Christian Ethics?

Or: why there can't be such a thing.

Ethics asks: What, if any, responsibility do I have toward others? It seeks both to justify my obligation and to delineate its scope.

But this questions signifies its downfall.

Two texts:

1. Genesis 4.9: After Cain has murdered his brother, Yahweh approaches and asks: "Where is your brother Abel?" Immediately Cain responds: "I don't know...Am I my brother's keeper?"

2. Luke 10.27-39: An "expert" in the Torah asks Jesus: "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" After Jesus' answer, the interlocuter, still wanting to "justifying himself" (thelon dikaiosai heauton) asks a further question: "And who is my neighbor?"

Both "Am I my brother's keeper?" and "Who is my neighbor?" are paradigmatic ethical questions--more or less concrete ways of asking What, if any, responsibility do I have toward other people? For contemporary ethicists, they are invitations to formulate theories that will delineate the nature of our ethical obligations and fix their scope. Without them, ethics as it is currently practiced dissolves.

What the biblical texts show, however, is that the questions themselves are a kind of impertinence. They are devised precisely (solely?) to eschew responsibility or at least mitigate its effects. In both cases, the divine response bears this out.

In Genesis, Yahweh refuses to give anything that resembles an intelligible answer to Cain's query. "What have you done?" he asks "Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground." No theory; no attempt to define ethical terms ("brother," "keeper," etc.); no attempt to set out necessary and sufficient conditions that would guarantee responsibility in some cases and exclude it in others.

In Luke, Jesus is a bit more hospitable. He answers the question (sort of), but his new "definition" of neighbor is so encompassing and so explosive of antecedent categories that it hardly looks like a definition at all (and certainly wouldn't function as a general "ethical principle" that could be applied confidently in future cases).

But we must listen even more closely.

Not only does Jesus' parable invite conceptual confusion where we (ethicists) want clarity, but it actually subverts ethical theory, as contemporary philosophers tend to understand that term.

In general, ethical theory works like this. (1) You ought to treat P in x-and-such way. (2) A is an instance of P. (3) Therefore, you ought to treat A in x-and-such way. Or, stated in terms of neighbors: (1) You ought to treat your neighbor kindly. (2) John is your neighbor. (3) Therefore, you ought to treat John kindly.

Which yields this kind of entailment: You ought to treat John kindly because he is your neighbor.

In this sense, theory is antecedent to practice. We first have to know that (1) John is a neighbor and that (2) neighbors ought to be treated in such-and-such way before we can act at all.

But Jesus will have none of this.

Indeed, his parable works in diametric opposition to this kind of thinking. For Jesus, it is not that knowing whether X is our neighbor enables us to see how to treat X properly. It is, rather, that treating X in such-and-such way makes her our neighbor (or, perhaps, allows us to see that X is our neighbor).

Which yields this kind of entailment: X is your neighbor because you treat her in such-and-such way (which isn't really entailment at all, since "because" indicates not a logical conclusion, but rather a causal connection).

In this sense, practice is antecedent to (and deconstructive of) theory.

But this is not ethics; indeed, this is, if anything at all, a kind of "anti-ethics".

Oh, Saint Jacques!