The Study of Ethics is Not Politics, and That's Absolutely Okay

A state of the union on my discipline.

This weekend, I should be at the annual Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) meeting in Chicago. It’s always in January, and it’s always in Chicago, for reasons that are probably the consequence of accessibility, and price¹. This works well when there’s not an ice and snow storm blanketing the country, so I write this from my home office, unwashed with my coffee pot close at hand.

In the landscape of academic conferences, the SCE feels closest to being home for me, and I miss seeing folks there. There are usually somewhere north of 500 people in attendance, with lengthy papers and discussions, and plenty of time for people to network, talk shop, and mostly not talk shop and enjoy being together.

My way into ethics came by way of theology, animating my concerns here. One of the concerns that I have about the guild is the way that ethics has become increasingly code for politics. “Politics”, as I’m using it, is a way of understanding the theological insofar as it connects with the conditions of human organization and living.

In principle, that’s not entirely terrible: ethics is, among other things, about doing something. Prudence involves deliberation about ways forward, which assumes that there’s a plan for action, counting the cost, and putting feet to ideas. But increasingly—and this year’s theme of “Riding on the Moral Arc of the Universe” is a great example—what is meant by the study of ethics in my guild is increasingly becoming something like the following:

1. Action as the Judge of How Moral Inquiry Proceeds. A presumed order, or at least, a range of acceptable actions, is identified. We want, for example, to end up with a just society, defined frequently in democratic participatory action, and then build our arguments backwards in terms of what helps us get to that point. In this case, “the moral arc of the universe” has a presumed destination and shape, and we’re working out what gets us to that point.

I want to signal first that having a presumed end point is somewhat inevitable, I think. We’re humans thinking in pictures, and so, when moral inquiry comes around, we have an idea what things like “goodness” or “justice” consist of. But in terms of doing Christian ethics, this mode creates an uneasy alliance between the first term—having to do with God—and the second term—human action. In positing in advance where we wish to go, we run a very real risk of overcommitting not just ourselves but God to the vision constructed in advance.

I also want to signal here that there is a place for revisiting past opinions and moral stances. Does anyone seriously want to try to be a slavery apologist, or to say that women shouldn’t vote²? It’s fine to look again at Augustine’s work and ask how his moral and theological vision was unquestionably shaped by his opinions on slavery³. It was commonplace for Christian ethicists in the 20th century to defend segregation, and we are fools to think that the next generation won’t revisit some of our positions in the same way. But beginning with the end in mind means that our scholarship will eventually either run out of gas, or just quit trying to do moral inquiry and become political theory, economics, or management theory.

But this presumption of action-first is not just the academy. To whit:

Signifying Nothing: Against Byung-Chul Han

Byung-Chul Han is not a political philosopher, nor an ethicist. He’s a philosopher working out the dynamics of contemporary life, drawing critiques of technology, desire, isolation and more into a comprehensive vision. Is it depressing? Yep! It is insightful? Yes! In the review, Han is chastised for missing nuances of Big Data, for not calling AI, anti-racism, and migration politics. But this is simply asking Han to be a different philosopher than he is. For Han’s work is fundamentally interested in the dynamics which make the world turn, while occasionally offering constructive plans forward. He’s a speculative thinker.

But from this review, you would think that Han is simply a bad philosopher or thinker, full stop, insofar as he doesn’t account for the most current of political concerns:

“Despite discussing the alienating effects of globalization, Han has nothing to say about accelerating mass migration or the liquidation of national sovereignty: Ultimately, he turns away from addressing politically critical issues in favor of neologistic cartographies characterized by a lacuna of detail.”

Beginning with the presumptions of a political outcome in advance stultifies our reading, kills our imagination, and frankly, makes our moral discourse worse. Shrinking down moral thought (and in particular, the psychology which undergirds our moral deliberations, which I take Han to be keenly interesting in) to a non-speculative argument about which actions he has in view, makes the work of moral argument very boring.

This brings us to the second thesis of the ethics-as-politics motif, which I think is more of a problem:

2. Beginning With Material Practices As Self-Evident. If ethics is the same as politics, then certain practices help maintain our common pursuit of the good, and some do not. Actions are determined to either contribute or detract from this. Having first assumed that the moral arc of the universe leads to a beatific world construed in set terms, it’s then possible to name what present actions are and are not. Nothing that lies behind the visible action can count as much as the act itself.

This presumes that intention of an action mean relatively less, and the effect of an action are what are primary. The loss of our ability to have intentions for things in turn mean that our actions must be thought of less as human actions and more techniques to be implemented. This presumption generates in turn the need for institutions concerned less with inquiring about what actions are as opposed to which actions we do: speculative inquiry becomes replaced by managerial practice. Finally, it rules out a world in which there can be misunderstanding, apology, and at times, disagreement even where there is common action.

We can paint too glossy a picture here, and presume that all actions should be open to the most charitable of interpretations, that the segregationist really loves their children and that this underlying love is what we should pay attention to. Some enactments of intention betray that the intention itself is malformed, and thus, their actions should be ruled out. But when the exceptions are made to stand in as the rule, we lose the ability to see that there is a difference between heretical actions (actions which truly speak of a different world), and heterodox actions (those which look alien, but are in fact getting at something shared and important).

King’s use of protest is instructive here: marches and protests were not a regular part of the moral toolkit, and construed by even his friends as unnecessarily antagonistic and even opposed to the aims of black Americans. It is in retrospect, though, that we see that the use of this act was intended in a way which was not the same as how it appeared.

But more seriously, assuming the self-evident nature of our practices puts too much stock in our ability to manufacture that which we long for. And in this, it truly loses the vision of the moral arc of the universe as King knew it, one which begins with God’s provision, and which can be sketched in terms of the virtues of those who inhabit it. For as King states here, the road toward the end of that moral arc is bumpy, and is one which God promises, but promises not in a shape that we can manifest. That which constitutes the the moral vision of the world is ultimately, King knew, is that which rests upon conformity of the soul toward God, and in that virtue, resting in the mystery and speculation that befits seeking a world which is God’s.

It is one which has an engine of hope in God’s activity.

You can throw a rock in the early church literature just about anywhere and find the presumption that bad ethics indicates bad metaphysics: to deny the efficacy of baptism or the Spirit’s work in sanctification is, Ambrose of Milan writes, to deny the nature of God. Their presumption is that things work in the opposite direction of most contemporary ethics, and that unless speculation is allowed to do its work, we will wind up doing in practice that which ultimately craters the world. For the world we hope for is, as King notes, more than the eye can see or ear can hear.

Doing Christian Ethics has in view either a world filled beyond hope, made possible by God, or it is eventually going to be management theory. There are only two ways forward here.

I love you, SCE. Hope to see you next year.

1. No, no one wants to be in Chicago in January. But it’s in the middle of the country, and it’s dank in the winter, and that’s exactly why it’s an affordable place to throw an ethics conference.

2. These people do exist! They really think that women voting and black emancipation were bad! I’m just saying that these are not serious people and are not worth your thinking about.

3. There are two very good works on this question that came out in the last year on this. My review of both of them will be coming out in Mere Orthodoxy’s print edition sometime later this year.