Dr. John Young                                                                                              2/8/09

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

 

Ethics and Us

 

For most people, it is more important to do good than to avoid harm. Most Germans were not part of the Gestapo, but most Germans did go along with the Nazis. When people do not have a conscience or are persistently irresponsible, they may need to be forced to stop doing harm because they will not figure that out for themselves, and are failing themselves, violating others, and/or destroying the planet. But very few of us are murderers, rapists, arsonists, terrorists, career thieves or persistent abusers. Our ethical problems are more often sins of omission instead of commission. We fail to speak up for justice when we could, to do the good of which we are capable, or to stand up against the powers and structures of evil when our doing so could help to save the world, or at least to make our communities more sustainable, just or loving places. We are like the Texas co-ed in the news this week that long ago identified the wrong man as her rapist, or those bureaucrats at the SEC who refused to take the warnings about ponzi-scheme Madoff seriously, or like the millions of Southerners who allowed racism to flourish, although they lynched no one.

 

            Ethics is the analysis of moral ideas, values and principles, the study of right and wrong. Ethics weighs the moral significance of human actions, shapes and reflects upon the rules of conduct and judges our chosen ways of living. Ethics and morals come from Greek words for character, customs, and conduct, and those three words reflect major ways of considering ethical dilemmas. Are ethics universal, and therefore a matter of character? Are ethics instead simply cultural customs, and therefore a matter of societal rules? Or is it best to consider ethics within particular situations and participants’ roles and therefore choices of conduct?

 

            The ethics of character can be based upon various foundations. Some people assume that human beings are born with a conscience, an inborn tendency toward altruistic behavior, or that the world inevitably nurtures conscience and virtues out of our experiences. Others argue that virtues such as generosity, honesty, and compassion are nurtured by education and self-discipline or by religious faith and spiritual practices.

 

            Ethics of custom lift up culture or community as the arbiter and usually focus on completing your dharma as with Hinduism and Buddhism, conforming to a social order based on respectful relationships as in Confucian China, or obeying commandments, like the Jewish 10 or the admonitions of the Muslim’s Koran.

 

            Ethics of conduct focus on situations and roles. Empiricists, like Locke, argue for the evaluation of our experiences. Utilitarians, like Bentham and the Mills, argue for the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Instrumentalists, like Dewey, argue for the human capacity for choosing among alternatives by evaluating the results to be achieved.

 

            The absolute ethics standard is probably Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: “act in such a way that the maxim of our actions can be willed as a universal law. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” Absolutists tend to put great store in people’s intentions, even if the results are bad or unintended.

 

            Most ethicists, however, believe that we should judge ethics by their results, by their consequences. Aristotle argued for ethics based upon reason and moderation, social beings seeking justice through practice and habit. Aristotle held up the Golden Mean as his ethical standard: to avoid both the intemperance of anger or passivity in the face of injustice. Christians reiterated and emphasized the Golden Rule found in most religions which reminds us to not do things to others that we would not want done to ourselves, or, to act with others as we want them to act with us.

 

            Much of contemporary ethics tries to avoid the extremes of sacred or universal assumptions or the constraints of traditional customs or unquestioned rules or obligations. Instead, they tend to want us to look at the particular situation and at the roles of the participants in those situations. Joseph Fletcher, the Christian situational ethicist, spoke as guest speaker at the dedication of this Chapel in the middle 1960s. He was a utilitarian, but he added a Christian twist. He argued for a calculus based on agape, Christian love of all neighbors. So, the rule became the greatest amount of neighbor welfare for the largest proportion of neighbors.

 

            When I was a Fellow at Harvard Divinity School in 1987, I studied ‘responsibility ethics’ of people like H. Richard Niebuhr and James Gustafson, where the ethical rule was to discover the most fitting thing to do in the given set of circumstances, thus attempting to combine the best of all the earlier ethical traditions.

 

            A big name now in ethics is John Rawls that tried to develop formalism or contractualism developing those procedures that best sustained life in a social context and that developed standards of freedom, equity and fairness that were separate from religion or cultural traditions.

 

            Think of the ethical dilemmas in the news at the moment, and consider how they may apply in your own lives. Nadya Suleman had octuplets as a single mom through in vitro fertilization after she already had six children. Most people have the choice of creating a child. Will they have children, under what circumstances, will they take full responsibility for them, or will they expect society to raise their children? Many of the world’s problems have grown out of population growth beyond the world’s resources and beyond the chosen responsibilities of billions of parents. In that environment, does the world keep reinforcing child bearing without demanding parental responsibility?

 

            The majority of health expenses in the United States are in the last months of most peoples’ lives. In a great many of those cases, millions are spent without extending the quality of those lives and with few benefits to the larger society, while millions of other people go without the most basic health services. Is this ethical? Have you made out a living will, specifying what extreme measures you want taken to remain clinically alive?

 

            More than half of the people in jail in the United States are there for a war on drugs that is not working. Most of the murders in Jacksonville and elsewhere are connected with the drug trade and gangs that control them. Do we want to continue to have more people in prison than in college and to spend more on incarceration than on scholarship?

 

            Generally, in modern life, we have wanted to maximize individual choice in personal moral issues, but many Americans still want freedom for their own personal choices but not necessarily for other peoples’ choices. Outing a gay person is bad, but outing a person who helped a gay marriage ban pass is ok?

            I believe that every bit of freedom needs to be paired with responsibility. I am favor of responsible liberation, but I don’t think that we can take good behavior for granted. So much of the worst behavior in the world seems to come from a relatively small proportion of any population who usually had multiple traumas as children. We need to significantly change the rules and reinforcements for parenting. Probably a tiny percentage of the population will need to be institutionalized or otherwise controlled to protect the rest of us. But the vast majority of us need to seriously work on our consciences to get beyond the myth that we can be good people by simply not ever doing anything really terrible. We need paradigm shifts: 1st: from aggressive coercion to nonviolent negotiation activism, 2nd: from maximizing our selfish excesses to societal fairness, and 3rd: from getting ours and consuming the world to nurturing sustainable futures.

 

            I believe that we need to continually combine personal lives based upon fairness, moderation, and self-discipline with social lives based upon a more equitable distribution of rewards, cooperation and sharing, and at least doing justice and when possible acting with love. A utilitarian and situational ethics based upon responsibility and an agape calculus sounds like a desirable and realizable goal.

 

Prayer: Creation, help us to nurture your powers for justice and for love. Give us the courage not to be bitter, not to be cynical, or to remain above the issues of our days. Give us courage when we are fearful; empower us to confront the powers and structures of evil. Let us bow and bend to find the paths of love, and come down where we ought to be, to simplify in the face of materialism, consumerism and sensual excess. But do not let us hide out from the work for justice that we can and need to do. Help us to understand our situations, to fulfill our responsibilities, to succeed in our best intentions for service and leadership. Help us to build strong bridges of love and justice to sustain your beautiful Creation. Alleluia!