Situation ethics the new morality by Joseph Fletcher Ситуативная этика

Coming full circle once again, this writer now recognizes, but more maturely, that philosophy is utterly useless as a way to bridge the gap between doubt and faith. And along with this neopragmatism, congenially, he has appreciated in a more sophisticated way the importance of the contextual or situational, i.e., the circumstantial approach to the search for the right and the good. We have seen the light when we recognize that abstract and conceptual morality is a mare's nest. Bonhoeffer was correct in his distaste for metaphysics, as Kierkegaard was in his hatred of systems.

Let us pinpoint this pragmatism before we move on. For our purposes here, let's just say that the pragmatic method is a legitimate tool of ethics. American pragmatism and British empiricism have always trained their sights primarily on Pilate's question, 'What is truth?" The ethical question, on the other hand, is, What is good? Yet the verum and the bonum (and for that matter, the pulchrum as well) are not really separable matters. James said, "The true, to put it briefly, is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving".⁵⁷ (This is the same temper and the very term Paul uses in I Cor. 6:12, when he says anything could be "lawful" but only if it is "expedient", i.e., constructive or upbuilding.)

As James called truth and goodness expediency, so John Dewey saw them as what gives satisfaction, and F. C. S. Schiller as what works.⁵⁸ All are agreed: the good is what works, what is expedient, what gives satisfaction. Socrates' question, "What is goodness?" gets from pragmatism the same answer Pilate's does. The good, it replies, like the true, is whatever works.

As Bonhoeffer said, "To ignore the ethical significance of success is to betray ... a defective sense of responsibility".⁵⁹ Pragmatism is, to be plainspoken, a practical or success posture. Its idiom expresses the genius and ethos or style of life of American culture and of the techno-scientific era. Whereas classical ethics and aesthetics treated the good and the beautiful separately (in spite of the Greeks' kalos which coalesces them), pragmatism lumps them and the cognitive all together, all three, under one broad umbrella—value. This puts the ethical question in the chair, at the head of the conference table.
«Давайте определимся, какой прагматизм мы имеем в виду, прежде чем двинемся дальше. Для наших задач, надо сразу сказать, что прагматический метод составляет собственный (legitimate) инструмент этики. Американский прагматизм и английский эмпиризм всегда отталкивались в своих взглядах от вопроса Пилата «Что есть истина?». Вопрос этики, со своей стороны, это – «Что есть добро?». К тому же verum <истина> и bonum <добро> (а кстати, также и pulchrum <красота>) в реальности материи неотделимые. Как сказал Джеймс – «истинное, кратко выражаясь, есть только полезное для нашего мышления, как правильное – только полезное для нашего поведения».2 (Это точно то же по характеру и самому своему выражению, что говорит Павел в 1-м послании Коринфянам 6:12, что все может быть «позволительно», но лишь в случае, если это «полезно», то есть конструктивно или созидательно.)

Если Джеймс назвал истину и добро полезностями, то Джон Дьюи (John Dewey) рассматривал их как то, что дает удовлетворение, а Ф. К. С. Шиллер (F. C. S. Schiller <Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller>) – как то, что работает.3 Все это едино: добро есть то, что работает, что полезно, что дает удовлетворение. Вопрос Сократа «что есть добро?» получает от прагматизма тот же ответ, что и вопрос Пилата об истине. Добро, отвечает он, как и истина, – это то, что работает.

Как сказал Бонхеффер, «игнорировать этическое значение успешного результата (success) значит выдавать ... ущербность собственного чувства ответственности».4 Прагматизм, говоря прямо, есть практическая установка или установка на успех. Прагматизм в обыденном употреблении этого слова отражает гений, этос, образ существования американской культуры и научно-технической эры. В то время как классические этика и эстетика трактовали доброе и прекрасное по отдельности (вопреки греческому калос (kalos), которое их не различает), прагматизм рассматривает их, вместе с познаваемым, как одно целое, под одной общей кровлей – «ценность». Это ставит этический аспект во главу угла (in the chair, at the head of the conference table).»
2 Pragmatism (Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., 1907), p. 222; repeated The Meaning of Truth (Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., 1929), p. vii.

3 См. Dewey's The Quest for Certainty (Minton, Balch & Co., 1929) and Ethics, with J. H. Tufts (Henry Holt, 1908); F.C.S. Schiller's Problems of Belief (London: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 1924); G. H. Mead's Mind, Self, and Society (1934) and The Philosophy of the Act (1938), both ed. by C. W. Morris (The University of Chicago Press).

4 Letters and Papers from Prison, tr. by Reginald Fuller (The Macmillan Company, 1962), p. 21.

We must realize, however, that pragmatism, as such, is no self-contained world view. It is a method, precisely. It is not a substantive faith, and properly represented it never pretends to be. Pragmatism of itself yields none of the norms we need to measure or verify the very success that pragmatism calls for! To be correct or right a thing— a thought or an action—must work. Yes. But work to what end, for what purpose, to satisfy what standard or ideal or norm? Like any other method, pragmatism as such is utterly without any way of answering this question. Yet this is the decisive question.

The very first question in all ethics is, What do I want? Only after this is settled (pleasure in hedonism, adjustment in naturalism, self-realization in eudaemonism, etc.) can we ask about the why and the how and the who and the when and the where and the which! The primary issue is the "value" problem, our choice of our summum bonum. This is a preethical or metaethical question, relying on some other source for a faith proposition or commitment. Only after this is settled can the method go to work, only after it knows what it is to seek or serve.

Christianly speaking, as we shall see, the norm or measure by which any thought or action is to be judged a success or failure, i.e., right or wrong, is love. What "love" is can wait for later and longer discussion, but here and now let it be clear that the situationist, whether a Christian or not, follows a strategy that is pragmatic.

In James's words: "A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concrete-ness and adequacy, toward facts, toward actions, and toward power".⁶⁰
2. Relativism

In our attempt to be situational, to be contemporary in our understanding of conscience, we can pin another label on our method. It is relativistic. As the strategy is pragmatic, the tactics are relativistic. Perhaps the most pervasive culture trait of the scientific era and of contemporary man is the relativism with which everything is seen and understood. Our thought forms are relativistic to a degree that our forefathers never imagined. We have become fully and irreversibly "contingent," not only about our particular ideas, but about the very idea of ideas themselves (cognitive value) and about goodness itself (moral value). The situationist avoids words like "never" and "perfect" and "always" and "complete" as he avoids the plague, as he avoids "absolutely."

In a symposium on anthropology Lynn White describes four major shifts in the canons of culture.⁶¹ All of them move in the direction of relativity. They are: (1) the shift from an Occidental to a global outlook, in which cultures are no longer compared as "high" and "low" (Europe's usually at the top!) but by purely factual and descriptive differences, unprejudiced; (2) the shift from language and logic to the use of symbol and nondiscursive reasoning;⁶² (3) the shift away from the rules of rationality to acceptance of unconscious and motivational dynamics as the foundation of human behavior; and (4) the shift—which is clearly visible in any situation ethic— from a hierarchy of values, ranged in some supposedly "given" and permanent order of bad or better, to a fluid spectrum of values.

This last shift is often mere drift, uncritically forsaking the idea that some things are better than others and adopting the notion that they are merely different, shading back and forth into each other according to the situation or the culture context—or even according to one's personal taste subjectively. With some this takes the radical form of De gustibus non disputandum, so that "What's one man's meat is another man's poison" in a kind of "absolute relativism."

9 Systematic Theology (The Chicago University Press, 1963), Vol. Ill, p. 47.

3. Positivism

A third presupposition is "positivism." In the case of Christian ethics this means theological positivism. When we get right down to it there are really' only two ways to approach "religious knowledge" or belief—two kinds of theological epistemology.⁶⁵ One is theological naturalism, in which reason adduces or deduces faith propositions from human experience and natural phenomena; nature yields the evidences, natural reason grasps them. Natural theology, so-called, and "natural law" ethics are examples of this method.
3. Позитивизм
«Следующим подходом является теологический позитивизм (или «позитивная теология»), в которой положения веры «устанавливаются» или утверждаются скорее волюнтаристски, чем рационалистически. Они а-рациональны, но не иррациональны, вне разума, но не против него. Эта исходная позиция подобна тезису Ансельма Credo ut intelligam (верю, чтобы понимать) из его Proslogion (первая глава); здесь скорее мышление поддерживается верой, чем вера мышлением. …»
The other approach is theological positivism (or "positive theology"), in which faith propositions are "posited" or affirmed voluntaristically rather than rationalistically. It is a-rational but not ir-rational, outside reason but not against it. Its starting point is like Anselm's Credo ut intelligam in the Proslogion (first chapter); thinking supported by faith rather than faith supported by thinking. Although it does not exclude reason, reason goes to work because of the commitment and in its service. Thus Christian ethics "posits" faith in God and reasons out what obedience to his commandment to love requires in any situation. God's existence and belief that Christ is God in man cannot be proved, any more than a Marxist can prove that history is headed for Communism and that labor is the sole source of commodity value.

But how, then, does positive thought play a part in non-Christian ethics? There is nothing "fideistic" or "heuristic" about the simple hedonism of a Hugh Hefner (editor of Playboy) or the complex social hedonism (utilitarianism) of a John Stuart Mill, or so it would seem. But hold on! Any moral or value judgment in ethics, like a theologian's faith proposition, is a decision—not a conclusion. It is a choice, not a result reached by force of logic, Q.E.D. The hedonist cannot "prove" that pleasure is the highest good, any more than the Christian can "prove" his faith that love is! After all, in his treatise on love, Bernard of Clairvaux found he had to declare, "Amo quia amo" (I love because I love). Love like good itself is axiomatic, ostensive, categorical, like blue or sour or anything else that simply is what it is, a "primary" not definable in terms of something else. There is no way under heaven of proving that the Supreme Court was "right" in decreeing in 1954 that public schools "should" and "must" ignore racial differences in their admissions policies. This is why the end product of the judicial procedure is called a decision, not a conclusion. Reason can note facts and infer relations, but it cannot find values (goodness). Bertrand Russell, acknowledging the non-rational nature of norms, even declares, "I can say that what the world needs is Christian love, or compassion".⁶⁶

As a matter of fact, this limitation on logic holds in aesthetics, the search for the beautiful, as it does in ethics, the search for the good. The pulchrum and the bonum are alike; art values and moral values he in the same field as far as logic's ground rules are concerned. Aesthetic and ethical propositions are like faith propositions, they are based upon choice and decision. The "leap of affirmation" is essential to all three.⁶⁷ (German existentialists call it Sprung—in which free act becomes concrete.)

Value choices are made and normative standards embraced in a fashion every bit as arbitrary and absurd as the leap of faith. The point is that nobody since Kant's analysis has seriously tried to continue Hegel's rational or "natural" demonstrations of theism except in the official Catholic Thomist line. (But even there it is only laid down as "an article of faith" that proofs of God can be demonstrated, not that any one of the classic "proofs" has succeeded!) Just as we cannot by reason build a bridge from the shore of doubt to the shore of faith, or from hope to certainty, or from nature to grace, so we cannot build by logic a bridge from facts to values, from isness to oughtness. Anselm's Credo ut intelligam has as its partner Credo ut judiceam (I believe so that I can make value judgments).

Ethical decisions seek justification, whereas cognitive conclusions seek verification. We cannot verify moral choices. They may be vindicated, but not validated. It was David Hume who set out this elementary point in its enduring form for British and American thinking.⁶⁸ Believers or unbelievers (theologically speaking), we are all bound to acknowledge that we simply cannot climb across the gap from descriptive to prescriptive propositions; from "is" statements to "ought" statements. We have to make jumps, faith leaps. They are not steps in logic or even in common sense.

In moral theology, or, if you prefer, theological morals or Christian ethics, the key category of love (agape) as the axiomatic value is established by deciding to say, "Yea" to the faith assertion that "God is love" and thence by logic's inference to the value assertion that love is the highest good. "You can't prove the supreme norm of an ethical system (sic) by deducing it from any higher norm," says John Hospers, "for if you could, it couldn't be called the supreme norm".⁶⁹ This applies to any ethic of whatever kind.

14 Human Conduct (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961), p. 584.

Ethics deals with human relations.⁷⁰ Situation ethics puts people at the center of concern, not things. Obligation is to persons, not to things; to subjects, not objects. The legalist is a what asker (What does the law say?); the situationist is a who asker (Who is to be helped?). That is, situationists are personalistic. In the Christian version, for example, a basic maxim is that the disciple is commanded to love people, not principles or laws or objects or any other thing.

There are no "values" in the sense of inherent goods—value is what happens to something when it happens to be useful to love working for the sake of persons. Brunner declared that the notion of value apart from persons is a "phantasmagoria".⁷¹ There are no intrinsic values, he says, being a blunt situationist. Anything, material or immaterial, is "good" only because it is good for or to somebody. (Pius XII warned against "personalistic morality," but its influence continues to grow among Catholic theologians.⁷²)

And just as good derives from the needs of people, so people derive from society. There is nothing individualistic about personalism, nor in situation ethics. Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch (A solitary man is no man at all). Value is relative to persons and persons are relative to society, to neighbors. An I is an I in relationship with a You; a You is a You, capable of being an I, in relation to a Me. Martin Buber's "dialogic" thesis about I-Thou—i.e., that true existence lies in personal relationships, not in l-it (relation to mere things)—has greatly influenced man theory in such theological work as Maritain's, Berdyaev's, and Tillich's.⁷³ Only people can exercise the freedom that is essential in the forum of conscience for decision-making. Only free persons, capable of being "the responsible self," can sustain relationship and thereby enter the field of obligation.

Не существует «ценностей» в смысле внутренне присущих чему-либо добрых свойств – ценность есть то, что случается с чем-то, когда ему случается быть полезным в деле любви, на благо людей. Бруннер заявил, что понятие ценности независимой от людей есть «фантасмагория».16 Будучи последовательным ситуационистом, он говорит – не существует внутренне присущих (intrinsic) чему-либо ценностей. Все материальное или нематериальное может быть «хорошим» лишь постольку, поскольку оно хорошо для кого-то или кому-то. (Пий XII предостерегает против «персоналистской морали», но ее влияние среди католических теологов растет.17)

И так же, как добро определяется интересами людей, сами люди определяются обществом (derive from society). В персонализме нет ничего индивидуалистического, как нет его в ситуативной этике. Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch (человек в одиночку вообще не человек <нем.>). Ценности соотносятся с личностями, а личности с обществом, с ближними. Всякое Я есть Я в отношении к Ты; Ты есть ты, способный стать Я, в отношении ко мне. «Диалогический» тезис Мартина Бубера о Я–Ты – именно, что подлинное существование заключается в межличностных отношениях, а не в отношениях Я–Оно (отношениях к предметам) – значительно повлияло на осмысление человека в таких теологических трудах, как исследования Маритена, Бердяева и Тиллиха.18 Только люди могут быть свободными, что важно перед судом совести, осуществляя <моральные> решения. Только свободные личности, способные быть «ответственными Я», могут иметь отношения с другими так, чтобы тем самым вступать в область <морально> должного.»
15 Замечательное эссе об этике как относительной написал Х. Р. Нибур – H. R. Niebuhr, "The Center of Value," Moral Principles of Action, ed. by R. N. Anshen (Harper & Brothers, 1952), pp. 162-175.

16 The Divine Imperative, p. 194.

17 Acta Apostolicae Sedis, Vol. 45 (1953), p. 278.

18 Cf. Will Herberg, Four Existentialist Theologians (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958), and J. B. Coates, The Crisis of the Human Person (Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., 1949).

In Christian situation ethics, there is also a theological side to personalism, since God is "personal" and has created men in his own image—imago Dei. Personality is therefore the first-order concern in ethical choices. Kant's second maxim holds: Treat persons as ends, never as means. Even if in some situations a material thing is chosen rather than a person, it will be (if it is Christianly done) for the sake of the person, not for the sake of the thing itself. If a man prefers to keep his money invested instead of giving it to his son who needs it, it could only be because he believes his son will need it far more urgently later on. To repeat, values are only extrinsically, never intrinsically, "valuable." Love is of people, by people, and for people. Things are to be used; people are to be loved. It is "immoral" when people are used and things are loved. Loving actions are the only conduct permissible.

The Christian situationist says to the non-Christian situationist who is also neighbor—or person—concerned: "Your love is like mine, like everybody's; it is the Holy Spirit. Love is not the work of the Holy Spirit, it is the Holy Spirit—working in us. God is love, he doesn't merely have it or give it; he gives himself—to all men, to all sorts and conditions: to believers and unbelievers, high and low, dark and pale, learned and ignorant, Marxists and Christians and Hottentots".

This is what is meant by "uncovenanted" grace. This is the "saving" truth about themselves which the faithless, alas, do not grasp! It is not the unbelieving who invite "damnation" but the unloving. Temple insisted that "the atheist who is moved by love is moved by the spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies".⁷⁴ If we put these working principles together (pragmatism, relativism, positivism, and personalism), their shape is obviously one of action, existence, eventfulness. The situation ethic, unlike some other kinds, is an ethic of decision—of making decisions rather than "looking them up" in a manual of prefab rules. Goethe's "In the beginning was the deed" comes to mind. James A. Pike's book title, Doing the Truth, puts it in a nutshell.⁷⁵ Situation ethics is more Biblical and verb-thinking than Greek and noun-thinking. It does not ask what is good but how to do good for whom; not what is love but how to do the most loving thing possible in the situation. It focuses upon pragma (doing), not upon dogma (some tenet). Its concern is with behaving according to the believing. It is an activity, not a feeling, an "activistic" ethic. Kant's phrase for ethics, "practical reason," is precisely correct. We can agree with G. E. Moore at least about this: that "casuistry is the goal of ethical investigation"—i.e., that an ethic is inauthentic until it gets down to cases.⁷⁶
Conscience
Situation ethics is interested in conscience (moral consciousness) as a function, not as a faculty. It takes conscience into account only when it is working, practicing, deciding. There have been four theories about what "conscience" is, but situationism takes none of them seriously. Some have said it is an innate, radarlike, built-in faculty —intuition. Others have thought of it as inspiration from outside the decision maker—guidance by the Holy Spirit or a guardian angel or a Jiminy Cricket. The popular theory nowadays is "introjection"—that conscience is the internalized value system of the culture and society. The Thomists have followed Aquinas' definition, that it is the reason making moral judgments or value choices.⁷⁷ But situationism has no ontology or being theory for conscience, whatsoever.⁷⁸

The traditional error lies in thinking about conscience as a noun instead of as a verb. This reflects the fixity and establishment-mindedness of all law ethics as contrasted to love ethics. There is no conscience; "conscience" is merely a word for our attempts to make decisions creatively, constructively, fittingly. If, with Huckleberry Finn, we were to suppose that conscience is a faculty, with a bag of reliable rules and principles, then we should have to say what Huck said when he wrestled over whether it was right to befriend Jim, the runaway slave: "If I had a yaller dog that didn't know more than a person's conscience does, I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same".⁷⁹ Thomas Aquinas' description is the best (leaving aside his faculty idea): the reason making moral judgments.

Another feature of situation ethics is its concern with antecedent rather than consequent conscience, i.e., with prospective decision-making rather than with retrospective judgment-passing. The ancient world ordinarily thought of conscience (syneidesis) as a review officer, weighing an action ex post facto and rendering approval or disapproval. (We all do this, head on pillow, after a long, hard day!) An example is Ernest Hemingway's famous definition, "What's good is what I feel good after, and what's bad is what I feel bad after". Savage cultures have often thought of conscience with the model of a sharp stone in the breast under the sternum, which turns and hurts when we have done wrong. Conscience here is remorse or reassurance.

Paul spoke of conscience in two of his letters, to Rome and Corinth, and tended to give a new twist to the Greco-Roman idea by treating it as a director of human decisions rather than simply a reviewer.⁸⁰ It acquired a future reference, directive and not merely reactive. So it is with situation ethics. By contrast, the morality of the confessional is ex post facto and retrospective, backward-looking.