, given Engelhardt’s premises, the call to be neighbors to the unborn is rendered so. This seems to me in part a reason for his reticence from within the framework of his Christian bioethics to address the wrongfulness of abortion in terms of killing persons, and injustices to persons. Persons go missing in the discussion of abortion (and other issues of reproductive ethics) in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics because an adequate account of the personhood of the unborn would radically undermine Engelhardt’s The Foundations of Bioethics. If, on the other hand, we give due weight both to the personhood of the unborn, and to the duties this places on us as Christians, then we have good reason to doubt that the foundations of bioethics are as spare as Engelhardt believes.
Notes 1. Both, it is important to note, were still considered objectively grave sins. 2. This is not to imply necessarily that rights are foundational for moral discourse as such. Indeed, there is good reason to hold that they are consequents of prior duties, representing, as John Finnis puts it, the perspective of the object of such duties and what is owed to them (Finnis, 1980, chapter eight). 3. Though not in some IVF procedures in which the embryo is not actively destroyed. 4. A further brief excursus is in order on the subject of the early Church and abortion. Engelhardt points to one strand of thought in the early Church as normative for traditional Christianity, namely, that in which the Fathers did not concern themselves with whether the fetus was animated, or ensouled, or not, but straightforwardly condemned abortion, as well as contraception and sterilization. In point of fact, the line between contraception and abortion in some of these early Fathers is rather blurred. Jerome, for example, suggests, according to John Connery, S.J., that “even a woman who makes herself sterile is guilty of homicide” (Connery, 1977, p. 53).
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Caesarius of Arles makes a similar suggestion. Later, the Si aliquis canon will dictate that anyone who gives a potion to prevent a man or woman from conceiving or generating a child “must be held as a murderer” (Connery, 1997, p. 80). At the same time, there were fathers who were concerned with the question of the time of animation, and related this question to that of abortion. So Connery, in his discussion of the early Church on abortion writes that: A tradition was forming which looked upon only the abortion of the formed fetus as homicide. Abortion of the unformed fetus, although universally condemned, was not classified as homicide…Parallel with this tradition was another which considered not only the abortion of the unformed fetus, but even sterilization, as homicide. These two traditions will continue to grow side by side for some centuries to come, and many attempts will be made to reconcile them. (pp. 63-64) These two traditions clearly do not stand in an easy relationship to one another, and each has its virtues and vices. The view that elides the distinction between contraception and abortion certainly seems to identify the relevant similarity in the wills of agents who engage in both sorts of act, and is witness to the Church’s constant teaching on both abortion and contraception. But, for reasons that will become clearer in the text, it seems to me to be now (though not then) both impossible and unjust to refuse to address the question of when a contra-life act is in fact also an act of murder. The other tradition, which became more firmly established in the Middle Ages, and which was concerned with drawing a distinction between abortion of an animated and abortion of an unanimated fetus, clearly recognizes the important need to distinguish between murder and non-murderous acts, without denying the moral wrongness of the non-murderous acts. But, as I have mentioned above, the attempt to draw the distinction seems doomed to have failed in the absence of further biological knowledge. So one strand of my argument in the text may be summarized in this way: the subsequent biological knowledge has two consequences: it makes it necessary to ask the question about the beginnings of the human person, and it makes it possible to answer it. 5. Blurring the lines is not necessarily the same as misidentifying one thing as another: Grisez points out that the Si aliquis canon, for example, merely says that contraceptors should be treated as homicides, not that they are homicides. 6. Kant in the Lectures on Ethics, Aquinas in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Three, Chapter 112. 7. This would parallel Grisez’s suggestion that there is an “irreverence towards God” implicit in mistreating His creatures (1993, p. 736).
Bibliography Aquinas, Saint Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1976. Boyle, J. “Limiting Access to Health Care: a Traditional Roman Catholic Analysis.” In Allocating Scarce Medical Resources, edited by H.T. Engelhardt and M.J. Cherry, 77-95. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002.
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Connery, J.R. Abortion, the Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1977. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Bioethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. Finnis, J. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Grisez, G. Vol. 2 of Living a Christian Life: Christian Moral Principles. Quincy: Franciscan Press, 1993. Kant, I. Lectures on Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Engelhardt the Anabaptist: Pursuing Ascetic Holiness in the Spirit of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s The Foundations of Christian Bioethics Frederic J. Fransen
H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.’s theoretical framework for bioethics includes multiple, overlapping, and seemingly conflicting moral perspectives.1 At the outermost level one finds society, a place for the interactions of moral strangers and a place in which lack of agreement about the content-full foundations of morality leaves peace-loving persons to use permission as both a necessary and a sufficient condition for deeming an action moral, at least in what Engelhardt calls “general secular moral” terms. Thus, at this level, not only is contracting with a killer to murder oneself a perfectly legitimate transaction (such as in the case of physician assisted suicide), but so is indentured servitude, if freely entered into (one might imagine the underlying ontology of graduate student-teacher relationships in the modern university). At another level, among those whom Engelhardt terms moral friends, matters are quite different. The necessity of consent is reduced to an at most 181 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 181-201) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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one-time occurrence, and provided a person has given such one-time consent, virtually any conduct must be allowed by the general secular moral society. Thus, within a Right-to-Life Community, it might be perfectly acceptable to execute both a woman and her doctor for murder and accessory to murder after an abortion, provided that the woman and her doctor had consented to the authority of their community to declare abortion murder and a capital crime, and provided that the community had decided the matter within its consented-to rules. In the meantime, members of an adjacent Pro-Choice Community must stand by and allow these executions to take place, since they fall within the framework of those sanctions to which the doctor and the woman had given their permission. Moral content from one community carries no authority within another. In Engelhardt’s world, such bizarre circumstances need not only arise within a specific community of moral friends. In the interactions among moral strangersor between groups of moral strangers belonging to different content-rich communitiesseemingly unthinkable exchanges might take place, so long as they do not involve violence and are consensual. Thus, within a society functioning according to the Engelhardtian permission principle, one might observe a group of Amish farmers going to a market and selling addictive and potentially deadlybut pesticide and meat-freecrops to their neighbors, a commune of vegetarian, socialist, animal-rights activists who are willing to take their chances with addiction and disease so long as no animal is harmed in the process.2 Assuming that the Amish have legitimate title to their produce, that no deceit is involved in the sale, and that the buyers are consenting persons using their legitimately acquired resources to make the purchase, there would be no general secular moral grounds for society to intervene to regulate or stop this transaction from taking place, however strange it might seem on the surface. In Engelhardt’s world, one either belongs to a content-rich and potentially restrictive community of moral friends, or one acts strictly according to the principle of permission in the general secular realm, bearing the full consequences of one’s acts in the world of moral strangers. Both The Foundations of Bioethics (1996) and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (2000), address issues related to each of these realms, albeit with starkly different emphases. The Foundations of Bioethics (hereafter Foundations) speaks primarily to a general secular audience and explores the world of general secular morality according to the permission principle. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (hereafter Christian Bioethics), by contrast, explores a particular community of moral friends, referred to as Traditional Christianity, by which Engelhardt means those adhering to the Orthodox Church. This division of labor between the two books poses a serious problem for someone offering a response. On Engelhardt’s terms, very little mediation is possible between the worlds of moral friends and moral strangers. Although one can have multiple and overlapping moral communities and, therefore,
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have much in common with people from a variety of communitiesor even participate in multiple communities simultaneously under certain circumstances3it is hard to imagine the possibility of multiple overlapping communities dealing with ultimate moral questions, such as procreation and sexuality, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, and death, immortality, and eternal life.4 In any case, this is not the approach taken by Engelhardt in Christian Bioethics. Instead, Christian Bioethics is written from the point of view of one particular community whose moral presuppositions are, by definition, impenetrable to the reasoning of outsiders such as myself. I am not, it is fair to say, a born-again Texian Antiochian Orthodox Catholic (Engelhardt, 1996, p. xi; 2000, p. xvi). Therefore, I am a moral stranger to the bulk of Christian Bioethics. Because I am a moral stranger, however, any criticisms that I might have are open to easy dismissal within Engelhardt’s system, by attributing my differences, for instance, to my not sharing the same understanding of authority with Traditional Christianity, or to my having a different hierarchy of values, or to me simply not getting it. As a moral stranger, moreover, I have no reason to “get it”or perhaps even to try. Rather than engaging my arguments, the response of a born-again Texian Antiochian Orthodox Christian might simply be to refer me to a holy person or spiritual father, or to offer me a knowing but silent nod and inclusion in his prayers. Although such responses may be fully adequate to a moral friendand indeed they might even be the most beneficent response available to a moral strangerfrom a moral stranger’s point of view, such responses are as disheartening as the emptiness one feels in the face of the postmodern tragedy of man’s inability to succeed in the Enlightenment Project (1996, pp. 65-66), or the sadness in one’s heart when pondering the failed attempt of some Anabaptists to win Germany for the faith in 1535.5 Despite this epistemological problem, however, I do not feel like a moral stranger to either the framework of Engelhardt’s Foundations, nor the thick community of Christian Bioethics. This can only be possible in one of three ways: either I am really Antiochian Orthodox, or Engelhardt is Anabaptist, or there is no fundamental difference between the two. The first and last assumptions seem patently absurd, at least to me. Therefore, in order to overcome the theoretical impasse described in the previous paragraph, I am going to assume that Engelhardt is not telling the full truth about his faith when he describes Traditional Christianity as the Eastern Orthodox Church. In fact, I am going to assume that Traditional Christianity as used in Christian Bioethics actually refers to Anabaptism, particularly that of the early Church (ca. A.D. 33-337 and then as reconstituted in 1527). With this in mind, I propose to test a few of the provisions of Christian Bioethics against that assumption. Before I begin, however, two final disclaimers are in order. First, I am neither a theologian nor a bioethicist, and I may not even be a very good Anabaptist. As a result, despite appearances to the contrary, the following arguments
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should not be taken as authoritative, in either sense of the word. Second, to avoid any misconception, I am in no way attempting an exploration of the limits of the ecumenicity of Christian Bioethics. Engelhardt and I would almost certainly agree that the bioethics, not to mention the theology, of a majority of the adherents of various Christian sects are seriously misguided, if not damnable, and, therefore, that human efforts at ecumenicity would probably be better served by prayerful requests for the intervention of the Holy Spirit than by Councils, Commissions, Boards or any other such gatherings of humans called to work out a common position. Instead, this essay seeks to explore the degree of Christian Bioethics’ compatibility with another group of pious devotees of the route to holiness taught by Jesus Christ and passed along to his disciples and others through the Holy Spirit. Given the radical surface differences between the Traditional Christianity of Christian Bioethics and the one described below, the more substantive agreements sketched here may be yet another example of the mysterious and miraculous ways of the Spirit.
I. The Return to Traditional Christianity As a prophet of the return to Traditional Christianity in the West, Engelhardt takes careful note of the overwhelming problems that had developed within Western Christianity by the time of the Reformation, but which were not solved by the Reformation as it developed in the form of magisterial Protestantism, and for which the solutions could not be found within the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. What was needed, as Engelhardt recognizes, was a return to the Traditional Christianity of the early Church. This effort involved rediscovering a way of thinking about Christianity that was “neither Protestant nor [Roman] Catholic.”6 It recognized insurmountable problems with both Roman Catholicism and magisterial Protestantism, and sought to avoid the pitfalls of both: [Roman Catholics] thought they could attain salvation in [useless, unchristian practices and ceremonies] but they failed miserably ... So, too, in the same way, everyone now wants to be saved in showy faith, without the fruits of faith, without the baptism of temptation and testing, without love and hope, and without true Christian practices. ... [those opposed to the true way of Traditional Christianity] despise the divine word and pay attention to the papal word, or to the word of the antipapal preachers, which is also not in conformity with the divine word. (Grebel, 1991 [1524], p. 37)
Accepting, therefore, that something had gone extremely wrong in the Western Church that needed dramatic correction, let us pursue our thought experiment regarding Anabaptism. In a section of Christian Bioethics that places the Scriptures in their context within the set of guideposts for the Christian life, Engelhardt quotes Saint Silouan the Athonite who engaged in a similar experiment:
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Suppose that for some reason the Church were to be bereft of all her books, of the Old and New Testaments, the works of the holy Fathers, of all service bookswhat would happen? Sacred Tradition would restore the Scriptures, not word for word, perhapsthe verbal form might be differentbut in essence the new Scriptures would be the expression of that same “faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3). They would be the expression of the one and only Holy Spirit continuously active in the Church, her foundation and her very substance. (St. Silouan, 1991, pp. 87-88; quoted in Engelhardt, 2000, p. 193)
Supposing that instead of the Scriptures, much of the liturgical tradition of the Church and all the carriers of the Apostolic Succession would disappear in a geographical area (perhaps as a result of severe persecution combined with extensive martyrdom).7 Surely, Saint Silouan would agree that the “one and only Holy Spirit,” would nevertheless restore the Church, despite such a loss of continuity. It may take a long time and, as Saint Silouan notes, it would not be a literal recreation, word for word, in the case of the Scriptures, and act for act in the case of the liturgy, but the Church under the Holy Spirit’s guidance would nevertheless be restored to the traditions of the “Fathers and the Patriarchs.”8
II. The Church as the Early Church How, therefore, would a group of inspired individuals, under the influence of the Holy Spirit and witnessing the corruption around them, go about restoring the Church? Let us further assume that the sources they had to work with were their observations of the corrupted Church, some works of the Church Fathersin particular Eusebius9and the Old and New Testaments. As Engelhardt observes, the Traditional Church did not think of itself primarily as the locus of theological disputations, but rather as a community of saints within which theology was found in a demonstrative life: “Theology is not primarily an academic field. Theology is the expression of an intimate relationship with God” (2000, p. 190). Indeed, for the Traditional Christians of the sixteenth century, the very word ‘theologian’ was a term of rebuke. “To the early Anabaptists it was precisely the lack of such spiritual immediacy which made the Reformers predominantly ‘theologians,’ that is, discursive thinkers on religious questions” (Friedman, 1973, p. 20). They similarly refused to place their faith in those trained in the theological schools of the Catholic Church.10 The alternative to a Christianity of discursive theology is a Christianity of holiness. The way of life outlined by such Christian morality “has much more to do with holiness than with social justice” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 163). Such holiness is discovered through a “life of repentance and virtue” (p. 172). Finally, as Engelhardt notes, truth(s) in this understanding will be revealed to the Christian in worship and through the practice of an “ascetic and liturgical life” (p. 188).
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III. The Ascetic Theology of Holiness Engelhardt must, therefore, closely identify with the struggles of the early Anabaptists, for despite all that had been lost to them, they were endeavoring to reinvigorate and reawaken the Traditional Church. In their efforts, they came “remarkably close to the practice of the apostolic and early ante-Nicene church...” (Davis, 1974, p. 167). As Kenneth Ronald Davis has shown, “Anabaptist theology may be best described as a theology of holiness” (1974, p. 129). The early Anabaptists integrated three key notions into what Davis called the “ascetic theology of holiness” (p. 129). Shortly, I will discuss two of these three, the “theology of martyrdom,” and the “theology of discipleship.” The final idea, “The doctrine of the two worlds,” will be reserved for last. But first, let me explain in somewhat more detail what is meant by an ascetic theology of holiness. Although this quotation is drawn from a description of the theology of Traditional Christians of the sixteenth century, I would argue that it is equally applicable to the understanding outlined in Christian Bioethics. There are three essential ingredients within the Christian theology of holiness. First, there must be a conviction that the development and attainment of actual sanctity, of Christ-likeness in inner spirit and outer conduct in the individual Christian disciple,11 is both a possibility and at the same time the supreme object of the redemptive purposes of God.12 Second, every person hoping for salvation is required actively to pursue and, in some measure, attain in this life some similitude of this otherworldly perfectionbased on Christ’s words: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect (Matt. 5:48)”.13 Third, if the ideal of the pursuit of holiness is to become a full theology of holiness, it must be demonstrably the determinative interpretive principle for understanding and expressing all other aspects of Christian doctrine and practice (Davis, 1974, p. 130). The last point, it seems, is the core claim of Christian Bioethics. The first two, however, are equally important and can be combined into particular claims about the importance of martyrdom, as well as the (generally) more common call to discipleship, both thought of in terms of their contribution to the quest for holiness.
IV. The Theology of Martyrdom In his discussion of “Suffering, Disease, Dying, and Death,” Engelhardt pays close attention to the issue of martyrdom, distinguishing it from suicide and euthanasia. In the process, he notes the prominent role that martyrdom plays in the theology of holiness of Traditional Christianity: The lives and deaths of martyred saints carry with them a vivid appreciation of the importance of locating life and death within the pursuit of the Kingdom
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of God. ... Christianity experiences martyrdom as a special opportunity to heal one’s soul and to unite oneself with God. (2000, p. 328)
Traditional Christians of the sixteenth century were fully aware of the call to martyrdom, which, during the worst years of persecution, became a central part of their understanding of what it meant to follow Christ. This was perplexing to their persecutors, whether Protestant or Catholic. “How does it happen”, asked the Dominican monk John Fabri of Heilbronn in 1550, “that they accept death so readily and joyfully” (quoted in Friedman, 1973, p. 28)? The answer lies in their understanding of death as an event in the past, as having occurred prior to baptism, and to their being born into eternal life. As Engelhardt notes, such an attitude about life and death becomes extremely relevant to a bioethics of dying within a theology of ascetic holiness (2000, p. 317). From 1527 to 1560, in the worst years of persecution, more than 5,000 men, women and sometimes children, attempting to live according to the precepts of Traditional Christianity, were martyred in Western Europe, primarily in small areas of what are now Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. This compares to fewer than 2,000 who died under the Spanish Inquisition during its entire 300-year history. Their stories were recorded in 1660 by Thieleman J. van Braght (1950 [1660]). One of the most famous examples of sixteenth century martyrdom is the story of Dirk Willems, who was arrested in 1569 in Asperen, Holland, for his faith: When he fled he was hotly pursued by a thief-catcher, and as there had been some frost, said Dirk Willems ran before over the ice, getting across with considerable peril. The thief-catcher following him broke through, when Dirk Willems, perceiving that the former was in danger of his life, quickly returned and aided him in getting out, thus saving his life. The thief-catcher wanted to let him go, but the burgomaster, very sternly called to him to consider his oath, and thus he was again seized by the thief-catcher, and, at said place, after severe imprisonment and great trials proceeding from the deceitful papists, put to death at a lingering fire by these bloodthirsty, ravening wolves, enduring it with great steadfastness, and confirming the genuine faith of the truth with his death and blood, as an instructive example to all pious Christians of this time, and to the everlasting disgrace of the tyrannous papists. (van Braght, 1950 [1660], p. 740)
V. The Theology of Discipleship Not every Christian is confronted with martyrdom through torture and death, especially today.14 The route to holiness for most Traditional Christians instead takes the form of asceticism, itself understood as a kind of martyrdom.15 As mentioned earlier, sanctification takes precedence over justification in this approach (Friedman, 1973, p. 24). In their desire to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in realizing God’s kingdom, Traditional Christians seek to live a “concrete, actualized
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Christianity, reminiscent of the primitive church of the apostles” (Friedman, 1973, p. 158). Positively, one’s search for holiness takes the form of “a total love for God and for one’s fellows, total obedience to God, and an otherworldly value system.” Negatively, it is represented as the “elimination of sin which is identified primarily with a corrupt human society, the flesh, and the devil” (Davis, 1974, p. 133). In one’s search for holiness through discipleship, one seeks to foster a “synergistically oriented, continuous attitude of repentance, the penitent life, which would then express itself in repeated acts of specific, public, or private penance, and confession for restoration after sins were committed” (p. 167). Most specifically, it is expressed in “its emphasis on daily devotions, including prayer, contemplation, adoration, and praise, and fasting” (pp. 174-175). Although the core of an ascetic theology of holiness concerns each individual’s commitment to follow Christ, even to the extent of martyrdom, it also includes an other-directedness that derives from Christ’s command to love one’s neighbor, even at a potentially high cost. Dirk Willems’ decision to return to rescue his pursuer is one extreme example of fulfilling the obligation to one’s neighbor. Other such examples abound.16 Moreover, by understanding Christianity as a way of life, while accepting the special circumstances of the hermit (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 210), Traditional Christianity thinks of its moral and ethical foundations as essentially located within a community of believers. This also implies that bioethical decisions should take place within a communal framework. As Engelhardt notes: Traditional Christian bioethics is not fully understandable outside of a traditional Christian life. Access to its content and its meaning grows within the life of faith, love, alms, asceticism, worship, and participation in the Mysteries of the Church. ...That life is communal. (2000, p. 191)
VI. The Holy Community of Saints The community of Traditional Christians has as its objective the pursuit of holiness and even sanctification, which, with the help of the Holy Spirit, is partially achievable, even during one’s earthly life. As Davis points out, “Holiness ... took on a corporate nature, concern, and expression similar to cenobitism” (1974, p. 140). Traditional Christians, therefore, understand themselves to be part of a holy communion of Saints, engaged in something akin to communal monasticism. One of the key elements of any close-knit community is the discipline it imposes upon its members. As Engelhardt notes: ...If the body of the Church receives these articulations [of moral or ethical precepts], they have an enduring, infallible, and special therapeutic standing. It is agreed that those who reject these formulations must be treated with excommunication. (2000, p. 200)
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As Engelhardt enters into the particulars of Traditional Christianity’s understanding of bioethical issues, he repeatedly mentions excommunication as the appropriate sanction for those who violate the Church’s accepted teachings. An important aspect of the reawakening of Traditional Christianity in the sixteenth century was the revival of the kind of Church discipline described by Christ in Matthew 18:15: If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
As Conrad Grebel wrote to Thomas Muentzer: “Strive with the word and create a Christian community with the help of Christ and his rule, as we find it set forth in Matthew 18” (1991, p. 42). This “rule of Christ” is the key to discipline within the Traditional Church. By creating a set of steps prior to a sanction that Engelhardt must certainly agree is an extremely harsh punishmentbeing treated as a tax collectorTraditional Christians of the sixteenth century approached falling away from the community in a therapeutic way. Their intent was to invoke authority gradually and progressively, giving the violator a chance to repent prior to being expelled. In the extreme cases in which a case goes as far as excommunication, however, expulsion is complete. For instance, when the Amish shun a member, he or she is denied all intercourse with the community, including family members.17 From the Church’s point of view, the shunned individual ceases to exist as a member of the community, and is considered worse than someone who had never joined.18 Because such discipline is required to maintain the communityand especially where expulsion of members is a viable option in more than a few casesit follows that communities of Traditional Christians need a welldeveloped understanding of their place in the world of moral strangers, including firm convictions about their relation to the society around them. That relationship is at heart sectarian, and indeed, fundamentalist19 in its refusal to compromise with society on matters of core concern. In speaking of this with regard to the bioethics of Traditional Christianity, Engelhardt echoes much the same idea: To the discomfiture of a post-metaphysical, liberal culture, sectarians or fundamentalists have a cult of full commitment to a transcendent truth. ... Traditional Christian bioethics is cultic in embedding its moral concerns in a particular life of worship. Traditional Christians pursue ways of life at variance with mainline moral and religious understandings, not to mention secular health care policy. (2000, pp. 157-158)
As a result, Traditional Christians find themselves self-consciously separated from the world. Although they are factually in the world, they do not consider
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themselves as a matter of fact of the world. One of the clearest statements of this position occurs in the Schleitheim Confession, written by Michael Sattler and accepted by Swiss Brethren on February 24, 1527: Fourth Article: A separation shall be made from the evil and from the wickedness which the devil planted in the world; ...For truly all creatures are in but two classes, good and bad, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who [have come] out of the world, God’s temple and idols, Christ and Belial; and none can have part with the other.
He further admonishes us to withdraw from Babylon and the earthly Egypt that we may not be partakers of the pain and suffering which the Lord will bring upon them: From this we should learn that everything which is not united with our God and Christ cannot be other than an abomination which we should shun and flee from. By this is meant all popish and antipopish works and church services, meetings and church attendance, drinking houses, civic affairs, the commitments [made in] unbelief and other things of that kind… (quoted in Wenger, 1949, p. 209)
The sociology of such a community is in harmony with the theoretical structure of both the Foundations and Christian Bioethics. It encompasses a world in which one’s primary commitments are to a moral community with a well-developed, authoritative structure for making ethical and moral judgments and to a set of disciplines to protect the spiritual and moral integrity of that community. Here, there is no significant departure from the Traditional Christianity of Christian Bioethics. The Christian community recognizes the existence of a world apart from itself and fully integrates an understanding of it into its own self-conception. The Traditional Christianity of the sixteenth century, however, goes one step further than that of Christian Bioethics, in that it also anticipates andunlike the Traditional Christianity of Christian Bioethicsintegrates the Foundation’s understanding of the relationship between a particular community and general secular moral world into its own practice.20 Moreover, unlike the Traditional Christianity of Christian Bioethics, although it condemns that world, it does not contemplate the use of force to try to change it. These differences are most apparent in two areas. The first is in the notion of consent, understood theologically, within sixteenth century Traditional Christianity. The second is the relation of Traditional Christians to the State.
VII. The Free Church The issue of a voluntary community bound by permission has two parts. The easiest one is expulsion. An important component of the communal quest for ascetic holiness is the ability to expel members for breaches in discipline. For the Holy Community of Saints to preserve its integrity, it must be able to
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expel members. More difficult than expulsion, however, is the question of how one goes about entering the Traditional Church. The default position within the logic of the Foundations is that of permission. That is, for lack of another grounding in the postmodern, post-Christian world, we are thrown back on permission as the only peacefully available authority upon which to justify the use of force. In fact, peace can be defined to include the use of force to protect those who are being coerced without their consent, as in “peace officers.” Whether or not moral communities internalize permission as a doctrine of faith, and whether or not they apply the principle of permission to their own admittance policies, the general secular moral world has the rightif not even the obligation to refuse to recognize one’s membership in a particular community unless one can document one’s entrance to that community as a full person, granting permission for the community to assume a stipulated authority over that person in defined areas. In other words, however the community understands membership internally, from the point of view of general secular morality, entry into its conditions must take a contractarian form. Unlike Orthodox Christianity,21 Traditional Christianity incorporates such a practice of free entry fully into its own theology. For sixteenth century Traditional Christians, infants and small children do not need to be baptized in order to be saved. Their souls are protected by God’s mercy, as explained by Jesus: They brought children for him to lay his hands on them with prayer. The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me; do not try to stop them; for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matt. 19:13-14)
Upon reaching personhood, however, humans souls are imperiledindeed, they will go to hellunless they voluntarily submit to baptism and become members in the Church. The practice of treating young adults as unredeemed and in a different salvific state is followed most literally by the Amish, who set their sixteen-year-old men and women loose in the world, where they partake of all the temptations of twenty-first century Western culture before being given the free choice to join the Church. The period of “skipping around,” or Rumspringa, as it is called in Pennsylvania Dutch, generally lasts for about two years in the case of women, and three to four years with men. Many live at home during these years, while others live in apartments or with friends.22 This practice of lived-sinfulness is theologically necessary so that the decision to join the Church is a free one, in which persons in the full sense of the Foundationsof Amish parents but not themselves Amishfreely agree to have Church discipline enforced upon them until their physical death, or to be subjected to shunning.23 After several years of modern clothes, cars, wild parties and illegal drug use,24 currently ninety percent of these “general secular persons” of Amish descent voluntarily give up their worldly ways and become Amish by becoming baptized into the Church.
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During this period, from the point of view of Amish parents, the stakes for their offspring are enormous. Unlike Amish children whose salvation is in God’s hands, a person who dies during Rumspringa is doomed to hell as an unrepentant sinner. Nevertheless, whereas such behavior is toleratedand even encouragedbefore baptism, someone who has been baptized Amish but then decides to leave the Church can never be accepted and is shunned for life unless he or she returns to the discipline of the community. Expulsion, however, is the only step taken. Shunned members are not pursued into the general secular world, for to do so would involve a use of force considered inimical to their understanding of the Christian life. Instead, they are simply left to fend for themselves in the general secular world of the “English,” or to join another community. In either case, their souls are lost to God. Implied in this theological understanding, of course, is the existence of a non-Church, or world apart from that of the Community of Saints. The attitude of Traditional Christians to the state, including its general secular morality, therefore, becomes an important and integral part of Traditional Christianity’s overall theology.
VIII. Can There Be a Christian Governor (Even in Texas)? The second area in which the Traditional Christianity described here differs fundamentally from that of the Christian Bioethics is in its core understanding of the state. Let us be blunt about it: the Engelhardt of the Christian Bioethics is a statist. He calls upon the Church to use state power to violate the permission principle to further the secular aims of the Church: The Orthodox Mounted Posse can saddle up and ride out to the Second Rome to restore the Hagia Sophia... carrying the Bonnie Blue Flag next to the Empire’s banner of gold with the proud double-headed eagle. (2000, p. 392)
The claim that Engehardt is a statist may come as a surprise to those who know him and his work. Some additional explanation is, therefore, in order. As Konstantinos Kotzias notes, under the Orthodox notion of symphonia, Church and State were conceived of as one perfect harmony (Contemporary Review, 2001). Credit for developing this conception is generally given to the Byzantine Emperor Basil I, who wrote: As the Commonwealth consists of parts and members, by analogy with an individual man, the greatest and most necessary parts are the emperor and the Patriarch. Wherefore agreement in all things and harmony (sumfwnia) between the Imperium and the Sacerdotium bring peace and prosperity to the souls and the bodies of the subjects. (Epanagoge III, 8; quoted in Goheen, 2000, p. 5)
However brief Engelhardt’s tongue-in-cheek description of the rise of Austin, Texas as the Fourth Rome, the Orthodox view of the state is fully compatible with his millennial hopes. Within Orthodoxy, the boundaries between the Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Man are frequently blurred. There are
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Holy Emperors, and just wars, and many Orthodox Christians see the state as an important tool of the Church.25 Therefore, the vision of the Mounted Posse must be taken seriously. From the point of view of Traditional Christianity, government by force is part of God’s plan, but only for those outside the Church: We are agreed as follows concerning the sword: The sword is ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and puts to death the wicked, and guards and protects the good. (Schleitheim Confession, Article six; quoted in Wenger, 1949, p. 210)
Although the use of force by governors is necessary given the evil in the world, it does not follow that this makes it acceptable for a Christian to become a magistrate: Shall one be a magistrate if one should be chosen as such? The answer is as follows: They wished to make Christ king, but He fled and did not view it as the arrangement of His Father. Thus shall we do as He did, and follow Him, and so shall we not walk in darkness. (Wenger, 1949, p. 211)
To exercise force as a magistrate, therefore, is to “walk in darkness,” and is not appropriate for a Christian. This is not to say that magistrates are not necessary. They are. But their necessity does not imply that they produce any good: “The dead works of darkness have no part in the light” (Wenger, 1949, p. 209). The distinction is not between moral and immoralthe Church is moral and government immoralbut rather between moral and amoral.26 Those exercising force do so within an entirely different set of categories than that which guides the lives of Traditional Christians. The rules for one Kingdom are incommensurable with the rules for the other. This does not make government badonly not good. Such a view is fully in keeping with the spirit of both the Foundations and Christian Bioethics. That is, although it is necessary for there to be a general secular realm to mediate relations between moral communities, as well as to locate those who chose not to live in any one particular community (Engelhardt’s yuppies), that realm is, effectively, beyond good and evil.27 By contrast, the rich moral communities in which our moral decisions are made are either good or evil, although we cannot generally agree about which is which. It follows that it is inappropriate for a Traditional Christian, whose only orientation is toward seeking the light, to be a magistrate (even a deputy sheriff), since to do so would necessarily detract from his pursuit of holiness. Perhaps the last Christian who was also a magistrate to understand this truly was Constantine the Great. Throughout his life Constantine acted to protect Christians and, therefore, might be considered a model magistrate. Because he knew that he could not do so as a Christian, however, he delayed his baptism until days before his death. In finally converting, he made the following, telling, declaration: ... For should it be his will who is Lord of life and death, that my existence here should be prolonged, and should I be destined henceforth to associate with the
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In other words, Constantine recognized that he had not been leading a Christian life until that time, and that upon becoming a Christian he must alter his ways and orient himself toward “a course of life as befits [God’s] service.”28 It is reasonable to assume that by this he meant to embark on an ascetic path of holiness, which was only possible once he had given up magisterial ambitions and transferred the power of the sword to his sons. Magistrates can become Christians, but Christians cannot become magistratesnor crusaders, even to restore the Hagia Sophia.29 Unfortunately, too many Christians after Constantine have had less compunction about recognizing the basic incompatibility between Christianity properly understood and the general secular obligations of magistrates.30 Therefore, it is appropriate, as the Christians of the sixteenth century did, to mark the break with Traditional Christianity not primarily at 1054, but rather to the reign of Constantine himself, after which the two Kingdoms became ever more confused, spiraling into the crisis that led to the Reformation. This wisdom of the sixteenth century is in contrast to the Orthodox concept of symphonia, in which the church and the state are in “perfect harmony.” From the point of view of symphonia, the state is good, if different from the Church. There is no room in the world of the Foundations, however, for a “good” general secular realm. Moreover, for a thick community to rise up and set out to conquer its neighborseven Traditional Christians in Texas or Papists and Muslims in Rome and Constantinoplewould be legitimate cause for the general secular world, together with other thick communities, to intervene. There can be no crusading symphonia within the terms of the Foundations. If Posse members were coming to distribute copies of the Martyrs’ Mirror and the Gospel under the Bonnie Blueeven at the cost of their own livesthat would be one thing. If they intend to distribute fire from Colt 45s, that is quite another matter. This distinction between moral communities and general secular morality was well understood by sixteenth century Traditional Christians, but is less well integrated into Orthodoxy. Engelhardt’s theology of Traditional Christianity, particularly as it integrates the philosophical positions of the Foundations into the descriptions of Christian Bioethics, provides a rich account of the way in which Christians dedicated to the traditions of the original Church should think about ethics and morality. Engelhardt’s core claim, repeated throughout Christian Bioethics, is that the authority for bioethical decision making among Christians can only be located within a Christian understanding of the central purpose of life, the ascetic pursuit of holiness. Decisions about how to respond to particular problems, therefore, should be liturgical, and should be made within the body of Christ rather than through the use of reason. The process itself should be integral to
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the pursuit of a life directed toward holiness. The core of this theology is the notion of Christianity as a way of life, the pursuit of holiness through ascetic practices and within a liturgical community. This is highly relevant to Anabaptism. Within Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt not only presents the prolegomena to a Christian bioethics, but also provides content for one. Although Anabaptists share much in common with Engelhardt’s theology, they have not extended this theology in the same way so as to establish their own content-rich bioethics. Scholars seeking to rediscover a Christian bioethics on the basis of sixteenth century Anabaptist writings have been unable to discover any substantive content on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, or the provision of medical services (Miller, 1990, pp. 203-213). Most of the Anabaptist writings on the subject have proceeded sociologically, rather than theologically, describing what Anabaptists do in practice, rather than identifying how they ought to guide their lives. As an example, one effort at Anabaptist bioethics provides factual information from a variety of points of view, but ends each section with a set of study questions, rather than practical conclusions that provide guidance (Miller, 1990; see also Snyder, 1995).31 For this reason, Christian Bioethics is groundbreaking, and something that all those who take Christ’s call to live the Christian life seriously should study carefully. By bringing to light so much information about the bioethical teachings of the early Church, Engelhardt provides a point of reference from whichguided by the Holy SpiritChristian communities intent upon living out the life of the early Church can meaningfully identify content for their own bioethical practices.
Notes 1. For helping me to unravel some of these, I am deeply indebted to Corinna Delkescamp-Hayes, Ryan Ahlgrim, Elvin Plank, Herbert Fransen, Mary Fransen, and Angelika Quitchke-Fransen. Their careful readings of earlier drafts and helpful suggestions have greatly improved this paper. Remaining tangles, kinks, and knots are entirely my fault. 2. Many Amish grow tobacco as a cash crop. Note that the use of horses to farm and for transportation may be considered exploitive by some animal-rights activists, making even Amish-grown cigarettes morally objectionable. 3. Given a system of limited and enumerated powers, one can imagine, without contradiction, being simultaneously a citizen of Texas, a member of the American College of Surgeons, and on the board of the National Rifle Association. 4. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine being a member of both the College of Cardinals and Planned Parenthood. 5. Misguided Anabaptists in Muenster, now in Germany, took up the sword in 1535 and for a short time established an Anabaptist theocracy. The sins of these people included not only the use of force in the name of the Church, but also the establishment of a community of property, including women. This tragic and unfortunate incident
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Frederic J. Fransen was invoked at the time to justify severe persecution of dissenters throughout Europe, and continues to be invoked today. In a part of the interview between Friar Cornelis and Jacob the Candlemaker, not included in the subsequent note, Friar Cornelis accuses Jacob of being a Muensterite. This phrase is borrowed from Walter Klaassen, Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant (1981). For Traditional Christians of the sixteenth century trying desperately to restore the Church, the execution of their leaders was such a common event that they provided rules for this in a confession of faith. Note in the Schleitheim Confession, Article Five: “...But should it happen that through the cross this pastor should be banished or led to the Lord [through martyrdom] another shall be ordained in his place in the same hour so that God’s little flock and people may not be destroyed” (Wenger, 1949, p. 210). “In the first place, we must with all understanding concede and confess that the first church of Christ and the apostles was destroyed and ruined in early times by Antichrist.... these very devout hearts have resolved that they shall serve God in all such quiet simplicity after the manner of the Fathers and the Patriarchs...” (Philips, 1957 [c. 1560], p. 207). Cornelius Krahn, one of the leading Mennonite historians of the twentieth century, notes that among the few documented sources from the Church Fathers that influenced Menno Simons was Eusebius, whom he repeatedly looked back to (1982, p. 42). See also Friedman (1973, p. 47n1). This comes through in the following exchange between Jacob the Candlemaker and Friar Cornelis, his prosecutor, which took place in 1569: Friar Cornelis: Well, I’ve come here to see whether I can convert you (Jacob, I believe, is your name) from your false and evil belief, in which you are erring, and whether I cannot bring you back to the Catholic faith of our mother, the holy Roman church, from which you have apostatized to this damnable Anabaptism. What do you say to this, eh? Jacob: With your permission, as regards that I have an evil, false belief, this I deny; but that through the grace of God I have apostatized from your Babylonian mother, the Roman church, to the members, or the true church, of Christ, this I confess; and thank God for it, who has said: “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Rev. 18:4; Isa. 52:11). Friar Cornelis: Is it true: And do you call our mother the holy Roman church, the whore of Babylon? And do you call your hellish, devilish sect of Anabaptism the members, of the true church of Christ? Eh! Hear this fine fellow once. Who the devil has taught you this! your accursed Menno Simons I suppose ... [Jacob cites Revelations in response] Cornelis: ... At what university did you study? At the loom, I suppose; for I understand that you were nothing but a poor weaver and chandler before you went around preaching and rebaptizing out here in the Cruthuysbosch. I have attended the university of Louvain and studied divinity so long, and yet I do not understand anything at all about St. John’s Apocalypse; this is a fact.
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Jacob: Therefore Christ thanked His heavenly Father, that He had revealed and made it known to babes and hidden it from the wise of the world, as it is written, Mathew 11:25. This exchange goes on for several pages, before Friar Cornelis gets frustrated and brings the interview to a close: Friar Cornelis: Well, I have no desire to dispute any longer with you. I shall go my way, and let the executioner dispute with you, with a burning fagot*** and afterwards the devil in hell, with burning pitch, brimstone, and tar, see. ... Friar Cornelis: Bah! in hell, in hell.... Hell yawns and gasps for your soul you accursed, damned Anabaptists that you are. Because of the foul language of the Franciscan, the original editions of the Martyrs Mirror left out this and a subsequent interview of Friar Cornelis. In the 1950 edition, the editors restored them, but replaced the unprintable language of the Franciscan with triple asterisks. For the complete interview, see van Braght, 1950 [1660], pp. 774-785. Such statements in Christian Bioethics are generally in reference to the particular, but generalizable context of bioethics: “Christian bioethics has to do with Christ” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 208). Compare “Woe to him who looks anywhere but at this end. For whoever thinks that he is a Christian must travel the path which Christ traveled” (Denck, 1991, p. 133). See, for example, “Traditional Christianity represents an always and everywhere present possibility of redemption of the Spirit” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 160). See, for example, Christian Bioethics, quoting Patriarch Bartholomew, “Joyful Light,” “…we become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4). We are truly changed...” (2000, p. 207). For Engelhardt, “theologians as saints in union with God” exist in the world in an ongoing, real, and present way, and therefore provide actual examples of how those who aspire to holiness can live. Their presence as exemplars indicates the real possibility of the devoted Christian attaining the perfection of holiness that saints represent. Exceptions, of course, are to be found. In the twentieth century, the number of martyrs of the Church was greatly added to, particularly at the hands of communists in the Soviet Union. See The Black Book of Communism, Stephane Courtois, et al. (1999). Persecution of twentieth century Christians also continues elsewhere. For up-to-date information on this, see www.christianfreedom.org. I am indebted to Corinna Delkescamp-Hayes for making me aware of the range of Christian practices that fall within asceticism. Even marriage can be thought of as a kind of asceticism. Most famous is Mennonite Disaster Service, a corps of volunteers who help in cleanup and reconstruction following natural disasters. Another Anabaptist service organization, Mennonite Central Committee is among the most highly reputed relief and development agencies in the world, and among those with the lowest overhead. Anabaptists are also leaders in the developing field of mediation and conflict resolution. Of particular interest with regard to bioethics is Anabaptist involvement in mental health work, which derived from the experiences of World War II conscience objectors doing service in asylums. In a 1983 study, one author noted that more than half of all church-related mental hospitals in North America were Anabaptist-related.
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Frederic J. Fransen They were modeled on the Gheel community in Belgium, where more than one of seven homes care for a mentally ill person. Gheel’s involvement in mental health goes back to the occurrence of a miracle in the early years of the Church: “According to tradition, Dympna, the daughter of an Irish king, was converted to Christianity and fled with a priest. The father of Dympna, angered over her conversion and elopement, pursued her. After finding Dympna and being unable to dissuade her from Christianity, he beheaded both her and the priest. The legend is that several mentally ill persons who saw the cruel act thus regained their mental health. This was accepted as a miracle and thereafter she became a patron saint for mad persons, saint Dympna.” When Mennonites set out to engage in mental health activity, they went to Gheel to examine their approach and incorporated into their own program of reform (see Neufeld, 1983). Intercourse here is meant both figuratively and literally. Not only are the bread and wine denied to shunned members, but their families cannot eat with them, and their spouses cannot have sexual relations with them so long as they refuse to repent. An example of this can be found in the story of Elvin Plank. Plank grew up in an Amish family and joined the Amish Church upon reaching adulthood. Afterward, he decided to leave the Church, in part to pursue a college education. After his bishop was unable to convince him to reconsider, he was shunned. This meant that even his family could not share a dish with him at a meal, and that they could receive nothing at all from him. When he married, in order to eat with his parents, neither he nor his parents could serve him, so his wifewho had never been Amishhad to put the food on his plate. If they went somewhere together, she had to drive the car, since his parents could not receive a ride from him. When he later joined a Mennonite Church, his Mennonite pastor wrote the bishop asking that the shunning be lifted, and the bishop and congregation joyfully did so, now that he was in good standing in an Anabaptist Church. (Interview with the author, December 18, 2003.) Some authors refer to Anabaptism as the “first true fundamentalist movement” (see Klaassen, 1981, p. 1; compare Engelhardt, 2000, p. 158). Within the logic of the Foundations, of course, it is not necessary for a moral community to incorporate the permission principle into its own internal practice, or even to believe it, but in order to avoid being an outlaw from the point of general secular morality, it must be able to document that, at least at one time, each individual in the community had given permission (which only persons can do) to be subjected to its sanctions. Thus each child who reaches personhood, however defined, must convince the general secular moral world that he or she has voluntarily joined the community. Adult baptism may not be necessary for a moral community, but something like it is essential for general secular morality. Anabaptism shares with Orthodox Christianity a disdain for Augustine’s notion of original sin, but breaks with Orthodoxy on the question of the status of the souls of non-persons. As a result, it is not important for Anabaptists that infants be baptized as far as their salvation is concerned. Because sin is a failure of the will to conform to God’s plan, only when one is a person in the full sense of the Foundations, can one sin in the full sense of the word: only persons can be culpable and,
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therefore, only persons are in need of the discipline of the Church to provide for their salvation. In a ceremony of child blessing, the following words can be spoken: “Maker of galaxies and planets, yet also of the hairs on our heads, we magnify your name for our creation and for all the blessings of this life. ... We claim the same assurance for him that Jesus gave to the children he took into his arms: Give the parents grace to raise their child to your glory. Let this child come to his own faith in Christ crucified” (Hymnal: A Worship Book, 1992, #792). Although they scorn infant baptism as “the highest and chief abomination of the pope” (Schleitheim Confession, Article One, Wenger, 1949, p. 208), many Anabaptists do dedicate their infants in the community and promise to educate them in the traditions of the Church. In return, the Church promises to help the parents to raise the child: “...We promise, with humility and seriousness, to share in your child’s nurture and well-being. We will support, by our example and words, your efforts to provide a loving and caring home, where trust in God grows and Christ’s way is chosen...”(Hymnal: A Worship Book, 1992, #791). A compelling documentary on this phenomenon is Lucy Walker’s 2002 documentary, The Devil’s Playground. One of the many surprising and interesting traditions among the Amish is that of “sleeping dates,” in which unmarried Amish youths share a bed with their boyfriend or girlfriend. This is apparently an ancient and widespread custom, which has been preserved by the Amish. Compare a similar scene in the Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot, in which a boy is sewn into a “bundling bag” so that he and his fiancée can sleep together. Although shunning may seem harsh, it is understood in contrast to the alternative practice of popish and anti-popish sects in the sixteenth century in putting heretics to death. The sixth article of the Schleitheim Confession includes the following statement: “...only the ban is used for a warning and for the excommunication of the one who has sinned, without putting the flesh to death,simply the warning and the command to sin no more” (Wenger, 1949, p. 210). According to Samuel Stoltzfus, 0.5 percent leave the church each year, 3 percent do drugs, 10 percent “travel in the fast lane,” and 25 percent participate in “hoedowns.” Hoedowns are rural drinking parties, generally held on Amish farms with their parents’ knowledge, in which as many as 1500 persons take part (Stoltzfus, 1999, pp. 110-111). Note, for instance, the Russian Orthodox Church’s efforts to have the state criminalize non-Orthodox mission activity in Russia. To use an example: if a Christian provides charity in keeping with the commandment to love one’s neighbor, a good and holy event occurs in which both giver and recipient gain spiritually. (The recipient also benefits materially.) If the state, by contrast, provides aid to families with dependent children, by contrast, a need might be met, but there is nothing holy about the transaction. It is purely secular. The bureaucrat, working with tax dollars that may well have been coerced, gains nothing in the way of holiness by administering the transaction. The recipient, as a consequence, partakes of none of the transformative holiness of the giver. Both receive secular benefitsthe bureaucrat in the form of salary, also paid with coerced moneybut the meaning of the event stops there. This also contrasts with Orthodox views.
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28. On the difficulties contemporary Anabaptists encounter when trying to negotiate the difficult waters of the Kingdom of God in a participatory democracy, see Frederic Fransen, “Uneasy Citizens: An Essay on the Difficulty in Creating a Mennonite Politics” (1997). 29. It is possible that Engelhardt could reconcile the Crusades of his Fourth Rome with a Christian understanding by declaring that neither he nor any other Texian Christian could join the Posse. He would also, however, need to remove it from any millennial hopes. 30. “Charles the Great then being elected Emperor of the West, and by signal Services deserving so well of the Church of Rome, Adrian and Leo III. Roman Pontiffs, loaded him with greater Honours than ever had been heard of. There was a mutual Emulation of Generosity and Courtesy betwixt them. Charles squander’d away Provinces, Cities, Jurisdictions, and other Temporal Riches on the Popes; they on the other hand repay’d him with their Spiritual Gifts. Thus the two Powers were so confounded and jumbled together, that their Boundaries, which were clear and distinct before, could never be well distinguish’d and ascertain’d thereafter; so that it has been the opinion of wise Men (Rich. Apolog. J. Gerson. par. 2. axiom 36), that Charles the Great went to further Lengths than Constantine the Great in ruining the Political State of the Empire, and corrupting the ancient Disciplines of the Church” (Giannone, 1729, p. 321). 31. Edwin Dubose’s survey of “The Anabaptist Tradition: Religious Beliefs and Health Care Decisions” (1996), finds few official positions on matters from reproduction technologies, abortion, and sterilization to gene therapy, sex selection, to medical experimentation.
Bibliography Basil I. Epanagoge, III: 8. Quoted in Michael Goheen, “Building for the Future: Worldview of Sand and Rock.” Religion in Eastern Europe 20, no. 5 (October 2000). Braght, T.J. van. The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Saviour, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660, Compiled from Various Authentic Chronicles, Memorials, and Testimonies, translated by J.F. Sohm. 1660 ed. Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1950. Courtois, S. et al. The Black Book of Communism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Davis, K.R. Anabaptism and Asceticism. Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1974. Denck, H. “On the Law of God.” In The Radical Reformation, edited and translated by M.G. Baylor, 130-151. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. The Devil’s Playground. Directed by Lucy Walker. Stick Figure Productions, 2002. Dubose, E. “The Anabaptist Tradition: Religious Beliefs and Health Care Decisions.” Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics, 1996. Engelhardt, H.T. Jr. Foundations of Bioethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000.
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Eusebius, Vol. I of Life of Constantine, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by P. Schaff and H. Wace. 2nd series. Edinburgh: repr. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1955. The digital version is by The Electronic Bible Society. Fransen, F. “Uneasy Citizens: An Essay on the Difficulty in Creating a Mennonite Politics.” In Separation from the World for American Peace Churches: Asset or Handicap? York, England: Sessions Book Trust, 1997. Friedman, R. The Theology of Anabaptism. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1973. Giannone, P. The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1793. Translated by Captain J. Ogilvie. London: W. Innys, 1729. Goheen, M. “Building for the Future: Worldview of Sand and Rock.” Religion in Eastern Europe 20, (October): 5, 2000, http://www.georgefox.edu/academics/undergrad/ departments/socswk/ree/goheen_bft.html#_ftn1 Grebel, C. C. Grebel to Thomas Muentzer, 5 September 1524, Zurich. In The Radical Reformation, edited and translated by M.G. Baylor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hymnal: A Worship Book. Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1992. Klaassen, W. Anabaptism: Neither Catholic nor Protestant, rev. ed. Waterloo, Ontario: Conrad Press, 1981. Kotzias, K. “The Myth of an Orthodox Block.” Contemporary Review (June 2001), www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_1625_278/ai_76737772 (accessed July 25, 2006). Krahn, C. Menno Simons: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Theologie der Taufgesinnten. Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1982. Miller, M. “The Maze of Bioethical Dilemmas.” In Bioethics and the Beginning of Life, edited by R.J. Miller and B.H. Brubaker. Scottdale, PA: Harold Press, 1990. Neufeld, V.H. “Introduction.” In The Mennonite Mental Health Story, edited by V.H. Neufeld. Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1983. Philips, O. “A Confession” ca. 1560. In Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, edited by G.H. Williams and A.M. Mergal. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957. Silouan the Athonite, Saint. Archimandrite Sophrony. Translated by R. Edmonds. Essex: Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1991. Snyder, G.F. Health and Medicine in the Anabaptist Tradition: Care in Community. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995. Stoltzfus, S.S. “The Drug Problem: How It Came to the Amish Community.” In What Mennonites Are Thinking, edited by M. Good and P. Pellman Good. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 1999. Wenger, J.C. Glimpses of Mennonite History and Doctrine. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1949.
Part III Christian Bioethics, Moral Pluralism, and the Hope for a Common Morality
Is “Discursive Christian Bioethics” an Oxymoron? Griffin Trotter
“For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is on the side of truth hears my voice.” Jesus, according to John 18: 37
In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. offers a Christian bioethics that “relocates the field yet once more”—from bioethics as an academic discipline tasked with navigating ethical controversies in hightechnology medicine back to bioethics as a way of life, as Van Rensselaer Potter initially proposed. But unlike Potter, Engelhardt portrays bioethics as life worshipping a transcendent God. “The goal”, he announces, “is to lead Christian bioethics back to where Christian reflections found themselves in the first millennium” (2000, p. xviii). The genesis of Christian bioethics, so conceived, antedates by about two thousand years the birth of discursive bioethics as a response to high technology medicine. Yet, in another sense, Engelhardt’s version of Christian bioethics is very new and very radical. Since the introduction of the term “bioethics,” no one has used it quite like Engelhardt now proposes. When viewed from the standpoint of the emerging orthodoxy of secular humanism or the somewhat less fashionable (yet barely distinguishable) ecumenical Christian bioethics, Engelhardt’s version of Christian bioethics is flagrantly sectarian and outrageously counter-cultural. Bioethics was born and raised in cosmopolitan neighborhoods at Georgetown, Hastings, and Charlottesville. In his current visage—bent, it seems, on kidnapping bioethics and dislocating it from these comfortable roots—Engelhardt appears more a Texian outlaw than a gentle mystic or pious reformer. Engelhardt has no intention of ridding the world of discursive bioethics. To the contrary, he conceives of two strains of bioethics operating in mutually 203 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 203–227) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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exclusive domains. Discursive bioethics is bioethics undertaken from the vantage point of immanence—admitting only the data and principles that can be appreciated by all reasonable persons and hence excluding claims to special knowledge from transcendent sources. Discursive bioethics is ineradicably secular1 and useful primarily for inter-communal discourse, where a multiplicity of diverging and incompatible moral communities must live together. It is tasked with the peaceful mediation of refractory disagreements between moral strangers.2 Sectarian bioethics, the second strain, is intracommunal and confined to particular moral visions. Its fundamental axioms are inherited through tradition; and it is tasked with helping moral friends articulate a content-full account of ethical biomedical practice. Engelhardt’s primary beef against the current practice of discursive bioethics is that its most influential practitioners market a substantive, sectarian worldview (secular humanism) as the universal morality of immanence. This project (liberal cosmopolitanism) is confused at best, since any substantive morality of immanence depends on premises that cannot be established by discursive reason alone. The arbitrariness of such fundamental premises from the standpoint of discursis seems to guarantee unproductive wrangling and ethical pluralism, with an expansive multiplicity of moral visions separated like monads in eternal circularity or infinite regress.3 At its worst, discursive reason devolves into “conceptive ideology”—intellectual adornment for coercive politics (Engelhardt, 1996, p. 68), replete with an inventory of academic high priests (e.g., tenured bioethicists), ritual deployments of intellect (e.g., political advisory committees), and creative myths disguised as facts (e.g., stories that portray infant mortality or life-span inequalities as consequences of poor health care access). Though I largely share Engelhardt’s disquiet about bioethics as conceptive ideology, I believe (apparently contra Engelhardt) that there is a middle ground between stark, substance-free secular bioethics and content-full sectarian bioethics. I believe, as Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J. has argued (2000, pp. 139-140), that it is fruitful to approach members of diverging moral communities as other than moral strangers—as “moral acquaintances,” to use Wildes’ term. Intermediate bioethics (my term for this middle path) is a process in which moral acquaintances deliberate together with an eye to peaceful collaboration (in the short term) and a common, universal appreciation of ethical truths (in the long run). In this essay, I examine one possible vantage point for this project—intermediate bioethics undertaken from a Traditional Christian perspective, conceived as an effort to engage non-believers discursively in a project that will ultimately open the pathway towards an appreciation of Traditional Christianity and the truths it bears (assuming, for our purposes, that Traditional Christianity offers the true morality). In order to make my case, I will: (1) summarize what I take to be Engelhardt’s argument against sectarian Christians’ use of discursive inquiry to generate
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ethical content, and then (2) show how intermediate bioethics—understood as a form of content-generating discursive bioethics—can be fruitfully undertaken from a Traditional Christian perspective. I will conclude that Engelhardt is wrong in so neatly divorcing sectarian bioethics from discursive bioethics. In the following discussion, several assumptions are operative. First, I assume that Engelhardt is correct about the theoretical foundation of secular bioethics in the principle of permission (though I have argued elsewhere that his account of the genesis of this principle is flawed),4 and hold that the principle of permission should hold sway throughout discursive bioethics—at least until inquiry converges on ethical truth. Second, I assume that Engelhardt is correct in his characterization of the dimensions of Traditional Christian morality as it operates in health care. If either of these assumptions is false, then my case against Engelhardt may actually become stronger. A third assumption is that intermediate bioethics, based on the principle of permission, is a field of inquiry that is: (1) discursively content-generating, (2) theoretical, and (3) historically traceable to the response to ethical issues emerging in late twentieth century, high technology medicine. It is discursively content-generating in that one of its aims is to generate discursive knowledge.5 It is theoretical in that it addresses bioethical issues at a relatively high level of generality. And it is historically situated in that it should be regarded as a concrete project of an actual community of inquiry6—rather than a domain of abstract universals, waiting to be discovered by whomever happens to apprehend them.7
I. Discursive Christian Bioethics as an Oxymoron Engelhardt views twentieth century bioethics as the projection of a failed Enlightenment project, which sought to establish tenets of morality on the basis of reason alone.8 As a species of Enlightenment discourse, mainstream contemporary bioethics purports to be discursive and secular in its foundations. As discursive, it rejects the idea that idiosyncratic, non-discursive sources of knowledge (such as the insights of religious mystics) can be foundational for the community of inquiry. As secular, it purports to reject premises that presuppose a particular moral vision—especially if that moral vision is religious in nature. There is only one viable version of secular bioethics on Engelhardt’s account—worked out in his second edition of The Foundations of Bioethics. Engelhardt argues that there is no non-coercive way to establish one moral vision over and against the others.9 On this basis, he concludes that secular ethics must either retain neutrality or resort to force. But force is not a method of ethical mediation (though it is a method of upholding standards established through ethical mediation). Hence, secular bioethics must remain neutral. In other words, secular ethics is a procedural ethics, devoid of substantive ethical content. Engelhardt argues that the only plausible non-coercive, value-neutral
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procedure is a permission-gathering one, and articulates this idea in his principle of permission: “Authority for actions involving others in a secular pluralist society is derived from their permission” (1996, p. 122). For Engelhardt, secular ethics founded in the principle of permission is as far as a discursive ethics can go. Sectarian bioethics, on the other hand, comes in as many varieties as there are distinguishable, particular moral visions. In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, Engelhardt strives to articulate a sectarian bioethics for Traditional (Orthodox) Christianity. On his view, Traditional Christian bioethics is transformative, liturgical-ascetic, and experientially-based. It is transformative in that it aids the individual in a process of turning away from a broken, sinful self to a state of holiness or purification in which the subject is oriented towards and receptive to God. It is liturgical-ascetic in that it prescribes a life of communal devotion in sacramental worship with the intentional repulsion of sinful impulses through the avoidance of actions, indulgences, and temptations that confound the transformative effort (2000, p. 191). Finally, it is experientially-based in that it employs an essentially practical, empirical, performative focus that places discursive or theological analyses in the background (p. 286). For the Traditional Christian, ultimate, complete, and unchanging truth has been available since the time of Jesus and is “at hand” (Mark 1:15; Matt. 4:17) for followers of Jesus, in the sense that it can be accessed through the liturgical-ascetic transformation of individuals within a community of faith. Christian ethics, which addresses general aspects of the path to this truth, was accurately, reliably, and completely articulated by Jesus’ followers and early Church fathers in the scriptures, liturgy, and spiritual practices of the first millenium. Christian ethics, on Engelhardt’s view, is best regarded as therapeutic in nature (2000, p. 284)—as a path to the “self-authenticating, ultimate truth” (p. 285) that is available only noetically (pp. 215-217) and only to those who are spiritually purified and hence freed (however temporarily) from temptation and sin. Hence, Christian ethics is not the ultimate truth, nor even the telos of a Christian life; it is at most a partial embodiment, strongly instrumental in nature, of a deeper, mystical spirituality. At the same time, it is clearly grounded in the noetic insight of saints and apostles who have traversed their paths to holiness. Like Aristotle’s eudaimon, the Traditional Christian views the telos as both origin and destination, and as the foundation for rules and habits of right living. Unlike the eudaimon, the Traditional Christian grounds the telos in a transcendent reality—stretching beyond the purview of conceptual thinking and elusive to any individual, community, or polis outside the Christian fold. Because (1) the noetic insight that grounds Christian ethics depends on experiential access to a transcendent God, and (2) this access is readily available only for holy individuals who have successfully undertaken the protracted
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regimens of Christian worship, it follows that (3) the axiomatic, noeticallybased foundations of Christian ethics are unavailable to discursive inquirers locked in immanence. Discursive inquiry, as a knowledge-generating enterprise, appears to be isolated from the fonts of genuine (i.e., Christian) ethical knowledge because it repels and repudiates, by its very methodology, the sources of this knowledge. Instead, discursive bioethics that seeks more than a permission-based modus vivendi is doomed to controversy and fragmentation, as inquirers wallow in circular logic and unending explanatory regress. For Engelhardt, content-generating discursive ethics is not only futile,10 it is selfreferentially inconsistent (since it requires axioms that its methodology precludes), and it is potentially corruptive (since it diverts focus from the Christian path to salvation). Discursive Christian ethics, on this view, is an oxymoron.
II. Intermediate Bioethics as Inter-Communal Discursive Bioethics for Sectarian Thinkers The immediate task for intermediate bioethics is to fashion a modus vivendi.11 That is, intermediate bioethics, as a practical field, seeks through compromise to create a provisional domain for peaceful coexistence between parties with diverging visions about the good life, about the common good, and about the optimal array of social rules and conventions that will promote them. The key concept, procedurally speaking, is compromise. Intermediate bioethics is wary of efforts to carve a quick consensus, since these are often contrived, and often lead to coercion.12 A modus vivendi approach encourages inquiry by respecting diverging belief systems and bringing their proponents into dialogue.13 Because the threat of an enforced pseudo-consensus does not preempt open discussion, prospects for inter-communal discourse are enhanced. This notion of intermediate bioethics is based on the conviction, largely inspired by American philosophers Peirce and Royce,14 that the impulse to throw out discursive inquiry is inexpedient. For sectarian thinkers—particularly Traditional Christians, Buddhists, and other spiritual instrumentalists who view ethics as a journey to holiness—intermediate bioethics is attractive, in the first place, because it views ethics in richly instrumental terms: both (1) as a means of getting from an undesirable state of affairs to a better one, and (2) as a way of transforming and sanctifying “means” by embedding them in ends. In intermediate bioethics, the undesirable state of affairs is moral controversy and the better state of affairs it desires is social harmony (understood primarily as peaceful coexistence rather than as social integration). Intermediate bioethics sanctifies its means insofar as it begets an array of practices and social virtues that are meaningful for those in the community of inquiry, and part of the peaceful coexistence they desire.
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A second attractive feature of intermediate bioethics for sectarians is the manner in which it generates discursive content—namely by introducing principles, rules, and practices that facilitate peaceful coexistence. This approach diverges from approaches that derive content-full moral visions linearly—i.e., from fundamental ethical axioms and principles that are viewed as self-legitimizing and inviolable in their own right, apart from ends such as peaceful coexistence. As an instrumentality, intermediate bioethics is discursively content-generating in the way that inquiry about how to ride a bicycle would be discursively content-generating. In inquiry about bicycle riding, epistemic content would generally take the form: “Technique X will help the cyclist to get from point A to point B.” In intermediate bioethics, the form would be: “Practice X will help the current array of moral acquaintances and moral strangers to coexist peacefully.” This epistemic structure is closely analogous to what we find in Traditional Christianity, where ethical claims generally take the form: “Practice X will help purify us, bringing us closer to God.” Such claims are true when the practice or technique does indeed generally contribute to the predicted desirable end. Third, and perhaps most importantly, intermediate bioethics is congenial to sectarian thinkers because it does not expect them to bracket, reconstruct, or dilute their particular sectarian ethical frameworks. Though intermediate bioethics hopes for an ultimate moral consensus, it rejects the effort to concoct a pallid, New Age universalism by distilling out robust elements of various moral visions that others find offensive, unbelievable, or uncomfortable. To the contrary, consensus in intermediate bioethics is likely to occur, if at all, when one full-bodied moral vision displaces the others by recruiting free individuals into its ranks. That is, moral consensus arises through competition and conversion—not through deduction, distillation, and decree. Despite the similarities, intermediate bioethics is distinguished from sectarian bioethics by its explicitly discursive nature.15 To wit, intermediate bioethics refrains from accepting the ethical axioms of any particular moral tradition or community—except as tentative hypotheses to be discursively examined, observed, and evaluated. This stance does not preclude representatives of various sectarian viewpoints from articulating and offering their sectarian views for the community of inquiry, but it does preclude them from foisting their moral vision, through coercion, on reluctant others. Hence, intermediate bioethics stands outside the domain of liberal cosmopolitanism (while admitting liberal cosmopolitan arguments), just as it stands outside the domain of any particular religious tradition (while admitting religious arguments). Non-forceful persuasion, conversion, and argument between aficionados of diverging moral communities are encouraged, but no one can proclaim victory until all legitimate doubts have been entertained and laid to rest. Intermediate bioethics can be undertaken at local, national, or even global levels. At each level, mutual agreement about rules and practices that will
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govern relations between particular individuals and particular moral communities is the sole means of normative content-generation. When provisional arrangements become widely enough accepted and practiced, they solidify into norms and constitute a kind of knowledge-base, endorsed by a deep consensus. At the global level, content is very sparse (contra liberal cosmopolitan bioethicists who claim to have established a durable consensus about issues such as brain death, informed consent, a right to health care, and other still contentious matters). Content sources such as the Nuremberg Code and the Helsinki Code lack global secular authority because they have not been implemented through permission from an appropriate plurality of the world’s moral communities. Whatever universal ethical norms we have in health care—for instance, the imperative that physicians not torture patients in order to extort higher fees—for the most part have emerged from routine social interactions, and not from bioethics, international politics, or any other formal deliberative process. Engelhardt has argued that ethical norms are unlike scientific norms in that only the latter are amenable to empirical verification (1996, pp. 39, 53). But this claim is disputable—depending on the prevailing account of the structure and meaning of ethical norms. On at least some accounts, ethical norms are amenable to empirical verification in much the same way we verify beliefs in chemistry, physics, and biology. Ethical norms are claims that certain practices will enhance experience in some specific way—by allowing people to coexist peacefully (intermediate bioethics), by bringing people closer to God (Traditional Christianity), by maximizing happiness (utilitarianism), by expressing freedom of will (Kantianism), and so forth. Insofar as these claims can be tested, the ethical norms are verifiable. They are verified when those who live according to the norms actually experience the predicted outcomes—just as chemists’ claims about the qualitative analysis of silvercontaining compounds are verified by the (inter-subjective) perception of a black precipitate when certain reagents are mixed. Unlike non-moral claims,16 ethical claims are particularly difficult to test, since to be tested they must: (1) be actually believed and enacted by an existing moral community, and (2) be congruent enough with the moral presuppositions of those outside the enacting community for the experience of the enacting community to be translatable and compelling. Engelhardt provides no argument to prove that these obstacles cannot be overcome in the long run (there is indeed no sound argument for such a negative thesis).17 Yet overcoming them will certainly be an arduous and prolonged task. The fact that physical and biological inquiries have progressed further than ethical inquiry is a manifestation of the magnitude of these obstacles—not a repudiation of the notion of ethical inquiry. In sum, intermediate bioethics is an instrumental ethics that mediates moral controversies between divergent moral communities and aims at peaceful coexistence. It plays by the ground-rules of secular bioethics in that
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it honors the principle of permission, but differs from Engelhardt’s strictly secular bioethics in that: (1) it admits, and strives to analyze and understand, arguments from divergent, sectarian moral communities,18 (2) it aims to generate ethical content, and (3) it optimistically holds that barriers between moral strangers can be worn down through dialogue, competition, and/or conversion.
III. Can Good Traditional Christians Participate Meaningfully in Intermediate Bioethics? Intermediate bioethics invites Traditional Christians and other sectarians to “come as they are” into its community of inquiry. However, given that Traditional Christians are already satisfied that they have discovered the ultimate sources of morality and truth, is there any reason they should accept this invitation? Why would a Traditional Christian want to participate in a community of inquiry that presumably would take millennia to arrive at the threshold of truths that are currently at hand for those within the Church?19 And in what sense could a Traditional Christian participant in the machinations of intermediate bioethics even be regarded as a genuine inquirer? In this concluding section, I will argue that Traditional Christians have something relevant and interesting to offer to intermediate bioethics, that they have good reasons to participate in intermediate bioethics, and that an inquiring role for Traditional Christians in intermediate bioethics need not diminish their religious convictions. My argument will proceed in five stages. First, I will argue that—contrary to prevalent opinion—noetic experience provides suitable hypotheses for discursive inquiry within intermediate bioethics. Second, I will argue that these hypotheses (including the hypothesis that they evolve from noesis) can be evaluated in a manner similar (though not identical) to other, non-noetically-founded premises. Third, I will argue that, despite access to the self-authenticating, complete, and ultimate truth, most Traditional Christians lack fully comprehensive, secure ethical knowledge. Fourth, I will argue that discursive inquiry (as in intermediate bioethics) can be a useful means of developing the ethical knowledge that Traditional Christians need to develop. Finally, I will argue that participation in a discursive community of inquiry, outside the faith community, is a potentially useful (though also potentially dangerous) means for Christians to fulfill their duty to spread the doctrines of Christianity across the globe.
A. Noetic experience provides suitable hypotheses for discursive inquiry. Charles Peirce—arguably philosophy’s deepest thinker about the generation of hypotheses for discursive inquiry—has argued at length that hypothesis
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formation, or retroduction, is a complicated form of induction that cannot be traced to a faculty of pure reason or rational intuition. To the contrary, he argues, retroduction proceeds from a process of musement that engages the whole sign-interpreting apparatus—emotions, passions, will, desire, and cognition inclusive. As Raposa observes, Peirce at times regarded musement as “a form of therapy, designed to facilitate religious perceptions” that ideally “evolves into religious meditation, becomes a type of prayer, filling the heart and mind of the Muser with the love of God” (1989, p. 151). Similarities between Peirce’s description of hypothesis-formation through musement and the generation of Christian insight through the purification of nous are apparent.20 In the first place, both are integrative activities requiring purity of focus. Christian nous, like Peirce’s power of reflection, is an indiscreet power that operates properly only when the other powers—“appetitive” (desire) and “incensive” (vehemence) in the usual Orthodox scheme—are aligned properly.21 Thus, Maximos the Confessor writes of the intellect’s “fawning friendship for the flesh” (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, p. 325) and claims that “an intellect agitated by passions is beset by impassioned conceptual images” (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, pp. 76-77). Nous (intellect) is not entirely distinct from desire and vehemence, but rather manifests a right measure of these powers in its natural operation. Likewise, a “pure” nous is not devoid of desire and vehemence; it is devoid of passion (which occurs with unnatural manifestations of desire and vehemence).22 Second, both Peirce and Christian Fathers such as Maximos firmly reject the fact/value distinction. For these thinkers, claims about “what is the case” are not strictly distinguished from claims about “what we ought to do.” Indeed, it is a central tenet of Orthodoxy that right opinions about metaphysical and cosmological issues (such as the Trinity and its functions) have ethical as well as theoretical import. They help bring us closer to God. Maximos holds that all “discourses of our Lord” contain four elements: (1) commandments, (2) doctrines, (3) threats, and (4) promises (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, p. 69). The admixture of these elements indicates that Maximos—like Peirce—views the fact/value distinction as a polarity along a continuum. Third, both Peirce and the Christians hold that the motive for discernment is the inquirer’s sense that she is lacking something. The discursive account of what she lacks is described differently from various points on the fact/value continuum—from the factual side as a firm belief; from the evaluative side as a good plan; and more holistically perhaps as a well-ordered life. Discernment, then, is the child—and the antidote—of restless longing and sin. The major distinction between Peircean musement and Orthodox Christian contemplation as adjuncts to the ethical life (setting aside Peirce’s liturgical separation from the Orthodox Church), is that Peirce seems to focus more on outward objects and events, while Traditional Christians tend to look inwardly.23 But this is a matter of degree and does not affect the ability of musement and
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contemplation to generate discursive content. In both cases, claims emerge and these claims can be regarded as hypotheses for discursive analysis. Whether these claims constitute adequate discursive hypotheses will hinge on their analyzability.
B. Hypotheses derived from noesis can be evaluated in a manner similar to other hypotheses. Noetic experience24 is generally disregarded by discursive inquirers because it is a special form of experience that is not available to all. As such, noetic experience fails both as a direct object of inquiry25 and as a form of experience that can verify ethical hypotheses. On careful examination, this interpretation is unsound. According to Christian doctrine, noetic experience is potentially available to all human inquirers, and it is both a source of Christian teachings and a way in which Christians apprehend and experientially verify truth. Though the experience of a transcendent God is quite distinct in ontological terms from what transpires in the realm of immanence, from the standpoint of discursive epistemology there are important similarities. According to Traditional Christianity, noetic experience, like the experiences that verify scientific hypotheses, is reproducible (nature, after all, is full of God’s grace and love, and all are called to receive it). That is why, for instance, various holy fathers agree on the tenets of Christian ethics. They acquire this knowledge through a common, experiential source, which they approach, through grace, in the liturgical-ascetic discipline. When a would-be prophet or mystic interprets an alleged instance of noetic experience in a manner incongruent with the interpretations of other Christians, it is taken as evidence that the experience was not a genuine encounter with God (likely due to the fact that the subject has not undergone a proper and complete spiritual transformation).26 In similar fashion, scientists who make observations that diverge from others in the community of inquiry (for instance, a scientist who observes pink elephants whenever he blows his duck whistle) is thought to suffer from an aberration in perception (perhaps due to large quantities of Scotch imbibed prior to his experiments) rather than as offering evidence that what others perceive as ducks are really pink elephants. When Traditional Christians say that fundamental insights and noetic experience are not ordinarily available to those outside the Church, they are not claiming that these insights and experiences are beyond the reach of any particular individual. They claim only that non-Christians must first embrace Christian teachings, and then undergo the rigors of spiritual transformation. But this qualification is neither radical nor unusual. As we observed earlier, it is a property of every ethical hypothesis that it can be verified only when it is first believed and enacted by an existing moral community.
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We also observed that Traditional Christianity views Christian ethics instrumentally, as a tool for purifying and transforming Christians so that they are receptive to God. In this respect, the Christian regimen is analogous to the tools of scientists. For instance, a scientist who wants to examine the minutiae of biological cells with an electron microscope needs to undergo a regimen of study and practice. If this regimen is followed faithfully, he will be able to use the microscope for its intended purpose. Most of the rest of us are unable to wield the microscope, but trust the scientist’s observations because: (1) we know they have been (or can be) reproduced by others who have learned to use the microscope, and (2) we trust that the development and use of electron microscopes has proceeded in accordance with other knowledge that is equally well verified. Given the plurality of moral systems and the difficulty in reproducing and reporting ethical experiences, it is less likely that religious insights—allegedly reproducible for those who faithfully undertake the prescribed regimen—will command such wide assent, but in theory they could. The Christian neophyte, new to the Church, far from pure, and relatively unpracticed in the Church’s liturgy and customs, is akin to the non-scientist who trusts the electron microscopist’s conclusions without having the ability to reproduce them personally. In typical instances, the new Christian has embraced Christianity without actually experiencing the type of verification that comes with purification and advanced noesis—presumably because of impressive evidence and testimony acquired from trusted sources. Hence, in The Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church (Anonymous, 1997, pp. 12-13), the following signs are proposed as verifying evidence when “the Church proposes the doctrine of Divine Revelation and of holy Scripture to people for the first time”: 1. The sublimity of this doctrine, which witnesses that it cannot be any invention of man’s reason. 2. The purity of this doctrine, which shows that it is from the all-pure mind of God. 3. Prophecies. 4. Miracles. 5. The mighty effect of this doctrine upon the hearts of men, beyond all but Divine Power.27 These signs constitute tangible premises for discursive inquirers. That the Orthodox Church employs them discursively in dialogue with persons outside the faith is neither remarkable nor unexpected. With God’s grace, they become effective tools of Christian evangelism. Of course, once inside the Christian fold, inquirers have a source of authority for mediating ethical conflicts. Is there still a role for discursive inquiry undertaken by Christians in community with persons outside the faith?
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C. Traditional Christians lack fully comprehensive, secure ethical knowledge. Christian doctrine may be complete (in the sense of covering all the general norms of human behavior), but it is not comprehensive (in the sense of interpreting these norms for all the contingencies of human experience).28 Traditional Christians disagree, for instance, about ethical questions (such as when it is permissible to lie) and political questions (such as the proper means of distributing property or the justification for war). These disagreements are not the result of content-divides between religious ethics and secular ethics, or between private ethics and public ethics. To the contrary, they reflect the fact that standards of Christian morality are not absolutely determinate. Though the basic commandments or principles are known, their application in particular spheres and cases is still somewhat up for grabs. Hence, in the Introduction to his book examining contemporary moral issues from the standpoint of Orthodoxy, Stanley S. Harakas writes: The Orthodox Church has no ready formulae and pat answers for many of the contemporary problems which we face in our modern technological society. The best which can be done is for some Orthodox Christians living today to seek to examine, test and evaluate these new and challenging questions of our time from the perspective of the Orthodox worldview. (Harakas, 1982, p. 8)
The degree of indeterminacy in Christian bioethics seems to be underplayed to some degree by Engelhardt, perhaps because of his (understandable) eagerness to exhibit the yawning chasm between Christian bioethics and its counterparts. For instance, Engelhardt employs several passages from St. John Chrysostom justifying physicians’ use of deception to show how Christian bioethics diverges from “the accepted standard American version of bioethics” on telling the truth (2000, pp. 363). But many Orthodox Christians are more stringent than Chrysostom about truth-telling.29 Further, Chrysostom’s comments on lying may not be the most reliable source for Traditional Christians, coming as they did in the wake of a scandal about his deception of friend Basil in a mutual compact that each would accept the priesthood if both men were called.30 Engelhardt rightly observes that deceit is handled “within a spiritual therapeutic context” (p. 360), with concern for the spiritual development of the deceiver and all others involved. Though this emphasis on spiritual wellbeing is alien to standard American bioethics, the concern with well-being certainly is not. The secular dialogue about deception parallels the Christian one in many ways—and in both cases precise guidance on circumstances that permit deception is elusive. The interpretation of Christian norms is a content-generating process, necessary to some degree in the lives of all Christians. Of course, this process can be undertaken as a “Christians only” affair—much as the Jews kept to themselves in developing mishnah and midrash as interpretations of Torah.31 But that risks neglect of Christian teachings about the limitless manifestations
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of God’s grace, the work of the Holy Spirit, and God’s command to help bring non-believers into the fold.
D. Discursive inquiry (as in intermediate bioethics) can be a useful means of developing the ethical knowledge that Traditional Christians need to develop. Alluding to the doctrine that nature is full of God’s grace, and that the Holy Spirit can descend on anyone, Engelhardt cites Orthodox speculation about Chinese mystic Lao Tzu—and the possibility that Lao Tzu experienced Christ before His Incarnation. From the same volume Engelhardt quotes St. Seraphim of Sarov: Though not with the same power as in the people of God [the Hebrews], nevertheless the presence of the Spirit of God also acted in the pagans who did not know the true God, because even among them God found for Himself chosen people…Though the pagan philosophers also wandered in the darkness of ignorance of God, yet they sought the Truth which is beloved by God; and on account of this God-pleasing seeking, they could partake of the Spirit of God, for its is said that the nations who do not know God practice by nature the demands of the law and do what is pleasing to God. (2000, p. 215)
Scriptural allusions (Rom. 2:14-15) to a natural ability to apprehend moral law led Church fathers to elaborate a moral epistemology similar in some respects to later accounts of moral sense philosophers such as Hutcheson and Butler, who proposed that humans possess a (corruptible) faculty, analogous to vision, for discerning right from wrong. In this vein, Saint Gregory of Nyssa writes that “the man who purifies the eye of his soul will enjoy an immediate vision of God” (Hopko, 1976, p. 46). However, unlike Hutcheson and Butler, Orthodox Christians believe that the soul “sees” ethical truth not primarily by looking outward at the world, but by looking inward, to the “Kindgom of God within” (Luke 17:21). Non-believers, like all human beings, are created in God’s image, and bathed in God’s love and grace. For Traditional Christianity, it is far from inconceivable that persons outside the faith—somehow in touch with a divinely sustained, deep-seated sense of morality—could in some circumstances help Christians navigate ethical hurdles (such as how to write an adequate DNAR order). Another reason for enlisting persons outside Orthodox Christianity as fellow inquirers is that some discursive communities of inquiry, such as communities engaged in intermediate bioethics, employ a method of inquiry that is well suited to producing the kind of fissures and openings that allow God’s grace to do its work. I refer to the method of compromise (Trotter, 2002), embodied in modus vivendi deliberations. Based as it is on the principle of permission, this method preserves the great prerogative of created humanity—modeled by the Theotokos—a freedom to acknowledge and obey, or repudiate and ignore, God’s word. It also provides a purchase for Orthodoxy, in that it
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admits all testimony, peacefully offered, on whatever terms the inquirers can negotiate. When Christians forge a “compromise” with members of diverging moral communities, it does not mean that Christians have decided that they will live in a manner that departs from the norms of Christian living. To the contrary, it means that, while recognizing that it would be impossible, ineffectual, or otherwise wrong to enforce certain Christian standards among those with diverging moral visions,32 Christians believe it benefits Christians and non-Christians alike to agree on rules of conduct. Such rules are regarded as compromises not because they prevent Christians from living according to Christian precepts, but rather because they fall short of these precepts and hence deprive the greater community (Orthodox and Heterodox inclusive) of the better, more substance-rich moral life that could be achieved when the precepts are voluntarily embraced by all human beings. Ethical deliberation towards a modus vivendi generates relevant ethical content for Traditional Christians because: (1) its provisional norms serve as specifications for Christian moral conduct within a particular ethically pluralistic social milieu (not in the sense of exhausting the responsibilities of faithful Christians, but rather in the sense of specifying political and/or ethical norms that Christians can agree to under given or similar circumstances), (2) its practice requires that Christians develop habits of conduct that themselves serve as specifications of Christian ethical commandments, and (3) it is a potential means for bringing persons outside the faith into closer contact with Orthodox Christianity.
E. Participation in a discursive community of inquiry, outside the faith community, is a potentially useful (though also potentially dangerous) means for Christians to fulfill their duty to spread the doctrines of Christianity across the globe. Whenever individuals with diverging moral visions are brought together to mediate moral disagreements, there is potential for ethical transformation. This prospect is enhanced when deliberation is non-coerced—as in intermediate bioethics, where inquirers seek only permission for a humble modus vivendi. Because Christians are commanded to love their neighbors, and to provide a tangible and compelling witness to persons outside the faith, the transformative potential of intermediate bioethics and of similar pursuits is of interest. This potential evangelical feature of co-inquiry between Orthodox and Heterodox is attractive, but also dangerous insofar as: (1) not every ethical transformation is a good transformation—Orthodox Christians would need to be on guard about subtle and not-so-subtle sources of temptation and corruption; and (2) the modus vivendi methodology is by no means a prevalent norm in contemporary international, national, or local deliberation—Orthodox Christians would need to be on guard to resist coercive politics deceptively marketed in the raiment of “democracy,” “human rights,” and “international law.”
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Traditional Christians who would be intermediate bioethicists are at risk of being seduced, persuaded, or contaminated by doctrines, sentiments, and arguments that countervail their Christian commitments. Though interaction with the Heterodox is commonplace and expected, Orthodox Christians who choose vocations in fields such as bioethics, politics, or public health willingly undertake a major burden of discourse, with its potential diversions and temptations. On the other hand, if all Traditional Christians eschewed bioethics, the results could be disastrous (since they would not be represented in crucial deliberations).33 In public deliberation, whenever the vocabulary, the rules of discourse, and the discussion are all framed or dominated by Heterodox, the prospects for Orthodox Christians are unlikely to be good. In 1978, the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in America (SCOBA) observed the thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by urging cooperation with President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to ratify elements of the UDHR in congress (Harakas, 1982, pp. 132-133). One might take this as a paradigmatic example of co-inquiry between Orthodox Christians and members of other, diverging moral communities. However, this example is far from constituting the sort of cooperative inquiry I have promoted in intermediate bioethics. To wit: the UDHR is perhaps not so much a modus vivendi as a distillation of Western secular morality formulated without significant input from Orthodox Christianity; many liberal cosmopolitans have sought to inflict it by force; and the endorsement by SCOBA seems to have little evangelical potential, since it seems to send the message that fundamental, content-full ethical norms can be derived on secular terms without taking account of major spiritual traditions. This is not to say that SCOBA erred; the only claim is that the SCOBA endorsement is potentially dangerous, and a far cry from the kind of cooperative inquiry I have endorsed. Perhaps, then, only a subset of Traditional Christians is suited for intermediate bioethics as a serious form of inquiry. In any case, it should be clear: (1) that discursive bioethical inquiry, as intermediate bioethics aimed at a modus vivendi, is a feasible, content-generating alternative to strictly secular bioethics, (2) that the modus vivendi will be interpreted and integrated in different ways by sectarian inquirers from various, diverging moral communities, (3) that Traditional Christians—members of a particular sect with a well-established, robust, and complete moral vision—can (and some perhaps ought to) participate in intermediate bioethics without sacrificing their moral beliefs, and (4) that intermediate bioethics, undertaken by Traditional Christians, can generate content acceptable to Traditional Christians. Hence, “discursive Christian bioethics,” is not an oxymoron.
Notes 1. For the purpose of this essay, “secular” will be understood to denote the absence of substantive ethical input from idiosyncratic sources (such as religions or
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Griffin Trotter particular cultural traditions) that cannot be verified by inquiry into immanent reality (acknowledging that the category “immanent reality” is tenuous insofar as it is divorced from transcendence and “reality” construed as somehow independent of God). Engelhardt’s working conception of secular in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics is similar: “Secular in this volume will be used, unless otherwise noted, to identify those moral frameworks that are neutral with respect to religious, including particular, quasi-religious cultural viewpoints. A viewpoint is secular in the sense of not being the morality of a religious or particular worldview, but of humans as such” (2000, p. 45, 2 f). Engelhardt also recognizes a role for discursive analysis within sectarian Christian bioethics—for elaborating, explicating and organizing tenets of a sacred theology— but emphasizes that “it cannot establish a content-full, moral vision” (2000, p. 189). The foundations of Christian moral knowledge are, for Engelhardt, found only in noetic experience. Noesis provides the foundation and content; discursis is an imperfect but useful means for articulating it. Observing the necessity of fundamental axioms—and the plurality of supposedly self-evident premises that present themselves as axioms for secular inquiry— Engelhardt asks: “whose axiomicity, whose self-evidence?” (2000, p. 217). The most complete version of my critique of Engelhardt’s account of the genesis of the principle of permission is in “Loyalty in the Trenches: Practical Teleology for Office Clinicians Responding to Terrorism” (2004). Engelhardt comments on the existence of non-discursive epistemologies—including the noetic epistemology of Traditional Christianity (2000, p. 236). Moreno (1995; 1999) claims bioethics is a consensus-seeking social reform movement founded on a naturalist version of inquiry. Stevens (2000) claims it is socio-political legitimation strategy. Sherwin, who agrees with Stevens that bioethics often functions as implicit cover for the socio-political status quo, claims it optimally should be a liberation movement based on a hermeneutic of suspicion (1992, pp. 76-95). These controversial claims specify the movement too deeply. For our purposes, it should be enough to hold that bioethics is oriented to the mediation of ethical controversy in medicine and the healthsciences, and that it is committed to inquiry that is: (1) interdisciplinary, (2) inter-communal, and (3) democratic in the minimalist sense that it seeks to establish standards of political and ethical mediation that are consistent with the core commitments of democratic nations. There are, of course, controversies about the substance of these core democratic commitments, and about the disciplines and moral communities that are best suited to make substantial contributions in bioethics. This doctrine of the historicity of inquiry sets intermediate bioethics apart from Platonism. Though Platonists might be induced to join in its deliberations, they would not acknowledge the “content-generating” office of intermediate bioethics. To the contrary, they would regard its results as terminally provisional, without promise of yielding genuine knowledge. I fear that Traditional Christians seduced by Platonic epistemology might raise similar doubts. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, for instance, observe that nous, or intellect, is “the highest faculty in man, through which—provided it is purified—he knows God or the inner essences or principles of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception” (1981,
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p. 384). We must ask about the nature of the first “or” in this sentence—do the authors mean to present the inner essences or principles of created things as independent objects of spiritual perception (strongly disjunctive “or”), or are these essences entwined with their creator (weakly disjunctive “or”)? In ethics, the former, Platonic spin begets dizzying perplexities, such as Plato’s Euthyphro problem (where piety must be either: (1) an idea wholly distinct from God and desirable for its own distinct essence rather than a projection of God, or (2) lacking appeal, but loved in a purely arbitrary way by God). For the historicist, created things exhibit the stamp of their creator, such that we can approach God through the study of His creations, and creation is good, not strictly in itself, but precisely as God’s creation. This provision, that bioethics seeks to establish the tenets of morality based on reason alone, is not part of the minimalist conception of bioethics assumed in this essay. Though Engelhardt is undoubtedly correct in his apprehension that many prominent bioethicists market their views as more strongly supported by reason than competing views, there are few bioethicists who claim to establish their positions through an appeal to reason alone. Engelhardt rightly acknowledges that a “general conversion” to a specific content-rich moral vision is a possible means of settling moral controversies non-coercively (1996, p. 35). His secular ethics is a temporizing device, pending this presumably salutary development. Engelhardt does not say that there is no role at all for discursive reason in Christian ethics. But reason is confined, on his view, to deducing the consequences and specifying the application of fundamental premises that arise only from, and are confirmed only by, the veridical experience of God. Even in this capacity, reason is frequently a blunt instrument, as Engelhardt demonstrates in his analysis of TEYKU problems in Jewish ethics (1996, pp. 129-131). A TEYKU problem is one that cannot be solved through discursive treatment of the moral law inherited by God. The only solution to TEYKU problems is a verdict from God—passed down, for instance, through a prophet such as Elijah. For those maintaining fundamentalist religious moral visions, understood in the sense described by Engelhardt (2000, p. xv), discursive reason works only in the company of grace. For a contemporary defense of modus vivendi liberalism, see John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (2000, pp. 105-139) or Patrick Neal, “Vulgar Liberalism” (1997, pp. 185-205), or Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (2000, pp. 25-56, 79-98). Each of these authors promotes a more left-leaning account of how a contemporary modus vivendi should work out than what you will find in Engelhardt or in my own work. These differences hinge—among other things—on the former authors’ more public-minded (and in Hampshire’s case, frankly socialist) conceptions of property. They are right, in my estimation, that property is an evaluative (rather than valueneutral) construction, and that it should be worked out as a modus vivendi. Though I believe that something close to Engelhardt’s libertarian concept is a more likely product, at least in the United States, I do not view his or any other account of property as a built-in feature of secular ethics based on permission. My concept of “Whig bioethics,” elaborated and defended elsewhere (2002) is in essence the same as “intermediate bioethics” elaborated here. In the Whig essay, I argue at length for compromise-based methods of mediation.
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13. The notion of mediation-focused inquiry deserves explanation, since mediation is often regarded as an agreement-producing rather than a knowledge-producing process. Intermediate bioethics seeks to mediate ethical disputes between parties with differing ethical theories, differing ethical principles, or differing interpretations of common ethical theories or principles. Knowledge is produced in this process insofar as: (1) moral opinions and practices are accurately inventoried, (2) particular practices are correlated with particular consequences, (3) one moral community comes to a better understanding of another moral community, (4) members of a particular moral community come to understand their own commitments in a deeper or clearer way, or (5) certain ethical claims are shown to have bearings on all moral communities. Regarding (1), an inventory of moral opinions and practices is necessary fairly to construct a roster of parties who should be present to grant or withhold permission in the negotiation of ethical controversies. Regarding (2), much of secular bioethics is occupied with arguments that certain policies (e.g., the legalization of assisted suicide) will lead to certain consequences (e.g., coaxing individuals to choose suicide). These arguments can be powerful mediating tools even under the principle of permission, since presumably citizens will be prone to granting permission for policies that produce consequences they all favor (despite diverging underlying reasons). Regarding (3), better understanding of others’ moral beliefs seems a likely, if not inevitable result of engaging them in deliberation or negotiation. Regarding (4), knowledge of a discursive structure that articulates a particular moral vision is useful to individuals tasked with representing that moral vision in negotiations over the terms of cooperation between divergent moral communities. Finally, regarding (5), the demonstration of a sound ethical theory, principle or interpretation is a potent mediating tool. Even Engelhardt allows that there is a legitimate object of knowledge in this realm— namely his principle of permission, which he proposes as the only sound basis for his mediating-conception of secular bioethics. More robust knowledge is possible if proponents of true doctrines are able to convert others to their point of view. It is important to observe that conversion and persuasion are still available to participants in secular debate under the principle of permission. Even if there is no way of rationally demonstrating the superiority of one moral vision over and against the others (a point that Engelhardt never proves), it may still be possible to persuade others that one moral vision is better than another. 14. The direct object of mediation in secular decision-making—agreement about how to proceed in the face of particular moral dilemmas or controversies—is typically not so much an object of knowledge as a tentative compromise. Intermediate bioethics is concerned primarily with generating the methods, theories, principles and data that facilitate such decisions. More often than not, actual decisions fall to citizens, practitioners, administrators and policy makers who have the opportunity to appropriate input from bioethics. Intermediate bioethics, then, is an account of bioethics as a field of inquiry that develops tools for mediating ethical controversies in biomedicine. These tools include a knowledge base that bioethics seeks to develop—but ethical knowledge in a robust, substance-rich sense is rarely achieved or even directly sought. This account of the office of bioethics diverges significantly from that of many contemporary leaders in secular bioethics—as well it should, since these leaders typically eschew the principle of permission we have tentatively granted in this essay.
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15. Regrettably, there is no room in this study to address the thought of pragmatists Peirce and Royce. Nor can I delve at length into the ideas of important contemporary interpreters such as Susan Haack. I should note, however, that these thinkers exhibit important epistemic similarities to Engelhardt, such as: (1) recognizing the social nature of scientific inquiry (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 83; Royce, 1968, pp. 322-331; Peirce, 1992b, pp. 149-151; Trotter, 1997, pp. 148-149, 273), (2) subscribing to fallibilism in discursive metaphysics and ethics (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 38; Trotter, 2000, pp. 84-90), (3) recognizing that the right and the good cannot be reconciled “unless one assumes a harmony between the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace grounded in God” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 85; Royce, 1995, pp. 163-185), and (4) holding that a hard-and-fast dualism between nature and grace is an aberration of secular vocabularies employed by those who ignore grace (Engelhardt, 1996, p. 31; Peirce, 1992c, pp. 250-251; Peirce, 1998b, p. 158). There is, however, a critically important point of basic moral epistemology on which these thinkers diverge from Engelhardt. Engelhardt is skeptical of the experimental method in ethics, because he believes there is no way that the community of inquiry can confirm or falsify moral claims (2000, p. 39; 1996, p. 75). From the pragmatist standpoint, this move is erroneous on two fronts: (1) Engelhardt overestimates the degree of certainty that can be obtained in experimental sciences such as biology and physics because he doesn’t recognize the fallibility of confirmations and falsifications based on mutual observation (Royce and Peirce, contra Engelhardt, are thoroughgoing fallibilists about logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences); and (2) Engelhardt fails to recognize the manner in which moral visions are confirmed and falsified over the long run. This divergence can be traced, in part, to Engelhardt’s reliance on a basically linear, non-conative account of discursive reasoning. Regarding linearity, Engelhardt holds that moral arguments must always begin with first premises or axioms, such that the epistemic strength of any system of beliefs is assessed by determining the antecedent support (in self-evidence or in observation) for these axioms. Though pragmatists acknowledge, with foundationalists such as Engelhardt, that certain beliefs are better justified and more fundamental for discursive reason than others, they also recognize that these quasi-foundational beliefs are themselves open to revision, especially when they countervail a large mass of other beliefs (even if none of these other beliefs, of itself, is better supported than the foundational beliefs). Haack refers to this pragmatic epistemology as “foundherentism,” designating its middle ground between epistemic foundationalism and epistemic coherentism (Haack, 1993, 73-94). Interestingly, Engelhardt has exhibited a tincture of support for the idea that communities bearing discordant moral visions are in amiable competition, and that moral truths may be disclosed if we refrain from interfering with the competition (2001, p. xiii). Regarding conation, Engelhardt (following Kant and other Enlightenment figures) seems to take it as an axiom that discursive reasoning excludes will, grace, or any volition-giving influence. For Peirce and Royce, discursive reasoning is sign-cognitive reasoning, which is ineradicably conative. 16. The term “discursive” is somewhat elusive. I will accept a standard semiotic interpretation—the view that discursive inquiry is a method of belief fixation undertaken by a community of inquiry interpreting signs through arguments. For discursive inquiry to proceed, there must be a perceived overlap in the experience
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Griffin Trotter of inquirers (such that they jointly recognize a certain object, event or concept as a sign for interpretation), and enough of a common vocabulary to allow meaningful communication. That is why the experience of religious mystics is not admitted at face value in a community of discursive inquiry—it is not a common object that can be evaluated with a common vocabulary. The notion that discursive inquiry must be “purely rational” or dictated by “reason alone” is ludicrous, since these categories are vacuous. As Peirce and others have argued, semiotic inquiry is inherently integrative, combining subjective, volitional, and cognitive elements. Though Peirce prefers “scientific” forms of inquiry, where belief is fixated through empirical evaluation of well-constructed hypotheses (Peirce, 1992a), this is not the only conceivable method of discursive inquiry. Belief fixation through a priori arguments is discursive. Belief fixation through authority (i.e., on the say so of someone in authority) or tenacity (i.e., through stubborn adherence) is not discursive, but may be justified through discursive argument. A purely “non-moral” claim is merely a useful fiction, since it is always possible to argue that any particular classification scheme or vocabulary utilized in scientific descriptions (such as the use of a scheme that reduces matter into an inventory of constitutive elements) is morally wrong-headed. We choose to describe the world in particular ways because our particular descriptions satisfy particular purposes. But there is always a potential ethical argument against any particular purpose or system of purposes. Engelhardt writes that “the empirical sciences benefit from a discipline imposed by an external reality, even when that reality always appears dressed in the expectations of particular times, societies and persons. In the case of conflicts regarding morals, such appeals to ‘facts’ do not appear to be as decisive, since what is at stake are not simply the ‘facts,’ but evaluations of the ‘facts’” (1996, p. 39). But this proposed duality between the empirical sciences and ethical inquiry is based on a hard and fast fact/value distinction that is repudiated by a recognition of the evaluative component of scientific descriptions and the lack of direct access to any “external reality” such as Engelhardt presupposes. The suggestion that public discourse requires a deliberation-specific public vocabulary that excludes religious concepts or premises derived from “private” morality is popular, but impossible to defend (since any enforced public vocabulary or standard of evidence begs the question in favor of particular, usually non-theistic, moral visions, then establishes these moral visions by force). Contemporary proponents of “deliberative democracy” (e.g., Thompson and Gutmann, 1996) often implement this draconian strategy. Citing Thompson and Gutmann, Thomas Halper observes: “When a leading explication of deliberative democracy evaluates a series of policy controversies and concludes that a liberal response is required in every case …, readers may begin to wonder whether deliberative democracy is a corollary of pluralism or a tactic to be used against it” (2003, p. 11). Intermediate bioethics, on the other hand, has no canonical vocabulary or standard—save for a general conception of permission and the dictum that moral acquaintances should negotiate using whichever terms and standards particular circumstances allow. The inevitably long timeline for discursive moral inquiry is especially troublesome for Christians, since they know that it is apt to be interrupted by the second coming of Jesus Christ.
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21. One apparent divergence between retroduction in Peircean musement and insight in Christian spiritual seeking is that Peirce insists that retroduction “does not afford security” (Peirce, 1998c, p. 441). But this passage refers to epistemic security from the standpoint of discursis. Presumably this would not exclude the kind of psychological certainty that accompanies a noetic encounter with God. Though Peirce discourages rigid certainty in scientific inquiry, he notes that “in matters of right and wrong, we sometimes cannot and ought not avoid it” (1998a, p. 56). 22. Following Plato (Republic, 434D-441C), Maximos the Confessor and most of the other Greek Christian Fathers held that there are three powers of the soul: appetitive (desire), incensive (vehemence), and intelligence (logikos, pertaining to the intellect [nous] and in some accounts also to reason [dianoia]) (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, pp. 193, 380, 384, 386). At times Maximos seems a little sloppy with his terminology, writing that: (1) intelligence (logikos) is an active faculty tasked with accomplishing the virtues, while intellect (nous) is a receptive faculty “which is capable of receiving unconditionally all spiritual knowledge, of transcending the entire nature of created beings and all that is known, and of leaving all ages behind it” (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, pp. 181, 380), (2) intelligence (logikos) is one of the powers of the intellect (nous), and that the former receives spiritual knowledge (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, p. 202), (3) intelligence (logikos) and intellect (nous) are both receptive faculties, the former receiving spiritual knowledge and the latter receiving wisdom (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, pp. 217, 238), and (4) intelligence (logikos) and intellect (nous) both exhibit active movements— the former in investigating (occurring when “the intelligence, through the operation of the virtues, discerns its own cause with the help of some wise and profound concept”), the latter in seeking (occuring when “the intellect, spurred on by intense longing, moves spiritually, and in cognitive awareness, towards its own cause”) (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, p. 241). The equivocation in these passages seems predicated in part on an implicit dual function of nous. On the one hand, it is an imminently natural faculty employed by all humans, useful in the conceptual apprehension of created objects and essences; on the other hand, it is a faculty of divine communion through which Christians acquire spiritual knowledge and manifest their deification (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, p. 193). Another source of apparent confusion is that the powers of the soul are intermingled, so that each expresses (and thus may be said to possess) the other. A third source (far beyond my scope) may be the presence in holy scripture of a number of incompatible linguistic conventions, which are difficult to transcribe into an authoritative Christian spiritual taxonomy. 23. “Passion,” which involves an imbalance or other misuse of the powers, should be distinguished from “natural” deployments of the intelligent, appetitive, and incensive powers (though these latter two tend to be lightening rods for passion). Maximos teaches: “Impurity of soul lies in its not functioning in accordance with nature.” Impurity of the intellect occurs with: (1) false knowledge, (2) ignorance of universals, (3) impassioned thoughts, and (4) assent to sin (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, pp. 88-89). 24. Maximos writes: “Until you have been completely purified from the passions you should not engage in natural contemplation through the images of sensible things; for until then such images are able to mould your intellect so that it conforms to passion” (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, p. 203).
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25. “Noetic experience” in this section denotes the activity of a purified nous (a.k.a., “intellect”), which, according to Orthodox Church fathers, is a source of direct knowledge. I will focus on the noetic encounter with God, though noesis is also a source of knowledge of created essences. This usage of “noetic experience” is quite restrictive, since it excludes the activity of a contaminated nous (which also, technically, is noetic). As a source of direct, experiential, conceptual knowing, the nous is akin to an inner sense (the “eye of the heart”), providing reason with concepts just as the senses provides it with percepts. Hence, Maximos the Confessor writes: “Things are outside the intellect, but the conceptual images of these things are formed within it” (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, 1981, p. 77). Because Maximos recognizes that the nous is subject to passions and corruption, he adds: “It is consequently the intellect’s power to make good or bad use of these conceptual images. Their wrong use is followed by the misuse of the things themselves.” We should add bad discursive reasoning to the inventory of bad outcomes of corrupted conceptual imagery. 26. By a “direct object of inquiry” I mean an experience shared by all inquirers (such as the setting of the sun every evening). Noetic experience may be studied indirectly, as in William James’ classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience (James, 1936, pp. 58-76, 186-253, 370-420). Often such studies proceed on the assumption that there is nothing special about noetic experience, and hence on the belief that the self-authenticating nature of noetically-apprehended truths is actually only a secondary interpretation of the experience—and a false one at that. 27. As Engelhardt points out (2000, pp. 97-108), the communal nature of interpretation in Traditional Christianity is an important point, in which it diverges from Protestant versions of Christianity, such as Kierkegaard’s, that represent the Christian experience as essentially subjective. 28. These signs seem to be recorded in order of ultimate importance, but in reverse order of their appeal to those outside the faith. Persons outside the faith are less likely to apprehend the sublimity and purity of Christian doctrine than those who have been purified. But miracles are impressive to all. And the lives of the apostles and members of the Church are, on a broad scale, probably the most important immanent signs of God’s presence for those outside the faith. 29. The distinction employed in this essay between “complete” and “comprehensive” content is potentially confusing, since neither of these terms has a precise rendering in the natural language. A better way, perhaps, of making this distinction is to use the terms “whole” and “determinate.” For instance, we might say that the commands to love God and love the neighbor constitute the “whole” of ethics, while conceding that the precise interpretation of these commands has not been determined in every case. My thesis in this section is that Christian ethics, as it is currently articulated in Traditional Christianity, is absolutely whole but not absolutely determinate. 30. Seventh century Egyptian ascetic Saint John Climacus condemned lying out of prudence—including most lies designed to help others. He claims that lying is permissible only when we are completely free of the urge to lie, “and then only in fear and out of necessity” (Climacus, 1982, p. 161). Engelhardt cites Elder Paisios, who warns that lying is a sin, and that lying on someone else’s behalf is half a sin—to be undertaken only for “significant things” (2000, p. 386). Though there seems to be agreement about this conclusion in Orthodox Christianity, there also
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seems to be quite a bit of divergence on the interpretation of “significant things.” 31. Chrysostom’s discussion of deception in Priesthood is delivered in the context of autobiographical comments about his deception of Basil—which Chrysostom defends as an instance of “prudent management.” J.N.D. Kelly notes that Chrysostom’s admirers have often been embarrassed by his lengthy discussion of “how invaluable deceits (apatai) planned ‘with a salutary purpose’ can be in war, in medical practice, even in the conduct of family life and relations with one’s friends” (Kelly, 1995, p. 26). 32. Kee writes: “Jewish teachers began to expand and add to the written Law a growing body of oral interpretation in which new applications of the ancient precepts were offered and new institutions dealt with that were not anticipated in the ancient laws themselves. In order to lend authority to the oral law, the tradition developed that it was as old as the written law and had actually been given orally to Moses at the same time he received the written Torah” (Kee, 1973, p. 126). In Orthodox Christianity, new interpretations are recognized as new interpretations—and viewed not as additional doctrinal content, but rather as guidelines that bring doctrine determinately into the contemporary world. The distinction between doctrine and the interpretation of doctrine, if I understand it correctly, is not based on discrete logical or structural features of the content in question, so much as on generality (which is always a matter of degree) and source. The most general, fundamental concepts and guidelines, along with some fairly specific directives, come from Jesus Christ and the early church fathers; these constitute doctrine. Subsequent content comes only by way of interpreting doctrine. 33. Engelhardt notes, citing Canon 119 of the Council of Carthage (A.D. 418/19), that “employing force to achieve conversions has from the beginning been forbidden” (2000, pp. 363, 386). 34. If one can convince non-Christians not to do things like prostitution, striptease, high-stakes gambling, and so forth, there will be fewer temptations to thwart Christians. If one cannot convince others not to engage in such tempting diversions, then it is still possible for Christians to negotiate a modus vivendi in which Christians cordon themselves off from such activities.
Bibliography Anonymous. The Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church. South Canaan: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1997. Climacus, J. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, translated by C. Luibheid and N. Russell. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1982. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Bioethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. ———. “Western Bioethics Reconsidered: An Introduction.” In Beyond a Western Bioethics: Voices from the Developing World, edited by A. Tan Alora and J.M. Lumitao. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2001. Gray, J. Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: New Press, 2000. Haack, S. Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993.
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Halper, T. Positive Rights in a Republic of Talk: A Survey and Critique. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Hampshire, S. Justice is Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Harakas, S.S. Contemporary Moral Issues Facing the Orthodox Christian. Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Company, 1982. Hopko, T. Vol. 4 of The Orthodox Faith: Spirituality. New York: The Department of Religious Education, The Orthodox Church in America, 1976. James, W. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Modern Library, 1936 [1902]. Kee, H.C. The Origins of Christianity: Sources and Documents. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Kelly, J.N.D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom: Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Moreno, J.D. Deciding Together: Bioethics and Moral Consensus. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. “Bioethics is a Naturalism.” In Pragmatic Bioethics, edited by G. McGee, 5-17. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. Neal, P. Liberalism and Its Discontents. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Palmer, G.E.H., P. Sherrard, and K. Ware, eds. and trans. Vol. 2 of The Philokalia: The Complete Text, compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Peirce, C.S. “The Fixation of Belief.” In Vol. 1 of The Essential Peirce, edited by N. Houser and C. Kloesel, 109-23. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992a [1877]. ———. “The Doctrine of Chances.” In Vol. 1 of The Essential Peirce, edited by N. Houser and C. Kloesel, 142-54. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992b [1878]. ———. “A Guess at the Riddle.” In Vol. 1 of The Essential Peirce, edited by N. Houser and C. Kloesel, 245-79. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992c [1887-88]. ———. “The First Rule of Logic.” In Vol. 2 of The Essential Peirce, edited by Peirce Edition Project, 42-56. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998a [1989]. ———. “On Phenomenology.” In Vol. 2 of The Essential Peirce, edited by Peirce Edition Project, 145-59. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998b [1903]. ———. “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” In Vol. 2 of The Essential Peirce, edited by Peirce Edition Project, 434-50. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998c [1908]. Raposa, M.L. Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Royce, J. The Problem of Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968 [1918]. ———. The Philosophy of Loyalty. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 [1908]. Sherwin, S. No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Stevens, M.L.T. Bioethics in America: Origins and Cultural Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
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Thompson, D., and A. Gutmann. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Trotter, G. The Loyal Physician. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. ———. On Royce. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2001. ———. “Bioethics and Healthcare Reform: A Whig Response to Weak Consensus.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 11(2002): 37-51. Wildes, K. Wm., S.J. Moral Acquaintances: Methodology in Bioethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.
The Ethical Significance of Moral Disagreement Joseph Boyle
I. Moral Disagreement: Dealing with the Phenomenon Sometimes a person’s moral judgment about some particular choice, event, or situation is logically opposed to the judgment of another person about that same choice, event, or situation. For example, Jim confidently judges that it would be wrong for him to lie to Betty, an elderly family member, about Betty’s dim life prospects, while another family member, Robert, confidently judges that such a lie is morally required and that Jim should do his part in carrying it out. Moral disagreements of this kind certainly appear to be commonplaces of moral life. Disagreements such as this one might shake the confidence of some of those involved concerning the soundness of their own judgments. This can happen when at least one of those disagreeing respects the other(s) as persons of sound moral judgment, or when at least one of them introduces considerations that are recognized by the other(s) as weakening his or her moral assessment. Plainly, there is not always a reason that will lead a party to such a disagreement to question his or her judgment. Each or both parties may have well-founded confidence in their own judgments. For example, Jim has thought long and hard about the evils of lying to elderly family members, and confidently believes that this form of lying is harmful. Each or both can also have an account of why the other disagrees. For example, Jim knows that Robert has always had a problem with telling the truth. Some of these accounts can be unflattering. For example, Jim believes that Robert knows lying to Betty is wrong, but will not face it and agree, because he cannot stand giving in to Jim’s moralism and tough argumentation. Another unflattering possibility is that the other party, although sincere in disagreeing, is morally at fault for failing to agree to one’s judgment. Thus, Jim believes that Robert has a problem with 229 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 229-245) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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lying because he has found it useful in covering up his many moral failings as an employee and family member. Moreover, one or both might hold that there is an innocent explanation for the other’s refusal to agree, a mistake the person could not avoid. For example, Jim believes that Robert has not understood how important it is for Betty to know about her bad condition and to have an opportunity to wrap up her earthly affairs. Of course, these justifications and explanations are available to all the parties in a moral controversy of this kind such that all the parties can confidently think they are correct. If their moral judgments are contradictory (unlike the opposed judgments of Jim and Robert, both of which might be in error), then one party is necessarily in error. That should give some pause to all involved, but not a reason for any of them seriously to question his or her moral judgment. That is so because reactions such as I supposed Jim to have towards his disagreement with Robert are not necessarily irrational, nor are they inevitably a form of moral dogmatism. As in other areas where correct judgment can be insincerely opposed or can be prevented by ignorance or by moral error, a person can be confident that he or she has investigated the possible influence of such factors sufficiently to assure himself or herself that they are not skewing his or her own moral judgment. Sometimes a person can have the further confidence that some such factors are skewing the judgment of a person rejecting his or her moral assessment. In short, the commonplace of moral life considered here—that we often disagree with others about particular moral judgments—is not by itself sufficient to generate deep puzzles about the nature of moral knowledge. Disagreements are widespread in every domain of human endeavor that involves truth claims, or other analogous claims of correctness or adequacy in which the results of human understanding are measured by appropriate standards. Moral disagreements are puzzling, therefore, not simply because they are disagreements about the adequacy of important practical convictions, but because of some features of these disagreements—perhaps, for example, their extent or resistance to resolution. The grand philosophical and theological narrative provided by H. Tristram Engelhardt’s work in Christian bioethics makes much of moral disagreement. Indeed, it is an irreducible element in Engelhardt’s narrative, as it must be in any comprehensive account of the current state of morality. Engelhardt’s narrative relies on moral disagreement at several key junctures. He begins with the natural law theory of the medieval Western Church. This theory has notably rationalistic elements: moral principle is known by reason, formulated propositionally and applied by discursive reason. It is also universalist in that the moral principles which reason manifests are held to be available to all human beings capable of understanding moral concepts, and so these principles have universal application. These aspirations of the Western Church came into crisis with the Reformation, but Enlightenment thinkers,
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notably Kant, sought to maintain the idea that the basis of morality was rationally knowable and universally accessible and applicable, while, of course, severing all connections between morality and religion or theistic belief. But the claims of Kant and other modern philosophers to provide a compelling, secular foundation for morality have done nothing to generate more widespread moral agreement. In fact, they have led to further and to deeper disagreements about morality, including disagreements about the rationalistic ethical theories themselves, whether Kant’s own or its consequentialist alternatives.1 This very summary rendering of the problem Engelhardt’s narrative addresses indicates the features of moral disagreement which are central to its role: the moral disagreement Engelhardt focuses on is that which arises initially within in a culture shaped by the expectations of medieval natural law theory and later by its secular offspring, Enlightenment rationalism. The relevant expectation is that people should agree on moral matters. In other words, it is moral disagreement in a context shaped by the expectation that it should not be there—that the emergence of substantial moral agreement is normal because morality is the property of common human reason. Engelhardt’s constructive response to the epistemological crisis of morality thus generated naturally aims to avoid the mistakes that generate the negative dialectic. The two aspects of his solution are systematically anti-rationalist and non-universalist. The first aspect of Engelhardt’s solution is his account of public, secular morality. Instead of a public secular morality based on a putative rational ordering of values, Engelhardt recommends a thin, libertarian public morality, which he calls libertarian cosmopolitanism. This secular morality promises little, since it eschews the value rankings that have led to the interminable moral disagreements that characterize postmodern social life. The purpose of this thin morality is not to provide a full bodied idea of the good which all interacting humans can embrace—that is the fallacy of natural law and the Enlightenment. Rather, its task is to provide an authoritative basis for interactions between moral strangers—those who share no common conception of the good. This public morality is based on the consent, agreements, and mutual permissions of moral strangers who wish to engage in peaceable interactions instead of the conflicts that arise from their diverse and often opposed moral outlooks. Its source is consent and so it is not rationalistic but voluntaristic, and since it binds only those who consent, its application is not universal. The second aspect of Engelhardt’s solution is his version of Christian ethics. Libertarian cosmopolitanism cannot provide a robust and content-full conception of good living. But it can provide the social space for that which it cannot deliver. Diverse moral communities can flourish within a pluralistic society governed by libertarian standards, and in these communities individuals can share a conception of the good and of the practices through which it can
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be realized. Engelhardt, of course, is not a relativist but a traditional Christian. So, he thinks that a moral community exists, membership in which provides what is needed to live a genuinely good—that is, religious and theocentric— life. But the moral truth is available only within the way of life of the Orthodox community, by the communion with God which this way of life makes possible. That communion with the Divine is not rationally articulable. Moreover, the source of moral truth is available just to the extent that membership in this moral community is available; and so, genuine moral life is neither universalist nor rationalist. This paper reflects on the role moral disagreement plays in getting this narrative going and, in particular, questions the claim that moral disagreement provides a compelling starting point for Engelhardt’s narrative. I argue that moral disagreement, even if understood from the rationalistic and universalist perspective according to which morality is the product of common human reason, requires neither a voluntaristic libertarianism nor sectarian Christianity, nor both.
II. The Expectation of Consensus As argued above, moral disagreement becomes a significant problem for moral theory and practice only if it is surprising that it exists, only if its common occurrences cannot be easily and satisfactorily explained. Moral disagreement will be surprising and anomalous only if this fact is inconsistent with a view of morality that implies that such disagreements should not exist or should be more limited in kind and extent than they are. In this section, I explore the question of whether the form of ethical rationalism and universalism that is essential to the view that moral principles are available to common human reason creates an expectation of substantial moral agreement. I argue that the creation of this expectation requires the addition of something outside this form of ethical rationalism and universalism; namely, the belief that no plausible explanation for widespread moral disagreement is available to those who hold that morality is based on common human reason. Roman Catholics who accept natural law theory, and maybe others as well, need not accept this claim, and consequently, have no reason to find their confidence in their own considered moral judgments to be shaken by the fact that others disagree with them. My argument will not assume that moral disagreements are rare or limited in respect to the objects about which there are moral disagreements. Indeed, although I am not convinced that moral disagreement is as deep and as extensive as Engelhardt believes,2 I will for the sake of argument allow that it is wide enough and deep enough for the purposes of his dialectic. I accept that moral disagreement is so deep that it touches the foundations of people’s conceptions of morality and moral principles, and so wide that it can affect
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any particular moral judgment, even those constituting general policies, such as laws and professional codes, practices, such as marriage, and institutions, such as property. A brief consideration of the depth and breadth of moral disagreement shows that it is surely pervasive enough for the purposes of Engelhardt’s argument. Disagreements of the kind described at the start of this paper appear common; still they find their place within moral lives that are not defined by disagreement alone. We do not expect disagreement to arise whenever we make a confident moral judgment about a particular choice or event. Certainly, a person making a moral judgment expects that not everyone will disagree with his or her moral assessment; a person ordinarily expects that some others—good friends, perhaps, or at least some fellow members of a group or community—will accept the moral assessments he or she makes. Much less do any of us assume that someone is ready to contradict every moral judgment he or she could make. Indeed, in making many such judgments a person expects that all or most people knowing the particulars would not contradict him or her. Nevertheless, it remains possible that for every concrete moral judgment any person makes, there is some person who, fully and accurately considering the facts of the situation evaluated, will come to a contrary moral evaluation. For example, consider a jury of typical North Americans considering the case of a public official accused of inflicting pain and grave bodily harm on a prisoner in order to obtain information necessary to prevent further terrorist murders. They would likely agree, if the facts showed just this, in condemning that official’s action as morally wrong. But in other ages and places, and even now when the information needed was seen to be strictly necessary for saving many innocent lives, many have thought that an intentionally harmful act, correctly described as torture, could be morally justified. In short, there is no particular moral judgment about an individual choice or event that someone might not contradict, and there are likely not many moral judgments that someone, somewhere, at some time has not actually contradicted, even when all the morally relevant circumstances were taken into account. The prospect of disagreement about moral judgments sketched in the preceding paragraph would be of theoretical interest only if those who disagreed were separated by time or isolated geographically or socially from one another. Some might find it puzzling that some people from far away or from other times disagree with one’s moral judgments, but others might find that fact to be just what one would expect from people far away, whose social world, problems and moral formation would likely be different than their own. On either reaction to this form of disagreement, no rational basis emerges for questioning one’s moral judgments which one knows are rejected by some far away in time or place. Moreover, the practical problems raised by having to get along with those who reject one’s moral judgments do not arise. We are
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not required to deal with these far away contrarians—only read or study about them. But the prospect of concrete moral disagreement among those who must interact and often must cooperate, such as the disagreement among family members with which I began, creates practical difficulties and can even lead to moral perplexity. These practically important implications of moral disagreement among family members and neighbors may be thought to undermine people’s confidence in their moral judgments. My initial example of Jim and Robert’s disagreement reveals some of the practical difficulties that arise when their contrary judgments bear on the same matter. Even if Jim and Robert fail to reach agreement about what to say or not to say to Betty, neither is forced by the situation to surrender or question his own moral judgment. For each might in that situation act independently, on his own moral conviction. Robert could benevolently lie to Betty, and do his best to prevent Jim from spilling the beans, and Jim could refuse to have anything to do with that act, or even try to expose the lie to Betty. This may hardly exhibit a rule for harmonious family relationships, and so may create a practical problem, but this outcome of the case does not suggest any further reason for either Jim or Robert to doubt the correctness of his moral judgment. Moral judgment is more straightforwardly challenged when those who disagree morally do so in respect to an action which requires their cooperation or common action: for example, when family members must agree on a course of medical treatment for a non-competent family member for whom they are together the proxy decision maker. In cases like this, agreement is necessary for a non-optional decision, and if the joint proxies have contrary moral judgments about a decision, then the practical problem implicates their moral judgments more intrinsically than when they can act independently and in opposition on the basis of their own moral views. For in these situations, each cannot act in accord with his moral conviction and still do what must be done. Cases like this one point to a specifically moral difficulty created by a concrete moral disagreement. Cooperative action is called for, but can be achieved only if one or both parties, who disagree morally, act contrary to moral conviction. Important as conflicts of this kind are for thinking about the social cooperation of those having opposed moral convictions, they do not yield a specifically new element for the dialectic detailing the foundering on moral disagreement of the universalistic and rationalistic ethics founded on common human reason. They add nothing special to this dialectic because they can arise for anyone who allows that moral disagreements can arise when cooperative action is called for. This kind of cooperative conflict can arise for anyone, no matter how they conceive morality and its foundations, for example, for two morally serious members of the same community who have no
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articulated view about the nature of moral reasoning and its principles. Any morally serious person can recognize the existence of situations calling for cooperative action while recognizing that the common actions others are willing to support is (in his or her own judgment) immoral. This can, and often does, happen within robust moral communities, when members of a religious family disagree on the sense and application of commonly understood and accepted norms. Such disagreements can be explained to the satisfaction of each party within the categories as mentioned in section I: feigned, insincere moral disagreement, innocent mistakes, and morally flawed ethical thinking, discernment or formation. In short, it is practical moral disagreements that are likely to generate personal skepticism about one’s moral convictions. But practical disagreements, even if they generate moral perplexity, do not necessarily have that effect. The reason, again, is that disagreement alone, without a view of morality that creates an expectation of agreement or disagreement, has no implication as to what amount of disagreement will be unacceptable. It is tempting to think that the depth of moral disagreement, not simply the extent of the moral judgments over which disagreement arises, may provide the ground for reflective people to be skeptical about their well-considered moral judgments. I think this temptation should be resisted, since deep moral disagreements about general norms and even principles shake our confidence in our convictions about moral norms and principles only if we have reason to think that others can be expected to know and express adherence to them.
A. Expected agreement about principles There may seem to be just such a reason in the view of those who believe that morality is a work of common human reason. According to this view, moral principles will necessarily be known or readily knowable by anyone sharing in that common human reason. Plainly, in this conception common human reason gives us propositionally articulable principles; otherwise the principles are not reasonable in the sense that they could not be used as premises in moral arguments. If these principles are rationally articulable, then they are in principle accessible to those able to exercise the human capacity to reason, since human reason responds to what is propositionally intelligible and articulable. But if these principles were arcane, accessible only to the learned, then they would not be included in what common human reason can judge. So, universal accessibility does not follow from rationality alone, but requires that the objects of rational judgment are sufficiently basic and simple as to be readily accessible to all who are in the moral domain. And that is what the view of morality as the product of common human reason implies. It is difficult to see how this element in the view of morality as the work of common human reason does not create an expectation about common acceptance of the most basic moral principles. St. Thomas Aquinas’ discussion of moral
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principles suggests as much: he considers the question of why the most basic moral principles, such as the twofold love commandment, are not listed in the Mosaic Decalogue, which, he says, contains the immediate implications of the natural law. His response is that these “primary and common precepts” though not listed, are contained within the Decalogue as the grounds for its precepts, but are not themselves in need of any further proclamation than that given by their being “written in natural reason as self-evident” (ST, 1-2, 100, a. 3 response and ad 1). On St. Thomas’ account, therefore, moral principle is there to be understood by anyone who is clearheadedly engaged in rational action; indeed, it is hard to avoid by any such person. This position is not unique to his version of natural law theory but seems required by any view similar to his in maintaining that morality is the work of common human reason. How is it conceivable that this does not imply that, at least at the most fundamental level, people should be expected to agree about morality? I believe there is a correct implication here, but not nearly so unqualified as the question suggests. There are two important qualifications to the view that common, rationally accessible principles must be a matter of de facto consensus. First, a person may have reason to disavow or ignore a moral principle he or she knows: for example, one might notice some obvious implications of the principle, dislike the conclusion, and so find some way to overlook, to set aside or to fudge when thinking about the principle. Surely, that can happen and has no tendency to show that the person does not know the principle. Second, there are a variety of ways in which, without bad will, a person or group can be confused in articulating the principles he or she knows or inadequate to the task of formulating them. Some of these can lead to disagreements about moral principles that are only implicitly used in moral reasoning, and some generate the disagreements that characterize moral theory; namely, those based on incomplete and misleading formulations of the rational understanding people have of moral principle. Ordinary moral thinking often starts with concrete moral problems and seeks resolutions of these problems, making use of underlying principles, but hardly focuses precisely on them and on their proper articulation. Ordinary moral thinking often proceeds by using casuistry, comparing cases that are problematic to those that are taken to be morally perspicuous, with principles plainly present even if not articulated, so as to reveal the moral character of the problematic cases. This process can reveal the moral intelligibility needed for moral guidance but only to the extent necessary for dealing with the problem at hand; formulating principles is not the point. In this approach to moral thinking, the articulation and explicit use of principles as premises in moral arguments is limited. But that does not imply that the intelligibility of the principle is not fundamental to the concrete moral conviction. In short, our understanding of moral principle does not ordinarily develop in the “top down” way the language of foundational or self-evident principles
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suggests. In many cases, questions about choices emerge and norms are formulated to settle matters, without any explicit attention to articulated moral principle. These norms contain an intelligible moral predicate but in an intuitively or casuistically revealed way that is sufficient for the problem at hand. This common way of approaching moral issues moves towards the articulate knowledge of universal moral principles in a gradual and as-needed way, and ordinarily does not articulate moral principle as a free standing proposition. When moral principle is articulated as the normative basis for all precepts, that formulation is likely to be sufficiently abstract so as to defy the comprehension of all but those carefully attending to its meaning independently of its instantiation within norms governing specifically described actions. In short, the idea that morality is the work of common human reason does imply that humans can know, and perhaps ordinarily do know, the basic principles of morality. That knowledge can remain partial and implicit or confused, and that allows that without careful reflection and attention even what is basic and readily accessible to human reason can fail adequately to be properly formulated, and that allows widespread misunderstanding. Thus, it should not surprise that norms like the precepts of the Decalogue will be more obvious to many people than are the more basic Love Commandments that ground them. Nor should it surprise us that across the languages of the many human communities there is no common and canonical formulation of the basic principle of morality.3 Moral communities may organize their ethical thinking in ways that highlight one or more fundamental moral concerns, or may approach moral questions piecemeal. In either case, the lack of apparent agreement with outsiders does not imply the absence of common moral understandings. Philosophers have sought to provide by their moral theories what ordinary moral thought and casuistry have not needed to address: a clear and uncontroversial formulation of moral principle. But they, too, apparently have failed. Consequentialists seek a formulation of the principle in terms of the good—our basic duty is to promote the good. So far that seems unexceptionable. But it quickly turns into a proposition having a supposition that the goods among which humans must choose are generally commensurable in goodness. That supposition is not self-evident, but likely false. So, the philosophers do not avoid confusion. Similarly, Kantian proposals about the formulations of the basic moral principle include one that is too restricted to interpersonal considerations to be plausible as the fundamental principle—the universalizability formulation, which captures the idea of the Golden Rule, but only implausibly the whole of morality. Here we have a different sort of confusion than that of the utilitarians. Another of Kant’s formulations—respect for rational nature as an end in itself—seems to share the problems of the formulations generated from casuistry. Even if true and basic, it is too vague to apply to many cases. What does
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and does not fail to respect rational nature as an end in itself? There are a few paradigm cases—such as slavery—but many other generally described cases where its application is unsure and unsurely determined. The preceding considerations suggest that the idea that humans have, or can easily get, a common grasp, however imperfectly it may be articulated, of basic moral principles is not obviously false. If there are good reasons for thinking that some moral knowledge is universally available,4 then the lack of consensus about how to formulate them is not strong evidence that such principles—propositionally articulable and available to all using human reason—do not exist. Consequently, an expectation of the possibility of consensus about moral principles is created by the view of morality as the work of common human reason. But an expectation about the actual existence of or likely prospects for a commonly agreed upon formulation of moral principle is not created by this moral view.
B. Expected agreement about general moral norms If morality is the work of common human reason, it is sensible to think that there is a basic principle that is formulable as a generally applicable moral rule. That general rule provides moral guidance by being joined to statements describing kinds of human actions about which people seek moral guidance.5 This, of course, is an account of the logical structure of moral thought, not of the actual moral reflection of people, but of how the results of that reflection can be exhibited for critical discussion and communication. The descriptions of actions needed to relate principle to what we do can be more or less general, and some fairly generally described actions are morally interesting to most people. The contours of these areas of interest are suggested by the topics considered in the Decalogue: actions relating humans to God; those inflicting harm on people; those creating and relating to people’s holdings of non-human goods; those involved in communicating with others and in other human interactions, for example, friendship and intimate relationships. Guidance for choices in these and other similar areas is needed and can be made in the light of moral principle. The guidance provided is a set of generally stated precepts, such as those of the Decalogue, arising from joining moral principle and descriptions of kinds of actions. The question to be addressed here is whether conceiving a set of moral norms like the Decalogue as the initial result of the working of common human reason creates a presumption that people should widely agree on something like the Decalogue. There is, perhaps, an approach to norms like these that might allow them to be widely agreed to. For example, let us consider the rule against killing. We might agree that there is an ill defined set of borderline cases in which a generally formulated and rationally justified prohibition of killing is not easily applied—for example, self-defense, capital punishment, and justified warfare.
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There might be further areas where the application of a general prohibition might be unclear: cases where deflecting harm from one causes death of another, or where not doing something that would preserve life is implicated in ending it. Noting all these cases, one might still reasonably think: killing is wrong; granted there are some hard cases requiring careful thought, but that does not mean that killing in the focal sense is not wrong. There is some merit to this way of thinking about general norms. There do seem to be some clear cases prohibited by a norm excluding killing, even if the whole range of hard cases is regarded as unsettled except by further careful and likely controversial thought. But the line between the cases clear in virtue of their connection to moral principle and those requiring controversial casuistry for moral assessment is not likely to fall on the line dividing the universally accepted and the contested. Therefore, the distinction between the cases covered by the general norm and those requiring complicated reasoning does not provide a ground for thinking that moral disagreement is limited to the hard cases. For example, abortion and euthanasia are forms of killing. They do add circumstances that add to the simple description of an action as killing, but as such they add very common and generally understood circumstances, not the myriad of detail that complicates moral thinking. Moral judgments about acts of these kinds remain controversial. Similarly, suicide, human sacrifice, revenge killing and other such generally described acts have been regarded by some as morally acceptable. If the general prohibition against killing is a simple implication of moral principle known or knowable by all how are we to explain the widespread inability to know it? A common, traditional answer to this question is that human weakness and immorality are at the root of the moral mistakes involved in these easy inferences from principle. Moral weakness and immorality explain different sorts of moral error in different ways. One common explanation is that there is a natural but morally questionable tendency for individuals and groups to restrict their concerns about fairness to the group with which they must cooperate to survive and flourish, their neighbors, narrowly understood. This restriction of concern can allow all sorts of evils, for example, discrimination, contempt for outsiders, and enslaving people. This concern, as distinct from its restriction, is an implication of moral principle, and historically has led to social arrangements such as fairly respecting property rights and insisting on judicial proceedings requiring due process, and so on. The restriction is easily explained by the self-interest of the community and its members in relationship to outsiders and to others without power: no need to put ourselves in their shoes. Some such account could spell out Aquinas’s famous comment on the Germani described by Caesar: they did not know that brigandige was wrong because of their bad customs (ST, 1-2, q. 94, a. 4); they were not able to extend to alien travelers in their lands the human concern shown within the community.
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More generally, human societies all have reasons to turn away from the full implications of morality: that can get you killed, wreck your position in society, or otherwise lead to results individuals and groups find abhorrent. All those prospects are difficult to face squarely if one does not accept the Christian doctrine of Resurrection of the Body. The Christian theological account of this form of human weakness is available to all Christians, and those holding for the reality of moral knowledge based on common human reason are no worse off than other Christians in this respect. Indeed, those who accept morality as the product of common human reason have some advantages here. Their conception of morality provides a basis for holding that those who do not know general moral truths adequately can be morally responsible for this ignorance, and have the capacity to overcome their moral ignorance.
C. Expected agreement about complex cases Although the line between what is a complex case and what is a case covered by a general moral truth is often unclear, there are complex moral cases made difficult by the presence of a number of morally relevant circumstances whose presence prevents an easy application of general norms. In cases such as these, careful reflection to articulate the various circumstances is needed, as well as careful analysis of the moral significance of these circumstances. The thinking involved may be capable of formulation after the fact into sound deductive argumentation that leads to an undeniable conclusion, but that thinking involves a number of descriptions, definitions, and classifications that are anything but infallible. In cases such as these—for example, end of life decisions where there are many complicating factors—only those who have thought long and hard about a given decision can be confident in their moral assessments, and even the most well reasoned of these can be disputed. So, in these cases, moral disagreement is to be expected; there is no ground for expecting agreement because the necessary thinking is complex and can easily go wrong without any moral fault on the part of a person addressing such a problem. In some cases, the moral complexities arise from the application of general but clearly defeasible norms. The moral generalities derived from the Golden Rule are like this; the classical example of the moral obligation to return borrowed property at the owner’s request is a famous example. Would returning borrowed property upon request be morally obligatory in all circumstances, including those in which returning it would be plainly unjust? The answer of Aquinas (ST, 1-2, q. 94, a. 4) and others is that the obligation does not bind in all circumstances; but specifying all these circumstances in advance is difficult. This effort may well lead to controversy. Contemporary issues exhibiting this sort of complexity include the difficulties in distributing scarce medical resources in a fair way.
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D. Moral diversity and the expectation of agreement In the preceding discussion, I argued that on the view of morality as the product of common human reason the expectation that moral disagreement will be overcome is limited. To complete this account of the prospects for moral agreement, I will consider very briefly the sort of moral diversity that does not necessarily involve disagreement. Many moral norms, for example, those concerning property, presuppose some form of social life and some form of authority, if only that of customs taken to be binding within a community. The details of any regime of ownership will include much that is conventional, and much that is instrumental to living and living well in a particular physical and social environment. Moral universalism recognizes the role played by such factors in determining whether a property regime is reasonable and just, and whether owners use their property reasonably (see Boyle, 2001). More generally, the values of a community express its common decisions, which can be informed by moral principle and law without being completely specified by them. The casuistry that sorts out complex moral cases must attend to these variable factors, and unmasking confusions caused by them can be crucial in clarifying issues and in removing apparent conflicts. But the moral differences that arise because of differences in communities’ diverse histories and circumstances, and from different choices the groups may have made in dealing with them, do not necessarily cause moral disagreement, as distinct from moral diversity. Indeed, much of this kind of moral diversity is compatible with agreement about moral principle. Of course, diverse moral communities often do disagree about moral judgments, but that is not simply because of their differing social choices shaped by variable conditions of human life. When those choices lead to the rejection of others’ moral judgments, that rejection reflects rejection or ignorance of moral standards. Thus, they disagree with those others about general norms and principles. In such cases, it is not the case that there is simply difference caused by distinct social choice caused in turn by differing circumstances, but a differing response to the morally significant values at stake. Those values are not purely local. This suggests that differences in communities do not as such generate disagreements in moral judgments. The fact that others in different social circumstances arrange their affairs very differently than do twenty-first century North Americans points to differences, not necessarily disagreements. Moreover, moral disagreements of the kind that are thought to generate a general suspicion of any effort to generate moral norms from common human reason arise within the same families, between those of the same religion, and so on. Even the very deep oppositions in moral outlook expressed by moral theorists are not necessary for moral disagreements of the kind I used to introduce this article. In short, moral disagreement leads to skepticism about reason’s capacity to deliver credible moral judgments only if there is no explanation of it
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compatible with the rationalism and universalism implicated in the view of morality as the product of common human reason. I have suggested that there are such explanations of the disagreements that arise at the various levels of moral discourse and judgment. The role of diverse communities in making moral life concrete does not add anything special to our understanding of moral disagreement. Membership in diverse communities is neither necessary nor sufficient for disagreement, whether with those in other communities or in one’s own community or outside any community. However, noting the compatibility of this very extensive form of moral diversity with universalism sets aside a parody of universalism.
III. Do We Need a Postmodern Public Morality? I have argued that ethical universalism does not generate the expectations of agreement the obvious absence of which would undercut the moral conviction of any person who so understood his or her moral judgments that way. The fact that a person finds others disagreeing with his or her moral judgments will usually give that person pause, and it may often cause him or her to revise the judgment, but it does not provide a reason for general skepticism about morality, because there are plausible explanations for the existence of unresolved moral disagreement compatible with moral universalism. This prospect has implications that some may think unacceptable. For a person can, on my account, be confident of his or her moral judgment, even when that puts him or her in conflict with others, including some with whom cooperation is needed. For example, as suggested at the beginning of this paper, family members may disagree about a moral decision on which their agreement is legally necessary, as when they are joint proxies for a family member. More generally, there are many deep moral disagreements in a modern pluralistic society; yet governments must sometimes take sides on these matters— for example, euthanasia must either be legally allowed or legally proscribed. If all parties to such conflicts are within their epistemic rights to stick to their considered moral judgments, social cooperation and mutual respect seem put in question. This might seem to require a public morality sufficient to guide the necessary interactions of those who disagree about the moral quality of the actions in question. Engelhardt has suggested a thin procedural ethic to serve this purpose. Those who disagree widely about ethical matters can consent to some constraints in their mutual interactions, and that consensual ethic creates a possibility for peaceable interaction. I believe, however, that Engelhardt’s libertarian cosmopolitanism is not required practically to address this condition of widespread moral disagreement. It is surely possible for morally opposed people to come to agreements about how to cooperate. Depending on exactly the proposition on which
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agreement is needed, more or fewer people could buy into such an agreement. Thus, for example, many people appear to agree that competent patients have a right to refuse medical treatment, and that a social agreement along these lines is acceptable, but many would not accept a law allowing physician assisted suicide or euthanasia. The agreements and disagreements with these social arrangements can be morally based, at least insofar as those who agreed or disagreed did so in accord with the dictates of their own consciences. So the moral grounds appealed to would likely be very different for different people, including many who agreed. The accommodations arrived at in this way are plainly far short of a “public morality,” even the thin libertarianism favored by Engelhardt. The morality involved is just that of the parties accepting some agreement. The common and mutual consent does not create a public morality as something distinct from a de facto agreement as to what shall be done. If Engelhardt claims only this, then his public morality is morally reducible to the moral judgments of those consenting to the arrangement. The morality remains within the moral judgments of the parties to the agreement. In particular, there is no presumption that the consent of oneself and others to an agreement provides a moral ground to limit or trump one’s antecedent moral judgments concerning the object of the consent. If Engelhardt’s libertarian cosmopolitanism claims the authority morally to bind those who believe that its permissions are prohibited by the moral judgments they antecedently think true, then an account is needed as to why the considerations favoring the permission are more compelling than those supporting the prohibition. It is this more robust reading of Engelhardt’s libertarianism—a reading that appears to be required if the traditional libertarian resistance to moralistic public action is to be sustained—that seems to me unnecessary for the conduct of public life.6 It will seem necessary not because of the requirements of public life but because of the now controverted belief that universalistic and rationalistic moral convictions must erode in the face of irresolvable controversy. The need to compromise for vital practical purposes may introduce circumstances that require careful scrutiny of one’s prior moral judgments, but this factor in moral judgment must, if it is not a temptation, meet moral muster in the light of a person’s own considered moral standards.7 Those standards normally include norms about what to do in the face of practical conflict. Therefore, for each person in such a conflict, normative considerations from outside his or her normative outlook will have little impact, except as temptations, and the question of how to resolve the conflict will be settled on his or her own moral terms. The fact that one considers consenting or making a contract to effect the needed agreement does not decisively alter that moral landscape.8 In short, compromise and mutual accommodation are sometimes possible between those who deeply disagree, and sometimes that is something a
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morally serious person can do compatibly with moral judgment. Compromise and accommodation are easier to whatever limited degree potential cooperators do morally agree. Overlapping consensus is certainly a possibility and seems to exist on some social issues, for example, concerning a competent adult’s right to refuse medical treatment. But sometimes a given compromise will be impossible for a conscientious person; in such cases, the benefits of the cooperation must be foregone and this bad side effect of moral integrity accepted. Sometimes proposed actions or omissions of others are morally intolerable and must be in some ways opposed, notwithstanding any general libertarian rule to the contrary. This at least is the array of options facing one who believes that morality prohibits a necessary cooperative undertaking. To sum up: the seriousness of moral allegiance to the principles, norms, and judgments a person believes true is not destroyed by the existence of irresolvable moral disagreement, at least not for those with a sensible conception of morality as based on common human reason. Such people have a nondogmatic account of why others disagree and of when it is unreasonable to maintain one’s moral judgment. If this is true, then a major element in Engelhardt’s dialectic towards a voluntarist social morality and the nonpropositional religious ethics of Orthodox Christianity is called into question. Moreover, once this element is in doubt, the need for a public ethics that stands free of anyone’s deep moral commitments and value rankings is unnecessary: conscientious compromises will do all that good people should do. Finally, the conviction of one who believes that God reveals part of His will for our lives through our common human reason can be humanly as secure as that of a holy practitioner of Orthodox Christianity.
Notes 1. See Engelhardt’s The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (2000), chapters 1 and 2 for the full story. See my review of this book for a brief summary of Engelhardt’s dialectic, “Orthodox Christianity and Libertarian Cosmopolitanism?” (2001). 2. I think that there is a common moral world that is recognized by many people, including those who try to dispute its authority. The participants in this common moral world may formulate in different ways, and may indeed disagree about, the grounds for their acceptance of its accepted deliverances, but this fact does not make their agreement simply a deal or accommodation. The content thus agreed upon is thin, but has a logical structure and implications. If I am mistaken in agreeing with Michael Walzer (and Jacques Maritian) on this, that is irrelevant to my current argument against Engelhardt, because I agree with him that there is enough moral disagreement to get his dialectic going, and dispute the other factors needed for his story (see Boyle, 1997). 3. See my “Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions” (1992) for further reasoning along these lines. 4. I am not arguing for this proposition here. I think it is true. See Boyle (1992).
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5. See Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (1977, pp. 66-74), for an account of the structure of this reasoning. 6. I am uncertain how to understand the moral force of Engelhardt’s libertarian permissions, particularly when they allow in the public domain activities one believes immoral and requiring public opposition. If they do not block some moral conviction from the domain of interactions between the morally opposed, then they do little to structure and direct the transactions in question; but if they do block moral conviction, then they have moral force that can compete with a person’s moral conviction. His treatment of abortion as a form of murder without commenting on whether it should, ideally at least, be legally prohibited is an example of what puzzles me. See Christian Bioethics, 2000, pp. 158, 209, 275-283. It is scarcely believable that Engelhardt would suppose that a traditional Christian would be blocked by libertarian permissions from acting publicly on a prescription of Orthodox morality having public implications. I would add that they no more credibly block a judgment based on common human reason. 7. The post-Tridentine Roman Catholic tradition has developed a considerable casuistry concerning cooperation with evil and tolerating evil. For an introduction to this literature, see my “Radical Moral Disagreement in Contemporary Health Care: A Roman Catholic Perspective” (1994). 8. See Boyle (1994) for a development of an argument for this claim.
Bibliography Aquinas, Saint Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1948. Boyle, J. “Fairness in Holdings: A Natural Law Account of Property and Welfare Rights.” Social Philosophy and Policy (2001): 206-26. ———. “Just and Unjust Wars: Casuistry and the Boundaries of the Moral World.” Ethics and International Affairs 11 (1997): 83-98. ———. “Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions.” In Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays, edited by R. George, 23-8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. “Radical Moral Disagreement in Contemporary Health Care: A Roman Catholic Perspective.” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 19 (1994): 183-200. ______. “Orthodox Christianity and Libertarian Cosmopolitanism?” Second Opinion (May 2001): 68-72. Donagan, A. The Theory of Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000.
Bioethics for Moral Strangers Stephen Wear
The Foundations of Christian Bioethics, by H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., contains much that is familiar to those who have studied his thought over the years. In sum: given the failure of the Enlightenment rationally to secure a contentfilled, lexically ordered secular morality, we are left with a bare-bones sort of ethics of permission between moral strangers. This is all very unfortunate, as Engelhardt himself repeatedly notes, in that it utterly fails to provide ultimate meaning and specific moral guidance to people within the often bewildering, not seldom tragic realm of health care. However, the difference between him and others is that whereas many commentators rail against such a constrained view of bioethics, he commends it as all that is possible from a secular perspective. Engelhardt has, in many ways, made a career out of retailing this skeptical vision of the limited possibilities of secular bioethics and the underlying critique that supports it. While others run out their content-filled visions of bioethical “truth” from whatever perspective—pragmatic, communitarian, Georgetown mantra, and so forth—there is Engelhardt, over and over again, pointing out the unjustified assumptions advanced, the questions begged, the infinite regresses triggered, and the overall “news from nowhere” that he sees much of contemporary bioethics as selling. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment project has failed and perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in bioethics, where so many issues of profound moment to so many people enjoy no real consensus whatsoever. What is new in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics is that Engelhardt comprehensively provides what he has long hinted at, viz. a content-filled vision of bioethics from within a specific non-secular perspective. The perspective is that of Orthodox Christianity, which he assures us he knows to 247 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 247-259) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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be the truth, and which constitutes his way out of the secular bioethics that he has done so much to describe. I will, in this paper, leave to others the core issue of whether what Engelhardt provides in this work truly describes the foundations of Christian bioethics. Engelhardt clearly thinks it does, not solely because of his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, but because, as he extensively argues, much of contemporary Christian thought has simply lost its moorings in the Christian tradition and experience. But I will leave this sort of reflection to others for two simple reasons: (1) I am not a Christian, and (2) I do not believe I have the requisite theological knowledge properly to evaluate the conclusions Engelhardt derives from his meditations on the ancient Christian texts and experience—not that I am unsympathetic with much that Engelhardt says in this regard. Unlike much of contemporary Christian bioethics, it seems to me he actually takes seriously the problems facing Christians within health care, and does so in a way that avoids just being another “God is dead and Mary is his Mother” version of Christianity, i.e., a Christianity that embraces what it sees as the Christian ethic without a corollary belief in God. It may well be a good way to keep one’s congregation in the pews, but what it has to do with Christianity has always escaped me. What I do propose to do is address three interrelated issues. (1) Is the secular, libertarian ethics of permission that Engelhardt sees us left with as impoverished as he and others hold it is, and if so, is this really all a secular bioethics can say? (2) Does this libertarian view somehow naturally tend to evolve into the liberal cosmopolitan view that he abhors as much as I do? And, (3) is there nothing between the libertarian and liberal cosmopolitan views which those who lack the content-filled sort of vision that Engelhardt aspires to might find relatively satisfying? I will proceed to address these issues first by briefly describing my own personal perspective on all this, particularly regarding the urge toward transcendence that I believe figures prominently in Engelhardt’s thought, an urge which I simply do not share. The initial point here will be that as I cannot follow where Engelhardt has led, my task will then be to reflect on whether the result, for those of us stuck in the realm of the immanent, is really as impoverished and unsatisfying as Engelhardt believes it to be.
I. The Urge to Transcendence For all his advocacy of a secular ethics of permission, one gets the sense that Engelhardt, like many other commentators, does not think people can live with such an ethics, however much he feels they must when faced with moral strangers. Other commentators often want to emphasize that a true appreciation of the realm of health care, with its asymmetrical power relationships, the diminished competence of patients due to illness, the
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bewildering medical assembly line, and so forth, calls for much beyond a procedural ethics of permission. Without beneficence or virtue on the part of health care providers, patients are just too vulnerable and at times prey, to those who provide their health care. Similarly, the libertarian political account that undergirds Engelhardt’s bioethics is seen by others as completely inadequate to support and fund the equality of access that they see as absolutely necessary for an ethical health care system. Engelhardt’s point, however, is that as long as it is moral strangers who are interacting, an ethics of permission is all that can be justified, and the political claims of equality and justice on moral strangers are similarly quite minimal. An impoverished setup perhaps, but anything more flies in the face of the deep-seated diversity of moral views that exist in postmodern society. There remains, however, a sense of the transcendent in Engelhardt, as one reads him closely over the years, which appears to lurk in the immediate background of all he says. That is: Engelhardt repeatedly talks of the deeper hunger for more than the minimal secular ethic that he otherwise supplies (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 209); put simply: “the immanent cannot still the hunger for the transcendent” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 313). He clearly believes that without a belief in God there is no ultimate personal meaning to life, no adequate account of suffering, and so forth. Not that he straightforwardly asserts that there is some clear logical or existential necessity operating here; at one juncture, he asserts that the inadequacy of secular bioethics is only truly appreciated from a religious (read Christian) perspective (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 73). But however much his minimal ethics may work as a way to deal with moral strangers, one senses that he simply does not see it as being adequate for one’s personal ethics; it is not a place where one can live, at least comfortably. The point is that however much secular ethics must be seen as radically limited, the ways of life that people can rest in are not, and cannot be. There seems to be a psychological “necessity” here for Engelhardt, however much other people may more-or-less ignore such deep urges. By way of initial response: as Engelhardt often appeals to personal knowledge and experience, I will do the same. That is, whereas Engelhardt at various junctures lets us know that he is a born-again Texican, I am a lapsed Unitarian from New Hampshire. Unitarian by raising, this involved a childhood experience of a rather locally grown “Christianity” with not a little deference to our neighbors Emerson and Thoreau down the road, and lapsed because when I finally got the nerve to ask the minister what God was, his response of “whatever you think he is” was so unsatisfying that I quickly concluded that Unitarianism merited neither further study nor allegiance. So, as far as the hunger for the transcendent goes for me, that was that, then and now. Whatever ethics I have had or seem to have welled up out of the Yankee farmer background I was nurtured in, with a lot of emphasis on self-reliance and personal responsibility, not much regarding one’s obligations
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to strangers of a positive variety; and, as far as the urge to or need for community goes, I am in agreement with another neighbor, viz. the Yankee poet Robert Frost, that stone walls good neighbors make. Not that I have not attempted to entertain something beyond all this, from graduate study that focused heavily on medieval philosophy, to various excursions into spiritual realms that might be expected of a college student of the 1960’s. Particularly to the point here, perhaps, I once even joined Professor Engelhardt in attending an Orthodox Christian service, and was certainly impressed. Unlike what I have seen when I have had occasion to attend various Christian services over the years, this was clearly the real thing. Rather than the usual “Mary is his mother/vote democrat always and often” fare, the incense was smoking, religious images and icons were everywhere, and the priest was deadly serious. Like I said, serious stuff....the real thing. It was, however, a little too real for a lapsed Unitarian. The images and icons served instead to re-awaken my iconoclast heritage, and that heritage is equally insistent about not allowing priests, or presbyters, or elders, between the individual believer and God. Nor did this experience rekindle any religious urgings in me. It instead instructed me that if I were ever to undergo some sort of religious transcendence, it would not be in such a place. Where that place is, I have no idea; nor am I currently seeking it. So that leaves me, and many other people I suspect, stuck in the realm of immanence, with only our brains and experience of life to guide us. In the rest of this essay, I will attempt to respond to Engelhardt’s portrayal of its impoverished character, among other things by arguing that it is not necessarily as impoverished and unsatisfying as he seems to think it is.
II. Two Cheers for the Enlightenment Such a background has always made me a rather mixed bag in relation to Engelhardt who has been variously my mentor, colleague and good friend over the years. We have always disagreed sharply in a sectarian way, viz. about the significance of the War of Southern Insurrection (mislabeled the American Civil War by some, the War of Northern Aggression by others), Engelhardt believing the Southern cause a righteous one, whereas I think it is most unfortunate that Sherman was not allowed to make a few more passes through the South to make them all howl that much louder. I suspect when he thinks of Picket’s charge at Gettysburg, he sees glory in the Southern ranks; I see it in the rows of cannon with which my ancestors shredded those rebel ranks with grapeshot. Beyond this, whereas Engelhardt has always seemed to see his ethics of permission as somehow unfortunate and not a place in which one can live, I always thought he had it pretty much accurate as to where many others and I do live. That is: my own upbringing, and experience of life, has instructed
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me that I should assume other people are in fact moral strangers to me, whatever cultural community I may happen to seem to share with any individual. That we may happen to share moral views thus needs confirmation to the extent we interact. Again, my experience is that knowing another’s religion, cultural background, and so forth, is unlikely to indicate what that person’s moral views are, within health care or outside it. This is the case even with other lapsed Unitarians, or even fellow Yankees. There is just no telling. This appears to leave me, and many others, in the position of being “libertarian cosmopolitans,” as Engelhardt labels the syndrome. That is: a content-filled, lexically ordered vision of the right and the good is not available to us. The Enlightenment having failed to provide this via reason unaided, and the necessary relief of religion being rejected, then our ethics can be procedural only, an ethics of permission which wholly lacks specific guidance within health care as well as without. According to Engelhardt, this is not a good result: What if the chaos of the moral life is such that many people possess no coherent understanding of the right, the good, and virtue? Thoroughly postmodern persons that not only have no moral narrative to share with others but also no coherent moral account of their own lives are exactly such individuals. Life happens to them, including their passions. They are persons without a moral plot for their own bibliographies. They have desires, impulses, urges, needs, wants, and concerns, but no moral projects that shape and unite their lives as a whole. In particular they have no coherent sense of good and evil to structure their life projects. This does not mean that such persons lack coherence to the point of suffering from a moral thought disorder disabling them from acting as moral agents. They can quite coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness. They simply lack a coherent substantive personal moral narrative. Instead their life is a sequence of happenings. (2000, p. 137)
Whoa! There appears to be a great deal packed into the notion of coherence here. And what does it mean to say, in the same breath, that such people “have no coherent sense of good and evil to structure their life projects” but concurrently allow that “they can quite coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness” (p. 137)? I believe two basic factors at least are in play here. First, Engelhardt clearly holds that only via a “noetic” experience of the foundations of Christian bioethics can the “difficulties besetting secular morality” be escaped. As he indicates, this is so because these foundations are: “(1) anchored in an experience of God, (2) apperceived as true, and (3) sustained in a community maintained in this experience over the centuries” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 168). In sum, without this noetic experience, any secular morality must be either a minimal ethics of permission, or if it presumes to more content, ends up offering the incoherent, question begging, news from nowhere that Engelhardt sees much of contemporary bioethics as offering. Now, as already indicated, others and I do not have this noetic experience to rely on, nor are we willing to take Engelhardt’s word for it. So if this is the
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real ground of the critique of secular ethics that Engelhardt offers, we might just as well shrug our shoulders and return to our own moral reflections, such as they are. At least we can “quite coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness” (p. 137). There is, however, another barrel in Engelhardt’s shotgun, viz. his portrayal of the failure of the Enlightenment project. And my main point about this particular salvo is as follows: Engelhardt’s assertion of the failure of the Enlightenment project to secure a content-filled, lexically ordered vision of the right and the good from reason unaided by tradition or revelation takes on an altered significance once one appreciates that in the end he holds that only a noetic religious experience can succeed in such a project. That is: his view of the Enlightenment thus succeeds only by begging the question of what counts as success in ethics once it is severed from any appeal to revelation and tradition. If we instead, divorced from that tradition and revelation as some of us are, tired of priests and presbyters telling us how to act, adopt the project of seeking to ascertain what a reason-based ethics might provide, however minimal, then success may well turn out to lie in a quite marginal, bare-bones sort of ethic, perhaps Engelhardt’s ethic of permission. This would not then be a failure for those of us not vouchsafed by Engelhardt’s noetic experience. Nor would any such result be a failure because the expectations of the early Enlightenment thinkers were much too high. That reason unaided may well supply much less than religion does is not only not a failure; it should have been expected. My point, in the end, is that Engelhardt may well have let the cat out of the bag here; i.e., if Engelhardt’s critique of the Enlightenment project ultimately rests on the fact that it could not provide the same sort of content-filled morality, on the same terms and principles, as the noetic Christian experience, then his critique is itself circular. Pursuit of the Enlightenment project might still legitimately continue, however humbled. It might just have to recognize that a more basic and humbler sense of what constitutes ethical justification will be part of the result. And if we keep in mind Aristotle’s dictum that one should not expect more of a type of inquiry than it is capable of providing, then this will not be failure either. If the above rings true, and for those of us stuck in the realm of immanence without any such noetic instruction I believe it must, then I submit that in the end we must conclude that Engelhardt is not even playing the same game as the rest of us. If, for example, he wants to insist that any reason-based ethics must provide the same level and depth of satisfaction, logical and existential, that religion does, then we simply need to part company with him, indicating that we are willing and bound to pursue whatever result we can manage, and failure simply is not shown, for us, if the result does not measure up to what he has found, which we have not. In the remainder of this essay, I will presume to summarize what I believe some of this legitimate result amounts to, first
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within the bioethical realm where moral strangers interact as patients and providers.
III. Justification and Belief in Clinical Bioethics Stuck in immanence as some of us are, the primary issue thus comes to regard what a secular ethics can provide, with an expectation that the result will probably not approximate the sort of ordered content that Engelhardt has obtained for himself. This question will, in part, turn on what constitutes legitimate justification and belief in bioethics. Here a further conjecture regarding Engelhardt may be helpful. That is: if we attempt to place Engelhardt as a philosopher, we might initially tend to think of him as some sort of chastened Hegelian. Aside from his well-known Germanophile tendencies, his dissertation was on Hegel, and he presents, in many ways, the aspect of the dedicated rationalist, however much the end result of that rationalism is severely limited. I believe we should, however, look further north from Germany for a philosophical soul mate for Engelhardt, viz. to Kierkegaard. In sum, where Kierkegaard spends most of his writing illustrating how no secular “way of life” can rest easy in itself, that all involve contradiction in some way or another, I submit that Engelhardt may be seen as engaged in the same project regarding all forms of secular ethical argument. For both, the end result is that one is left to somehow jump to what one might rest easy in or, of course, remain in the realm of the incoherent and ultimately unsatisfying. The point of my argument thus far is rather that if we cannot jump with either of these thinkers, then we are stuck with coming up with the best account that we can (some account may be more adequate than others). The search for such an account may well also involve re-thinking what constitutes legitimate justification and belief in ethics, with the expectation that it may end up much less austere than what Engelhardt insists upon. More specifically: take Engelhardt’s reflection on Tom Beauchamp’s attempt to hold that “there is a common morality shared by all.” Engelhardt notes that Beauchamp “tries to make his case by listing fourteen rules he holds to be universal”, such as “1) Tell the truth. 2) Respect the privacy of others ... 6) Do not kill” (2000, p. 31). So far, so good, one would think, but not for Engelhardt. Aside from the obvious fact that no such principle enjoys unanimity across cultures, Engelhardt observes that Beauchamp is explicitly offering an “open-ended list of moral considerations that different persons from different communities may rank differently” (p. 31). And this will not do for Engelhardt; being open-ended, Beauchamp’s principles “cannot provide any moral guidance” (p. 31). What should we think of this? On the one hand, I believe Engelhardt is correct in making the important point that Beauchamp’s system fails in an important sense; namely, that many of the specific dilemmas that called forth
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the field of bioethics are simply not going to be solved by such an approach. This is so because they are dilemmas precisely in that they involve head-on conflicts between the very principles that Beauchamp advocates. Thus, as Engelhardt endlessly points out, as Beauchamp and others cannot provide a lexical ordering of such principles, whereby we might decide between them when they conflict, then his principlism does not provide the guidance sought. At most, Beauchamp’s principlism helps us better understand the nature of the dilemmas at hand, but cannot resolve them without begging the question as to the relative ranking of any of these principles, in general or in any particular case. Fair enough. I believe Engelhardt has Beauchamp dead to rights in this regard. What Engelhardt fails to allow is that Beauchamp may still be meaningfully and helpfully offering a great deal of guidance about how to proceed in the usual case where we are not faced with intractable dilemmas, but are merely trying to fathom how we should usually act. And Beauchamp’s acceptance of the open-ended character of all this does not constitute abject failure of his system; it is just a prudent recognition of its limits. Beauchamp may thus succeed in an important sense for all that Engelhardt says. Let us consider the possibilities here more specifically. Consider the notion of truth-telling. Now it is clear that truth-telling does not enjoy universal acceptance across cultures, so descriptive ethics will not help us. Further, à la Engelhardt, when truth-telling conflicts with some other basic principle, e.g., beneficence (as when we hesitate to tell a patient who is currently suffering a myocardial infarction that this is so for fear we will worsen the effect somehow), it may well be that reflection on the case at hand will leave us with a “six of one, half dozen of the other” result regarding the weight of the conflicting principles. But that hardly indicates that the principle of truth-telling is not ethically mandatory in the usual case. That ethical guidance has limits does not mean that it does not provide guidance. Now this is hardly the place to attempt to argue that truth-telling is a universal ethical maxim. Nor is this needed, as I believe sufficient argument has already been supplied. To my mind, Sissela Bok, in her classic piece on “Lies to the Sick and Dying,” has done a quite adequate job of marshaling a “preponderance of the evidence” in favor of embracing truth-telling as an appropriate ethical rule, as what we should do in the usual case (1978, pp. 232-255). Admittedly, it is primarily a consequentialist argument, and would surely remain open-ended, as Beauchamp’s principles are. Still, it does provide guidance in the usual case, and its consequentialist character seems hardly objectionable for those of us stuck in immanence and thus intend only to “coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness” (p. 137), as Engelhardt puts it. More generally, and toward the issue of how impoverished any legitimate secular ethics must be, I submit that such consequentialist argumentation can and
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has produced a full blown “system” of clinical ethics that is not impoverished, contains much guidance in the usual case, and legitimately guides the behavior of many in the clinical realm. As I have suggested elsewhere: Whether it be in the “Patients Bill of Rights” (American Hospital Association, 2001) which is hung on the walls all over the institution, or in well known legal or reviewing body (i.e., JCAHO) statements that many staff can parrot, or in the policies and procedures of the institution, many bioethical issues appear in the form of established truths. The right of competent patients to informed consent and confidentiality, to be told the truth, to refuse any and all treatment, and so forth, are seen as guiding principles for everyone. They are seen as no more up for grabs, intellectually or morally, than the clinical guidelines for managing diabetes, or the proper methods for assessing and responding to multi-infarct dementia. Teaching within such a framework of accepted moral truths goes into considerable clinical and ethical detail before any true controversy arises. Explaining how competence, i.e., decision making capacity, should be evaluated, the rankorder of surrogates for incompetent patients, what sort of interventions require informed consent and what the elements of any such disclosures should be, and so on, are clearly delineated for staff who, in the main, want to know how to proceed in the usual case. One often spends time “talking tactics,” whether this regards how (not whether) to tell bad news to patients and families, when and how to encourage patients to designate a surrogate or generate advance statements regarding extraordinary scenarios, or how to document what one has discussed or determined so it will be available and useful during subsequent care. The further point here is that, however much actual bioethics teaching at (or near) the bedside may incidentally key to, or be triggered by, actual controversy or disputes, a very broad and complex background of what is accepted or assumed guides most such discussion. Often these moral truths completely control what is then done, as when a patient’s specific prior statements are held, per hospital policy, to overrule contrary wishes or views of family members, or when “self-destructive” patients who are deemed competent are allowed to continue those behaviors, however much staff and family would like somehow to prevent them from occurring. Even when policy does not clearly stipulate the proper ethical course, tactics aimed at dispute mediation—attempting to restore staff-patient/family interaction—or simply talking it out in the hopes that consensus might be reached, are utilized to resolve problems as often as anything one would recognize as ethical reasoning. That such latter tactics as converting dispute into consensus often work suggests that the accepted truths mentioned above are not only those of the institution and its staff, but are often shared equally by patients and their families. The diversity of ethical beliefs and values itself appears to be more a creature of the lecture hall, than a presence at the bedside. (Wear, 2002, pp. 436-437)
My basic point here is that there actually exists a canon of clinical ethics that is widely shared (at least in the West), provides specific and comprehensive guidance in the usual case, seems to well satisfy most patients and providers,
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and enjoys substantial support from the last few decades of argument, debate and experience in Western clinical circles. I will further presume to suggest that this canon might well amount to a universal clinical ethics, for all that Engelhardt says. It is surely the case that certain other cultures do not subscribe to this canon, e.g., if Engelhardt is correct, that of Orthodox Christianity. I cannot see, however, that this is a telling criticism. For once one marshals one’s arguments, e.g., as Bok does in favor of truth-telling, one might legitimately conclude that different practices are, in fact, unethical, however much they enjoy the sanction of some particular culture. Not that we are obliged to be overly imperialistic about this; in the end, all we need seek is a system of ethical norms that can guide us in our interactions with moral strangers. They can then still inform us if they see things differently, e.g., that they would not want the sort of aggressive truth-telling that this Western canon advocates. We still have guidance for ourselves and, via patient’s bill of rights statements and otherwise, can advise moral strangers of how we intend to conduct ourselves absent contrary instructions from them. Nor do I think such an approach is as impoverished and merely procedural as Engelhardt portrays it. We can surely presume to emphasize the need for beneficence and virtue in health care providers given the vulnerability and diminished competence seen in patients. More substantially, there are many situations where such providers might legitimately go beyond the merely procedural as when they perceive that patients are making uninformed, foolish, or needlessly tragic choices, as when a patient with moderate emphysema indicates he or she never wants to be on a “breathing machine,” and the provider appropriately advises the patient that such an exclusion may well not be wise as they may later present with an eminently treatable acute infiltrate for which a short term trial intubation might successfully return them to base line. More substantially, I submit, there is a whole constellation of “standard practices” in medicine that are no less so because the occasional patient rejects them, and it seems fair to say that the debate of medical futility has clearly succeeded in identifying scenarios where medical aggressiveness is just not appropriate, however much certain patients or families may have different views, and however one wants to deal with the discrepancy. This canon, then, is neither impoverished, not merely procedural, for all that Engelhardt says. Nor is it simply arbitrary “news from nowhere,” however much unanimity about it does not exist, and it does not fully satisfy the hopes and expectations of the early Enlightenment.
IV. The Politics of Health Care Provision The other fly in the ointment here regards Engelhardt’s claim that secular bioethics must also embrace a libertarian sort of political philosophy; anything beyond this is seen as unjustified and more “news from nowhere.” I propose
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to address this issue by referring to Engelhardt’s further argument that such a libertarian political view naturally tends to evolve into some sort of a much more insidious liberal cosmopolitanism, a result we both abhor. As Engelhardt says: This libertarian cosmopolitanism is libertarian in drawing authority from the permission of those who collaborate, and not from any particular valued state of affairs, much less from a lexical priority or value given to freedom or liberty. It is cosmopolitan in the sense of providing a framework that can be invoked outside of any particular socio-historical context, tradition, or moral community by drawing simply on the consent of those willing to be involved. Such a sparse moral foundation may be endurable only if the individuals who collaborate primarily place their own lives within functional moral communities where they confront others as moral friends, persons with whom they share a content-filled moral vision. (2000, p. 43)
Engelhardt proceeds to observe, however, that: Because increasingly people do not find themselves in such communities, and because they often find themselves hungering for community, value and meaning, the default position becomes, not as a matter of strict necessity, but as a matter of moral desire, a liberal cosmopolitanism. (2000, p. 43)
What we thus find, according to Engelhardt, is another form of urge to transcendence, as previously discussed: This shift from a libertarian cosmopolitanism to a liberal cosmopolitanism involves a radical change of moral and metaphysical perspective. It establishes a fundamentally different context for a bioethics. A libertarian cosmopolitanism advances no criticism of particular moral communities, as long as those who participate can from the outside be seen as giving their permission...it constitutes the moral point of view of moral strangers...involves no particular ranking of values...eschews moral imperialism. This is in contrast to a liberal cosmopolitanism, which assigns a cardinal value to a particular understanding of autonomous choice and holds that all persons should likewise. The liberal cosmopolitan ethos requires that people decide to be autonomous, selfdetermining individuals. The failure to pursue this ethos of autonomy becomes an indication of false consciousness... Liberal cosmopolitanism locates self-determination centrally in its account of human flourishing. In the absence of a transcendent moral truth, the focal point of the moral life becomes autonomous self-determination. The good life is not found in submitting to and being determined by the good and the true. Autonomy instead becomes integral to the good. (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 43)
There is much here that I would second; in fact, it signals a parallel thread of argument in Engelhardt’s book that can be profitably read even by those who have no particular Christian commitments, but are more simply unable to follow along with the liberal cosmopolitanism that Engelhardt is at such pains to explicate. It, in effect, traces the movement from a minimal ethics of permission, which relies on freedom as a side constraint, to a full-blown liberalism that makes freedom the primary value and focus of the moral life.
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This in turn, as Engelhardt observes, moves us from a tolerant minimal secular ethic to an intolerant, imperialistic ethic that demands that all support a society, and health care system, that keys to a much richer notion of human flourishing as its touchstone. The arguments for the welfare state, socialized medicine, confiscatory taxation, and so forth, are not far behind. Within the confines of this essay, we should now pause to reflect on what we have to say about this shift from libertarian to liberal cosmopolitanism. Is it driven by some clear logical or existential necessity? Engelhardt does not think so, although his own tendency toward transcendence is appearing here in another form, however misguided, by his lights. Is this liberal cosmopolitanism still the “news from nowhere” that he has always claimed it is, especially given the arguments we have previously considered? I do not think so. Once we have placed ourselves wholly in the realm of the immanent, with our ethics charged with ascertaining how we might best “coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness,” then it would seem that restricting ethics to considering freedom as a side constraint is no longer mandatory, and a reflection on whether and how a given society might consider supporting the liberal view of human flourishing becomes as legitimate as any ethical reflection. In effect, if we reject Engelhardt’s austere employment of the Enlightenment project for a much more garden variety ethics that humbly pursues the issue of how best to “coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness,” then the liberal cosmopolitan view merits as much of a hearing as anything else. Lapsed Unitarian Yankee that I am, I am as committed as Engelhardt to opposing this shift to a liberal cosmopolitan view, but not for the philosophical reasons that he gives. As previously argued, I submit that his critique of secular ethics itself fails once we recognize that its only real satisfaction, and wellspring, comes from a view of the Enlightenment project that can be satisfied only by returning to some sort of religious vision. Given this, and thus proceeding with our more garden variety ethical reflections, I would feel obliged to admit that a society might legitimately and coherently opt for liberal cosmopolitanism. The basic argument for this could appeal to Engelhardt’s own notion of permission, but expand its basis, viz. that permission may be sufficiently secured from a democratically based social, majority rules sort of permission. As I have argued extensively elsewhere (Wear, Freer, and Koczwara, 1999, pp. 363-383), the “representatives of the people assembled” might legitimately choose to support such a system, including forcing it on others who do not agree with it. In effect, I believe permission is necessary, but see no reason why this must be limited to only the explicit permission of specific individuals. I would then, for my part, presume to argue that such a liberal cosmopolitanism is unwise and imprudent for many of the sort of reasons that contemporary American conservatism offers. A good start for such an argument
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might be obtained by reviewing F. A. Hayek’s book Road to Serfdom. I will not supply such argument here, but be content merely to signal it towards my rejection of the idea that such a much more circumscribed political view need not, for good and sufficient reasons, shift to that of liberal cosmopolitanism, as Engelhardt seems to believe. It would most likely, however, once the “representatives of the people assembled” have reflected on the issues and arguments, result in a polis, and a health care system, that goes way beyond the libertarianism that Engelhardt erroneously holds we are limited to in the secular realm. My basic argument here is that for those of us who, unlike Engelhardt, remain stuck in the secular world of immanence, a substantial, secular ethic can be (and has been) legitimately fashioned that provides respectable, coherent guidance for moral strangers. His critique, in effect, succeeds in claiming that the Enlightenment has failed only by appealing to a transcendental result that many of us do not accept. Ethics then can legitimately and helpfully proceed in a more garden variety fashion whereby we seek, as best we can, to “quite coherently and accountably seek satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness,” as Engelhardt himself expresses it. Nor need the result of such an inquiry be objectionably impoverished; in fact, we have about three decades of substantial argument, debate, and experience that has resulted in a detailed canon of clinical ethics that seems to work for many, and may well constitute a universal ethic for all that Engelhardt says. Similarly, I would submit that legitimate political permission can be gained from the “representatives of the people assembled” to a polity that goes way beyond the limited libertarian polis that Engelhardt advocates. This, in turn, might be kept from shifting to an objectionable liberal cosmopolitan polity by advancing the usual conservative prudential arguments.
Bibliography Bok, S. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. Hayek, F.A. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Wear, S.E., J. Freer, and B. Koczwara. “The Commercialization of Human Body Parts: Public Policy Considerations.” In Persons and Their Bodies: Rights, Responsibilities, Relationships, edited by Mark J. Cherry, 363-83. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. Wear, S.E. “Teaching Bioethics at (or near) the Bedside.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27, no. 4 (2002): 433-45.
Ethics Expertise1 Nicholas Capaldi
This essay would never have been conceived or written if it had not been for H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. I have learned and shared many things with and from him, many of them too profound and important to be publicly acknowledged and discussed. From an intellectual point of view, I have rediscovered the limits of philosophy, the need for the transcendent (see, e.g., Engelhardt, 2000), and the dangers of taking ethics expertise too literally (see, e.g., Engelhardt, 2002). The notion of ethics expertise in any important and controversial sense is really a contemporary idea. We live in an age dominated by science and technology. Experts are understood to be individuals with technical instrumental knowledge and skills who can give authoritative and definitive answers about why something happens or how to make it happen. Some have even suggested the bizarre idea that there are ethics experts. Why is this idea bizarre and how did it come about? To answer those questions, to understand the idea of “ethics expertise” and its variants, it is necessary to begin by enumerating the different historical senses of ethics expertise.
I. Classical Philosophical Contributions to the Idea of Ethics Expertise By classical philosophy, I mean the views which derived from Plato and Aristotle.2 What these philosophers share in common is the following. There is an objective external framework of norms (comprising the true, the good, and the beautiful). Our first task is to apprehend those norms, and our second task is to conform our behavior and all social structures to those norms. Theory logically precedes practice (T/P). Moreover, theory takes the form of a deductive argument in which we argue from first principles to specific applications. The ultimate structure of these first principles is a comprehensive metaphysics (hence, there is no real separation among ethics, politics, religion, and so 261 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 261-272) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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forth). Only those who understand the ultimate big picture can truly determine what the right thing to do is in a particular set of circumstances. Philosophers with the proper vision and training, therefore, are the true ethics experts. There are, of course, significant disagreements between Plato (a priori forms) and Aristotle (empirically observed teleology) on how to discover these first principles. Needless to say, many of the views of Plato and Aristotle have been challenged, and some might even say to some extent largely discredited. Nevertheless, what remains is the belief that there is an intellectual elite,3 who have access to an “objective” intellectual structure beyond or “behind” practice that entitles them to recognition as ethics (or political) experts. Practice should conform to their collectively determined theory. This is a view that still permeates and dominates the academic world today. This is a difficult position to defend if there are conflicting views in the academy, and that leads to a tendency toward some form of ethical and political uniformity, lest the public fail to recognize and honor the claim to expertise. In the classical world, philosophers formed schools or sects, in which membership was exclusive and voluntary. In its classical form, this view was privately inspirational and publicly mostly harmless. Part of the weakness of the classical intellectual elite was that the uneducated public could not recognize and, therefore, acknowledge their expertise; at the same time, this lack of recognition rendered the classical intellectual elite relatively powerless and harmless. The recognition of an external order also inhibited most excess. In its modern variant, as we shall see, it becomes pathological and dangerous.
II. Early Christian Contributions to the Idea of Ethics Expertise4 The Judeo-Christian worldview introduced the idea of a personal transcendent God in place of an impersonal order. Christianity went further in rejecting the classical Greek assimilation of the totality of life to the political by insisting that the ethical-religious domain was independent of the political domain. Access to God’s principles was a product5 of moral virtue and not intellectual virtue. Moral virtue was achieved through faith, communal authority, ritual, and ascetic practice. Many of these early Christians embodied in their own lives and practices the very virtues they expounded. There was and is in this context no gap between theory and practice. The ascetic practices emphasized self-sacrifice partly as a way of achieving a form of disinterestedness. Those who achieved this state were accorded recognition as spiritual mentors rather than as ethics “experts.” Their status might be more appropriately described as holiness or saintliness. But, in any case, it gave to some people an elite status, a form of moral authority and the role of spiritual mentors. In an important sense, early Christianity eschews
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the notion of expertise; it is the later combination of Christianity with classical Greek philosophy that makes this an important part of the story. Problems abound as to how exactly to understand the relation6 of the ethical-religious domain to the political domain, and there is always the danger that asceticism itself becomes a form of pride. Nevertheless, this is a view that has remained a powerful stimulus to the ethics content of the members of religious communities from the time of its inception to the present, and it has largely been politically benign.
III. Late Medieval (Roman Catholic) Ethics Expertise This version of ethics expertise consists of early Christian expertise now viewed through the lens of philosophy. I’ll use the term ‘theology’ loosely here to mean the rationalization of Christianity through the employment of classical Greek philosophy. To be an “expert” here was to be both a member of the intellectual elite (intellectual virtue) and the moral elite (moral virtue). Few people could achieve both sorts of virtue, and that is one reason why ethical expertise was necessary; namely, so that all could live an ethical life. Recognition of the elite by the non-elite was facilitated both by the erudition and articulateness as well as the ascetic lifestyle of those who claimed this status. Recognition was achieved through association with another institution, the university and its trappings. The university was invented in the late Middle Ages primarily to train clergy who thus constituted the ethics experts. The university becomes the locus of ethical expertise. Modern universities still claim this authority long after they have given up even the pretense of belief in the transcendent or the practice of moral virtue. One of the dangers of trying to combine intellectual and moral virtue is the tendency for the former to subsume the latter. This transforms morality into an intellectual exercise, the application of theory to practice or morality as the reflective observance of rules or ideals. Emphasis is put upon having a correct and defensible theory rather than on how to act. The ideals too quickly turn into obsessions. Inevitably, moral sensibility is inhibited or even eroded in favor of an elaborate casuistry. The object seems to be to observe a rule instead of behaving in a certain concrete manner. Obsession with rigid deductive structures and a preoccupation with logical systematicity have been destructive of both historical understanding and rational criticism. This is especially true with the assimilation of the Aristotelian natural law tradition and its tendency to obscure the dividing line between ethics and politics. Part of the appeal of Aristotelianism and Aristotelian natural law was supposed to be that non-believers could concede it. It is but a short step to ignoring everything except the intellectual virtue. It is now important to introduce a distinction between those who remained inspired by Platonism (e.g., Augustinians) and those who were inspired by
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the newly rediscovered Aristotelianism. The Platonists always emphasized the divine locus of holiness, the unclose-able gap between the ideal and the actual world (hence, no earthly utopianism), the recognition that even the Church was imperfect, the inspirational role of the spiritual domain, and the purely negative role of the political domain (to prevent or punish evil). The Aristotelian inspired Christians, on the other hand, accepted the idea of a hierarchical order to the social world, but instead of the state being preeminent the institution of the Church would be. The role of the Church (especially as defined by university trained clerics) was to serve as ethics experts who directed the state to take an active (positive) role in helping individuals achieve their ultimate good, understood as salvation. Statism became the preferred mode for the implementation of ethics expertise. The danger of any “Aristotelian” inspired view, as here defined, is utopian reform. Once you place the “form” in the “matter,” there will always be a temptation to close the unclose-able gap. To the extent that you remember the divine mystery you can, like Aquinas, use the Church as a check on government excess. To the extent that you come to view yourself as the voice of the divine on earth, you are tempted to try to make the world divine7 by claiming that your ethics expertise entitles you to supreme political power. We shall dub this the Gnostic (utopian) temptation. Protestant reformers faced the same temptation. Some remained true to the Augustinian-Platonic view and sought to protect the church from worldly corruption. Some gave in to the Gnostic temptation. The “experts,” now holding a multiplicity of conflicting theological views, vied for control of worldly political power. The result was the religious wars of the seventeenth century. One thing we have not really explained is why there should be a diversity of theological views. The obvious answer is that the appeal to different and conflicting philosophies will yield different and conflicting theologies. The further answer is that, as we shall see, there is no way to reconcile philosophical disagreements through rational argument alone.
IV. Early Modern Philosophy This period tended to downplay the notion of expertise. To begin with, early modern philosophers were initially concerned to accommodate new values in science, commerce, and politics to old values. As a consequence they tended to incorporate religious modes of thought along with philosophical modes of thought, as for example in Hobbes and Locke. The main compromise that arose at first in Protestant countries was the distinction between the political realm (where procedural norms prevailed) and the religious-ethics realm (where substantive norms were articulated). One thinks in this context of Locke’s use of Christianity to defend religious toleration and a secular state. The long-term tendency of this compromise was (a) to marginalize and
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eventually to exclude the idea of a purely religious expertise;8 and eventually (b) to secularize the whole context of ethics and politics.9 One thinks in this context of Hume’s critique of the “monkish virtues” (asceticism) as pathological. Public policy on the whole seemed not to need expertise. This was a period when philosophers emphasized toleration, liberty, and autonomy. Moreover, there is something inconsistent about autonomous agents asking others to take responsibility for making ethical judgments that concern themselves.
V. The Enlightenment Project The origin of the contemporary idea of an ethics expert derives from the Enlightenment Project (Capaldi, 1998). This movement, which is not to be confused with the whole of the Enlightenment, asserted the doctrine of scientism, namely, that physical science was the whole truth about everything. Among the French philosophes (e.g., La Mettrie or Holbach), who were the primary proponents of this view, the success of physical science solved all potential philosophical problems, since philosophy was no more than the logic of science. Further, it was assumed that there could be a social science based on the model of physical science. Just as physical science led to the wonders of modern physical technology, so there would be a corresponding social technology that would solve all social (ethics, economic, political, aesthetic, and so forth) problems.10 This purely secular and naturalistic conception of expertise was espoused in the nineteenth century by Comte (as positivism) as well as Marx, and it survives in various forms of positivism, behaviorism, analytic philosophy, artificial intelligence, and so forth. This intellectual movement or collection of movements (a) dominates the intellectual world; (b) finds its locus in universities; (c) permeates all professions based on university education including journalism, the ministry, law, and medicine; (d) explains why the only two growth areas in the discipline of philosophy are bioethics and business ethics; and (e) is inevitably statist because the social technology requires planning by experts who need the full resources of government power and taxation to solve all social problems. We are now in a position to summarize all of the relevant features of ethics expertise as they are reflected in the Enlightenment Project. 1. Theory precedes practice (T/P) a. “experts” need have no actual experience of what they direct b. they “see” the truth “behind” the practice c. they can teach “how” to do it, not “what” to do—triumph of methodology over substance d. disdain and condescension expressed toward mere practitioners 2. Intellectual elite e. communication skills (articulate) f. use of insiders vocabulary and set of references
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g. recognition is achieved through association with the university and its trappings h. journalists are junior partners who popularize intellectual knowledge for the public 3. The university becomes the locus of ethical expertise (solves problem of recognition), primarily because of its connection with scientific and technological research. American universities followed three models: German Research model; small religious liberal arts college; utilitarian model (e.g., A&M)—all three reinforce various older features of the notion of ethics expertise. 4. Gnostic (utopian) temptation i. a certain impatience with practice that refuses to conform to theory j. statism becomes the preferred mode for the implementation of ethics expertise k. obscure the dividing line between ethics and politics i already inherent in Aristotle ii fostered by the modern assumption that there is no such thing as free will—everything is a matter of environmental determinism; hence the need for primarily external sanctions Enlightenment Project ethics expertise (EPEE as we shall now call it) usually takes two forms. The simple form is utilitarianism. The expert already knows (because he has graduated from the “correct” program in the social sciences or philosophy11 at one of the “major” schools) what ends human beings pursue; hence, he only has to calculate the consequences of the various alternatives. This form of expertise is often criticized because behind these judgments there are all kinds of “deep,” creative and imaginative accounts offered (e.g., Rawls, Nozick or Nagel), conflicting accounts of what ends human beings pursue (teleology) and no current reductive physiological explanation of which account, if any, is true. The complex form of EPEE recognizes the limitations of utilitarianism and its attendant philosophical difficulties. It adopts a different approach. A real scientific explanation is an exploration, that is, a hypothesis about the hidden structure behind everyday events. Analogously, we begin with surface ethics judgments and then speculate on the hidden structure behind these judgments. All kinds of “deep,” creative and imaginative accounts are offered (again, e.g., Rawls, Nozick or Nagel). The hidden structure hypothesis allows one to determine which surface ethics judgments are veridical and which are not. This approach is sometimes called “Kantian” to avoid any problem about the status of the original ethics judgments. There is one major problem with the complex form of EPEE. There are alternative exploratory accounts with no way to resolve disputes over which one is correct. Moreover, there is the suspicion that these explorers are merely
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rationalizing private ethics and/or political agendas by populating their hypothesis with whatever they need to confirm their cherished intuitions (i.e., prejudices). This is one of the subjects in which Engelhardt has made his greatest contribution. Here we go back to a point we made earlier, namely, that there is no way to reconcile philosophical disagreements through rational argument alone. Proponents of EPEE thought they could avoid this problem by appeal to scientism, but scientism cannot validate itself (see Capaldi, 1998). In the area of ethics, the mess is even more apparent. Engelhardt has made the following powerful case against the possibility of a philosophical resolution of moral diversity. It is not simply the case that there are significant moral disagreements about substantive issues. Many if not most of these controversies do not appear to be resolvable through sound rational argument. On the one hand, many of the controversies depend upon different foundational metaphysical commitments. As with most metaphysical controversies, resolution is possible only through the granting of particular initial premises and rules of evidence. On the other hand, even when foundational metaphysical issues do not appear to be at stake, the debates turn on different rankings of the good. Again, resolution does not appear to be feasible without begging the question, arguing in a circle, or engaging in infinite regress. One cannot appeal to consequences without knowing how to rank the impact of different approaches with regard to different moral interests (liberty, equality, prosperity, security, and so forth). Nor can one non-controversially appeal to preference satisfaction unless one already grants how one will correct preferences and compare rational versus impassioned preferences, as well as calculate the discount rate for preferences over time. Appeals to disinterested observers, hypothetical choosers, or hypothetical contractors will not avail either. If such decision makers are truly disinterested, they will choose nothing. To choose in a particular way, they must be fitted out with a particular moral sense or thin theory of the good. Intuitions can be met with contrary intuitions. Any particular balancing of claims can be countered with a different approach to achieving a balance. To appeal for guidance to any account of moral rationality one must already have secured content for that moral rationality. Not only is there a strident moral diversity defining debates regarding all substantive issues, but also there is in principle good reason to hold that these debates cannot be brought to closure in a principled fashion through sound rational argument. The partisans of each and every position find themselves embedded within their own discourse so that they are unable to step outside of their own respective hermeneutic circles without embracing new and divergent premises and rules of inferences. Many traditional thinkers find themselves in precisely this position. They are so enmeshed in their own metaphysics and epistemology, so convinced that they are committed to “reason” when what they are committed to is a particular set of premises and rules, so
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able to see the “flaws” in the positions of others who do not accept the same rules, that they quite literally do not understand the alternative positions or even how there can be other positions. More important, they fail to understand the character of contemporary moral debate. What is peculiar about contemporary moral debate is not just the incessant controversy but also the absence of any basis for bringing the controversies to a conclusion in a principled fashion.
VI. Last Refuge The last line of defense is to claim that an ethics expert can facilitate the discussion of ethical issues by helping others to put their thoughts into a clear argument. We can call this the modest but pure argument clarification model. This emphasis on logic is a tenuous connection with the scientism of the Enlightenment Project. However, identifying premises logically does not tell us which premises are true. I suspect that people who do this and call themselves experts are engaging in some sort of subliminal pressuring that gives privilege to certain premises over others.
VII. Politics, Ethics, and Expertise Given the foregoing discussion, I conclude that there is no such thing as ethics expertise. Ethical issues are not the sort of thing about which one can have “expertise.” There are spiritual mentors or ethical mentors within a given community all of whose members subscribe to a substantive view of what is right and what is wrong. In no instance have I ever found that intellectualizing those substantive views helps very much. Usually the most valuable intellectual activity is a critique of previous attempts at over-intellectualization. What meaning, then, can be given to the practice of bioethics? The simple answer, which is all we have space for here, is to seek guidance from spiritualethical mentors on specific issues. What happens if there are incommensurable ethical communities? The simple answer is that you move to the political level and recognize that on the political-legal level all that you will obtain is agreement on procedural norms (e.g., autonomy) that leave different ethical communities or the members thereof to practice as they see fit. We might call this the negotiation model of bioethics. What meaning can be given to the practice of business ethics? A business ethicist can be either a scholar of business ethics or a business ethics practitioner. The point of business education is to understand and explain market activity in the broadest sense. It is a philosophical activity in that it seeks to reveal the role of business activity on the map of our total experience. It is not a theoretical endeavor. It involves knowledge of our tradition of business
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behavior. Comparative studies are valuable in getting us to look more carefully at our traditions. Historical studies would show what people have said and thought—manner of thinking. Its purpose is not to expose errors but to understand its prejudices. Business ethics education is an explanatory not a practical activity; we do not infer practical consequences from understanding or explanation. To be a scholar of business ethics is not directly linked to being a business ethics practitioner. Business ethics as a practice is immanent. That is, it is either identifying the traditional norm(s) relevant to a particular situation or amending existing arrangements by explication of the norms inherent in previous practice. It is very much like the practice of law in the common law tradition. These norms cannot be accessed as a permanent substructure; they can never be definitively explicated but are fertile sources of adaptation; they are an inheritance that does not entail its own future development. Explication is a mode of understanding social practices. It presupposes that all social practices function with implicit norms and that to explicate a practice is to make explicit the inherent norms. In explication we try to clarify that which is routinely taken for granted, namely our ordinary understanding of our practices, in the hope of extracting from our previous practice a set of norms that can be used reflectively to guide future practice. Explication attempts to specify the sense we have of ourselves when we act and to clarify that which serves to guide us. We do not change our ordinary understanding but rather come to know it in a new and better way. Explication is a way of arriving at a kind of practical knowledge that takes human agency as primary. It seeks to mediate practice from within practice itself (P/T).12 Explications are narratives that may or may not contain arguments within them, but the overall explication is not itself an argument. You cannot refute an explication, but you can offer an alternative one. An explication presupposes a general background agreement on what we are trying to achieve; it commences with a diagnosis of the problem at issue; it then proposes a response; it recommends this proposal by considering the consequences likely to follow from acting upon it; it balances these against those of at least one other proposal. We may raise the question whether the norms of market practice are compatible with the norms of specific ethical communities. The simple answer, which is again all we have space for here, is to seek guidance from spiritual-ethical mentors on specific issues. What happens if there are incommensurable ethical communities? The simple answer is that you move to the political level and recognize that once you are on the political-legal level all that you will obtain is agreement on procedural norms (e.g., autonomy) that leave different ethical communities or the members thereof to practice as they see fit within the larger procedural framework. We might call this the negotiation model of business ethics.
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Finally, we can ask in the case of both bioethics and business ethics: Can there be specific ethical communities in which there is serious conflict and confusion both about what the right thing is to do and about who the mentors are or whether the mentors could be misguided on a specific issue? I think the answer is yes. Depending upon how charitable one wants to be we can call those ethical communities (a) dysfunctional, or (b) communities in crisis, or (c) disintegrating communities. This is a story for another occasion.
Notes 1. There are a potentially infinite number of ways in which one can define and defend ‘expertise’ by trivializing the meaning of the term. I shall not waste my time with those definitions. 2. This is not the only way to read Aristotle, as I shall point out later. However, it is one of the more influential readings. 3. The elite is intellectual as opposed to practical in the senses that their status is (a) not the result of past practice or achievement and (b) not dependent on their ability to affect present or future practice and achievement. This is one of the consequences of the T/P paradigm. 4. This view is still present in Orthodox Christianity. 5. The exact relationship is not something that can be explained as any kind of natural process precisely because the transcendent is beyond earthly conceptualization. 6. Lord Acton has famously argued that Christianity was, as a result of the space created, therefore responsible for our notions of political liberty. 7. This is what Voegelin sees as the danger of what he calls ‘Gnosticism’ (see Voegelin, 1968). 8. There arose a distinct notion of anti-clericalism. 9. This did not impact medicine until the last half of the twentieth century. Medicine did not become a disputed area until the development of modern medical technology raised substantive ethics issues and the cost of such technology became a political issue. 10. The formal components (assumptions) of this Axiology are as follows: 1. Primacy of theoretical knowledge. As a consequence of scientism, theoretical knowledge is primary and practical knowledge has a secondary status. The philosophical challenge is not merely to identify the realm of the practical but to explain it theoretically. 2. Dichotomy of fact and value. (a) Only factual judgments can be true. (b) Value judgments are not truths because they do not refer to structures independent of the observer or agents. 3. Science of Ethics. (a) Values are a kind of epiphenomena. (b) Given the primacy of theoretical knowledge and the derivative nature of the social sciences, there can be a physical-scientific and/or social-scientific factual account of the substructure of the context within which values function.
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271 This is how the realm of the practical will be explained, ultimately, in theoretical terms. (i) There is a two-tier view of human psychology in which values are epiphenomena with a materialist substructure. (ii) The relevant explanatory constituents of the substructure are physiological drives; (iii) Freedom is compatible with substructure determinism only if freedom is construed as the absence of arbitrary external constraints, and where restraints are determined to be arbitrary relative to the fundamental drives. (iv) The fundamental drives alleged to exist in the substructure are neither culture specific nor conscious level specific but physiological (e.g., seeking pleasure), and therefore more universal. (v) The fundamental drives also seek some kind of homeostasis or maximization that permits negotiation or overruling specific rules (utilitarianism). (vi) The foregoing conception of freedom leads to a political conception of ethics based on external social sanctions instead of morality (which involves the inner sanction of autonomous agents). (vii) This substructure allows for a social technology in which cognition can control volition because this substructure is not dependent upon a perspective; it is a structure that reveals our basic and universal drives so that we respond automatically (causally) to any information about this structure. (viii) If we add a cultural (i.e., social and historical) dimension to our understanding of this substructure (i.e., a social epistemology) we arrive at Hegelian versions of analytic philosophical ethics. (ix) This is the science of ethics for which analytic philosophers seek, i.e., this is the level at which we shall find explanations that exhibit realism, causality, and empirical verifiability but not deductivity. (c) Knowledge of this substructure is what permits social and political planning. (i) Liberalism, socialism, and Marxism all subscribe to the two-tier view of human psychology in
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Nicholas Capaldi which values are epiphenomena with a materialist substructure that is transcultural, timeless, and allows for a social engineering that renders human beings compatible and cooperative (homeostasis). (ii) This substructure can be appealed to in order to correct surface disagreements and overcome relativism. (iii) In the case of liberalism the upper level consists of rights (e.g., life, liberty, property, etc.) that are not directly equatable with or deducible from a specific account of the good life. (iv) If we supplement the cultural account with some notion of homeostasis, the Hegelian versions become compatible with socialism and Marxism
on the political level. 11. Philosophy is now (a) either the study of the logic of science or (b) a social science explaining both individual (including how we learn) and social behavior. 12. It can be argued that this philosophical activity is also to be found in Aristotle.
Bibliography Capaldi, N. The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation. Dordrect: Kluwer, 1998. Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. ———. “The Ordination of Bioethicists as Secular Moral Experts.” Social Philosophy and Policy 19(2002): 59-82. Voegelin, E. Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essays. Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1968.
On the Appropriateness of a Christian Bioethics Thomas A. Cavanaugh
In this paper, I consider The Foundations of Christian Bioethics with the intent of indicating the unique relation that obtains between Christianity and Bioethics such that it makes sense to have a work so entitled. In our pluralistic age, adjectival modifications abound. Thus, initially, few would remark upon the reasonableness of entitling a volume Christian Bioethics. Somewhat similarly, one would take little note of volumes entitled Islamic Bioethics, Japanese Bioethics, and so forth.1 One observes, however, the paucity of titles such as Christian Geometry or Buddhist Astronomy. This calls for explanation. At the very least, our ready acceptance of the plausibility of a Christian Bioethics deserves attention when contrasted with our initial skepticism of a Christian Mathematics. In what follows, I argue two claims. First, that Bioethics occupies a relatively unique position amongst practical disciplines insofar as its subject matter, the human being as patient, would not exist and cannot adequately be known absent revelation of the Fall. Second, and following from this first claim, I argue that Bioethics absent revelation apprehends the fallen human condition as basic. Thus, Bioethics cannot understand disease as a symptom of the human problem, namely, sin. Accordingly, a Christian Bioethics is a sound endeavor.
I. Differentiating Disciplines In his Commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate (in Questions V and VI), Saint Thomas Aquinas addresses the division and the methods of the different sciences (Maurer, 1963). Saint Thomas follows and elaborates upon Aristotle’s abbreviated discussion of the bases for differentiating Arithmetic, Physics, and Metaphysics. Aquinas proposes that one differentiates these speculative disciplines (concerned with knowledge ordered towards understanding in 273 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 273-283) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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contrast to practical sciences ordered towards doing or making) from one another in terms of two aspects. The first concerns the role of matter in the existence of the thing known. The second concerns the role of matter in knowing the thing. Physics studies material being in motion. Mobile being requires matter for its existence. Moreover, one may not abstract from matter in one’s knowledge of mobile being. Thus, matter plays a crucial role both in the existence of the thing Physics studies and in knowing that object. In Arithmetic, one studies being insofar as it admits of quantity. While being would not admit of quantity were it not material—that is, there would not be three of something nor the concept three absent stuff—one need not introduce matter or stuff into one’s mathematical knowledge. Indeed, one tends to abstract from matter even in one’s geometrical representations. Thus, for example, in a geometrical argument a triangle is not of a specific size. Rather, one attends to the properties that any sized triangle of certain proportions could have—such as a right-angled isosceles triangle. While mathematical phenomena cannot exist apart from stuff, they can be understood apart from matter. Metaphysics concerns being insofar as it exists, simply. Because some beings—immaterial beings—exist independently of matter, one need not abstract from matter in order to understand them. Indeed, immaterial beings—such as the one who moves all things by being loved to whose existence Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics—cannot be known if one incorporates matter into one’s understanding of them. Accordingly, the subject matter of Metaphysics exists independently of matter. Therefore, it can—indeed must—be so understood. Thus, Aquinas differentiates the speculative sciences from one another to the extent to which matter plays (or lacks) a role both in the existence of the objects they study and in the very act of knowing them. He does so because he—again, following Aristotle—holds knowledge to differ from sensation insofar as knowledge abstracts from matter while sensation remains immersed in the features of stuff. Sensation, therefore, does not get beyond the particular while knowledge moves towards the general and away from the individual by means of abstraction. Accordingly, Aristotle and Aquinas offer a philosophical division of the sciences. They do so by attending to matter’s role in knowledge as a further articulation of the original difference between sensation and knowledge. Analogously, I propose a theological and Christian division of disciplines in terms of their subject matter’s relation to divinely revealed truths, such as The Fall and Christ’s Incarnation, Suffering, and Death. Following Aquinas’s division of the sciences, I note the relation between these revealed truths, on the one hand, and the existence of certain disciplines’ subject matters and knowledge of those subject matters, on the other. I contend that Bioethics is relatively unique amongst practical disciplines insofar as the
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subject matter with which it deals, namely, agents and actions bearing on patients—i.e., humans as sick, in pain, and dying—would not exist absent the Fall. Moreover, only a Christian Bioethics can fully understand how to act with respect to patients as patients. For a Christian Bioethics can distinguish pain, suffering, and death as symptoms from the underlying disease, sin. In contrast, secular Bioethics—at least typically—misapprehends the patient’s diseased condition as fundamental. Thus, Bioethics has only a superficial knowledge of the patient’s relation to suffering, sickness, pain, and death. Accordingly, as I will now argue, Christian Bioethics correctly apprehends the patient as a patient by distinguishing sin as a disease from sickness as a symptom. In making this claim, I first contrast Bioethics from other practical disciplines.
II. Differentiating Politics, Economics, Ethics, and Bioethics In his discussion of the division of the sciences, St. Thomas discusses speculative disciplines ordered towards knowledge for its own sake. In contrast to speculative sciences, there are practical disciplines such as Politics, Economics, and Ethics ordered towards acting and making. Bioethics is a practical discipline ordered towards acting well in the forum defined by medicine. Bioethics considers matters as diverse as research into the causes of and cures for disease, caring for sick persons, the conduct of patients, and a myriad of other acts bearing upon human sickness. At the center of Bioethics, one finds the patient. Patient comes from the Latin patior - pati – passus, meaning to bear, undergo, suffer, or endure. One defines a patient as one who suffers, bears, undergoes, endures, or is subject to sickness. Sometimes well-intentioned thinkers—in the hope of empowering a patient—propose to refer to him as a client. Similarly, occasionally some institutions of health care ask their employees to refer to the patient as a customer. Of course, by doing so one loses the connotations associated with being a patient: of being sick, of bearing with something involuntarily, of being in need, of being dependent, of being vulnerable (from the Latin vulnus meaning naked), and so on. As I will shortly argue, one cannot eliminate sickness, suffering, and death from Bioethics. Insofar as the venerable term patient captures these ineradicable phenomena definitive of Bioethics, we must retain it in our vocabulary. Since Bioethics concerns practical knowledge, to understand the unique relation of Bioethics to Christianity and thereby to understand the appropriateness of a Christian Bioethics, one must consider other practical disciplines. I will consider Politics, Economics, and Ethics (understanding Politics to include Law) as prominent and important disciplines that nicely contrast with Bioethics and illustrate the uniqueness and appropriateness of a Christian Bioethics. Politics addresses how to govern men as social animals. Famously, James Madison asserts that Government would not exist were men not fallen:
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Here, Madison asserts that school of political thought that holds that absent fallen human nature, government would not be necessary. Such thinkers often refer to government as a necessary evil. Others differ, holding that the need for government does not arise entirely from the fact that we now live in a state of fallen human nature. Rather, government partially addresses the need to coordinate human actions, even given entirely virtuous citizens. Thus, insofar as we have arbitrary yet necessary rules to coordinate our behavior, government is not a necessary evil. Rather, government is an art that would exist even if men were angels in their behavior. Of course, much of government would not exist were there no Fall. For example, there would be no need for criminal law, punishment, law enforcement, or a military. Nonetheless, government as a coordinator and organizer would exist if man were not fallen. Accordingly, Politics would exist—albeit in an abbreviated fashion—absent the Fall. Moreover, Politics currently can adequately understand its task of securing the human good, e.g., of coordination, absent an understanding of man’s fallen nature and other revealed truths central to Christianity. Thus, neither Politics’s subject matter nor its understanding of that subject matter depends upon the facts at the center of Christian revelation. Surely, because we are fallen and our understanding is obscured, we do not grasp political truths as easily or as clearly as we would absent the Fall. Nonetheless, those truths that we may fail to grasp due to the Fall are not truths dependent upon our being fallen. So, for example, humans are naturally social animals. Because we are fallen, we may, as Hobbes, fail to apprehend this truth about ourselves. Yet, those who—as Plato—succeed in apprehending this truth about humans as social do not do so by incorporating some understanding of the Fall in their apprehension of this truth. Thus, a significant body of political truths do not require knowledge of the Fall to be understood. Turn now to consider Economics. Roughly, Economics concerns how to produce material prosperity. Absent the Fall, there would certainly be no poverty, nor would there be problems such as the just distribution of goods or difficulty in securing one’s material needs. For the ordeal of labor results from sin: By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Gen. 3:19)
Nonetheless, were there no Fall, one would still find human arts that transform nature, specialization in these arts, and exchange of goods and
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services to meet human needs and desires. One would also find Economics, to the extent to which it addresses these matters. Of course, much of Economics would be absent. So, for example, just as in Politics one would find no criminal law, in Economics one would not find the study of poverty or of market failure. Yet, insofar as Economics cannot be reduced to features that would not exist absent sin, this discipline, its subject matter, and understanding of that subject matter would exist even in Eden. Again, after Eden’s loss, while a proper understanding of wealth and its place in a human life may be obscured by the darkness that descends upon the human intellect, failure to understand wealth appropriately—e.g., considering it an end instead of a means—does not result from a failure to incorporate divine revelation into one’s Economics. For, prior to Revelation, thinkers such as Aristotle correctly apprehended the nature of wealth as a means. Now consider the practical discipline most proximate to Bioethics, namely, Ethics. Ethics concerns how one becomes a virtuous agent and, thereby, how one achieves human happiness. Of course, absent the Fall there would be Ethics: there would be such phenomena as acting virtuously and becoming virtuous. Indeed, there would be no other kind of conduct. For example, we would not struggle with concupiscence that leads us astray from the mean in which virtues of character such as temperance consist. Nor would we err by vicious acts. Clearly, the subject matter of Ethics would exist and knowledge of that subject matter—the constituents of human happiness—would be correctly apprehended in Eden. Currently, the Fall obscures our ability to apprehend our end. As Aquinas notes, supernatural revelation is necessary for human beings to apprehend their true end insofar as, otherwise, few would know God, these only after much time and study, and with an admixture of error. The loss of Eden significantly affects ethical knowledge while not obliterating it. Thus, to greater and lesser extents the subjects and knowledge of the subjects of Politics, Economics, and Ethics would exist absent the Fall. Similarly, given the Fall, knowledge of the subjects of these disciplines is available to reason unaided by Faith. Bioethics, however, differs. For Bioethics addresses how one conducts oneself regarding sickness, suffering, and death. Thereby, Bioethics confronts phenomena that result immediately from Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. Here, one encounters questions such as: How ought one to experience pain, suffer, and die? How ought one to care for those who experience pain, suffer, and die? Pain, suffering, and death would not exist absent the Fall. Thus, Bioethics addresses realities that would not exist in Eden. We experience pain, suffer, and die as the fruits of our first parents’ Original Sin. Were there no sin, there would be no medicine or therapy for these symptoms. In this respect, Bioethics differs from Politics (and, as noted, Economics, and Ethics more generally) insofar as the latter would exist were there no Fall. Again, Politics—in addition to dealing with the unique problems of fallen
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man such as retributive justice—also addresses the practical issues that arise from human beings as social animals regardless of their fallen state. That is, Politics concerns matters of distributive justice, such as how property is held and shared, that would attend human life even if Adam and Eve had not fallen from God’s grace. Similarly, Politics concerns the necessary, yet arbitrary coordination of human activities that do not arise because of man’s fallen state. Rather, such need for coordination attends the human condition as social and naturally in need of the political art. Of course, were there no Fall, there would be no Christian Politics, just as there would be no Christian Bioethics. For absent the felix culpa, there would be no Christ.2 More to the point, however, is not that there would be no Christian Bioethics, but that there would be no Bioethics at all. For absent pain, suffering, and death due to sin, there is no medical therapy, and thus no ethic bearing upon medical therapy, even a secular Bioethics. Thus, Bioethics has a much more intimate relationship to Christianity than other disciplines to the extent to which it addresses some of the very phenomena that Christ does. Accordingly, presenting a Christian Bioethics has significant import for Christianity, for the foundations of Bioethics are proximate to those of Christianity itself. In what follows, I argue that Bioethics absent revelation apprehends the fallen human condition as basic. Thus, Bioethics cannot understand disease as a symptom of the basic human problem, namely, sin. Christian Bioethics can so differentiate sin and sickness. Moreover, this distinction has practical ramifications, as I note in what follows.
III. Distinguishing Diseases and Symptoms, Sin and Sickness Original Sin causes the evils of pain, suffering, and death and justly leads to these phenomena. As with evil, pain, suffering, and death are to be avoided. Accordingly, these phenomena appropriately give rise to medical therapies and attempts to relieve pain, sickness, suffering, and, at the least, to postpone death. Thus understood, medicine is a response to the symptoms of sin. Of course, not all so understand disease. Indeed, only a Christian or theologically-informed Bioethics apprehends illness as a symptom. Typically, Bioethics and medical interventions informed by secular Bioethics understand disease as a basic reality beyond which one need not inquire. Granting that point, to what practical ramifications could this conceptual difference lead? Regardless of how a Christian Bioethics conceives of illness, will it not propose to treat illness as a secular Bioethics would, given that they agree on the basic badness of sickness? This modest conceptual difference has significant practical import, although we may be on the historical threshold of noticing it. That is, the difference between Christian and secular Bioethics with respect to their differing conceptualizations of
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disease as symptom of sin and disease as basic illness becomes more evident as medical technology advances in its ability to mitigate and perhaps indefinitely postpone death. To explore this possibility, one must consider the origins of the medical ethic, and its most basic quandary.
IV. Bioethics’ Question In his magisterial, The New Medicine and the Old Ethics, the historian of medical ethics, Albert Jonsen, claims that the central tension at the heart of medicine and medical ethics is the conflict of interest that obtains between the goods of the patient and those of the physician: the danger of contagion in the treatment of diseases; the opposition of the financial well-being of the doctor and the patient’s care found both within fee-for-service reimbursement plans and capitated systems; and the significant benefits to physicians and risks to patients in the use of experimental therapies illustrate the variety of conflicts of interests found in medicine. Understandably, Jonsen proposes that medical ethics exists primarily to address this ineliminable tension. While conflicts of interest both inherently attend the practice of medicine and deserve much attention in medical ethics, one errs in thinking that they constitute the heart of Bioethics. Such conflicts, while they may appear more pronounced in medical ethics, attend all professional activities. A lawyer, for example, suffers a conflict of interest in serving as an advocate for, at times, opposing interests. Professors bear conflicts of interest in assigning their own texts for a course, and, more profoundly, in balancing the rewards for research with their obligations to their students. All professions suffer conflicts of interest. Moreover, the ethics of each profession must address how to deal with these conflicts. For example, ethicists propose that accountants must avoid both the reality of a conflict of interest, as well as the mere appearance of such a conflict—a very demanding standard. Thus, while conflicts of interest certainly pose problems in medical ethics, they do not constitute the definitive issues of medical ethics. Rather, the central ethical issue definitive of medical ethics concerns the ends towards which one orders the medical art. One finds this problem articulated at the very beginnings of the medical ethic in the West in the myth of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Asclepius illustrates the ethical quandary at the heart of medicine in his possession of two vials of the Gorgon’s blood, given to him by Athena. The blood taken from the right side of the Gorgon heals and restores life, while that taken from the left side sickens and kills. Just as the Asclepian symbol of medicine, a single snake on a staff, symbolizes the homeopathic principle that he who sickens, heals (the snake both wounds with venom and heals with his intimate knowledge of the earth), so this principle underlies the problem at the center of medical practice. For the power to heal encompasses the power to sicken. To what end will one order this ability: towards death or towards life? In Greek myth, Asclepius typically uses his power to heal and not to
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sicken. Hippocrates—who establishes one branch of Asclepian practice— definitively orients the medical art towards health and life by forswearing poisoning and killing. Yet, if one were to leave this question of the proper ordination of medicine as if it were sufficiently answered, merely holding that medicine must not be used to sicken and to kill, one would not have come fully to grips with the central ethical quandary definitive of medicine. For, while that problem encompasses medicine’s orientation to death and sickness, it is not limited to it. Indeed, even Hippocrates never addresses the more profound, underlying problem that the possibility of killing and sickening is but one instance of, namely, the technological imperative. With certain qualifications bearing upon consent and the welfare of others, that command generally asserts that if one has a means to relieve pain, suffering, and death, then one should employ that means to do so. Of course, Hippocrates does not address this problem because his characteristic difficulty is the paucity of his armamentarium against sickness, pain, and death. Nonetheless, one sees in the Asclepian myth that this difficulty presents itself right from the beginning in medical practice. Recall that the astronomical constellation Ophiuchus (the serpent-bearer) immortalizes Asclepius after Zeus punishes him. Zeus punishes Asclepius, not for violating the forthcoming Hippocratic Oath in an act of killing or sickening accomplished by using the vial of blood from the Gorgon’s left side. Rather, Asclepius suffers Zeus’s wrath for his use of the medical art to raise the dead. In interpreting the myth, some err by holding that Zeus punishes Asclepius for accepting money to raise the dead. While greed may be the motive for using his art to raise the dead, Zeus does not object to Asclepius’ greed. Rather, the gods punish Asclepius for going beyond the appropriate bounds of medicine. Hades’ complaints over the loss of his kingdom of the dead lead Zeus to kill Asclepius so that mortals may not acquire immortality via medicine. Zeus does not object to the use of the blood from the Gorgon’s left side to kill. Rather, the boundary violated bears upon the use of the medical art—blood from the Gorgon’s right side—to cure death. Death is not a proper problem for medicine. Rather, it is a defining boundary in two ways. First, medicine is not to be used to kill. Second, medicine is not to be used to cure death. As noted, curing death was not an issue for Hippocrates. Yet, for current medicine it may become one. Here we see the import of a Christian Bioethics as it addresses the issue definitive of medical ethics: to what ends ought we to direct the medical art? In medicine, the technological imperative does not assert that physicians ought to use their art to produce sickness, death, or, for example, weapons. Thus, the technological imperative does not violate the definitive Hippocratic commitment not to use this art to sicken and kill. Rather, this imperative commands that one must do what one can to relieve pain, suffering and, if possible, death. As technological, one does not understand the full import of this imperative absent a fully developed technology. Thus, while Hippocrates
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sees the significance of declaring death and sickness out of bounds, he does not commit himself or his followers not to raise the dead. For, even with his knowledge of the Asclepian myth and of how out of bounds this would be, his art does not offer him the opportunity to raise the dead. We, however, may stand at the threshold of this boundary, for the ability indefinitely to forestall death may become available in near decades. Research on cellular aging, stem cells, organ tissue transplant therapies, and allied technological developments may offer us in the not-too-distant future the opportunity to postpone death significantly, perhaps indefinitely. Of course, this would not be to raise the dead, as Asclepius did. Yet, it might become tantamount to the ability to address death itself as a disease. Of course, such technologies remain largely speculative. Accordingly, thoughts about how such technologies would affect human lives remain conjectural. Nonetheless, given the Asclepian myth’s bearing upon the use of medicine to raise the dead, one wonders if the vial from the right side of the Gorgon may not shortly be so used once again. How does this possibility bear upon the overall argument regarding Christian Bioethics’ ability to distinguish disease as a symptom from disease as basic? If secular Bioethics cannot but help to take disease as basic, then given technological developments that promise to be capable of addressing death itself, such a Bioethics would typically argue on behalf of such technologies as profoundly good. A Christian Bioethics, in contrast, although it may not necessarily reject the use of such technologies, would certainly insist that death can never be adequately treated by medical technology. For death is a symptom of the first disease, sin. The human as patient results from the human as transgressor. Thus, a Christian Bioethics aware of this relationship correctly apprehends what stands at the center of all Bioethics, the human as patient. Accordingly, those who propose to articulate a Christian Bioethics— as Engelhardt does—do so with good reason. Given his emphasis upon the liturgical aspect of a Christian Bioethics, I wish now in conclusion to address specific medical acts that lend themselves to becoming part of Christian liturgical life.
V. Thou Shalts in a Christian Bioethics Christian Bioethics typically receives note for what it prohibits, e.g., abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and so on, because of the significant differences between secular and Christian Bioethics in their treatment of reproduction, abortion, and death. Yet, just as the Natural Law’s first principle commands that one does good and avoids evil, so, too, does Christian Bioethics. In what follows, I conclude this reflection on the appropriateness of a Christian Bioethics by briefly considering the doing of good that such an ethic proposes. Moreover, following Engelhardt’s suggestion of the role of the liturgy in therapy, I consider the liturgical possibilities these acts offer.
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“Man hath no greater love than this: that he give up his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Following Jesus, a Christian Bioethics sees pain, suffering, and death as opportunities to participate in His redemptive suffering. Without Christ’s revelation, human suffering and death remain phenomena that we cannot fully understand and in which we can find no ultimate meaningfulness. The punishment for our first parents’ sin is itself redeemed by Christ in His voluntary acceptance of death to which He was not in justice subject.3 Accordingly, by accepting His passion and crucifixion on our behalf, He enables us to offer our otherwise due suffering and deaths for others. A Christian Bioethics proposes that patients offer their pain, suffering, and deaths up for the redemption of others. Of course, it would be a perversion of the Christian understanding to seek out pain, suffering, and death or to fail to avoid these basic evils to offer them up for others. Nonetheless, given their inevitability, patients will eventually have the opportunity to offer their own sufferings and deaths up for others, just as Jesus did. The willingness to do so and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that allow one to do so are at the foundations of a Christian Bioethics. Students of a Christian Bioethics offer up their sufferings and deaths for others. Currently, Christian communities of worship typically pray for the sick. Indeed, in the Roman Catholic liturgy the rubric for the prayers of the faithful calls for a praying for the sick of the community. A Christian Bioethics would suggest, additionally, that the sick offer up their pain, suffering, illness, and death for others, just as Christ did. Physicians and nurses limited in their ability entirely to eradicate a patient’s pain and symptoms might incorporate into their armamentarium the age old advice of “offering it up.” Such an opportunity might give a patient the needed insight into her condition that her pain and suffering admits of meaning and value. Of course, physicians and nurses could only do so at the threshold of their ability to address the patient’s pain and symptoms. Moreover, such advice could only be offered meaningfully to a patient who understood the import of pain and illness and the opportunity these phenomena represent. Nonetheless, a communal acknowledgment of this meaning on the part of care-givers reflects a Bioethics imbued by Christianity. Similarly, just as Jesus shed His blood for others, those familiar with a Christian Bioethics will give their own blood for patients. One can imagine a sodality or Christian fellowship—it would be surprising if one does not exist somewhere—that encourages the regular giving of blood to the local blood bank in imitation of Christ’s shedding of His blood on our behalf.4 Such a sodality would encourage Christians to imitate Christ, perhaps setting aside special days on which to give blood in conjunction with the liturgical calendar, such as on Good Friday, or on Fridays during the year, in commemoration of Christ’s death. Finally, a Christian Bioethics will also support and advocate the donation of vital bodily organs upon one’s death as a sharing of the precious gift of life.
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Just as Jesus gave His life, so a serious follower of a Christian Bioethics would be willing to donate his organs and corpse so that others might live. Indeed, one would think that organ donation would be embraced by the Christian Churches and seen as an act of distinctively Christian charity. Such organ donation might be made liturgical at the Rite of Christian burial at which the deceased’s act of donation would be recognized as a foreshadowing of Christ’s bringing life from death, just as the organ donor’s act brings life from the sorrow of his death. In conclusion, given its unique abilities to apprehend the human being as a patient and, thereby, to distinguish disease as a symptom from disease as basic phenomenon, thinkers sensibly propose a Christian Bioethics. Moreover, such a Bioethics clearly makes specific medical acts more meaningful by incorporating them into Christian worship.
Notes 1. For example, see Hoshino, 1997. 2. In the Exultet hymn in the Liturgy for Holy Saturday Liturgy one reads: “O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem!” One might translate this, “O happy fault which merited to have so great and so good a redeemer.” 3. The point here is not that Christ accepted a death that was unjust—that of an innocent man unjustly condemned to death. Rather, Jesus was not in justice subject to death. Had He not accepted death, He would not have died. Thus, He alone had the ability to pay our debt. Moreover, He thereby transformed our payment of our debt by death and suffering so much so that we now may offer our sufferings and deaths on behalf of others. 4. Perhaps, this practice could be named Sangue Christe, in Texan manner. In my undergraduate years, one faithful Jesuit priest, Father Thomas Aquinas McGovern, S.J., inconspicuously and regularly gave his blood in imitation of Christ’s shedding of His Blood. Certainly, there must be many Christians who think of Jesus’ example when they do give blood. Yet, one would think it would rise to a more conscious and organized level at which the giving of blood could become sacramental, like the wearing of a medal or blessing oneself with holy water upon entering a church.
Bibliography Engelhardt, H.T., Jr. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2000. Hoshino, K., ed. Japanese and Western Bioethics: Studies in Moral Diversity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Jonsen, A.R. The New Medicine and the Old Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Madison, J. Federalist, #51. New York: New American Library, 1961. Mauer, A. The Division and Methods of the Sciences: Questions V and VI of Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, translated by A. Maurer. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963.
Part IV A Restatement
Re-reading Re-reading Engelhardt H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.
I. Claiming Too Much and Claiming Too Little: Moral Diversity and the Myth of Consensus The controversies concerning my work include complaints that I claim too little, as well as complaints that I claim too much. My work may indeed seem puzzling. On the one hand, I explore the character of the world when approached apart from God. I show how little moral guidance can be derived from sound, rational, secular moral argument. On the other hand, I examine the implications of the traditional Christian experience of God and show the rich and particular moral guidance that is available. My attempt has also been to show the compatibility of these two projects. My project of showing how the second completes what is empty in the first and transforms the secular moral vision (Engelhardt, 1991) spans some two decades (Minogue et al. 1997). As for having claimed too little, there are various contentions lodged against my claim of having secured good grounds for a secular moral epistemological skepticism. As I argue, secular moral rationality cannot establish which morality is canonical or which view of human flourishing is normative, because we do not share common basic moral premises or rules of evidence. Secular moral pluralism marks the fallen human condition. The position I establish is not that of a moral metaphysical skepticism. I do not deny that there is in fact one canonical normative account of the good, the right, and the holy. I only demonstrate that secular rational argument cannot show which among the many competing secular moralities is canonical. Secular sound rational argument cannot get us free from the moral pluralism we confront. In the face of this circumstance, I give an account of, and a justification for, a sparse common secular morality grounded in permission that can bind moral 285 A.S. Iltis & M.J. Cherry (eds), At the Roots of Christian Bioethics (pp. 285-315) © 2010 by Scrivener Publishing
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strangers. The fallen human condition is one in which markets flourish and moral strangers, should they wish, can collaborate with moral authority in morally sparse projects. This human condition is one in which a web of moral authority grounded in consent binds not only moral strangers but moral enemies. The secular world is characterized not just by moral pluralism and sparse procedurally grounded moral practices, but by ultimate moral and metaphysical disorientation. Within the confines of secular moral rationality, all is viewed as if it were without ultimate meaning, as if all came from nowhere, went to nowhere, and for no final purpose. Within the horizon of secular experience, there is nothing that can be said about the meaning of things beyond reality simply being there to be embedded in human practices. Cut off from even the hope of a point of transcendence that can serve as a moral and metaphysical anchor, man becomes the measure of all things and there are different and contending human measuring rods.1 The full implications of this state of affairs are still largely unacknowledged, for they bring into question such currently dominant secular pieties as human dignity and human rights by undercutting their claims to centrality in morality, law, and public policy. Such secular moral claims become particular commitments within particular moral understandings. They become elements of one among numerous and competing moral understandings. Nevertheless, many still aspire to affirm as canonical particular, secularly transformed Christian moral understandings, absent a recognition of the Christian God (Vattimo, 2002). Hence my having been charged with claiming too little. As for having claimed too much, I am faulted for having pointed out that there is no final way free from this moral and metaphysical disorientation except through experience of the Trinity. My work in various ways has argued for the impossibility of a secular moral surrogate for Christianity, not in order to point towards nihilism, but in order to show the way to the God Who lives. The reader is then confronted with the core empirical claim of traditional Christianity: as a noetic-empirical fact of the matter one can know that God lives and that He is the God preached by the Christians (Hierotheos, 1998; Engelhardt, 2006a; Romanides, 2008). The reader is brought from a set of arguments about how little we can know philosophically to how much we can know theologically. Taking this last step is difficult, because it requires ascetic commitment. It requires breaking one’s pride and submitting to God. It demands a personal turn to a personal God. This step towards theological knowledge is impossible unless one takes on a new way of life. It is for this reason that it is in general easier to gain agreement about claims regarding our moral pluralism, its intractability, and the limits of secular moral knowledge, than it is to gain agreement to join in the project of gaining theological knowledge through ascetic struggle. Nevertheless, succeeding in bringing persons to acknowledge moral diversity itself remains difficult.
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One might think it would be simple to show that humans do not possess a common morality or a single content-full bioethics. After all, humans disagree vociferously regarding when sexual relations are morally illicit, as with regard to the moral status of bestiality, homosexual liaisons, or for that matter sexual relations outside of the marriage of a man and a woman. We disagree about the nature of social justice, the strength of individual property rights, the circumstances under which needs justify claim rights that trump claims to property, and about the moral legitimacy of social democratic states. We also disagree about the circumstances under which humans may be killed, as illustrated by debates regarding human embryonic research, abortion, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, and capital punishment. We do not agree as to how one should rank such cardinal values as liberty, equality, prosperity, and security as illustrated by the differences between the political and social systems of Canada and Singapore. We do not share a single set of settled moral judgments. We do not share a common morality. More fundamentally, we do not share the basic moral premises or rules of moral evidence that would allow us to resolve by sound rational argument our disputes about the proper nature of morality and bioethics. We are left with profoundly different accounts of morality and human flourishing, framed within different accounts of the ultimate meaning of things. One’s view of the nature of human flourishing changes if one no longer recognizes God, along with rewards or punishments in the world that is to come, and instead approaches reality as if all is without final purpose and there is no life beyond the grave. As Elisabeth Anscombe puts it with respect to morality, the loss of a recognition of God’s existence and of immortality radically changes the practical force of morality: “It is as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten” (Anscombe, 1958, p. 6). Among other things, once the existence of God is denied, the absolute claims of morality are undercut, as Kant recognizes in the Canon of Reason in the First Critique and in the Dialectic of The Critique of Practical Reason. Because the genesis, the justification, and the motivation of morality are no longer recognized as in principle united in God, they in practice fragment into disparate sets of considerations. As to the genesis of morality, it becomes in part a biologically-based phenomenon and, as with all such phenomena, likely marked by a polymorphism of moral inclinations and sentiments that in different balances among inclinations and sentiments conveys different advantages for inclusive fitness, in different circumstances. Different balances of egoism and altruism, inclinations to abide by moral rules or inclinations hypocritically to violate them, will be more or less productive of social stability, wealth, and inclusive fitness in different socio-cultural and physical environmental niches. Claims regarding the good, the right, and the virtuous are also in principle placed within different frameworks of justification, ranging from various utilitarian accounts to
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diverse deontological accounts. Finally, the moral life can in principle be supported by different plausible motivating considerations. The intersection of these factors produces a robust plurality of moral visions. As Vattimo observes, “Atheism … [is] another catastrophic Tower of Babel” (Vattimo, 1991, p. 31). There need no longer be one particular content, justification, or motivation for the moral life, since there is no longer in principle a single, canonical perspective from which to define that content, establish a justification, or select a proper constellation of motivations to be moral. Despite all these points of profound disagreement regarding the character and substance of morality, there are claims of moral consensus. The Foundations of Bioethics (Engelhardt, 1986, 1996), as well as an edited volume on aspirations to a global bioethics (Engelhardt, 2006a), addresses this paradoxical state of affairs: namely, there are incessant, indeed intractable moral disputes, combined with passionate claims of consensus. Often, the agenda behind such denials is rather clear. There is a desperate commitment on the part of many to deny the foundational moral pluralism defining our secular culture so as to be able without controversy to announce various forms of putative common agreement regarding the moral implications of human dignity and particular views of an ever-increasing list of basic human rights. Yet, such claims of human dignity and human rights are generally unsecured by sound rational argument, in that the claims depend on particular moral premises and rules of moral evidence that are themselves unsecured. It will not do simply to renounce all claims to foundationalism, because then one is left with the canonization of the particular perspectives and conceits of particular dominant groups in particular localities. We are left with a paradoxical state of affairs in which there is both robust moral pluralism and the general assertion of consensus can be accounted for by a number of circumstances. First, this dogged presumption of consensus is sustained by a widespread false consciousness, an ideology of consensus that serves the economic and political interests of those who endorse it. This ideology, whether or not explicitly recognized, allows its supporters to sell their services as moral experts supposedly privy to the canonical morality that should supply the bases for a putatively universally rational and generally morally justifiable public policy. That is, the affirmation of the ideology of a common morality and of a consensus allows its defenders to forward their services in advancing particular moral, policy, and political agendas as if they represented the one and only rationally defensible moral position. Without such an assertion of rational consensus, such “experts” would have to acknowledge that they are only experts regarding, and defenders of, one among a number of competing moralities. They would be recognized as merely offering their services as experts regarding the claims of a particular moral-philosophical sect. Second, ideological interests in consensus are further strengthened by the illusion of consensus generated by the recommendations and statements
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produced by many ethics commissions and committees. What goes unnoticed is the circumstance that most do not appoint to ethics committees and commissions that must reach substantive conclusions persons of truly diverse normative commitments. If persons appointed to such committees represented the range of actual moral diversity, such committees would produce interminable debate and controversy rather than conclusions and recommendations. The policy- and agenda-oriented character of the incentives for selecting particular members for such committees and commissions facilitates the social construction of consensus. This circumstance leads to changes in the character of the moral views and of the “consensus” endorsed by such committees and commissions as those appointing their members, and consequently the membership of such commissions and committees, change. This circumstance is amply demonstrated by the differences in moral positions and ideology between the National Bioethics Advisory Commission appointed during Bill Clinton’s presidency and the President’s Council on Bioethics appointed during George W. Bush’s presidency. The denial of intractable moral pluralism and the affirmation of moral consensus are also in part rooted in fears that the balkanization of societies might be further strengthened, given an honest appraisal of our moral condition and a subsequent increasing self-identity of persons around the particular moral communities to which they are committed. In short, claims of consensus function as an element of a Realpolitik in which consensus is claimed in order to aid in the establishment of a particular social agenda. For example, when a particular moral and political agenda is advanced as the basis of claims regarding human rights and human dignity, it often becomes politically incorrect, a matter of secular heresy, to be skeptical about such claims. Alleging the existence of a common moral vision may also contribute to maintaining support for law and public policy by convincing people of the moral rightness, not the merely legal rightness, of governing law. The result of all this is that, despite the circumstance that the contemporary, dominant, secular culture is defined by an intractable pluralism, it is also characterized by a denial of this state of affairs, along with the affirmation of the claim that there is a common morality that supports a common bioethics that can be laid out through a generally accepted bioethical methodology (e.g., with the four principles of Beauchamp and Childress, 1979). These circumstances, as well as others, are stumbling blocks on the way to understanding my work, which starts from a frank acknowledgement of the moral pluralism that defines the human condition and the limits to being able to establish a moral authority for much of law and governmental action. Some of the essays in this volume also explore these stumbling blocks by describing, analyzing, and evaluating the problems my work has addressed. Others do so by falling prey to these very stumbling blocks. After all, many of these stumbling blocks, such as the inclination towards passionately advancing
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claims regarding the existence of consensus, are integral to the self-deceptions of the dominant, secular culture within which we find ourselves. That culture tends to obscure its own characteristics by its very taken-for-granted character. It tends to hide the profound moral pluralism that brings many of its core assumptions into question. Many who address my work do not concede the existence of this moral pluralism, although their disagreements with my view concerning the possibilities for a general secular morality and their disagreements with the moral commitments of Orthodox Christians demonstrate that which they wish to deny: moralities and bioethics are substantively plural.
II. Living in a World without Ultimate Meaning Another difficulty lies in a failure of many readers to appreciate the limits of human reason, the transcendence of God, and the implications for moral theory and theology, points addressed in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Engelhardt, 2000). Many are also not willing to recognize the deep metaphysical disorientation that results from our secular culture’s commitment to regarding humans and the cosmos as ultimately meaningless, as coming from nowhere, going nowhere, all for no discernible, ultimate purpose. Indeed, this culture seeks to embrace this circumstance as a virtue. There is a hope to locate all within a horizon of finitude and immanence that can obscure any sense of a loss or importance of ultimate meaning. Many have the hope that they can thus move beyond all conflicts and controversies grounded in disagreements regarding the ultimate meaning of things. This hope has roots in the cultural developments that took place at the end of the Enlightenment and in the wake of the French Revolution. The aspiration thoroughgoingly to relocate the transcendent within the ambit of the immanent lies at the core of the position G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) articulates in 1802 in his essay “Glauben und Wissen”. Here Hegel diagnoses and then supports a radical change in elements of Western culture, especially in the religious sensibilities of his time. He notes these as manifest in “the feeling that ‘God Himself is dead’” (Hegel, 1977, p. 190; Hegel 1968, p. 414). He recognizes that the old metaphysics that grew from the philosophical rationality of Scholasticism is also dead, leading Hegel to speak of “the corpse of reason and faith” (Hegel, 1977, p. 55; Hegel, 1968, p. 315). Against this background, Hegel sees his task as freeing culture from all yearning for the transcendent and noumenal. Instead, he seeks to disclose a philosophical and cultural standpoint anchored firmly within the horizon of the finite and the immanent. Hegel seeks to “re-establish for philosophy… the absolute Passion, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and harshness of its God-forsakenness” (Hegel, 1977, p. 191). Considered apart from God, the perspective of philosophical reflection becomes the “absolute” perspective, which substitutes for the
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perspective of God. It is the perspective within which all rational questions are asked and answered. In this, Jürgen Habermas recognizes “the methodical atheism of Hegelian philosophy and of all philosophical appropriation of essentially religious contents” (Habermas, 2002, p. 68). Some faced with our contemporary moral and metaphysical disorientation wish to embrace this meaninglessness as a moral agenda. They wish to exorcize all claims of moral and metaphysical ultimacy, particularly religious claims. Despite the twentieth century having killed tens of millions in the atheist pursuit of justice and fairness, there is a growing view of religion as the primary threat to world peace. In place of concerns for the ultimate, we are invited resolutely to embed ourselves in the satisfactions and pleasure of the moment so as to settle into a world that will supposedly be marked by fewer global conflicts. Such a view naively discounts the possibility of conflicts over scarce resources and on behalf of power and glory, in the hope of entering into a peace achieved by pursuing nothing but merely immanent animal satisfactions (Fukuyama, 1992). The result is an attempt to canonize ultimate meaninglessness. This shift of philosophical perspective has proven profoundly transformative of Western culture. The contemporary dominant culture of the West is committed to the articulation and defense of an all-encompassing secularity. All yearning for the transcendent is to be lost within the bounds of the search for immanent self-satisfaction. Among the outcomes of this overriding commitment to immanence are attempts to make do with a Christianity without God (Zabala, 2005, p. 14). Religious sensibilities are to be retained as long as they can be resituated within the sphere of the immanent and the finite. As a consequence, a profound gulf is opening between this postmetaphysical, post-traditional, post-religious secular culture and those cultures that still recognize the presence of the living, personal God (e.g., traditional Christians, Orthodox Jews, and most Mohammedans). This gulf constitutes a profound point of disagreement, one of the most troubling characteristics of our contemporary moral and cultural condition: a fault-line of conflict dividing traditional believers from the secular culture. In part, this is a philosophical, not a theological issue. It involves the challenge of how one can and should appreciate the meaning of human existence and reality. In part, this is also a religious issue, indeed an issue of religious fundamentalism, if one understands the latter as a reaction against modernity, against an attempt to domesticate and then recast religious claims in secular terms. One might consider Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) bold claim published as the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution was about to begin: We have good reason to say … that ‘the kingdom of God is come unto us’ once the principle of the gradual transition of ecclesiastical faith to the universal religion of reason, and so to a (divine) ethical state on earth, has become general and has also gained somewhere a public foothold, even though the actual
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Kant’s goal is to render Christianity rational and make it conform to the expectations of modernity, so as to pursue the possibility of perpetual peace. Kant has faith in the power of rationality, where Fukuyama hungers for a peace grounded in animal satisfaction. Both wish to settle into a world without real transcendence. Habermas correctly appreciates fundamentalism as a reaction against this project. He recognizes within many religious bodies a commitment to resist the demands of the culture born of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. As he puts it, We call ‘fundamentalist’ those religious movements which, given the cognitive limits of modern life, nevertheless persist in practicing or promoting a return to the exclusivity of premodern religious attitudes. Fundamentalism lacks the epistemic innocence of those long-ago realms in which the world religions first flourished and which could somehow still be experienced as limitless. … But modern conditions are compatible only with a strict, Kantian form of universalism (Habermas, 2002, p. 151).
Traditional religious believers and surely traditional Christians are committed to rejecting the project of Kant, Hegel, and Habermas of recasting the significance of traditional Christianity through a “non-destructive secularization” (Habermas, 2003, p. 114) as incompatible with Christianity. The result is a deep cultural gulf. This gulf separates those who recognize the ultimate meaning given by a transcendental personal God, from those who would lodge the moral life and human flourishing totally within the satisfactions that can be realized within the horizon of the finite and the immanent. Since the contemporary secular culture is committed to denying the intractable character of moral pluralism and to ignoring the consequences of its metaphysical disorientation, it is difficult for many to accept or even acknowledge the actual character of our contemporary state of affairs. These difficulties are compounded by the circumstance that the Christianities of the West are sufficiently distant from the Christianity of the first millennium that the theological spirit of traditional Christianity has become nearly inaccessible to Western culture, including Western Christian theology. The defining difference of the Christianities of the West is in great measure anchored in the embedding of the Western Christian theologies within the governance of philosophy, especially through the locating of moral theology within moral philosophy (Engelhardt, 2006a). This shift has led the Roman Catholic community and much of Protestantism to embrace the mores of the Enlightenment with its secularist and egalitarian commitments. Although there were important antecedents, in 19th-century mainline central-European Protestantism, which had been domesticated by demands of the secular culture, much of the radical deconstruction of Western
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Christianity occurred in the wake of the moral, epistemological, liturgical, ascetical, and ecclesiological chaos engendered by Vatican II (1962-1965). The result was that a major cultural institution of Western culture, Roman Catholicism, was significantly (which is to say, even further) disconnected from its roots in traditional Christianity. As a consequence, it became ever more enmired in substantive internal disputes and controversies as well as progressively unable to respond to the secularizing forces of the age. In addition, a cluster of Christianities whose understandings of theology and its theological lifeworld had been recast by the demands of the secular culture were set in a trajectory progressively at odds with that of the Christianity of the first millennium. The depth of this divide is only increasing. As the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeus I has observed: “The manner in which we [the Orthodox versus others] exist has become ontologically different” (Patriarch Bartholomeus I, 1997, pp. 2). Nevertheless, many are blind to these developments and differences, thus making an adequate appreciation of their nature difficult. The Western Christian attempt to compass God within discursive reason has in the end obscured the nature of transcendence, the nature of the profound gulf separating created and uncreated being. The seemingly innocent attempt to articulate an account of natural law open to all has itself obscured the transcendent character of God. Morality has been increasingly uncoupled from a rightly-ordered relationship with the transcendent God. As David Bradshaw indicates, the West’s view of God developed from a Christianity that had “no concept of God [; this Christianity of the first millennium] view[ed] God not as an essence to be grasped intellectually, but as a personal reality known through His acts, and above all by oneself sharing in those acts” (Bradshaw, 2004, p. 275). Kant, Hegel, and Habermas may in the end have shown, as Bradshaw puts it, that “the God who has been the subject of so much strife and contention throughout western history was [n]ever anything more than an idol” (Bradshaw, 2004, p. 277).
III. Reflections on the Reflections on Engelhardt As Delkeskamp-Hayes recognizes, this state of affairs, one characterized by both moral pluralism and metaphysical disorientation, defines our contemporary moral cultural context. “The 21st century is marked by an explicit moral and metaphysical disorientation. There is a growing appreciation of the dominant secular culture’s inability to justify a particular content-full morality or an account of the final meaning of human life and the cosmos. In this secular culture, isolated within the horizon of the finite and immanent, humans find themselves embedded in a seemingly irresolvable plurality of moral perspectives” (2009, p. 23). Delkeskamp-Hayes correctly appreciates that, given the dominant secular culture’s commitment to claiming the existence of consensus (e.g., regarding human dignity and human rights), this
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culture must at the same time deny the substantive moral pluralism we face and the actual grounds for our failure to achieve consensus. As already noted, there is an ideological barrier to recognizing that many are truly moral strangers, persons divided by foundationally different moral as well as metaphysical premises and rules of evidence. As a consequence, the term “moral stranger”, which identifies our moral separation through moral pluralism, has the politically incorrect force of bringing into question the culture’s passionate proclamations of moral consensus. Delkeskamp-Hayes offers a carefully developed geography of our situation. The essays by two of my former students, one a Confucian and the other a Jesuit, each in its own way further develops Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes’ reflections regarding the implications of moral pluralism and metaphysical disorientation. Fan correctly underscores that The Foundations of Bioethics is post-metaphysical, while The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Engelhardt, 2000) addresses transcendent issues that had once been compassed by philosophy, and that the character of the latter supplements the post-metaphysical character of the former. Fan appreciates that there is only one Engelhardt, and that the Engelhardt of The Foundations of Christian Bioethics completes but does not contradict the Engelhardt of The Foundations of Bioethics. A major project of my work, as Fan notes, has been that of providing a theoretical account of the moral and metaphysical controversies that characterize the human condition, and which are expressed in the post-modern moral pluralism and the metaphysical disorientation of the contemporary dominant culture of the West. As a Confucian, it is only to be expected that he does not (at least yet) appreciate that the only way beyond the difficulties defining our dominant, post-traditional culture lies in recognizing the Source of all meaning and the ultimate point of orientation, namely, the Triune God. As Wildes acknowledges, any discursive account of the human moral condition is always to some extent hostage to the force of the social constructions imposed by the particular moral community within which it is framed, and this is surely the case for Confucian and Roman Catholic thought. One is always tied, at least in part, to the conceits of one’s historical and social situation, unless and until one noetically encounters the Truth. Yet, as a Confucian who recognizes the claims of both ultimate reality and of tradition, Fan is able in good measure to appreciate the moral and metaphysical disabilities of contemporary Western culture. This capacity is located in his keen appreciation of the moral vacuity or rootlessness of much Western and Chinese culture, as well as his sophisticated understanding of traditional social structures. The cardinal issue concerning ultimate orientation is whether humans are able to go beyond the post-modern iteration of diverse social constructions of reality through connecting with ultimate reality. Wildes correctly appreciates the bond between The Foundations of Bioethics and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. He recognizes that one cannot
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establish as canonical by sound rational argument any particular moral vision without already having established background canonical moral premises and rules of evidence that can justify the foundation for the content-full, moral understanding that one wishes to affirm. As Agrippa summarized the challenge to this project nearly two thousand years ago, any attempt to establish a canonical moral perspective through sound rational argument either begs the question, argues in a circle, or involves an infinite regress.2 It is this set of difficulties that underlies what Gerald McKenny in his essay refers to as Engelhardt’s intellectual puzzle. It is this state of affairs that defines as well the gulf separating moral strangers: they cannot resolve their moral controversies either through sound, rational argument or through an appeal to a common authority. The relationship between The Foundations of Bioethics and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics presents no puzzle for Kevin Wildes, because he recognizes the presence and force of substantive moral and metaphysical difference. This is the case even though he insists on introducing the term “moral acquaintances” to identify the circumstance that, inter alia, with regard to some issues, persons may enjoy moral friendship and with regard to other issues be separated as moral strangers. Persons quite frequently in some areas share common premises and moral visions, while in crucial areas they remain divided and perhaps in conflict, a point to which Griffin Trotter in a somewhat different fashion also turns. People often have loyalties divided among different moral communities. Having said all this, moral differences remain: moral understandings are plural. Wildes’ notion of moral acquaintances is not the basis for a critique of my position, but only for a further elaboration. Gerald McKenny resists core arguments of both The Foundations of Bioethics and The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Correctly observing that there can always be a controversy as to whether a person has given uncoerced permission, or for that matter has even given permission, McKenny falsely concludes that such puzzles necessarily or even usually depend on moral disagreements, in particular on moral disagreements as with respect to the correct orderings of cardinal values. He fails to note regarding when bare permission has been given that what is at stake in most controversies is not any particular ordering of values or particular moral appreciation of the goodness of permission, or even a view as to harms associated with coercion, but rather a dispute about a bare fact of the matter, though surely a fact overlain with moral significance. The question is whether permission has been given. The Foundations of Bioethics appreciates that secular morality has no canonical basis to affirm the goodness of permission or to claim that on balance a harm is associated with particular forms of coercion. It is simply the case that permission can supply the foundation for a sparse moral fabric of common authority. The question as to whether permission has been given by one person to another particular person without coercion by the permission receiver
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is not necessarily a moral question. It can be a factual question as to whether the persons in question have entered into the practice of resolving controversies on the basis of agreement. This is not to deny that various moral and other normative commitments frame the context of discovery, thus shaping the facts one perceives to be the facts of the matter. The Foundations of Bioethics does not presume that the procedural approach it offers as the secular default means for cooperation among persons who have different rankings of values, and are in general moral strangers, will solve all controversies. However, this practice will allow moral strangers to collaborate with common moral authority. In the process, particular thresholds for permission, procedures for confirming permission, and different practices that attend to risks of false positive and false negative determinations of whether permission has been given can in particular circumstances be established and authorized through practices established on the model of the spontaneous structuring of particular markets as a result of numerous free individual choices. What is offered is a way beyond some of the moral controversies that are a function of the fallen human condition, a condition defined by moral pluralism. The Foundations of Bioethics is not advanced as a moral panacea. It does not aspire to set all content-full moral controversies aside, but only to showing a way around some of them by disclosing a possibility for limited cooperation among moral and metaphysical strangers. The only final way out of the intractable secular pluralism and metaphysical disorientation defining our secular culture, given the fractured and disparate character of our moral insights and understandings of the meaning of things, is, as The Foundations of Christian Bioethics argues, noetically to encounter the Truth. Our state of confusion (i.e., moral pluralism and metaphysical disorientation) within the horizon of the finite and the immanent is also the result of an inability to secure a point of ultimate orientation. Such a point of orientation can only be secured through a noetic encounter with the Truth, which encounter is an experience with decisive consequences for the knower that are very distantly analogous to a first-person encounter with a sensible quale (e.g., experiencing blue). It is this experience that makes the community of Orthodox Christianity not simply a community, but the canonical community of knowers as well as the canonical community of worshipers. The community of right-believing and -worshipping Christians is, because of its anchoring in noetic experience, categorically the community. All of this is to affirm a view of theology and ultimate truth at odds with what defined the Christianities that emerged in the West during the second millennium. Those Christianities in great part placed themselves within the governance of secular philosophy and thereby engendered the developmental character of the theologies of the Western Christianities (Engelhardt, 2006a) as well as eventually the post-traditional, post-modern character of the currently dominant secular Western culture.
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A number of the essays in this volume are poster-children for the deep and widening cleft between the mind of the original Christianity and the various Western Christianities that took shape in the second millennium. This radically different understanding of Christianity that began to emerge in the West in the latter part of the first millennium and took full form in the second millennium resituated all moral and theological issues. In the end, it even recast how secular moral issues are regarded in the West. The character of these developments is sketched in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics and elsewhere. Christopher Tollefsen’s essay paradigmatically discloses this gulf between the life-world of the Christianity of the first millennium alive today in Orthodox Christianity and that of the contemporary Western Christianities. He unwittingly underscores this gulf between the Western Christianities and the original Christianity of the first millennium by his amazement at the character of the mind of the Fathers. Tollefsen’s views, for instance, trade on the old saw that the early Fathers placed acts of contraception under the rubric of abortion, without noting that acts he considers to be those of contraception were likely considered to be feticidal by those Fathers. He does not notice the silence by the Fathers on the use of the early equivalent of diaphragms and condoms. Tollefsen confronts a number of these differences between the Western Christianities and the Christianity of the first millennium, including the circumstance that many sinful acts are referred to as equivalent to murder, although no one is actually killed (e.g., as when Canon LXXII of St. Basil the Great penances divination like murder). The moral concerns of the Christianity of the first millennium are set within a discourse quite different from that of the moral theology of most contemporary Western Christianities. Tollefsen reacts to these differences not by trying to enter into the mind of the Fathers, into the thought-style or paradigm of the early Church. Instead, he invokes the reflections of contemporary secular philosophical fathers such as P.F. Strawson (1919-2006), no less, in order to argue that the Church’s spiritual-therapeutic treatment of both murder and accidental death as forms of homicide “would seem to involve a refusal to see murder as an affront against persons, whereas accidental death [is] a tragedy for persons; and it would fail to do justice to the persons who had in radically different ways done the lethal deed” (2009, p. 169). This commitment by Tollefsen as a theological matter to a secularly justified account of God’s justice may make it difficult for him to appreciate the paradigmatic prayer of repentance of the murderer and adulterer, as well as great saint, David, “Against Thee only have I sinned and done evil in Thy sight” (Ps 50:4 LXX). The difficulty with secular accounts of justice in Christian theology is that Christianity sets centrally God’s declaration to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Exodus 33:19). The Messiah comes bringing mercy, not justice. It is precisely because sin involves
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primarily an alienation from God, the Lord of the universe, that one can in true repentance be absolved for the murder of millions so that all is entirely forgiven without purgatory. Tollefsen wishes to impose on a transcendent and merciful God his own secular standards of justice and his own account of sin. As a result, he has difficulty in appreciating the Church’s spiritual therapeutic interest in penancing (as a matter of spiritual therapy) both voluntary and involuntary homicide. Through his essay, one encounters the great difficulty Tollefsen has in thinking himself back into the mind of the Church of the first millennium. He lives in the paradigm of a quite different religious community, a new religious body that emerged fully in its new identity in the early second millennium, in great measure due to the role philosophy came to play in reshaping its theology. The differences separating the Christianity of the first millennium from the Christianities that developed in the West are profound. They lie in substantively different understandings of such cardinal issues as theology, Church, Bible, sin, redemption, grace, and the force of God’s commandments. In part, the difference divides those rooted in an experience of God Himself versus those rooted in a moral-philosophical-theological framework that has succeeded in placing justice and human rights on a par with, if not precedent to, the traditional Christian experience of God. As a consequence, one finds in the Christianity of the first millennium, from which the Western Christianities slowly but progressively separated themselves, a strikingly different appreciation of all the cardinal matters of life, ranging from murder and gender essentialism (e.g., the taxis ordering men and women in the family and in the Church) to the significance of homosexual relations, and indeed all sexual liaisons outside of the marriage of a man and a woman. For example, as already noted, prohibition of early abortion in the Christianity of the first millennium rest not on the claim that the early embryo is ensouled (see e.g. Letter 188 of St. Basil to Amphilochius concerning the Canons), but on the fact that God forbids such acts.3 There is the puzzle for Tollefsen and other Western Christians concerning the early Church’s recognition of involuntary sins and sins committed in ignorance. Where the West is still struggling with the implications of its medieval claims in a nature broken by sin regarding the recognizability of constraints set by natural law, the Christianity of the first millennium remains oriented towards submitting to the content of the law to love one’s neighbor, which is understood in the light of the discharge of the first great commandment to love God fully and rightly. It is the first commandment that always remains prior to any consideration of justice or basic human rights. All turns on how correctly to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matt 22:37), so that one can then rightly love one’s neighbor as oneself (Matt 22:39). Orthodox Christianity maintains a vivid sense of the divine-commandment character of Christian obligations (Engelhardt, 2007a). Orthodox Christianity
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has not developed an independent morality, moral philosophy, or moral theology as a third thing that may mediate, revise, or develop the Church’s original understandings of appropriate deportment. So, too, because Orthodox theology is in its foundations an experience of God, theology does not emerge as a third thing that can serve as an academically institutionalized practice in authority to revise and develop the character of theological commitments. This shift in the character of philosophy’s role with regard to theology is in great measure the result of philosophy, which had begun as the handmaid of theology, now becoming theology’s master. One should note that the term ancilla dominae as employed by Peter Damian (A.D. 1007-1052) and Gerard of Czanad (d. A.D. 1046) was originally meant to underscore the subservient and limited role of philosophy. Nevertheless, theology in the West became a philosophically driven academic institution. Tollefsen does not appreciate the force of this development. He is so intent on developing and vindicating a secularly apprehendable moral framework that can support universal claims of justice and human rights, which he contends that all men should by natural reason recognize (albeit they have only a fallen human reason), that he misses the point of The Foundations of Bioethics. The volume shows how little fallen man separated from right worship can and will see, as is in fact demonstrated by the widespread acceptance by reasonable persons of abortion and physician-assisted suicide, actions that Tollefsen presumably holds to violate natural law. The Fathers did not nor do they hold that the reference in Romans 2:14 regarding those gentiles who by nature do what the law requires applies to pagans in general, but only to pious pagans such as Melchizedek and Cornelius (see St. John Chrysostom’s Homily V on Romans). Tollefsen would most likely concur that there is a widely accepted set of secular moral reflections that supports a post-traditional, post-Christian morality at odds with the commitments of traditional Christians. Those are precisely the gentiles who do not do by nature what the law requires. Tollefsen would likely also recognize that the moral difference between secular morality and the moral commitments of traditional Christians lies at least in part in the circumstance that those who endorse the dominant, post-traditional, post-Christian morality affirm as self-evident basic moral premises and rules of moral evidence different from those of traditional Christians. There is real moral difference in the world, because there is not one sense of moral rationality: we do not share one morality. The Foundations of Bioethics shows why this is the case and why better discursive philosophical reflection will not resolve the moral pluralism we face, nor set aside the intractable moral controversies we confront. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics shows the way out of this difficulty, not through better moral-philosophical distinctions and arguments, but rather through an experience of the living God acquired through right worship. It explains that small subset of gentiles who by nature do what the law requires.
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Fred Fransen’s essay is a jewel. He is zealous to embrace a church in community with the Church of the Fathers. He recognizes the unique gift to mankind of martyrdom. All of this he gets exactly right. Where he goes wrong is where all Protestants as Protestants must go wrong – namely, in their appreciation of Church. Or rather, to put the point a bit more stridently, Protestants cannot get the notion of Church right. Or to put the matter even more starkly, Protestants lack the meaning of Church around which early Christianity was built. Protestants in rightly protesting against the heresies of the medieval Western church (e.g., universal papal jurisdiction, purgatory, indulgences, etc.) thought that, in order to ground their critical position, they had to presume that one could start the Apostolic church anew in the 16th century. So they made the Bible into the basis of the church, rather than recognizing the Church as having accepted and authorized the content of the Bible. After all, early creeds stressed belief in one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic Church, not belief in a particular Bible. Once everyone was left to read the Bible on his own, as the old saw goes, the result was that the Protestants traded having one man as pope for having every man as pope. As a consequence, Western Christianity is scandalously fragmented due to attempts again and again to reform and restart Christianity anew on the basis of a new reading of the Bible. On the basis of the Bible alone and without continuity with the visible Church that is one with the Church of the Apostles,4 Protestantism has effected its own reductio through its constant fragmentation. The difficulties with the Protestant project are in fact manifold: first, Christ promised to preserve His Church against the gates of hell (Matt 16:18), and God is not an underachiever. The Church He founded cannot cease to be. Second, as the Reformers were protesting against the church in Western Europe, the original Church was alive and well in Palestine, as well as elsewhere. Protestants did not need to try to establish the Church anew. Third, it is only within the theology of the unbroken Church embedded in right worship and right belief that one gets doctrinal points rightly. It is the Church, not the Bible outside of the Church, that supplies the privileged epistemological viewpoint for Christian theology. Therefore, in disagreement, to address an example from Fransen, one does not abandon infant baptism. Given the injunction of Christ that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. … I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:3,5), and given the command “Suffer the little children to come to me” (Matt 19:14), and given the antiquity of infant baptism, infant baptism is not to be set aside. Fourth, one does not have good grounds for regarding the reign of St. Constantine (A.D. c.274-337) and the establishment of Christianity as constituting a rupture in the history of Christianity. The early Christians having obeyed pagan emperors in all things not contrary to the faith recognized no bar to obeying Christian emperors. The original Church knew and still knows that what St. Paul says of a pagan
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government also applies to an Orthodox emperor, such as St. Constantine the Great. “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established … for he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” (Rom 13:1,4). The Church also understands that this Scripture applied and applies not only to internal enemies, but also to external enemies, thus legitimizing the possibility of war and Christian military service (all without oppressing civilians – Luke 3:14).5 Fifth, the Church had understood and still understands that the Church affirmed in the creeds as the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church can only be recognized in that Church that has both a succession of bishops from the Apostles, along with the maintenance of Apostolic belief. The Church is an actual visible assembly in right worship and right belief. There is no invisible Church, although one should pray that many who are not now in the Church will be in the Church after the Judgment on the Last Day. All of this is to say that to see things within an authentically Christian theology is to see everything in the unbroken mind of the ancient Church and in a way quite different from what emerged in the second millennium. Here I wholeheartedly agree with Fred Fransen in recognizing that this original and enduring theology of Christianity is primarily a theology of holiness, not a theology of discursive reflection, social justice, and human rights, as is the current conceit of many of the religious bodies still lodged, even after the Reformation, in the Western medieval synthesis of philosophy and theology. Both Tollefsen and Fransen are thus in quite different ways focused on providing a justification for the moral-theological perspective that emerged in the West long after Christ had ascended and left His Church on earth protected in the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, Fransen’s view is much closer to the Fathers than Tollefsen’s. The next three authors in this volume, Griffin Trotter, Joseph Boyle, and Stephen Wear, in various ways explore further the possibility of a procedural morality, a morality that can be shared with moral strangers. In different ways, each of them also recognizes that those who authentically live within particular, substantive moral communities, such as the community of Orthodox Christians, will truly appear strange against the background of the morality of the dominant secular cosmopolitan culture. As the author of the “Epistle to Diognetus” puts it, Christians “dwell in their own fatherlands, but as if sojourners in them; they share all things as citizens, and suffer all things as strangers. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is a foreign country” (Lake, 1965, “Epistle” V.5). The morality of Orthodox Christians stands over against the morality of liberal cosmopolitans, as well as the morality of traditional Texans. In quite a different fashion, it stands over against the sparse morality sketched in The Foundations of Bioethics and elsewhere
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(Engelhardt, 1997). Trotter is correct that a local, more substantive morality is present or develops in particular communities. It can take shape in part as all spontaneous orders develop, through a multitude of tacit, not merely formal agreements. All of these authors in diverse fashions realize the following state of affairs as characterizing the human condition: (1) there are some communities of very devout believers (e.g., observant Orthodox Jews as well as nonexcommunicated Orthodox Christians who regularly and in good order approach the chalice) who are bound together as moral friends in very thick moral communities (and who give their full loyalty only to this community); (2) there are various, less thick communities grounded within particular moral and metaphysical understandings both traditional and post-traditional (e.g., traditional Texans and Confucians, as well as mainstream Episcopalians); (3) there is a dominant, cosmopolitan, post-Christian, post-religious, posttraditional culture that overarches particular communities and is deeply in conflict with the commitments of traditional believers on issues ranging from abortion and the authority of men in the church, to capital punishment and euthanasia (there are not only strident cultural wars, but actual contemporary bloody wars over some of these issues, as with some fundamentalist Mohammedans); and (4) there is a set of practices such as the market and contracts that can allow morally authoritative collaboration not only among moral strangers, but among moral enemies. An adequate account of our moral geography must attend to all four of these features of our cultural context. In The Foundations of Bioethics, I have addressed the fourth and last of these phenomena, the domain of moral meaning that can be shared by moral strangers. In The Foundations of Christian Bioethics I have attended primarily to the first, namely, what those bound in true faith can share, but also in part to the second and the third as distractions from the first. In certain circumstances, I have even addressed culture and commitments of traditional Texans (Engelhardt, 1990, 2004). I have in particular explored the third, the postChristian culture that is at odds with religious orthodoxy (Engelhardt, 2006b, 2003, 2001, 1991). In all of this, I have no reason in principle to object to the general lineaments of Griffin Trotter’s proposal. Indeed, it is clear that various regional and even international, but nevertheless particular, moral understandings develop out of the interaction of particular individuals and communities of individuals. I disagree with Trotter as to the justification of such intermediate moral understandings: they cannot be grounded primarily in general, secular, rational resources, because there are no such generally available, common moral understandings, in that we have no common understandings of human happiness, human flourishing, or the human good. Rather, as the market fashions particular structures, so, too, intermediate mores, intermediate understandings of what is consuetudo can come into existence. All those who are religious fundamentalists6 (e.g., Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Jews), this author included, know that such understandings
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constitute merely a provisional agreement or modus vivendi. They do not trump that to which one is out of theological grounds committed. As a consequence, when Joshua is told by God to ride into Jericho with his men, he may, indeed should kill all that lives in the city. The point is that only in very limited senses is there “a middle ground between stark, substance-free secular bioethics and content-full sectarian bioethics” (Trotter, 2009, p. 204). This middle ground is simply a provisional modus vivendi. This middle ground is the child of a market of agreements and of the rhetoric of persuasion. It is not grounded in common, discursive, rational understandings. In this middle ground, for example, to talk about peaceful co-existence can serve as a delaying strategy so as to prepare better for war. “Ethical deliberation” within an intermediate morality will therefore never truly and rightly specify traditional Christian moral conduct. Joseph Boyle is concerned to vindicate the existence of a common human moral rationality. By this, he does not mean what the Fathers mean, namely, a common capacity of repentant humans through ascetic struggle and right worship to experience God and in the light of God’s uncreated energies to know how they should act. For Boyle, common human reason has become an independent tribunal of rational reflection directed to the investigation not only of sensible, empirical reality, but also of morality and theology in a context set apart from the experience of God. He is correct that it is logically true that the widespread moral disagreement characterizing the human condition does not only follow from the circumstance that humans do not share “a common human reason”, if one means by this a failure to share a common human appreciation of how one ought to rank basic human goods and right-making conditions. The difference could follow as well from sinful willfulness. However, as I argue in The Foundations of Bioethics, Secular Humanism and Bioethics: The Search for a Common Morality, The Foundations of Christian Bioethics and subsequently (2007b, 2006c, 2005a, 2005b), human disagreements are in fact substantially (but not exclusively) rooted in foundationally different appreciations of human moral rationality. A common human moral rationality in the sense of a common ranking of cardinal human goods or a common fabric of settled moral judgments does not exist. Humans do not share a common morality or a common moral rationality. To give an example of moral difference, unlike Western moralists who live in the shadow of Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354-430), Orthodox Christians appreciate that in certain circumstances it is a good and praiseworthy thing to lie, to tell a falsehood directly with full intention to deceive (e.g., when saving Jews from the National Socialists). As St. John Cassian the Just Roman (ca. A.D. 360 – 435) observes defending the traditional Christian position, “Holy men and those most approved by God employed lying, so as not only to incur no guilt of sin from it, but even to attain the greatest goodness; and if deceit could confer glory on them, what on the other hand would the truth have brought them but condemnation?” (Cassian, 1994, p. 465).
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For another example of moral diversity, consider Boyle’s contention about the existence of a common human moral rationality as advanced in the claim that “a jury of typical North Americans considering the case of a public official accused of inflicting pain and grave bodily harm on a prisoner in order to obtain information necessary to prevent further terrorist murders … would likely agree, if the facts showed just this, in condemning that official’s action as morally wrong” (Boyle, 2009, p. 233). Moved by his claim, I enquired of a number of Americans, Europeans, and Texans whether they would consider such an official to have acted in a morally wrong, licit, or morally obligatory fashion, as well as how they would vote, if they were members of such a jury. Granted, mine was by no means an unbiased or significant sample (after all, the majority of the persons polled were either philosophers or theologians whom I knew well – a point to which I will return in speaking to Stephen Wear’s claims regarding “widely shared” views of moral canons). All agreed that the official was morally obliged to engage in such actions, if the official had clear and convincing evidence that the prisoner had the information and would divulge it and that this would save a number of lives. Moreover, both the Americans and Texans agreed that a decent jury should find such an official, if indicted, not guilty. Relying on well-established precedent in common law, they held that through jury nullification the official’s action would be regarded as an act of necessity undertaken outside the law and not to be punished by the law. That is, any law under which the official could have been found guilty would in this case have been appreciated as inappropriate or inapplicable and therefore to be nullified by the jury. Moreover, the view of those polled was that the jury should do this with the clear understanding that their nullification of the indictment would place the case beyond any appeal by the state but would set no precedent. This view expressed regarding how juries should operate offers an example of the intermediate morality about which Griffin Trotter speaks. In summary, Joseph Boyle’s contention that humans share a “common human [moral] reason” cannot be true if the possession of a common human moral rationality entails the possession of a common sense, after mature deliberation, about how to rank important human goods and cardinal rightmaking conditions. Such simply and clearly does not exist. Even Boyle’s appeal to the Mosaic Decalogue (Boyle, 2009, p. 236) discloses further moral diversity by raising the question as to why, when Christians think of the Law, they should just think of the Decalogue rather than of the seven laws given to Noah. As already noted in a footnote, Christianity from its beginning forbade abortion on the basis of the laws of Noah. Moreover, the Jerusalem Council upheld the proscription in the laws of Noah of the eating of blood (Acts 15:20). It is for this reason that Christians are still forbidden to eat blood sausage (although I can understand from the poorly seasoned character of Canadian blood pudding why this may never have seemed a significant issue for
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Joseph Boyle). The point is that discussions with reflective, rational individuals from different moral communities discloses not just disagreement about moral issues of great significance, but disagreement as well concerning the moral premises and rules of evidence to which one could appeal for the resolution of these disagreements. Boyle on closer inspection of the matter will find well-developed and disparate accounts of not only when killing is wrong, but also when it is a good time to kill in order to please God (Eccles 3:3). For example, God enjoined the Israelites, “in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them … as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deu 20:16-17). For further reflections on this last topic, I would commend to Joseph Boyle’s attention the very thoughtful examination of the issue of when one ought to kill, as given by Moses Maimonides (A.D. 1135-1204) in the Mishnah Torah. Unlike Marcion of Sinope (ca. A.D. 110-160), right-believing Christians acknowledge that the God of both the New and the Old Testament is equally righteous and holy, indeed that He is the same God. The point among other things is that God gave different laws to different communities (e.g., to the sons of Noah and then to the Jews) at different times. Understanding what it is to identify the canonical morality is both complex and a matter of foundational contention. Much of what Stephen Wear develops in his paper recapitulates what Joseph Boyle develops. When Wear advances his account of “a canon of clinical ethics”, he defends it on the basis of its being “widely shared” (Wear, 2009, p. 255). But how widely shared and with whom must a set of clinical-ethical views be in order to be well-grounded? For that matter, what does a proposition being “widely shared” have to do with the truth of any proposition? Most importantly, who is the we whose widely-held views are normative or definitive? How much of a majority and of whom entails what level of confidence in the truth one wishes to affirm? For example, what does the circumstance that persons generally widely affirm certain propositions in physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine have to do with the truth of what they affirm? Why would opinions in matters of morality be any different? Why and under what circumstances would a moral consensus count for anything? Just as in the case of Joseph Boyle’s official who engages in torture in order to prevent further terrorist actions, views with regard to the propriety of any matter will differ, depending on the moral community polled and its background commitments. To specify whose widely shared opinions are normative requires already identifying who knows what truly. Wear describes my claims regarding noetic theology as circular (2009, p. 252). My claim that one should move from the Enlightenment project lodged in discursive rational justification to the Christian commitments grounded in noetic experience is secured by the claim that rightly-ordered moral knowledge in these matters requires for its foundation rightly-ordered empirical (albeit
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in this case noetic, not sensible) experience. An analogous sort of empirical claim is made by those who recognize that the central truths of medicine are empirical, not rational-deductive. There is no circularity involved in pointing to these empirical circumstances, although there can surely be disputes about the nature of those circumstances, their character, and the truth of the claim. Last but not least, Wear’s appeal to “representatives of the people assembled” to settle any matter depends on antecedent arguments regarding the divine right of majorities and on arguments to show how, why, and to what extent moral authority is realized in particular assemblies. Much more would have to be said, because, inter alia, the founders of both America and Texas understood the great dangers involved in rule by the majority. Indeed, they recognized that “the people is a beast.” As a result, they framed constitutions that limited majority rule and in the case of the United States so structured the more authoritative legislative branch (i.e., the Senate) that now an eighth of the population elects more than a majority of the Senate. One needs to show which assemblies have what moral authority and on what basis. As Wear well knows, there has been blood shed in the territory now occupied by the United States over the issue of which representative assemblies were lawfully assembled. Claims about “a canon of clinical ethics” involve complicated issues, as Nicholas Capaldi and Thomas Cavanaugh appreciate. As Capaldi rightly notes, there is a foundational difficulty in talking about ethics expertise, given that the fallen human condition is marked by moral pluralism and an inability to set that pluralism aside through sound rational argument. Capaldi like Delkeskamp-Hayes observes, “Not only is there a strident moral diversity defining debates regarding all substantive issues, but there is in principle good reason to hold that these debates cannot be brought to closure in a principled fashion through sound rational argument. The partisans of each and every position find themselves embedded within their own discourse so that they are unable to step outside of their own respective hermeneutic circles without embracing new and divergent premises and rules of inferences. Many traditional thinkers find themselves in precisely this position” (Capaldi, 2009, p. 267). As Capaldi acknowledges, moral diversity is real and intractable. As a consequence, this is no particular body of moral claims that without great controversy can sustain a canon of clinical ethics. Cavanaugh appreciates that contemporary moral and policy controversies are defined by the fallen human condition. As a consequence, the existence of law and political constraint, rather than being truly normative, reflects the results of sin. For Cathleen Kaveny’s fine-grain analysis of my arguments and her comparison of my position with that of Germaine Grisez, I am very grateful. First, I am grateful for the care and energies she invested. Second, the manner in which she repeatedly sees my position wrongly provides an important and nuanced heuristic illustration of the paradigmatic differences separating Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian understandings of theology. As to
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her reflections concerning the legalistic approach about which I reproach the Romans, my point is this: The Roman Catholics have a legalistic approach to sin in tending to focus on determining the guilt or innocence of the sinner, rather than curing the sinner’s sinfulness. A spiritual therapeutic approach, should recognize that we are all sinners and attempt first and foremost to bring the cure of repentance and purification so that union with God can take place. The issue raised about legalism addresses the accent in Roman Catholicism’s approach to the sinner, an approach that Kaveny herself illustrates. Roman Catholicism’s accent is on determining guilt or innocence, rather than nurturing repentance. For example, the Orthodox surely hold that there are things that one should never do (e.g., effect an abortion). The crucial difference is how to approach the sinner, once the sinner has sinned. The absence of an innocence-establishing appeal to the principle of double effect with regard to abortion in Orthodox Christianity means that there is no way to find a woman innocent who has had an indirect abortion (e.g., removing a cancerous uterus of a pregnant woman with the intention to cure the cancer but not to kill the infant in utero). Rather than looking for a basis to establish a finding of innocence, what is important is to help the woman to mourn the act in which she has been involved. The Roman Catholic engagement of the principle of double effect with regard to abortion provides an example of Roman Catholic legalism, not just in terms of its focus on finding those involved to be innocent, but because of the loss of a concern with spiritual therapy. Before turning to the issue of the contrast between a noetically grounded and a discursively grounded theology, I must address a few of the other important points raised by Kaveny. First, from the circumstance that a spiritual father should act as a spiritual physician rather than as a judge, it does not follow that spiritual fathers have “great discretion” (2009, p. 149), as Kaveny alleges. Physicians should identify the best therapy for their patients, an obligation that does not invite “moral monsters of arbitrariness, and favoritism” on the part of physicians, physical or spiritual, any more than it does on the part of judges. Of course, policemen, prosecutors, and juries have great discretion, if not more discretion than physicians. To begin with, the question is whether the focus is juridical or therapeutic. Then there is the issue of judging and treating well. As to the task of the good judge, it is to judge rightly, while the task of the good physician is to cure effectively, in the case of the spiritual physician by bringing the sinner to repentance and purification from passions. Second, I do not claim that certain acts of abortion are both “permitted” and to be “repented”, or that they are in some sense allowed (2009, p. 145). This is simply false. All abortions are sinful, as I clearly state in The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Third, some of Kaveny’s confusions appear to turn on her falsely imputing to the Orthodox a Roman Catholic view regarding contraception. Fourth, it is not the case that I or more importantly the Orthodox Church fails to hold that we are all called, each and every one of us, to
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have the courage of martyrs in all things (2009, p. 151). Indeed, on the page Kaveny cites from The Foundations of Christian Bioethics in substantiation of her false claim that I hold that Orthodox Christianity fails to require all to strive for perfection, I quote Matthew 5:48: “Ye shall be perfect, even as your Father Who is in heaven is perfect.” Perhaps she was confused by my observation concerning the Orthodox Christian position that “everything is required; anything can be forgiven” (Engelhardt, 2000, p. 237). Fifth, Kaveny has it wrong with regard to the issue of marriage, divorce, and remarriage within Orthodox Christianity. On the one hand, the Church follows Christ, Who rejected the teaching of Hillel that one may divorce one’s wife for any reason (Matt 19:3), and indirectly affirms a position similar to that of Shammai that divorce is permitted only on grounds of porneia (Matt 19:9). On the other hand, the Church recognizes all second marriages, including those of widows and widowers, as spiritually problematic, although “it is better to marry than to burn” (I Cor 7:9). Sixth, Christ’s kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). The kingdom that is to come, the city that is to come, the New Jerusalem, is not simply built up from below but descends from above (Rev 21:1-2). Nor are there politics or community structures in heaven as there are on earth, because human laws and political organizations are framed in response to sin and to human sinfulness. The community that is restored by the Church is community with God, with the Trinity. All truth is personal, and this community is fully personal. Thomas Cavanaugh sees what Cathy Kaveny does not see, or at least does not address, namely, that politics, governments, legal systems, medicine, and bioethics are all about sin – or at least about how to come to terms with the various consequences of our sins and the sin of Adam. It is for this reason that one cannot simply build the kingdom of heaven from the bottom up as a social project, as an undertaking in social justice. It is for this reason that Orthodox Christianity focuses primarily on establishing and enlarging the community of right worship, right belief, and right conduct (which surely includes almsgiving) so as thus to build up the Kingdom of Heaven by being transformed in and through God’s grace, which comes from above. It is for this reason that in Orthodox Christianity’s Eastern rites the Liturgy begins with the proclamation, “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The kingdom into which we are to enter comes from God. Nevertheless, Orthodox Christians recognize that all authority on earth is from God (Rom 13:1-4) and that the Church must pray that rulers will be God-fearing and right-believing, and even in the right circumstances anoint God-fearing, right-believing men as kings and emperors. Finally, as to the gulf between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian theology, it lies most fundamentally in the circumstance that Orthodox theologians are sensu stricto those who know, and do not merely know about, God. Grisez’s dialectical theology produces knowledge about God. In contrast,
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for the Orthodox, as John Romanides puts the matter, “The Fathers do not say anything about God on the basis of philosophical reflection. They do not sit at their desks like the Scholastics in order to do theology, because when the Church Fathers theologize, speculation or reflection is strictly forbidden” (Romanides, 2008, p. 85). Moreover, Orthodox Christianity does not merely experience the truth in “theological reflections, liturgical practices, and ascetical practices that have been handed down,” as Kaveny puts it (2009, p. 152). Instead, the Church always experiences the Truth as revealed now and as always the same. Orthodox theology is an empirical theology that unites theologians across the centuries. It is this theology that maintains the Orthodox Church united over space and time, unlike the fractured Protestants or the Roman Catholics with fragmentations of doctrine on the one hand and development of doctrine on the other. Rather than Orthodox Christian theology resting on claims of papal infallibility or papal magisterium, its theology rests in the experience of God by the holy Fathers over the ages and today. It is this that unites the Church as one. Because this theology is at its core personal, an experience of the holy Trinity, it is not legalistic or discursive. We were not created to think our way to knowledge about God, but to submit to Him and to experience Him, to know God’s uncreated energies. This is not an individualistic enterprise: no Orthodox Christian should ever seek to have his own personal theology. For Christians, there is no theology other than that of the Trinity. To all the authors who contributed to this volume and for their essays, I am very grateful. Each of these authors has joined with me in exploring foundational issues in moral philosophy, metaphysics, theology, and bioethics, about which I have considerable concern. In each essay, an important contribution has been made, directly or indirectly, to recapturing the seriousness of the task of coming to terms with life in a culture that has over the span of two generations become normatively post-traditional and post-Christian. A thoughtful and critical appreciation of these radical and rapid changes has only begun to emerge. These authors have been very generous to join me in contributing to the task of understanding and critically evaluating our circumstances.
IV. Rethinking the Nature and Task of Philosophy: Taking the Turn to Theology For the ancient Greeks, philosophy was generally not just an academic undertaking, but also a way of life aimed at the human good and human flourishing and, in many cases, the pursuit of the ultimate meaning of things. Philosophy was rarely a limited analytic descriptive project or merely a critical project focused on avoiding ultimate questions. Even if Socrates meant to resituate philosophical reflection through focusing it on moral issues, Plato relocated such reflections within larger metaphysical concerns. These ultimate
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questions are in the end difficult to avoid. To avoid them takes a firm act of the will. It would be simpler if there were nothing, but there is something, and the gulf between existence and non-existence is infinite. The principle of sufficient reason calls out for an infinite and non-surd, that is, an infinite personal answer – an answer that can only be satisfactorily provided by a personal God. This recognition is not the beginning of a discursive proof for the existence of God, but is an account of how one can begin to turn to reality so as to look through reality as through an icon and see God. It is the beginning of a will to an encounter with reality such that one does not merely see in nature traces of God, or bases through rational argument for concluding to God’s existence, but rather looks through nature to its Creator. It is the beginning of the experience of grace, which requires an act of the will to turn to that grace, an act of turning to God, and not merely a discursive argument for the existence of God. It is because of pride and the passions, not because of faulty arguments or a lack of intellectual acumen, that many will not recognize God. Instead, they decide to focus their concern on creatures apart from their Creator. With this turn of the will, everything begins to look different, as one progressively ceases to look through reality as through an icon to God and looks instead on reality as seen completely apart from God. When we turn away from God, we are left with the broken moral and metaphysical landscape of intractable moral pluralism and metaphysical disorientation. The Foundations of Bioethics describes and offers an account of the broken character of this defining context. The arguments advanced in both editions of this work are not made in order to celebrate moral pluralism, its intractability in the face of sound rational argument, or its framing metaphysical disorientation. The goal has been instead honestly to assess our situation. Given the reluctance of many of the contributors to this volume to acknowledge the full depth of our moral differences and the implications of these differences for both secular and Christian moral reflection, facing our condition is obviously no mean task. It is both an intellectual and a moral challenge. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics shows us where the only way free from this disorientation lies – namely, in a rightly-developed focus on the God Who is the source of all and to Whom all reality is in fact properly to be oriented. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics addresses questions about right conduct and orientation, ranging from concerns with abortion and euthanasia to the proper use of human genetic engineering that arise within The Foundations of Bioethics and that are existentially cardinal, but unanswerable within its confines. Those who are interested in a foundational, discursive, philosophical answer to such questions will be disappointed. The correct answers depend neither on learning nor on erudition. Access to such final answers comes only through an ascetic struggle that allows one rightly to love God with all one’s heart, mind, and soul, and in the light of that love to love one’s neighbor
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properly. The Christian message is addressed to both the learned and the ignorant. It is Personal. In the end, it is not what one knows, but Whom one knows that is important: the Trinity to Whom all can have access through repentance, right worship, and right belief.
Notes 1. The connection between finding oneself set solely within the horizon of the finite and the immanent and finding oneself confronted by an intractable moral pluralism was explored by Protagoras (ca. 490-420 B.C.), who lived through and influenced the passage of Greek society into the period of post-traditional moral and religious commitments that characterized the Hellenic Age. As Protagoras puts it, “man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not” (Diogenes, 1979, vol. 2, pp. 463-465, IX.8.51). 2. From the beginning of Western philosophy, there was the recognition that one cannot through sound rational argument resolve disputes between those separated by different moral visions. Protagoras, for example, appreciates “that there are two sides to every question” (Diogenes, 2000, vol. 2, p. 463, IX.8.51). Clement of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 150 - 211/216) notes that “Should one say that Knowledge is founded on demonstration by a process of reasoning, let him hear that first principles are incapable of demonstration…” (Clement, 1994, vol. 2, p. 350, Book 2, chapter IV). Agrippa summarizes the difficulties under five clusters of arguments that show the irresolvability of these disputes, his famous pente tropoi (Diogenes, 2000, vol. 2, p. 501, IX.88). 3. The Orthodox Church continues to keep Noachite commandments, as was required by the Apostles in Acts 15:28-29 and confirmed in Canon 63 of the 85 Apostolic Canons and in Canon 67 of the Quinisext Council. With regard to abortion, the Jewish rigor of the Noachite law is also maintained. “On the authority of R. Ishmael it was said: [The Gentile is executed] even for the murder of an embryo. What is R. Ishmael’s reason? – Because it is written, Whoso sheddeth the blood of man within [another] man, shall his blood be shed. What is a man within another man? – An embryo in his mother’s womb” (Sanhedrin 57b). 4. Jaroslav Pelikan observes that early Christianity appreciated the one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church as an actual, visible community united in faith and worship, so that “efforts to superimpose upon the second or third centuries the distinction made by Augustianism and especially by the Reformation between the visible and the invisible churches have proved quite ineffectual….” (Pelikan, 1971, pp 160-61). 5. For an example of Orthodox Christian participation in war before the reign of St. Constantine the Great, consider the holy Great-Martyr Mercurius, who died as a martyr in A.D. 259. “In battle, an angel of the Lord appeared to Mercurius, placed a sword in his hand, and assured him of victory over his enemies. Indeed, Mercurius displayed wonderful courage, mowing down the enemy like grass” (Velimirovic’, 2002, vol. 2, p. 580). 6. The term “fundamentalism” has a complex history. Fundamentalism initially identified Christians who affirmed at least the bare essentials of Christianity. The term took its origin from the American Bible League, which in 1902 began producing
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H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr twelve pamphlets entitled “The Fundamentals,” which were directed against higher biblical criticism in reaction against modernist, liberal, or revisionist forms of Christianity, many of which were influenced by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). These twelve pamphlets called “The Fundamentals” appeared after 1909 and defended points taken from a fourteen-point creed developed from the 1878 Niagara Conference. The fundamentals were then summarized around six core doctrines: the inerrant inspiration of the Bible, the Virgin Birth of Christ, Christ’s atonement for the sin of Adam through His death, Christ’s physical resurrection, the miracle-working power of Christ, and the Second Coming. The focus of the term was originally on Christians alone. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies fundamentalism as a “religious movement which became active among various Protestant bodies in the United States after the war of 1914-18, based on strict adherence to traditional orthodox tenets (e.g., the literal inerrancy of Scripture) held to be fundamental to the Christian faith; opposed to liberalism and modernism” (1933, Supplement, p. 399). For an overview of some of these early publications, see Torrey, 1990. Fundamentalism later came to identify any group of believers (e.g., Jewish or Mohammedan) who are committed to living according to the original defining beliefs of their religion, unaltered by the conceits of the Enlightenment and modernity. The term fundamentalist was then even further recast by some in order to identify any moral/metaphysical understanding, whether secular or religious, that holds its claims to truth to trump comprehensively the claims of any competitor. As Rawls puts it, Many persons – call them “fundamentalists” of various religious or secular doctrines which have been historically dominant – could not be reconciled to a social world such as I have described. For them the social world envisaged by political liberalism is a nightmare of social fragmentation and false doctrines, if not positively evil. To be reconciled to a social world, one must be able to see it as both reasonable and rational. Reconciliation requires acknowledging the fact of reasonable pluralism both within liberal and decent societies and in their relations with one another. Moreover, one must also recognize this pluralism as consistent with reasonable comprehensive doctrines, both religious and secular. Yet this last idea is precisely what fundamentalism denies and political liberalism asserts (Rawls, 1999, pp. 126-127). Many traditional believers will in this sense be pleased to be counted as fundamentalists (e.g., traditional Mohammedans, Orthodox Jews, traditional Protestants, and Orthodox Christians). Among other things, they will have grounds to recognize as very regrettable and far from reasonable the fragmentation of society into communities organized around false, not to mention sinful moral and metaphysical viewpoints.
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Beauchamp, Tom and James F. Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press: 2008. Boyle, Joseph. “The Ethical Significance of Moral Disagreement,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 229-245, 2009. Bradshaw, David. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Capaldi, Nicholas. “Ethics Expertise,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 261-272, 2009. Cassian, John. “Second Conference of Abbot Joseph.” Vol. 11 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. 2nd series. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994. Cavanaugh, Thomas A. “On the Appropriateness of a Christian Bioethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 273-283, 2009. Clement of Alexandria. “The Stromata.” Vol. 2 of Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994. Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy, 9 vols. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1950-1967. Delkeskamp-Hayes, Corinna. “Morality in a Post-Modern, Post-Christian World: Engelhardt’s Diagnosis and Therapy,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 23-69, 2009. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931. Engelhardt, H. T., Jr. “The Euthyphro’s dilemma reconsidered.” Pluralistic Casuistry, edited by Mark J. Cherry and Ana S. Iltis, 109-130. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. ———. “Why ecumenism fails: Taking theological differences seriously.” Christian Bioethics, 13.1 (April 2007): 25-51. ———. “Critical reflections on theology’s handmaid: Why the role of philosophy in Orthodox Christianity is so different.” Philosophy & Theology 18.1 (2006): 53-75. ———. “Abortion and the culture wars: Competing moral geographies and their implications for bioethics.” Bioethics: Frontiers and New Challenges, edited by Paulo Zagalo e Melo, 27-36. Lisbon: Principia/Fulbright Commission, 2006. ———. “Public discourse and reasonable pluralism: Rethinking the requirements of neutrality.” Handbook of Bioethics and Religion, edited by David E. Guinn, 169-194. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “The belligerent kingdom.” God, Truth, and Witness, edited by L. Gregory Jones Reinhard Hütter, and C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell, 193-211. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005. ———. “What is Christian about Christian bioethics? Metaphysical, epistemological, and moral differences.” Christian Bioethics 11.3 (December 2005): 241-253. ———. “I’m the law: The office of sheriff and the spirit of the west.” I’m the Law! Recht, Ethik und Ästhetik im Western, edited by Kurt Bayertz, Margrit Frölich, Kurt W. Schmidt, 75-92. Frankfurt/M: Haag & Herchen, 2004. ———. “The deChristianization of Christian hospital chaplaincy.” Christian Bioethics 9 (April 2003): 139-160.
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———. “The deChristianization of Christian health care institutions, or, how the pursuit of social justice and excellence can obscure the pursuit of holiness.” Christian Bioethics 7 (April 2001): 151-161. ———. The Foundations of Christian Bioethics. Salem, MA: M & M Scrivener, 2000. ———. “The foundations of bioethics and secular humanism: Why is there no canonical moral content?” Reading Engelhardt, edited by Brendan P. Minogue, Gabriel Palmer-Fernández, James E. Reagan, 259-285. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. ———. The Foundations of Bioethics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford, 1996. ———. Secular Humanism and Bioethics: The Search for a Common Morality. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991. ———. “Texas: Messages, morals, and myths.” Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 21 (October 1990): 33-49. ———. The Foundations of Bioethics. New York: Oxford, 1986. Fan, Ruiping. “A Confucian Student’s Dialogue with Teacher Engelhardt,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 71-87, 2009. Fransen, Frederic J. “Engelhardt the Anabaptist: Pursuing Ascetic Holiness in the Spirit of H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.’s The Foundations of Christian Bioethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 181-201, 2009. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Religion and Rationality, edited by Eduardo Mendieta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Hegel, G. W. F. Faith & Knowledge, translated by Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. ———. Vol. 4 of Jenaer kritische Schriften, in Gesammelte Werke. Hamburg: Meiner, 1968. Hierotheos, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos. The Mind of the Orthodox Church, translated by Esther Williams. Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1998. Kaveny, M. Cathleen. “Down by Law: Engelhardt, Grisez, and the Meaning of Legalism,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 135-163, 2009. Lake, Kirsopp (trans). “Epistle to Diognetus.” Vol. 2 of Apostolic Fathers. (1965): 359, 361. McKenny, Gerald. “Desire for the Transcendent: Engelhardt and Christian Ethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 107-133, 2009. Minogue, Brendan P., Gabriel Palmer-Fernández, James E. Reagan. (eds.) Reading Engelhardt. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Rawls, John. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 Romanides, John. Patristic Theology, translated by Alexios Trader. The Dalles, OR: Uncut Mountain Press, 2008. Tollefsen, Christopher. “Missing Persons: Engelhardt and Abortion,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 165-179, 2009.
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Torrey, R. A. (ed.). The Fundamentals. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Classics, 1990. Trotter, Griffen. “Is ‘Discursive Christian Bioethics’ an Oxymoron?” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 203-227, 2009. Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity, translated by Luca d’Isanto. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ———.The End of Modernity, translated by Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Velimirovic’, St. Nikolai. The Prologue of Ohrid, translated by T. Timothy Tepsic’. Alhambra, CA: Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America, 2002. Wear, Stephen. “Bioethics for Moral Strangers,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 247259, 2009. Wildes, Kevin, Wm. “Completing the Picture: Engelhardt’s Christian Bioethics,” in At the Roots of Christian Bioethics, edited by Ana S. Iltis and Mark J. Cherry. Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, pp. 89-104, 2009. Zabala, Santiago (ed.). The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Contributors
Thomas J. Bole, III, Holy Archangels Greek Orthodox Monastery, P.O. Box 422, Kendalia, Texas 78027 Joseph Boyle is Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 170 St. George St., Rm., 408, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5R 2M8;
[email protected]. edu.ca Nicholas Capaldi is Legendre-Soule Distinguished Chair in Buisness Ethics, Loyola University New Orleans, 6363 St. Charles Ave., Campus Box 015, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118;
[email protected] Thomas A. Cavanaugh is Professor of Philosophy, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton St., San Francisco, California 94117;
[email protected] Mark J. Cherry is the Dr. Patricia A. Hayes Professor in Applied Ethics and Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, St. Edward’s University, 3001 S. Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas 78704;
[email protected]. Corinna Delkeskamp-Hayes is Director of European Programs, International Studies in Philosophy and Medicine, Buchbergstrasse 17, 63579 Freigericht 1, Germany;
[email protected] H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., is Professor Emeritus, Baylor College of Medicine and Professor of Philosophy, Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, Texas 77005;
[email protected] Ruiping Fan is Associate Professor, Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Ave., Kowloon, Hong Kong;
[email protected] Frederic Fransen is President and CEO, Donor Advising, Research & Educational Services, 9780 Lantern Rd., Suite 150, Fishers, Indiana 46037;
[email protected] 317
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Contributors
Ana S. Iltis is Associate Professor, Department of Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University, 221 North Grand Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri, 631032006;
[email protected] M. Cathleen Kaveny is John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law and Professor of Theology, Notre Dame Law School, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556;
[email protected] Gerald McKenny is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208;
[email protected] Griffin Trotter is Professor, Department of Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University, 221 N. Grand Blvd., St. Louis, Missouri 63103; trotterc@slu. edu Stephen Wear is Associate Professor of Medicine and Co-Director of the Center for Clinical Ethics and Humanities in Health Care, 803 Veterans’ Hospital, Buffalo, New York;
[email protected] Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J. is President, Loyola University New Orleans, 6363 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans, Louisiana 70118;
[email protected] Index
Amish, 37, 42, 100, 182, 189, 191-192, 195, 198-199, 201 Anabaptism, 19, 181, 183-184, 186, 195, 196-201 animal rights, 173, 182, 195 Anscombe, G. Elisabeth M., 287, 312 antichrist, 196 anti-clerical, 35 apostles, 116, 124, 188, 196, 206, 224 Apostolic succession, 185 Aquinas, Thomas, xi, 9, 29, 31-33, 119-120, 137, 140-142, 147, 151, 159-161, 163, 166, 170, 172-173, 178, 235-236, 239-240, 245, 264, 273-275, 277 Aristotle, 113, 166, 206, 252, 261-264, 266, 270, 272-274, 277, 313 artificial insemination, 28, 168 artificial intelligence, 265 ascetic struggle, 58, 286, 303 ascetic transformation, 3, 206 asceticism, xiv, 3, 10, 30-31, 50, 53, 58-59, 119, 122, 128, 139, 146, 148, 152, 154, 157, 167, 169, 185-188, 190, 194-195, 197, 206, 212, 262-263, 265, 286, 310 Asclepius, 279, 280-281 assisted suicide, 36, 96-97, 138, 181, 183, 220, 243
Abel, Francesc, xii Abilene, 10 abortion, xi, 2, 5, 9-10, 15, 17-18, 28, 36, 42, 97-98, 101, 138, 144-145, 150, 156, 165-178, 182, 195, 200, 239, 245, 281, 287, 297-299, 302, 304, 307, 310-311 indirect, 307 Abraham, 65 Absolute Spirit, 34 Absolute Thought, 34 Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 270 Adam, 29, 50-51, 168, 277-278, 308, 312 addiction, 182 adultery, 127-128, 150-151, 158, 168 reproductive, 168 affection, 91 age of reason, 25 Agrippa, 25, 295, 311 Ahlgrim, Ryan, 195 almsgiving, 51, 308 Alora, A. Tan, 225 altruism, 44, 287 America, 16-18, 84, 226, 304, 306 North, xii, xiv, 197, 233, 241 American Bible League, 311 American College of Surgeons, 195 American Hospital Association, 255 319
320 atheism, 37, 78, 288, 291 Athena, 279 Augustine of Hippo, Blessed, xiii, 49, 198, 303, 311 Augustinians, 263 Austin, 10, 192 authority, political, 6, 10, 42, 62, 67, 107 autonomy, 37-39, 40-41, 60, 96, 129, 138, 257, 265, 268-269, 271 autonomy, principle of, 85, 92 axiology, 270 Babylon, 190 whore of, 196 baptism, xii, 184, 187, 191-193, 198-199, 300 Barcelona, xii Barth, Karl, 130 Bartholomeus I, Patriarch, 197, 293, 312 Basil, Bishop of Wichita and Mid-America, xiv Basil I, Emperor, 192, 200 Basil the Great, Saint, 18, 297-298 battery, 98 Battle of San Jacinto, 18 Bayertz, Kurt, 313 Baylor College of Medicine, x, xiii Baylor, M. G., 200-201 Beauchamp, Tom, 41, 68, 92, 96-97, 104, 253-254, 289, 313 behaviorism, 265 Belgium, 187, 198 Benedict XVI, Pope, xiii beneficence, 12, 41, 96-97, 249, 254, 256 benevolence, 63, 131 Bennett, William, 98 Berlin, xiii, xvi Bermuda, 103 best interests, viii, 2, 4 bestiality, 287 Bible, xiv, 48-49, 58, 65, 132, 298, 300, 312 Bible Belt, 118 bioethics, viii-ix, xiv-xvi, 1-6, 8, 11-12, 15, 24, 30, 39, 46, 49, 51, 57-60, 66, 72, 76, 89-103, 107, 112, 129-130, 143, 161, 167, 177, 181,
Index 184, 187, 189, 195, 197, 203-205, 207-209, 214-220, 247-249, 251, 253-257, 265, 268, 270, 287-288, 290, 308-309, 313 American, 214 as political ideology, 4, 11, 204, 214 birth of, 203 Christian, xiv, 2-3, 6, 9, 11, 29, 54, 76, 101, 107, 115, 126, 139, 146, 162, 174, 188, 195, 197, 203, 206, 214, 217, 230, 248, 251, 273, 275, 282 content-thin, 89 discursive, 11, 203-205 intermediate, 204-205, 207-210, 215-220, 222 sectarian, 11, 204-206, 208, 303 secular, xv, 2, 6, 95, 99, 102-103, 115, 174-175, 204-205, 209-210, 220, 247-249, 275, 287, 303 Western European, 16 Whig, 219 biology, 10, 32, 94, 166, 172-174, 209, 221, 305 birth, 17, 101 Blackstone, William, 92, 104 blasphemy, 65, 152 blood pudding, 304 Bok, Sissela, 254, 256, 259 Bole, Thomas J., 4, 18 Bonn, viii Bonnie Blue Flag, 10, 192, 194 Boyle, Joseph, 11-12, 19, 95, 104, 171-178, 241, 244-245, 301, 303-305, 313 Bradley, Denis, 160, 163 Bradshaw, David, 293, 313 Brazos de Dios, 10 Brennan, Donald, v Brubaker, B.H., 201 Brumley, M., 147, 163 Brusatti, Louis T., v Buchanan, Pat, 98 Buddha, 81 Buddhism, 80-81, 86, 175, 207, 273 Bull of Union with the Copts, 65 burden of proof, 67-68, 121 Bush, George W., 289
Index Caesar, 239 Caesarius of Arles, 178 Callahan, Daniel, ix, xv-xvi Calvin, John 130 Canada, xi, 287 cancerous uterus, 145, 307 canon law, 157 Capaldi, Nicholas, 11, 19, 265, 267, 272, 306, 313 capital punishment, 42, 238, 287, 302 capitalism, 37, 72, 107 Caplan, Arthur, viii-ix, xv-xvi Carlo Cardinal Martini, xiii Carolingian Renaissance, xiii Carter, Jimmy, 217 Cassian, John, 303, 313 casuistry, 5, 97-98, 149, 157, 160, 236-237, 239, 241, 245, 263 categorial theory, viii causality, 271 Cavanaugh, Thomas, 11, 19, 306, 308 charity, 170, 199, 282-283 Charles the Great, xiii, 16, 200 Charlottesville, 203 chastity, 166, 173 chemistry, 32, 94, 209, 305 Cherry, Mark J., v, 16-21, 85, 87, 178, 259, 313-314 childbirth, 173 Childress, James, ix, 6, 41, 68, 92, 96-97, 104, 289, 313 China, 71, 72, 77, 80-82, 84-86, 215 Cultural Revolution, xii, 84 chiropracty, 2 Christ, 13, 49, 53, 60, 66, 124-126, 128, 132, 149, 152, 159-161, 167, 169-170, 172, 174, 184, 186-190, 193-197, 199, 215, 222, 225, 274, 278, 282-283, 300-301, 308, 312; see also: God dread judgment seat of, 51 second coming of, 312 kingdom, 308 physical resurrection of, 312 virgin birth of, 312 Christendom, 7, 10, 24, 36, 44, 65, 313 Christian Scientists, 15
321 Christianity, xi, 2, 10, 15, 24, 29-30, 32, 35, 44-46, 48-49, 51, 53, 58-59, 66-68, 111, 114-115, 118, 120, 122-123, 127-128, 130, 138-139, 148, 152, 154, 160, 165, 167, 177, 182-190, 192, 194-195, 198, 204, 209-210, 212-213, 216, 218, 224225, 248-249, 262-264, 270, 273, 275-276, 278, 282, 286, 291-293, 297-298, 300, 304, 308, 311-312 anonymous 100 Christian life, 48, 53, 111, 116, 126, 143, 146, 154, 159, 161, 169, 184, 188, 192, 194-195, 206 Christian metaphysical orientation, 7, 24 militant, 100 Orthodox, x-xi, xv-xvi, 1-3, 6-10, 14, 24, 32, 45-46, 48, 51, 58, 65, 72, 75, 77, 79-80, 82-85, 107-108, 114-118, 126, 129, 137-139, 147, 152, 175, 183, 189, 191, 193, 211, 214-217, 224, 244-245, 247-248, 250, 256, 270, 290, 296-299, 301-303, 306-309, 311-313 Protestantism, xiii, 35, 65, 72, 109, 119, 126, 130-132, 139, 184, 187, 224, 264, 292, 300, 309, 312 rationalization of, 263 Roman Catholicism, xi-xiii, 15-17, 26-27, 65-66, 72-73, 77-78, 97-98, 109, 119, 121-123, 126, 130, 136140, 142, 144-145, 147, 150-155, 157-158, 160-162, 166, 174, 176178, 184-185, 187, 196, 213, 232, 245, 263, 282, 292-294, 306-309 traditional, 122, 140, 155, 184, 190-194, 197, 204, 206, 208, 213, 215, 224, 293, 297 see also Christianity: Orthodox Western, 3, 7, 9, 16, 24, 26-27, 30, 36, 58, 65, 67, 108-109, 135, 138, 184, 297-298 christliche Sitte, 119 Christmas, xiii, 16 Chrysostom, Saint John, 214, 225, 299 Church, meaning of, 300
322 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 92 City University of Hong Kong, 85 civil liberty, 60 civil rights, 83 Clement of Alexandria, 25, 311, 313 clergy, celibate, xiii Climacus, Johannes, 125-126 Climacus, Saint John, 224-225 clinical ethics, 102, 255-256, 259, 306 Clinton, William Jefferson, 98, 289 cloning, 5, 101, 168, 281 Coahuila, 18 coercion, 64, 112, 131, 207-208, 295 collaboration, 11, 29, 37, 40, 43, 45, 61-62, 67, 74, 76, 82, 204, 302 Colt 45, 194 commandments, 53, 142-143, 162, 168, 211, 214, 216, 298 common good, 9, 140, 147-148, 159, 207 common law, 269, 304 communion, 72, 125, 223, 232 communion of Saints, 188 communitarian, 69, 79, 100, 247 community, ix, xii, 4, 7-9, 39-40, 43-44, 50-51, 55-56, 62, 71, 73, 76-80, 83-85, 90, 98, 100-103, 108, 129, 131, 138-139, 148-149, 151, 158159, 162, 182-183, 185, 188-195, 198-199, 205-210, 216, 220-222, 233-234, 239, 241-242, 250-251, 257, 268, 282, 296, 300, 301, 308 Christian, 108, 135, 137, 213 ecclesial, 147 non-geographically-located, 84 of faith, 4 of inquiry, 205 of reason, 4 of Saints, 188, 190, 192 religious, 72, 80, 298 Comte, Auguste, 265 concepts of health and disease, viii Confucian spirits, 81 Confucianism, 8, 71-72, 76-77, 79-82, 84-86, 175, 294 anti-Confucian political movements, 84 rituals, 81 virtues, 85
Index Confucius, 82, 86 Connery, John R., S.J., 177-179 consensus, xv, 24, 28, 53, 56, 62-63, 66-67, 82, 98-99, 207-209, 218, 238, 247, 255, 288-290, 293-294 consensus fidelium, 99 de facto, 236 liberal, 66 overlapping, 41, 98, 244 pseudo, 207 consent, x, 9, 18, 29, 36-38, 40, 62, 74-76, 82-83, 101-102, 131, 138, 167, 175-177, 181-182, 190-191, 231, 242-243, 255, 257, 280, 286 Constantine, Emperor, Saint, 193-194, 200, 300-301, 311 Constantinople, xiii, 10, 194 contraception, 10, 150, 156-158, 166, 172, 177-178, 297, 307 contraceptives, 156 condom, 297 diaphragm, 297 contract, 17, 58, 63, 95-96, 138, 243, 302 controversy, 74, 90, 96-98, 175, 207, 218, 240, 243, 255, 268, 288-289, 295, 306 controversy theory, 73 conversion, x, xi, 8, 54, 58, 74, 76, 101, 110, 129, 198, 208, 210, 219-220, 248 Cornelis, Friar, 196-197 Council of Carthage, 225 Council of Europe, 19 Council of Trent, 65, 122, 136 Courtois, Stephane, 197, 200 crime, 165, 182 criminal law, 276, 287 Crusades, 16 culture, 15, 17, 23-24, 26-28, 30, 34-35, 41, 43, 45, 53-54, 56-58, 63-65, 82, 84, 99, 113, 131, 152, 173, 189, 231, 256, 271, 288-290, 292-294, 296, 302, 309 Chinese, 294 Christian, 113, 130, 302; see also: Christianity cosmopolitan, 301 of Death, 171
Index secular, 7, 57, 59, 152, 291-293 Western, 44, 59, 92, 191, 291-294, 296 culture wars, 16, 302, 313 Dallas, 10 Damian, Peter, 299 Daoism, 80-81, 86 immortals, 81 David, Saint, 297 Davis, Kenneth, 186, 188, 200 de Zulueta, Francis, 92, 104 death, vii, 28, 57, 101, 128, 141, 144-146, 162, 169, 171, 174, 183, 186-187, 191, 193, 199, 239, 275, 277-283, 297, 312 accidental, 297 brain death, 209 Decalogue, 236-238, 304 Declaration of Helsinki, 21 dedication, 31, 44, 50 defilement, 128-129 Delkeskamp-Hayes, Corinna, 4-7, 17, 19, 195, 197, 293-294, 306, 313 democracy, 43, 64, 103, 200, 216 deliberative, 222 limited, 43, 58, 75 democratic polity, 60 Denck, H., 197, 200 Deng Xiaoping, 72 Denzinger, H., 160, 163 Derrida, Jacques,132 despair, 45, 156 determinism, 266, 271 Devlin, Lord Patrick, 92, 104 Didache, 17, 20 Dilley, Stephen, v Diogenes Laertius, 25, 311, 313 discursive analysis, 32, 212, 218 disease, 2, 16, 101, 109, 182, 273, 275, 278-279, 281, 283 disorientation metaphysical, xv, 23, 286, 291-293, 296, 310 moral, 23 dispensation, 157 distributive ethics, 102
323 diversity, 5, 25, 41-44, 53-54, 57, 68, 91, 249, 255, 264 Divine commands, 141 energies, 47 lawgiver, 151-152 nature, 47 revelation, 47, 213 will, 141, 152 divorce, 11, 150-151, 158, 308 doctrine of the two worlds, 186 Donagan, Alan, 245 Donaldson, James, 313 DuBois, James, v Dubose, Edwin, 200 Duffy, John, viii Dympna, Saint, 198 economia, 157 economics, 275-277 ecumenical council, ninth, xiv ecumenical councils, 15 Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrius I, xiii ecumenism, 184 Eden, 15, 277 egalitarianism, 72, 78 Egypt, 190 Elijah, Saint, 219 elite, intellectual, 262-263 moral, 263 embryo, human, 5, 17-18, 166-168, 172, 174-175, 177, 298, 311 experimentation, 2, 5, 287 destruction of, 168 stem cell research, 2 embryocide, 18 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 249 Emmitsburg, 136 emotions, 211 emperor Confucian, 85 Orthodox Christian, 10 pagan, 300 enfant terrible, ix Engelhardt, Susan, vii, xiii-xiv, xvi, 14 Engels, Fredrick, 27
324 English Civil Wars, 25 Enlightenment, 3, 7, 24-31, 35-36, 42-43, 45, 57-60, 73-75, 84, 107, 119, 131, 174-175, 183, 205, 221, 230-231, 247, 250-252, 256, 258259, 265, 268, 290, 292, 305, 312 ensoulment, 18, 165-166, 169 envy, 63, 93 Ephraim of Syria, Saint, 32 Episcopalians, 302 epistemology, viii, 56, 59, 89-91, 95, 103, 108, 212, 215, 218, 221, 267, 271 moral, 90 Epistle of Barnabas, 17, 20 equality, 5, 12, 39, 63, 67, 93-94, 138, 152, 249, 267, 287 eternal life, 170, 183, 187 ethical norms, 209, 216-217, 256 ethical universalism, 242 ethics, Christian, 8-9, 76, 107-110, 114-120, 122-123, 126-127, 129-132, 137, 139-140, 148, 157, 159, 206-207, 212-213, 224, 231; see also: Christianity commissions, 42, 289 expertise, 11, 261-264, 266, 268, 306 business, 265, 268-270 Jewish, 219 secular, 76-77, 139, 167, 175, 205-206, 214, 219, 248-249, 252-254 Eucharist, 85 eudaimon, 206 Europe, xiv, 16, 196, 200 Council of, 16 Western, 3, 300 Europeans, 304 Eusebius, 185, 194, 196, 200 euthanasia, xi, 2, 5, 15, 28, 36, 138, 171, 183, 186, 195, 239, 242-243, 281, 287, 302, 310 Euthyphro, 29, 52, 87, 219 Evangelium Vitae, 166 Eve, 168, 277-278 evil, 10, 15, 18, 64, 141, 145, 150, 166-169, 173-174, 176, 190, 193, 196, 229,
Index 239, 251, 264, 276, 278, 281-282, 297, 312 cooperation with, 245 tolerating, 245 Ewell, C. Rosalee Velloso, 313 excommunication, 51, 188-189, 199 experimentation, viii, 174, 200 expulsion, from the community, 189-191 Fabri of Heilbronn, John, 187 fairness, 43, 63, 144, 239, 291 faith, 4, 7-8, 14, 16, 25-27, 30-32, 35-36, 53, 60, 99-101, 108-109, 111, 114-115, 123, 125-126, 131, 142, 146-147, 150, 152, 154, 160-161, 183-185, 187-188, 191, 196, 199, 206, 210, 213, 215-216, 224, 262, 282, 291-292, 300, 302 corpse of, 290 faith seeking understanding, 68 role of, 90 faithfulness, 41, 44 fall of man, 11, 29-30, 50, 142, 274, 276 fallibilism, 221 family, x, xii, xiv, 13, 16, 79-83, 158, 171, 173, 189, 198, 225, 229-230, 234-235, 242, 255, 298 Chinese, 80 Confucian, 77 Fan, Ruiping, 6-7, 19, 294 Farrow, Douglas, 86 fasting, 51, 53, 188 Fathers of the Church, xiv, 18, 20, 47-49, 51, 60, 64, 139-140, 152, 168, 177, 185, 196, 200, 211, 223, 297, 299-301, 303, 309 Fernandez, Gabriel Palmer, 61 feticide, 297 fetus, 18, 166, 168-169, 172, 174-175, 177-178 Fides et Ratio, 57 Finnis, John, 94, 104, 177, 179 Fletcher, H., 18-19 forbearance rights, 14-15, 69, 75 Foucault, Michel, 130 foundationalism, 74, 221, 288
Index Foundations of Bioethics, x-xvi, 1-2, 6-10, 19, 24, 29, 31, 35, 38, 44-46, 5455, 57, 68-69, 71-73, 78, 83, 86, 89, 104, 132, 165, 174, 177, 179, 182, 200, 205, 225, 288, 294-296, 299, 301-303, 309-310, 314 Foundations of Christian Bioethics, xi, xv, 2-3, 6-8, 10, 19, 24, 29, 31-32, 43, 45-47, 52, 54-55, 64-65, 68, 71, 76, 79, 86, 89, 104, 110, 133, 135, 137, 163, 176-177, 179, 200, 203, 225, 244, 247, 259, 272-273, 283, 290, 294-297, 299, 302-303, 308, 310, 314 Fransen, Frederic J., 10-11, 19, 200-201, 300-301 Fransen, Herbert, 195 Fransen, Mary, 195 fraud, 102 free market, 43, 74, 103, 108 freedom, 12, 15, 37, 39, 42, 44, 54-55, 61, 85, 96, 137-138, 149, 153, 175, 209, 215, 257-258, 271 as a side constraint, 12, 15, 55, 257 as a value, 55, 66 freedom, individual, 40 Freeman, K., 17, 20 Freer, J., 258-259 French Revolution, 59, 290-292 Friedman, R., 185, 187-188, 196, 201 friendship, vii, 51, 54, 64, 132, 211, 238 Frölich, Margrit, 313 Frost, Robert, 250 Fukuyama, Francis, 57, 68, 291-292, 314 fundamentalism, 42, 135, 291-292, 311-312 Gaius, 92 game theory, 5 Gaudium et Spes, 147, 163 gender essentialism, 298 gene therapy, 200 Genesis, 132 genetic engineering, 310 genetic parenthood, 168 gentile, 189, 311 geometry, 32
325 George, Robert, 98, 245 Georgetown University, ix, xii, 203, 225 Gerard of Czanad, 299 Germany, 183, 195, 253 Gettysburg, 250 Gheel community, 198 Giannone, P., 200-201 Gibson, Mel, 199 Gillis, Chester, 103 global village, 63 Gnostic (utopian) temptation, 264, 266 Gnosticism, 270 God, v, xi, xiii-xiv, 3, 5, 7-9, 15, 17, 23, 26-27, 31-35, 45-53, 58-59, 65, 72, 77, 79, 83, 99, 101, 109-111, 114, 116-117, 119-130, 132, 138-144, 146-155, 157, 159-163, 165, 167-170, 172-174, 177-178, 185-188, 190-199, 203, 206, 208209, 211-213, 215, 218-219, 221, 223-224, 232, 238, 244, 248-251, 262, 277-278, 285-287, 290-294, 297-301, 303, 305, 308-310 as lawgiver, 141 authority from, 99 command of, 2 community with, 79 death of, 57 experience of, 2, 108, 303, 309 kingdom of, 291 knowing, 46 love of, 310 mind of, 142 submission to, 309 uncreated energies of, 309 union with, 64, 116, 129, 143, 156, 161, 307 will of, 153 Goheen, Michael, 192, 200-201 golden rule, 170, 237 Golgotha of the spirit, 34 Good Friday, 282, 290 Good Samaritan, 170-171 good human, 28, 37, 74-75, 143, 161, 238, 302-304 thin theory of, 93-94, 98, 267
326 Good, P. Pellman, 201 Gorgon, 279-281 Gospel, 125, 159, 194 synoptic, 125 grace, x-xi, 15-16, 47-48, 50, 52, 72, 119, 121-122, 139, 142, 146, 149-150, 155, 161, 165, 196, 199, 212-213, 215, 219, 221, 278, 298, 308, 310 Grateful Dead, 6 Gray, John, 219, 225 Grebel, Conrad, 184, 189 Greece, 15 Green-Musselman, Jack, v Gregory VII, Pope, xiii Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint, 32 Gregory of Nyssa, Saint, 215 Grisez, Germain, v, 9, 95, 104, 136-137, 140-147, 149, 150-154, 157-163, 170, 177-179, 306, 308 guilt, 50, 126-127, 156, 169, 303, 307 juridical, 51 Guinn, David E., 86, 313 Gutmann, Amy, 222, 227 Haack, Susan, 221, 225 Habermas, Jürgen, 291-293, 314 Hagia Sophia, 10, 65, 192, 194 Halper, Thomas, 222, 226 Hampshire, Stuart, 219, 226 happiness, 12, 16, 18, 50, 100, 173, 209, 251-252, 254, 258-259, 277, 302 Harakas, Stanley S., 214, 217, 226 Hartmann, Klaus, vii-viii, xvi Harvey, John Collins, xii Hastings, 203 Hastings Center, ix, xvi Hauerwas, Stanley, 64, 67-68 Hayek, Friedrich A., 259 health, 4, 41, 54, 66, 67, 98, 102, 171, 189, 197-198, 209, 217, 249, 251, 275, 280 health care, 8, 11, 40, 91, 96, 101-102, 138, 171, 205, 209, 247-249, 251, 258-259 policy, 103 resource distribution, 138
Index heaven, vii, 13, 85, 149, 159, 186, 191, 308 kingdom of, 167, 308 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, viii, xvi, 17, 20, 33-36, 54, 61, 68, 109-110, 118, 120, 123-124, 129-130, 253, 290-293, 312, 314 hell, xi, 15, 165, 191-192, 197 gates of, 300 Hellenic Age, 311 Helm, P., 160, 163 Helsinki Code, 209 heresy, 3, 60, 65, 165, 300 hermeneutic circles, 267, 306 hermeneutic of suspicion, 60 heroin, 15 heterodox, 79 Hierotheos, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, 286, 314 Hildebrand, Dietrich von, xiii Hinduism, 72 Hippocrates, 280 historicism, 108, 129 Hmong, 15 Hobbes, Thomas, 264, 276 Hogan, Margaret, 62-63, 66-68 holiness, 10, 49-50, 53, 108, 116, 119, 126-127, 146, 154-158, 162, 167, 169, 184-188, 190, 193-195, 197, 199, 206-207, 262, 264 pursuit of, 127 Holland, 187 Holy Mountain, xiv Holy Scripture, 213 Holy Spirit, 48, 52, 99, 157, 162, 184-185, 187-188, 215, 301, 308; see also: God homeostasis, 271-272 homicide, 165, 172, 177-178, 297-298 involuntary, 145, 169, 298 homosexuality, 138 homosexual relations, 28, 287, 298 homosexual unions, 42 honesty, 41, 102 Hong Kong, 84 hope, vii, 13, 25, 29, 32, 35, 42, 53, 57, 64, 76, 90, 99, 109, 114, 137, 150, 159, 167, 184, 269, 275, 282, 291
Index Hopko, T., 215, 226 Hoshino, Kazumasa, 283 Houser, N., 226 human being, 66, 144, 146, 151, 165-166, 172-174, 273, 283 human condition, vii, 30, 55, 273, 278, 285-286, 289, 294, 296, 302-303, 306 fallen, 306 human dignity, 39-40, 41-42, 64, 96, 149, 286, 288-289, 293 human flourishing, x, 8, 12, 25-26, 38-40, 44, 56, 63, 75-76, 82, 122, 129, 257-258, 285, 287, 292, 302 human nature, 33, 94, 108, 120, 147, 276 human rights, 2, 4, 24, 42, 63, 216, 286, 288-289, 293, 298-299 human sacrifice, 239 human subjects research, 5 Humanae Vitae, 156 Hume, David, 33, 35, 68, 265 humility, 52, 168, 199 Hunter, James Davidson, 16, 20 Husserl, Edmund, viii, 54 Hütter, Reinhard, 313 hypothetical contractors, 93, 267 ideology, 11, 16, 28, 39, 56, 64, 97, 99, 204, 288-289, 294 liberal social-democratic, 82 idolatry, 65 Idziak, J.M., 160, 163 ignorance, 15, 50, 173, 215, 223, 230, 240-241, 298 illness, 248, 278-279, 282 Iltis, Ana S., v, 18-21, 87, 104, 313-314 immanence, 1-2, 8, 34, 109-110, 112, 114, 118, 120, 122, 124-125, 128-129, 132, 138, 143, 154, 162, 204, 207, 212, 250, 252-254, 259, 290-291 immortality, 31, 183, 280, 287 impecunious, 28 in vitro fertilization, 168, 177 incest, 145 indentured servitude, 181 indulgences, 136, 206, 300
327 inequality, 63, 67 life span, 11, 204 infallibly, 152-153 infant mortality, 11, 204 infanticide, 36 informed consent, 75, 102-103, 209, 255 innocence, 292, 307 Innocent IV, Pope, 16 inquisition, 16 Spanish, 187 Institute for Advanced Study in West Berlin, x, xiii Institute of Religion, x InterAction Council, 16, 20 International Federation of Catholic Universities, xii, xiv International Study Group in Bioethics of the International Federation of Catholic Universities, xiii-xiv inter-subjectivity, 33-35, 37 intuitionist, 73, 93, 174 intuitions, 5, 61, 92-94, 96, 118, 211, 267 Ishmael, R., 311 Israelites, 305 Isaac of Syria, Saint, 32 Jackson, John Hughlings, viii Jacob the Candlemaker, 196 James, Saint, 125,160 James, William, 224, 226 Jarmusch, Jim, 160 Jehovah Witnesses, 15 Jericho, 303 Jesuit, xii, 283, 294 Jesus, 125, 136, 147, 149, 150, 154, 162, 167, 169-170, 184, 191, 199, 203, 206, 222, 225, 282-283; see also: God Jew Orthodox, 37, 72, 75, 79, 138, 175, 214, 291, 302-303, 305, 312 Reformed, 27 John Paul II, Pope, 57, 165-166, 171, 174 John, Saint, 196 John Cassian the Just Roman, Saint, 303 John Chrysostom, Saint, Liturgy of, xi John, the Evangelist, Saint, 32
328 Joint Commission on the Accrediation of Healthcare Organizations, 255 Jones, L. Gregory, 313 Jonsen, Albert, viii-ix, xvi, 97-98, 104, 279, 283 Joshua, 303 judgments factual, 270 value, 270 Jurick, Donna, v jury nullification, 304 jus gentium, 92 jus naturale, 92 justice, 4-5, 41, 43, 94, 96-97, 110, 131, 155, 157, 166, 169-172, 174, 249, 282-283, 287, 291, 297-299 distributive, 278 retributive, 278 social, 138, 185, 308 Kabul, 13 Kant, Immanuel, vii-viii, xvi, 4-5, 16-17, 20, 23, 25, 29, 33-37, 39, 46, 54, 61, 109-110, 118-119, 123, 129-131, 173, 178-179, 221, 231, 237, 287, 291-293, 312 Kantianism, 209 Kaveny, M. Cathleen, v, 9, 20, 155, 163, 306-309 Kee, H.C., 225-226 Kelly, J.N.D., 225-226 Kennedy Institute, ix, xii Kierkegaard, Sören, 45, 109-110, 124-126, 130, 132, 224, 253 killing, revenge, 239 kingdom of God, 54, 149, 152, 167, 169, 200, 300 of grace, 4, 16, 221 of man, 192 of nature, 16, 221 of reason, 4 Klaassen, Walter, 196, 198, 201 Klein, Eran P., xvi Kloesel, C., 226
Index knowledge moral, ix, 7, 71, 90, 100-101, 103, 218, 230, 238, 240, 286, 305 theoretical, 270 Knox, T.M., 20 Koczwara, B., 258-259 Kotzias, Konstantinos, 192, 201 Kraft, R., 20 Krahn, Cornelius, 196, 201 Kuehn, Manfred, xvi Küng, Hans, 41 Lake, Kirsopp, 314 Lamar, Mirabeau B., 18 language-game, 37, 55 Lao Tzu, 215 Law of Noah, 304, 311 Roman, 92 laxism, 153 Lee, Shui Chuen, 87 legalism, 9, 135-137, 139-143, 149, 151, 153-154, 159, 162, 307 legalistic approach to sin, 3, 9, 50, 135-137, 143-145, 148, 153-154, 157, 162, 307, 309 Leo III, Pope, 16 Levinas, Emmanuel, 132-133 liberal cosmopolitanism, 118, 176, 204, 208, 217, 248, 257-259, 301 liberalism, 39, 59, 219, 257, 271-272, 312 libertarianism, 2, 6, 9, 12-13, 28, 39-40, 42, 56, 72, 76, 100, 108, 117-118, 131, 138-139, 176, 219, 231-232, 242-245, 248-249, 251, 256-259 liberty, 5, 12, 18, 40, 55-56, 93-94, 96, 138, 176, 257, 265, 267, 270, 272, 287 civil, 18 personal, 2 life human, 23, 42, 50, 137-138, 140, 158, 160, 167-169, 171, 241, 277-278, 293 human biological, 46, 165 human personal, 165 liturgy, xi, xiv, 82, 123, 185, 206, 213, 281, 283, 308
Index Locke, John, 62, 264 logic, 30, 32-34, 191, 198, 221, 268, 272 Louden, Robert B., xvi Louisiana, 160 love, v, 14, 30, 32, 47, 50, 52, 58, 60, 66, 77, 81, 116, 162, 168, 170, 172, 174, 184, 188, 199, 212, 215-216, 282, 298, 310 love commandments, 236-237 love between parent and child, 82 between siblings, 82 conjugal, 166 failure of, 172 of enemies, 66 of God, 49, 52, 116, 211, 224 of neighbor, 174 of self, 49, 52, 167 loyalty, 81, 302 Luckmann, T., viii, xvi Luibheid, C., 225 Lumitao, J.M., 225 Luther, Martin, 130 lying, 58, 214, 224, 229-230, 303 Maastricht, xiv MacIntyre, Alasdair, ix, xvi, 24, 68, 96, 104, 107-108, 119, 131, 133, 138 Madison, James, 275-276, 283 magisterium, 136, 151-152, 157 magistrates, 10, 193-194 manualist, 122, 136, 145, 160 Marcion of Sinope, 305 Marion, Jean-Luc, 132-133 Maritain, Jacques, 148, 163, 244 market, x, 7, 24, 27, 37-38, 40, 55, 58, 61, 75, 83-84, 103, 182, 204, 268-269, 302 failure, 277 rights, 83-84 marriage, 75, 128, 150-151, 158, 166-168, 197, 233, 287, 298, 308 same gender, 2 second, 308 Marten, R., 69 Martin, Gottfried, viii
329 martyrdom, 14, 50, 53, 64, 185-188, 196, 300 martyrs, 197, 308 Marx, Karl, 27, 265 Marxism, 72, 271-272 Maryland, ix, 136 masturbation, 127-128 mathematics, 32, 161, 221, 273 Mauer, A., 283 Maximos, 211, 223-224 Maximos the Confessor, Saint, 211, 223-224 McCartney, James, xv McGovern, Fr. Thomas Aquinas, 283 McKenny, Gerald, 8-9, 20, 295 medicine, vii-x, 8, 16, 24, 32, 46, 54, 91, 95, 101-102, 148, 203, 205, 218, 256, 265, 270, 275, 277-281, 305-306, 308 history of, viii organization of, 102 socialized, 258 Melchizedek, 299 Mendieta, Eduardo, 314 Menno Simons, 130, 196, 201 Mennonite, 196-198, 200-201 Mennonite Central Committee, 197 Mennonite Disaster Service, 197 Mercurius, holy Great Martyr, 311 Mergal, A.M., 201 Messiah, 297; see also: Jesus metaphysics, viii, 31, 36, 57, 59, 221, 261, 267, 273, 290, 309 Middle Ages, xiii, 24-27, 30-31, 36, 47, 49, 59, 166, 263 middle level principles, 5, 41, 96-97 Milan, xiii Milbank, John, 107-108, 119, 133 military, 18, 276, 301 Miller, M., 195, 201 mind-brain relationship, viii Minogue, Brendan P., 61, 68-69, 104, 285, 314 miscarriage, 30, 156, 166, 169 modernity, 3, 26, 29-30, 31, 35, 41, 59, 99, 119, 176, 291-292, 312 collapse of, 44
330 Mohammedans, 13, 291, 302, 312 monastery, 78 monasticism, 188 moral acquaintances, 11, 66, 204, 208, 222, 295 agent, 170 agreement, 8, 64, 101, 231-232, 241 anthropology, 8 argument, 14, 73, 85, 107, 285 authority, 2, 6, 42, 55-56, 60-61, 67, 73-75, 81, 83, 85, 90, 100, 102103, 175, 262, 286, 289, 296, 306 authority, secular, 1-2, 15, 56, 83, 175 authority, state, 4 authority, universal, 175 character, 75, 159, 236 community, 7, 38-40, 44, 55-56, 61, 64-66, 71-73, 75-81, 83-86, 90, 98, 100-103, 175-176, 182, 190191, 193-194, 204, 208-210, 212, 217-218, 220, 231-232, 235, 241, 257, 289, 294-295, 301-302, 305 consensus, 5, 23, 26, 28, 41, 56, 57, 60, 62, 65, 99, 208, 288, 294, 305 controversies, 14, 39, 60, 73-75, 77, 81, 85, 91-92, 94-99, 209, 219, 230, 295-296, 299 disagreement, 11-12, 110, 229-232, 234-235, 239-242, 244, 303 disagreements, 62, 216, 231-235, 241-242, 267, 295 diversity, 5, 23, 41, 55-57, 63, 65, 82, 91-92, 120, 241-242, 267, 286, 289, 304, 306 dogmatism, 230 enemies, 286, 302 evidence, 8, 25, 60, 287-288, 299 friends, 11, 39, 44, 54, 66, 73, 77-81, 85-86, 181-182, 204, 257, 295, 302 gradualism, 158 guidance, 14, 50, 122, 236, 238, 247, 253, 285 ignorance, 240 indeterminacy, 214 intuition, 91, 98
Index judgment, 229-230, 233-234, 242-244 law, 9, 16, 92, 94, 141-142, 148, 151153, 155-156, 158-159, 169, 219 life, 5, 8, 28, 37, 39, 44, 59, 76, 82, 100, 136-137, 140-143, 146, 153, 155, 157, 162, 216, 229-230, 232, 242, 251, 257, 288, 292 maximalism, 153 minimalism, 153 narrative, xi, 15, 17, 251 norms, 14, 25, 35, 119, 137, 140, 142-143, 146, 151, 157-159, 235, 238, 241 orientation, 50-52, 122 perspective, xi, 5, 27, 43, 295 pluralism, ix, 1, 7, 11, 17, 24, 30, 41-45, 55, 57, 63, 67-68, 73, 285-286, 288-290, 292-294, 296, 299, 306, 310-311 precepts, 142-143, 187-188, 216, 225, 236-238 premises, 14, 25, 39-40, 60, 77-78, 81, 96, 99, 103, 285, 287-288, 295, 299, 305 relativism, 43 rules, 136, 143, 150, 153, 162, 287 strangers, x, 1, 6, 11-12, 14-15, 26, 38, 40, 47, 54-55, 60-62, 64, 66, 67, 73-81, 85, 167, 174-176, 181-183, 189, 204, 208, 210, 231, 247-249, 251, 253, 256-257, 259, 286, 294-296, 301 tradition, 123, 152 truth, 1, 8, 43, 60, 85, 110, 112, 116, 137, 158, 232, 240, 257 values, 25, 92, 96, 103 virtues, 3, 12, 80, 92, 108, 178, 207, 223, 262, 277, 282 vision, xv, 5, 28, 37, 42, 63, 73, 75, 84, 94-95, 97, 103, 110, 175, 205, 208, 217-220, 257, 285, 289, 295; Christian, 15; secular, 44 morality, ix-x, xiv-xv, 4-11, 15-17, 25-30, 32, 35-38, 42-44, 46, 49-57, 59-62, 64, 71-72, 74-76, 81-82, 84-86, 90, 94, 96, 100, 109-110,
Index 112-120, 123, 130-131, 137-138, 140, 142-143, 146, 148-149, 151, 153-154, 156, 158-159, 165, 169, 172-177, 181, 194, 204-205, 210, 215, 218-219, 222, 230-232, 234238, 240-245, 251-252, 263, 271, 285-289, 293, 299, 301-303, 305 canonical, 56 Christian, 9, 29, 50, 54, 76, 146, 185, 205, 214; see also: Christianity common, ix, 27, 74, 82, 92, 96-97, 101, 103, 118-119, 123, 138, 253, 287-288 content-full, 14, 23, 114, 138-139 first order, 38 immanent, 117 intermediate, 304 of consent, 39 political, 77, 138 post-Christian, 36, 299 post-traditional, 84 procedural, 43, 75, 113 public, 138, 231, 242 rational, 65 second order, 28, 36, 37, 38, 40, 44, 54, 61, 67 secular, ix-xi, xv, 1-2, 4, 6-7, 11-12, 24, 36, 42-43, 55, 57, 59, 64, 66, 74, 83, 123, 167, 182, 191-192, 194, 198, 217, 231, 247, 251, 285, 290, 295, 299 sexual, 167 social, 244 universal, 2, 4, 6, 42, 204 Moreno, Jonathan, 218, 226 Mormons, 42 Moses Maimonides, 305 Mount Athos, 48 Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary, 136 Muenster, 195 Muentzer, Thomas, 189 multi-culturalism, 95, 99 murder, 10, 17-18, 97, 144, 165-166, 168-169, 178, 181-182, 245, 297298, 311 Muslims, 10, 72, 138, 194 mutual agreement, 64, 73, 208
331 mutual consent, 36-37, 44, 75, 243 mutual love, 50, 167 mutual recognition, 41 mysticism, 2, 48, 138 Nagel, Thomas, 266 National Bioethics Advisory Commission, 99, 289 National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, viii, 20, 98 National Endowment for the Humanities, ix National Rifle Association, 195 National Socialists, 303 natural law, 16, 25-26, 33, 92, 94-95, 117, 122, 137, 152, 157, 169, 174, 230-232, 236, 244, 263, 281, 293, 298-299 naturalism, 108, 129 nature, fallen, 50, 276 naturopathy, 2 Neal, Patrick, 219, 226 Nelson, J.L., 62-67, 69 neo-pagan, 76 neo-Platonism, xiii Netherlands, 179, 187, 225 Neufeld, V.H., 198, 201 New Age universalism, 208 New England, 63 New Hampshire, 249 New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, vii Newton, K.S., 201 Nicholas I of Rome, xiv Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 113, 130 Nieuwsma, Virginia, xvi nihilism, 74, 113, 130-131, 286 noesis, 210, 212-213, 218, 224 noetic, 2, 46-49, 58, 64, 75, 108-110, 125-126, 130, 139, 142-143, 206, 210, 212, 218, 223-224, 251, 296 experience, xiv-xv, 32, 48-49, 124-126, 139, 143, 146, 155, 210, 212, 218, 224, 251-252, 286, 296, 305-306
332 knowledge, 46, 48, 74-75, 77, 109-110, 114-116, 120-121, 125, 130, 143 theology, 29, 305 non-maleficence, 41, 96-97 Noonan, John, 155, 157, 163 noumenal world, 34, 290 noumenon, 34 nous, 29, 48, 64, 211, 218, 223-224 Nozick, Robert, 14, 20, 98, 266 Nuremberg Code, 209 O’Donovan, Oliver, 119, 133 Obama, Barack, 17 obedience, 44, 49-50, 62, 119, 126, 141, 152, 161, 169, 188 objectivity, 33-35, 66 objectivity-as-inter-subjectivity, 34 Ockham, William, 47 Ogilvie, Captain J., 201 Ophiuchus, 280 organ donation, 282-283 organ transplantation, 5 Orthodox Church, xiv, 48, 146, 157, 182183, 211, 213-214, 224, 309, 311 Russian, 199 Orthodox Mounted Posse, 10, 192 pagan, 36, 76-77, 126, 215 pain, 190, 233, 275, 277-278, 280, 282, 304 Paisios, Elder, 224 Palamas, St. Gregory, xiv Palestine, 300 Palmer, Gabriel-Fernández, 68-69, 211, 218, 223-224, 226, 314 papal infallibility, 309 papal magisterium, 309 papists, 10, 194 paradise, 149 parents, 38, 82, 173, 198-199, 277, 282 Amish, 191-192 Parliament of the World’s Religions, 16, 20 Partridge, Christina, xiii, xvi passions, human, 35, 44, 49-50, 119, 148, 211, 223-224, 251, 307, 310
Index patients bill of rights, 255 patriarchal Church of New Rome, xiii Paul, Saint, 160, 300 peace, 53-54, 57-58, 63, 175, 181, 191-192, 291-292 peaceable negotiation, 74 Peirce, Charles, S., 207, 210-211, 221-223, 226 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 311, 314 Pellegrino, Edmund, ix, 95, 104 penance, 127, 136, 145, 188 penitential practices, 136 Percy, Walker, 24 permission, v, 15, 37-38, 40, 44, 61-62, 64, 66-67, 75-76, 81-82, 103, 112113, 118, 127, 131, 175-176, 181182, 190-192, 196, 198, 206-207, 209, 215-216, 218-220, 222, 243, 247, 249-252, 257-258, 295-296 permission, principle of, 36, 38-40, 44, 67, 74, 77, 81-82, 85, 110, 113, 118, 205-206, 210, 248, 251, 285 person, 10, 12, 14, 18, 27, 30, 35, 40, 47, 49, 50-51, 62, 64, 81, 98, 100101, 112, 131, 145-146, 148-149, 155-158, 161-162, 165-166, 168170, 172-175, 178, 182-183, 186, 191-192, 198, 229-230, 233, 235236, 240, 242-245, 251, 295-296 respect for, viii, 15, 102 personal responsibility, 249 personhood, 37, 46, 62, 165-166, 169, 172-174, 177, 191, 198 Peter, Saint 10 Petry, M.J., 68 Pharisees, 159, 162 Philips, O., 196, 201 philosophy, vii-ix, 3, 7, 9, 11, 13-14, 27, 30-33, 36, 45-48, 54, 57-60, 65, 111, 116, 118, 138, 160, 210, 250, 261, 263, 265, 290-292, 294, 296, 298-299, 301 analytic, 265, 271 Aristotelian, 31, 33, 263-264 Greek, 263, 309 moral, 24, 46, 51, 91, 95, 97, 107, 116-117, 177, 292, 309
Index of medicine, viii pagan, 48, 65, 215 political, 117, 131, 256 rationalist, 161 relationship to theology, 16, 24, 45 Western, 33, 311 Photios the Great, Saint, xiv physician, xii, 16, 28, 67, 97, 145, 243, 279, 287 physician-assisted suicide, 28, 287, 299 physics, 31-32, 94, 209, 221, 273-274, 305 pietist, 35 Pinkard, Terry, xv-xvi Plank, Elvin, 195, 198 Planned Parenthood, 195 Plato, 29, 60, 68, 92, 147, 219, 223, 261-262, 276, 309 Platonism, 218, 263 political liberalism, 107-108, 312 politics, 83, 200, 226, 256, 268, 275-278 pope of Rome, xiii positivism, 265 post-modernity, 3, 7, 17, 24-30, 32, 34-39, 41, 43-46, 49, 53-55, 57, 74, 90-91, 99-100, 104, 183, 191, 231, 249, 251 Potter, Van Rensselaer, 203 poverty, 53, 276-277 prayer, 3, 51, 53, 122, 137, 149, 152, 169, 188, 191, 194, 211, 297 pregnancy, 173, 307 President’s Council on Bioethics, 98, 289 pride, 263, 286, 310 priest, xii, 77, 155, 158, 177, 198, 250, 283 priesthood, xii, 18, 128, 214 principle of double effect, 144-146, 162, 307 cancerous uterus, 144 early delivery of a nonviable baby in the case of the mother’s congestive heart failure, 145 principle of sufficient reason, 310 principlism, viii, 92, 254 privacy, 98, 103 proceduralism, 102
333 procreation, 50, 167, 183 promise-keeping, 66 property, rights, 15, 18, 83-84, 146, 195, 214, 219, 231, 233, 239-241, 272, 278, 287 prophylactics, 156 proportionalism, 144, 150 prosperity, 39, 60, 93, 192, 267, 276, 287 prostitution, 225 Protagoras, 6, 311 psychology, 31, 271 psychotherapy, viii public discourse, 41, 222 public good, 67 punishment, 189, 276, 282, 301 purification, 30, 145, 156, 206, 211, 213, 307 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 94-95 Quinisext Council, 18, 20, 311 Quitchke-Fransen, Angelika, 195 Rahner, Karl, 100 rape, 145 Raposa. M.L., 211, 226 rational argument, 5, 14, 16, 23, 29, 42-43, 56, 60, 72-75, 78, 92, 99, 114, 264, 267, 285, 287-288, 295, 306, 310-311 contractors, 92 rationalism, 35, 108, 121-122, 129, 131, 147, 151, 154, 161, 231-232, 242, 253 rationality, 2, 5, 17, 23-26, 31, 33, 35, 40, 44, 61, 68, 91, 94, 235, 292 discursive, xiv, 32, 35-36, 109, 131, 154 moral, 4, 5, 17, 23, 28, 36, 74, 94, 112, 267, 285-286, 299, 303-304 philosophical, 290 secular, 1, 29 Rawls, John, 56, 60, 63, 69, 93, 98, 104, 117, 266, 312, 314 Reagan, James E., 61, 68-69, 314 realism, 271 Realpolitik, 289
334 reason, ix-x, 6-9, 11, 15-17, 25-28, 30, 33-34, 36-37, 48, 57, 59, 64-65, 73-75, 90, 92, 94, 95-97, 99-100, 108-112, 114, 117-124, 129-131, 141-144, 146-147, 150, 152, 157-159, 161, 173, 176-177, 183, 194-195, 205, 210- 211, 213, 215, 219, 222-224, 229-230, 232, 234-236, 241-242, 244, 252, 258, 263, 267, 277, 281, 286, 290-291, 299, 302-304, 306, 308 common, 238, 241 corpse of, 290 discursive, 8, 108-110, 112-115, 119124, 139, 142-143, 146-147, 204, 219, 221, 293 failure of, 12, 26, 46, 56, 113-114, 251 faith in, 25-26, 36 human, 2, 25, 91, 142, 146, 231-232, 235-238, 240-242, 244-245, 303-304 making idol of, 25 moral, 7, 25, 89-91, 95-96, 100-101, 107, 114, 121-122, 130 natural, 92, 236 practical, 90, 95, 98, 131, 144, 158 public, 89-90 religion of, 291 secular, x, xi, 7, 12, 14, 25-26 universal, 175 redemption, 197, 282, 298 reflective equilibrium, 97 Reformation, 15, 26, 48, 91, 130, 184, 194, 230, 301, 311 Reich, Warren T., xvi Reign of Terror, 291 reliability, 44 religion, x, xiii, 26-27, 75, 80-81, 90, 107, 109, 119, 130, 231, 241, 251-252, 261, 291, 312 repentance, xi, 3, 15, 50-52, 156, 169, 185, 188, 297-298, 307, 311 reproduction, 101, 167-168, 200, 281 see also procreation assisted, 128
Index Republic of Texas, 18 research ethics, 102 resource allocation, 5 resurrection, 133, 240 retroduction, 211, 223 revelation, 46, 64-65, 108, 119, 123, 132, 137, 161, 252, 273, 276-278, 282 biblical, 121, 129, 132 divine, 132, 277 Rice University, x, xiii, 77 right worship, 77, 299-301, 303, 308, 311 rigorism, 153, 162 risk aversion, 93 ritual purity, 85 Roberts, Alexander, 313 Robison, W.L., 61-62, 64, 67, 69 Romanides, John, 286, 309, 314 romanum gubernans imperium, 16 Rome, 10, 15, 65, 194 Bishop of, 160 fourth, 10, 192, 200 second, 10, 192 Rorty, Richard, 5, 23, 35-36, 43, 56, 69, 99, 104, 117, 130 Royce, J., 207, 221, 226 rule by the majority, 306 rule of law, 40, 149 rules of evidence, 14, 39-40, 73, 78, 81, 285, 294-295, 305 rules of inference, 14, 306 rumspringa, 191-192 Russell, N., 225 Sabbath, 159 Saint Louis University, v salvation, 2, 10, 54, 100, 157, 167, 184, 186, 192, 198-199, 207, 264 Samaritan, 170 San Francisco, 118 sanctity of life, 96, 144 Sanders, T.C., 104 Santa Fe, 10 Sattler, Michael, 190 Schaff, Philip, 18, 20, 200, 313 schism, 86, 123 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 119, 130-131
Index Schleitheim Confession, 190, 193, 196, 199 Schmidt, Kurt, 313 Scholasticism, ix, xiv, 3, 26, 31-32, 48, 58, 73, 84, 119, 122-123, 140, 160, 290, 309 second, 25 Schönmetzer, A., 160, 163 Schutz, Alfred, viii, xvi scientific inquiry, 221, 223 scientism, 265, 267-268, 270 Scofield, Giles, 15, 20 Scotus, Duns, 119 scripture, 48, 121, 132, 139, 223, 184-185 Scrivener, Martin, v sectarian, 11, 53, 189, 203-204, 207-208, 217-218, 250 sects, Christian, 184 religious, 78, 80, 199, 262 secular humanism, 97, 203-204 security, 5, 39, 93, 223, 267, 287 self-defense, 84, 238 self-gratification, 57 self-reliance, 249 sense experience, 32-33 Seraphim of Sarov, Saint, 215 sex selection, 200 sexism, 50, 138 Sextus Empiricus, 25 sexual license, 176 sexual relations, 28, 198, 287 sexuality, 35, 50, 101, 127-128, 167-168, 183 carnal union, 127-128 disordered, 65 marital, 167-168 Sharpton, Al, 98 Sherman, 250 Sherrard, P., 211, 218, 223-224, 226 Sherwin, Susan, 218, 226 shunning, 189, 191-192, 198-199 Silouan the Athonite, Saint, 184-185, 201 sin, xi, 11, 51, 58, 93, 127, 150-151, 158, 162, 166, 188, 198-199, 206, 211, 223-224, 273, 275-278, 281-282, 297-298, 303, 306-308
335 atonement for, 312 disease as symptom of, 279 involuntary, 127, 156, 169 mortal, 142, 150 original, 156, 198, 277-278 venial, 151 Singapore, 287 Singer, Peter, 95, 104 skepticism, 235, 273 about morality, 241-242 epistemological, 43 moral epistemological, 285 moral metaphysical, 285 slavery, 14, 172-173, 238 Smith, Norman Kemp, xvi, 20 Snyder, G.F., 195, 201 Snyder, Jon R., 314 socialism, 37, 182, 219, 271-272 society, secular, 28, 66, 89, 91, 100-103, 138 Socrates, 60, 92, 309 Sohm, J.F., 200 solidarity, 96 sons of Noah, 305 soul, 18, 31-32, 64, 148, 156, 187, 197, 215, 223, 298, 310 Soviet Union, 197 Sparks, Jack N., 17-18, 20 Spicker, Stuart, ix spiritual father, 152, 155-156, 183, 307 harm, 51, 127, 145-146, 156 life, 7, 136 therapy, 151, 156, 298, 307 treatment, 145, 156 spirituality, mystical, 206 St. Edward’s University, v St. Mary’s Grammar School Houston, xi St. Thomas High School, xi Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in America, 217 starvation, 171 state liberal, 62, 176 minimal, 56, 62, 83-84 secular, xi, 9, 15, 42, 83, 90, 100-101, 103
336 statism, 192, 264-265, 266 liberal-social-democratic, 83 sterilization, 10, 166, 172, 177-178, 200 Stevens, M.L.T., 218, 226 Stoltzfus, Samuel, 199, 201 Stout, Jeffrey, 117 Strawson, P.F., 169, 297 striptease, 225 suffering, 50, 101, 171, 190, 249, 251, 254, 275, 277-278, 280, 282-283 suicide, 93, 186, 220, 239 supernatural, 108, 119, 121-122, 277 surrogacy, commercial, 15, 168 Swiss Brethren, 190 Switzerland, 187 Symeon the New Theologian, Saint, 32 symphonia, 10-11, 192, 194 Synod at Basel, 65 taxation, 13, 39, 84, 258, 265 temperance, 277 Texan, xi, xiii, 10, 15, 18, 283, 301-302, 304 Texas, vii, x-xi, 10, 13, 18, 192, 194-195, 306 Texas Revolution, 18 Texian, 10, 18-19, 183, 200, 203 TEYKU, 219 theologians as academics, 48, 308 as holy men, 48, 308 theology, xii, 3, 24, 30-32, 35, 45-49, 51-52, 56, 58-60, 65, 107-108, 117, 119, 123, 136, 142, 147, 155, 160-161, 184-188, 191-192, 194-195, 218, 263, 290, 292-293, 296, 298-301, 303, 309 academic, 52 as academic inquiry, 108 ascetic theology of holiness, 186 discursive, 47, 185, 307 discursive rational, 47 dogmatic, 142 empirical, 309 liturgical, 59 moral, 9, 24, 51-52, 123, 136-137, 139, 141-143, 154, 292, 297
Index noetic, 2, 47-49, 58, 108, 138, 147, 307 Orthodox, xiv, 8, 24, 306, 309 see also theology: noetic; noesis of discipleship, 186-187 of discursive reflection, 301 of holiness, 301 of human rights, 301 of martyrdom, 186 of social justice, 301 Patristic, 48 personal, 309 post-Tridentine, 122-123 Western, 7, 9, 30, 32, 46, 48, 108 theosis, 168 Theotokos, 215 therapy, spiritual, 298, 307 thing-in-itself, 33-34 Thirty Years War, 25 Thomasma, David, 96, 104, 222, 227 Thoreau, Henry David, 249 tithing, 55, 162 tobacco, 195 toleration, 41, 44, 57, 118, 176, 265 religious, 264 Tollefsen, Christopher, 9-10, 20, 297-299, 301 Torah, 214, 225, 305 Torrey, R.A., 312, 314 torture, 16, 187, 209, 233, 305 Toulmin, Stephen, 97-98, 104 Tower of Babel, 288 transcendence, 3, 8-9, 15, 32, 34, 37-38, 43, 45-47, 49, 55, 61-62, 67, 74, 101, 108-118, 120-121, 123-132, 135, 138-139, 143, 154-155, 189, 204, 206, 212, 218, 248-250, 257-259, 261-263, 270, 286, 290-294, 298 Trinity, 86, 104, 161, 211, 286, 308-309, 311 Trotter, Griffin, 11, 20, 215, 221, 227, 295, 301-304 truth-telling, 102, 214, 254, 256 Tulane University of Louisiana School of Medicine, vii Turiaso, Jennifer, xvi
Index Ulpianus, 92 UNESCO, 16, 20 Unitarianism, 249-250, 258 United States, 84, 171, 219, 306, 312 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 217 University of Bonn, vii University of Louvain, 196 University of Notre Dame, 17, 133 University of Paris, 16 University of Texas at Austin, vii University of Texas Medical Branch, viii Urban II, Pope, 16 utilitarianism, 4, 41, 174, 209, 266, 271, 287 utopianism, 264 van Braght, Thieleman J., 187, 200 Vatican Council, First, 146-147 Second, xi-xii, 122-123, 136, 140, 143, 147, 149, 152, 163, 293 Vattimo, Gianni, 29, 35-36, 69, 286, 288, 314 Veatch, Robert, 95-96, 104 vegetarianism, 182 veil of ignorance, 63 Velimirovic, St. Nikolai, 311, 314 venom, 279 vigils, 51 violence, vii, 6, 15, 54, 131, 182 Voegelin, Eric, 270, 272 voluntarism, 47, 119, 121, 141, 154 Wace, Henry, 18, 20, 200, 313 Wake, Peter, v Walker, Lucy, 199-200 Walter, Jennifer, K., xvi
337 Walzer, Michael, 86-87, 118, 244 Wang, Xiaoying, 72, 87 war, 311 American Civil War, 250 of religion, 91 European wars of religion, 25 War between the States, 18 War of Northern Aggression, 250 War of Southern Insurrection, 250 World War II, 197 Ware, Kallistos, 211, 218, 223-224, 226 warfare, 80, 238 Washington on the Brazos, 18 Wear, Stephen, 11-12, 21, 255, 258-259, 301, 304-306, 314 Weiner, R. B., 61, 66-67, 69 welfare state, 258 Wenger, J. C., 190, 193, 196, 199, 201 Wesley, John, 130 Western Europe, xii, 187 Wildes, Kevin Wm. S.J., 6-7, 11, 21, 61, 65-66, 68-69, 90, 92, 95, 98, 100, 102, 104, 204, 227, 294-295 Willems, Dirk, 187-188 Williams, A.N., 163 Williams, Bernard, 130, 160 Williams, Esther, 314 Williams, G.vH., 201 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 34, 36, 60-61, 69 World Medical Association, 16, 21 Zabala, Santiago, 291, 314 Zagalo e Melo, Paulo, 313 Zanardi, William J., v Zaner, Riichard M., xvi Zerkavos, Pilotheos Fr., 165 Zeus, 280 zygote, 168, 172
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