Just More Clever Than the Next Guy: The Despair of Contemporary Christian Ethics

A Lament for My Discipline, and for Moral Thinking At Large

When the argument for your position is your self, the moral life is done for.

Reminder: if you’re an educator, or home educator, I’ve got deals for you.

A Requiem for Moral Thinking

There’s much to be said for how most public ethical thinking is either 1) individual postulations unrelated or unaccountable, or 2) group-thinking ideology having defined contours like a tradition, but without any of the flexibility or movement. But traditioned thinking is in retreat at the popular level. Very rarely are moral arguments roots unapologetically in the commitments of a theological community.

Traditioned ways of thinking, by nature, are trying to work within constraints, seeing themselves as having to be responsive to and for communities. Soon, I’ll offer some thoughts about the former—ideological stances as parodies of traditioned thinking—but this week, my mind is on the first problem: ethics as extensions of the individual. What I’m describing is not the sole property of Protestants, but of Catholics as well. It’s a dark place.

In case you thought that professional ethicists had more of a handle on this, I’m sorry to inform you otherwise.

In a recent paper before the Society of Christian Ethics, one of my old teachers and co-editors at Baylor offered a strident critique of the state of the field of Christian Ethics. The professional guild, he argues, having resented the bounds of a tradition, has relied on self-authorization to fill the void. This detachment from official traditions comes hand in hand with detachment from informal and ordinary traditions and connections.¹

With the detachment of people from ordinary bonds—the basis for traditions in a loose sense—ethical argument becomes not an appeal rooted in common sources and a common ethos, and not responsible to any body in particular. Arguments thus are made on the basis of cleverness and the power vested by the hearer in one’s identity. To be heard—or taken as a serious representative—the argument has to be not a bearer of a tradition or governed by it, but make its appeal through cleverness.

He goes on to note that authority, rooted in one’s identity, be it a marker of gender, ethnicity, or class— is a manifestation of this problem. When an author asks us to agree with their argument because of their sense of self, this is a species of authority rooted in cleverness: it relies upon the recognition and valuation of the hearer, not on whether or not the argument may be correct, well-reasoned, or connected to the concerns of a community of persons. The validation of the argument is your self, and if your self is perceived as a self worth listening to, the argument passes through.

In one sense, these arguments appear because who the arguer is hasn’t been taken seriously because of implicit gender bias or racism. But the question as to whether or not this is resting on the person’s cleverness as opposed to the argument being rooted in the concerns of a particular community is pretty damning and one which descriptively sticks, I think. There’s a lot worth engaging here, but I’m most curious about this notion of “cleverness” as indicative of an argument that isn’t accountable to an audience, of not having one’s arguments tethered to a particular group of people.

So, first, I want to take a look at the difference between testimony and cleverness.

What makes a testimony—an experience which happens to the self and which is the basis of an argument about something being true—different? Why isn’t Paul just being clever when he argues that the Gentiles should be accepted into the church?