Ethics

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Ethics

The root of the term ethics is the Greek word ethos, which means the "character, spirit, customs, and guiding beliefs of a people." This is a good way to approach the discipline of ethics. Ethics is primarily the activity of reflecting upon the underlying assumptions, customs, stories, institutions, and accumulated experiences of a culture that guide its moral understandings and expectations. We receive our clues about what is right and wrong, good and evil, worthy and unworthy from this ethos. For example, in the North American ethos, the following are found: Aesop's fable of the boy who cried "wolf"; Walt Disney's tale of Pinocchio; a string of broken treaties with Native Americans; the ninth commandment given to Moses at Mount Sinai, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor"; the philosopher Immanuel Kant's terse warning, "By a lie a man annihilates his dignity as a man"; and the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects one from being a witness against oneself. This is a sampling of the raw material of our North American cultural ethos, the mixture of stories, key historical experiences, sacred and legal codes, and moral principles that we find ourselves inwardly answerable to whenever we contemplate, as this string of material illustrates, whether or not to tell a lie. A culture's ethos is this great mass of reference points that guide its behavior. Ethics, then, is thoughtful reflection on a culture's ethos, a kind of science of ethos. Ethics sorts through an ethos, inventorying it, bringing to the surface its inconsistencies, and determining its deepest patterns and commitments.

The material that is contained in an ethos will differ from culture to culture. To a Yanomamo Indian in Brazil, mention of Pinocchio will not trigger thoughts of the ugly consequences of lying, nor will a commandment coming from Mount Sinai necessarily have any compelling authority in parts of Asia. That this is so raises the question: If moral reference points are so culturally dependent, is there anything universally true about ethics? Is there any sort of action that is wrong regardless of the culture in which it occurs?

Ethics and the Will-to-Power

Some thinkers have concluded that there is nothing universal about ethics. Social theorists who have been influenced by the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly French deconstructionists (among them, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard) and American neopragmatists (such as Richard Rorty), have followed Nietzsche in reducing ethics to the most inventive way in which humans have masked their will-to-power, their fundamental instinct to discharge their own strength and have power over others. Ethical systems, in this view, are designed by the powerful to subdue the masses or by the masses to overthrow the powerful. Ethics, according to this view, is a matter of power contesting with power and has nothing to do with absolute or transcendent goods or rights—because there are no absolutes, nor is there a transcendent reality (God, moral law, or values such as beauty, goodness, or honesty that come to us from some truer dimension of reality) against which to measure human activity.

Natural Law Theories

Other thinkers, however, have retained some belief in the notion of natural law, an idea with deep religious roots in Western thought. Natural law refers to the idea that there is some higher law or moral order that runs through the cosmos, a law that persists in the background of all specific laws and legal codes and which all laws that govern human societies dimly reflect. It originated as a theory among ancient Greek philosophers, particularly the Stoics, and was picked up by Christian theologians, who attributed the validity of natural law to God. God, it was claimed, created the cosmos and ordered it according to certain fundamental principles, the primary of which is that all things are created to seek their own good and that the common good of the whole is found when all of its parts strive for and attain the purpose assigned to them by God. St. Augustine (fourth century c.e.) put his imprint on the idea of natural law in his claim that the human heart is restless until it finds rest in God. Augustine offered Western thought one of its most enduring conceptions of the moral life—the idea that installed deep within each person is a homing device, as it were, that seeks God through a morally good life and that is agitated and ultimately disappointed when it seeks anything else. This became the preeminent way of understanding the work of the conscience in the West.

In another noteworthy development of this cluster of ideas, St. Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century c.e.) suggested that the natural law consists in this simple fact: All human beings feel inclined to do what is good and to avoid what is evil. That simple fact, he insisted, is universal. The implication of this is that while different societies may disagree on which intentions and actions are good and which are evil, every society distinguishes between good and evil, and every person, by virtue of being human, senses an inward inclination that favors the good and is repelled by the evil. In spite of the differing moral systems found around the planet, this simple fact of conscience is virtually universal.

Natural Rights and Human Rights

The emergence of the concept of human rights is an important result of this doctrine of natural law and one in which the United States has played an important role. It was the sixteenth-century Dutch Protestant thinker Hugo Grotius who recast the discussion of natural law into the new concept of natural rights. While natural law theory had acquired too much confidence about the knowability of the moral order of the cosmos in Grotius's judgment, he was nevertheless unwilling to surrender a humbler confidence that we can know enough about human nature to base legal theory—the way governments are organized and run—upon it. This represents an interiorization of the doctrine of natural law. Given the renewed emphasis by Protestants on the deleterious effects of original sin on the human capacity to perceive reality clearly, Grotius insisted that we cannot trust our knowledge of the grand moral order of the universe, but we can know something true about our own internal moral order through introspection. What we thus learn is that certain features of human beings, the conscience in particular, ought not to be violated and that any person, institution, or government that attempts to do so is violating our natural rights. We have a right, Protestant thought increasingly insisted, to our deepest aspirations and convictions, and no religious or civil authority may be allowed to intrude upon that.

This appreciation for the sacredness of the conscience became a major catalyst for the Enlightenment, and the United States emerged as an earnest experiment in building a society and its laws out of a recognition of this feature of the individual person. Philosophical reflection on natural rights was concretized into the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

In the twentieth century, and as a direct reaction to the Holocaust and other atrocities surrounding World War II, a further development of the idea of natural rights occurred. In 1948 the newly founded United Nations issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that elaborated in thirty-one articles the basic human rights that all nations and their governments must respect in order to satisfy the scrutiny of the international community. One thing that is extremely important but easy to miss in this is the success it represents of the basic natural law doctrine that humanly formulated laws ought to reflect some larger and ideal order of things. A second thing worth noting is the evolution in terminology here from natural rights to human rights, in a sense extending Grotius's religiously based suspicion of our capacity to know the cosmic order; the shift in language from "natural" to "human" is a shift in understanding what it is that grounds the rights that are being recognized. Natural rights were understood to be grounded in the order of nature, which was believed to be inherently moral. Nature bore within itself a moral design that Enlightenment science was confident it could discern. Human rights, on the other hand, are understood to be grounded in the obvious dignity of human beings. In earlier Jewish and Christian understandings, belief in human dignity was derived from biblical stories about humans being the "very good" and culminating act of God's creative work in Genesis, subsequently worthy of God entering covenantal agreements with them and of Jesus sacrificing his life in order to redeem them. In modern human rights thought, because it seeks to appeal to every society, the central idea of human dignity necessarily remains ambivalent toward specific traditional religious accounts for the source of this dignity. Human dignity, in other words, is simply asserted and not backed up with the authority of sacred scriptures or traditions. That humans possess an inherent dignity is presumed to be obvious. The evolution of this can be seen by comparing the opening statements of the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776):

we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights (1948):

whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. . . . the general assembly proclaims this universal declaration of human rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations . . .

In the first, rights are understood to be derived from the divine Creator; in the second, rights are derived from human dignity itself.

Human rights thinking has come to prominence in the United States since 1960. The civil rights movement, seeking equal treatment under the law for people of all races, drew strength from the standard set by the U.N. declaration. Legal arguments are now often couched in the language of rights—the rights to privacy, to bear arms, to life, to free speech. Former president Jimmy Carter attempted to make human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy. The Catholic Church, under the impetus of Pope John XXIII (in office 1958–1963) and Vatican II (a council occurring in a series of meetings, 1962–1965), offered an explicitly theological argument for understanding the recognition of human dignity and the observance of human rights as the foundation for world peace. In effect, in the 1960s Catholicism offered a theological undercarriage for a doctrine of human rights that returned it to its natural law roots, thus allowing the concept of rights to come full circle.

Toward a Global Ethic

In Chicago in 1993, there was a large gathering called the Parliament of the World's Religions. This was the second time this parliament had convened. The first time was also in Chicago, one hundred years earlier in 1893. The 1893 parliament was the first time that representatives from the world's major religions had met together in one place simply to hear one another out. In anticipation of the 1993 gathering, the Catholic theologian Hans Küng recruited leaders of the major religious traditions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, and so on) to draft the Declaration towards a Global Ethic, a document that isolates four irrevocable directives, upon which the religions are in agreement. The four grow out of the prohibitions found in virtually all religious traditions against killing, theft, lying, and sexual immorality. The declaration recasts these negative prohibitions into a positive framework for supporting human rights. The prohibition against theft, for instance, supports the rights to work, a fair wage, and certain basic forms of welfare. The prohibition against lying supports the right to institutions that provide education and ethical formation—forms of human development that make people less susceptible to lies.

To reach a consensus among the religions on even four ethical principles is an enormous achievement. It shows that the ethos of each has enough in common that agreement across cultural and religious boundaries is possible, at least to some extent. It is by means of the discipline of ethics that such patterns of agreement are discerned and sorted out.