Theological Ethics as Political Ethics: A Conversation with Raymond Geuss

The Future of Theological Ethics

First, I hope that theological ethics can sustain and even strengthen its origins in Christian community and identity. Culture today in the US, UK, and Western Europe is increasingly secular, pluralist, fast-paced, fragmented, and guided by the values of modern science and individual autonomy. A relation to the transcendent can lend greater meaning and purpose to human moral striving. The specifically faith dimension of theological ethics is especially important to those generations who did not grow up with the strong, if in some ways narrow and oppressive, religious formation of the 1950s and ’60s. It is today important to ground ethics explicitly in what we Christians profess to be the reality of salvation from God in Jesus Christ. This is a major theme of Benedict XVI, especially in his earlier writings, his 2007 book Jesus of Nazareth, ⁴ and his 2005 encyclical Deus caritas est (see nos. 28-29).

Second, however, I hope that Christian ethics can sustain the commitment to global justice that characterized the Vatican II period, and has taken new shapes in worldwide local theologies. The priority of access for all to basic social and material goods can get marginalized in the quest for renewed Christian identity, in, for example, some ethics of Christian virtue, of discipleship community, of eucharistic identity, of the way of the cross, or of countercultural witness. Yet the mandate to work for just global conditions has been a resounding theme in the majority of encyclicals of popes from John XXIII onward; of worldwide political and liberation theologies; of Catholic organizations and networks such as Caritas Internationalis, CAFOD, Jesuit refugee service, Sant’ Egidio; and of numerous Protestant counterparts.

In the words of Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical, Caritas in veritate, the force of genuine Christian love ‘leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace’ (no. 1), including the reform of structures that keep 1.7 billion people in absolute poverty, and cause six million children to die of hunger every year. Global justice is an essential dimension of the theological ethics of the future.

My third hope, only briefly treated here, is that theological ethics can discover grounds both intellectual and practical for a realistic optimism that change is really possible. In other words, my hope is for hope itself. I believe one key root of such hope is committed, solidaristic action. As Benedict XVI says in Spe salvi, ‘All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action’ (no. 35).

‘Outside Ethics’

Now let me engage more directly with Raymond Geuss. Geuss proposes that ‘there is something outside “philosophical ethics”’, to which we ethicists should be more attentive. To do this, we must get past ‘the project of modern ethics’, which Geuss defines as the Kantian attempt to answer ‘What ought I to do?’ on the basis of ‘an autonomous philosophical ethics established as a discipline devoted to giving such answers in purely secular terms’. ⁵

Moving ‘outside ethics’ so defined has two complementary components. First, it requires abandoning an abstract, rationalistic model of ethics, and recognizing that ‘evaluative discourse is a part of the very texture of our lives’. ⁶ I trust it is clear that I agree completely that ethics is always historical, contextual, political, and always already invested in practical outcomes. As Geuss insists, ethical values are recognized, possibilities pondered, and claims validated historically and inductively. ⁷ Christian ethics takes shape, not in the abstract nor on the basis of reason alone, but from within communities, practices, and discourses that shape identities, worldviews, goals, and perceived possibilities. The task of theological ethics, then, is to understand and interpret the moral dimensions of the Christian experience of God, embodied within ecclesial communities, and to support the integrity and the power of Christian social practices.

But ‘outside ethics’ also has a second meaning. It refers to the possibility that the modern ethical insight into the dignity or basic equal worth of all persons (expressed for example as ‘human rights’), as well as social reformation, depends on a trans-ethical experience of ultimacy. Perhaps such an experience is beyond the ‘secular, immanent’ realm altogether. ⁸ Perhaps hope must come ‘from outside the present’, from a reality that is utterly different, beyond our control, and even ‘messianic’. ⁹ The Christian theologian, obviously, sees the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, Christ’s resurrection, and the sending of Christ’s Spirit, as inbreaking realities of this sort. Ethics may require recourse to an experience that is, or is analogous to, religious experience.

One way for a theologian to read this proposal is as support for community-oriented varieties of Christian ethics, in which the aim is to live in conformity to Christ, but not necessarily to engage wider social structures, nor to expect that those not privy to Christian experience of the absolute could or would partner with Christians for the global common good. This would be an interpretation I reject. Rather, the divine self-disclosure in history has both eschatological and inner-historical dimensions, so experience of the ‘outside’ reality is neither limited to Christians nor devoid of political consequences. Here are three reasons.

1. The first is the gospel. Although Jesus himself did not mount a reform of social structures, the inclusive and status-reversing nature of the kingdom, communicated in parables, exorcisms, healings, and iconoclastic table-fellowship, does have social and economic implications for those who take him seriously. ¹⁰ This is especially so where Christians have the ability to affect local and global conditions of social exclusion, oppression and violence. Thus I affirm the ‘preferential option for the poor’ (Gustavo Gutiérrez, John Paul II, Benedict XVI) as the first mandate of Christian social ethics. This includes structural justice. Elite academics are not entitled to declare the struggle for justice naïve, unimportant, or impossible. People existing on less than a dollar a day, being raped in a conflict zone, or tortured in a prison cellar have the prerogative to say if the way of the eucharist or the cross entails abdication of politics.

2. Genuinely ecstatic or mystical states are peak experiences that do not occur frequently, and do not occur for all individuals. One role of religious community is to sustain the conditions of such experiences, but another is to mediate their effects for the whole community via an inclusive way of life. Through prayer, liturgy, art and music, and shared moral practices, participants sense the divine in greater and lesser degrees of intensity and duration, encouraged by fellowship with other seekers, and finding God in community with them (1 Cor. 13, 14.4; Jn 13.34-35, 14.25-26, 15.9-12, 17.20-22). Ecstatic experiences of the absolute, then, are not essential to moral conversion, though they do sustain communities within which conversion occurs.

3. I concur in the teaching of the Catholic Church (Dominus Iesus, 2000), and of theologians of interreligious dialogue, that neither peak experiences of the divine; nor more quotidian experiences of God, of ‘a world that is radically different’, ¹¹ or of moral conversion, occur only within Christianity or within religion. In fact, some Christians widely regarded as exemplary of peak spiritual experiences have not borne fruit in respect for basic human dignity and ‘rights’. Augustine accepted judicial torture, Bernard of Clairvaux preached the crusades, and Catherine of Sienna urged the pope to start a new one. Fallible humans always need communities of practice where they come to appreciate moral goods, acquire dispositions of respect and compassion, and learn how to put ideals into practice in just and loving ways. Peak experiences are neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding of and commitment to equal human dignity.

Now, granting the contextual, practical nature of ethics, let us get back to the prospects for global discourse and practical commitment. From my perspective as a Catholic, feminist, liberationist, social ethicist the biggest challenge is not Kantian abstractions, which have already been supplanted by historicist, postmodern, and postcolonial trends. It is to show why, if ethical analysis is contextual, and theological ethics even originates within a specific communal experience of God, then particularity of ethical standpoint, as well as what Geuss calls ‘realism’ about people’s moral motives and capabilities, do not defeat the ethical-political aim of action based on consensus across cultures and religions.

To this end, it is important to argue two things: (i) human beings do share experiences, values, and goals in common; and (ii) common human ethics does recognize and at least in theory upholds what is expressed in liberal thought as basic equality, even if ‘equality’ has no simple practical meaning. ¹² Similar ideas are behind Kantian respect for persons, biblical love of neighbor and enemy, Catholic social teaching’s affirmation of human dignity, the feminist appeal to common humanity, and the preferential option for the poor in liberation theology and recent papal encyclicals. By equality I mean not equal distribution of goods, but respect for everyone as of inherent worth, and deserving equal consideration, despite differences in characteristics and status.

The ‘equality’ argument is much more difficult to make than the ‘goods’ argument. It is easy to enumerate basic goods, institutionalized variously in different cultures. According to Aquinas they include the ability to preserve one’s life, to mate and raise a family, to live cooperatively in society, and to seek knowledge about God (ST I-II.94.2). The list could be refined and expanded, for example to include freedom of movement, food and clean water, literacy, political participation, the opportunity of productive work, and healthcare. These are things all persons and cultures value and the lack of which brings suffering. Thanks to global media, we ‘modern Westerners’ can witness up close the faces of people whose lives are blighted by wars and civil conflict, unemployment, forced migration, human trafficking, food shortages, and ecological disasters. Who really doubts that these conditions are bad and their opposites good for human flourishing? Where we really differ, however, is on who should get these goods. We want them for ourselves but not necessarily for everyone else. Equality of access to goods is violently disputed.

In a discussion of equality in Philosophy and Real Politics, Geuss suggests that ‘equality’ should not be considered and cannot be defined in the abstract. ¹³ I agree. Instead the focus or starting-point should be ‘health, development and exercise of powers, fruitful social interaction, etc’. Treatment is ‘just’ or ‘fair’ if a surgery patient receives morphine and a drug addict does not, for example. Justice or fairness means treating people as equal in respect to access to basic goods (fulfillment of basic needs), although actual access will depend not only on their needs but on availability of goods, the institutional structures available to support fair distribution, and, of course, the willingness of individual agents to commit to fair access and work within just structures.

In the course of remarks about politics, Geuss confirms equal respect as a moral criterion that can condemn egregious though common violations, and serve as an ethical rallying point. He repeatedly mentions military interventions by the US and Britain, and implies moral fault in failures to treat people in other cultures respectfully in relation to goods such as life, functioning government, and political self-determination.

Here are a couple of examples from Real Politics. ‘Colonial intervention was in bad odour in Britain between the 1960s and the year 2000, but we now (2007) have troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan again.’ ¹⁴ ‘As the Bush administration in the United States has perhaps learned, once you destroy something like the Iraqi polity, the pieces cannot necessarily be reassembled.’ ¹⁵ In Outside Ethics, Geuss quotes Adorno to say that modern societies are ‘radically implicated in evil’, epitomized by Auschwitz, because they are totalitarian systems. ¹⁶ Geuss does not explicitly defend equality or equal respect as a criterion of social and political ethics, possibly because he wants to open the possibility that realities like Auschwitz prompt us to go entirely outside ‘the everyday moral consensus that is the basis of our social life’. ¹⁷ But to concur, as I do, in the judgmental overtone of these statements, does imply agreement about the goods at stake, and about equality as a criterion of justice.

Two tasks of Christian social-ethical theory are to explicate theologically the relevance of basic goods and equality for just social relations and structures; and to engage with other entities and actors locally and globally to clarify goods and equality, to make the case for their obligatory nature, and to seek their practical realization.

As Geuss has shown, merely abstract arguments for equality and rights do not produce ethical action. Recognition of the subjectivity and intersubjectivity of others, as in fundamental ways like one’s own, is the origin of respect that is effective in the real political world. What claims respect is another person’s existence as a self-conscious, other-directed subject and agent, with freedom, reason, affectivity, imagination, and a characteristically human type of embodiment that connects the subject with the natural and social environment and provides the conditions of experience of subjective states. (This definition is not intended to be boundary-setting, in the sense of defining who is or is not a human subject or person. I think it is a mistake to let boundaries and exceptions control the definition of personhood. It is better to try to capture the central and most representative meaning first, and secondarily think about why anomalous cases are still included within the ambit of human relationality and respect.)

The ‘realist’ problem, as rightly identified by Geuss ¹⁸ and as echoed in theologies of pervasive human sin, is that recognition and respect of this sort are scarce at the practical level, even when given lip service in ethical theory, law, political propaganda or UN declarations. For people to be motivated in real life by moral ideals, they must become functional priorities at the personal and social levels; they must constitute the practical worldview within which action occurs.

So beyond providing principles and ethical analysis, Christian ethics supports sites where solidaristic respect and inclusion are enacted, forming members to carry reordered relationships and practices into their social worlds, increasingly comprising global networks. Christian ethics has a role within ‘Christianity [as] a way of life’. ¹⁹ Yet this way of life is never isolated or insulated from other cultural communities and realities in which Christians participate. It is ‘aimed at the good life, with and for others, in just institutions’. ²⁰

A Final World about Hope

Hope for ethical transformation, personal or social, cannot be dependent on assurance that, overall, global conditions are changing for the better. Perhaps this is so. Yet hope is rooted in something more immediate, tentative, and risky: the practices and successes of communities that, networking with other communities, actually begin to change situations of oppression, violence, and suffering. Often, perhaps always, these practices are nourished by experiences of ultimacy, though not always in religious guise. It may be that the most difficult test of Christian authenticity is the power of our communities to nurture practical (not merely conceptual) encounters with ‘incarnation’ and ‘resurrection’ that engender social transformation. How frequently and how lamentably we Christians fail this test.

Theological ethics interfaces both with the practical life of the churches and with wider political realities on which we are dependent and to which we are responsible. I hope therefore that our discipline in the future will strengthen communities in which divine presence and transforming power are credibly attested; while also advocating for basic human goods and for just access, especially for those most at the margins; and ultimately forming bridges to more just social arrangements as possibilities that beckon cross-traditional moral response, however limited and fragile.