Situation ethics the new morality by Joseph Fletcher Ситуативная этика
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| for law's sake.
We must be quite adamant about this. The conventional view is that through obeying law we serve love, because (it is claimed) there is no real conflict at all between law and love. Even Brunner comes too close to saying this, in explaining Luther's teaching that law serves love threefoldly as discipline, repentance, and guidance.102 Often we hear quoted the Judaizing phrase in Matt. 5: 17-20 (and Luke 16:17), "Not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law", and "Whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments" shall be small potatoes in the Kingdom. Literalizers or fundamentalists take these phrases, however inconsistent they are with the rest of the Gospels and with Paul's letters, as a law requiring the law! Bernhard Haring, C.Ss.R., makes an impressive effort to ease the law ethic by pleading the primacy of love over law, but at bottom he still identifies law with love, and when he stresses the spirit rather than the letter of the law, he is still distinguishing them, not separating them as a situationist would.103 The love commandment (the Shema of Deut. 6:4-5 combined with Lev. 19:18, in Mark 12:29-32, etc.) is, so runs the argument, Jesus' summary of the law! But here lies the issue. Is the Summary to be taken as a compendium or as a distillation? Legalists take it as a compendium, as a collection and conflation of many laws, obedience to all of them being implicit in their coming together as a summary. Situationists, however, take it to mean a distillation, i.e., that the essential spirit and ethos of many laws has been distilled or liberated, extracted, filtered out, with the legal husks, or rubbish, thrown away as dross. The situationist replies to all claims that love commands us to follow the law, "Yes, all right. We are willing to follow principles and precepts if they serve love, when they do. But just the same, there can be and often is a conflict between love and law". They cannot be partners; at best, love only employs law when it seems worthwhile. Let's look at the Ten Commandments, Ex. 20:2-17 and Deut. 5:6-21, for instance. They are very "sacred" in popular Judaism and Christianity, and much pious lip service is paid them even in secular culture. Protestants regard them as God's positive revealed enactments, and Catholics regard them as natural laws discernible by reason but backed up by specific revelation via Moses' tablets of stone. We shall refer to them in the numbering of their order in the Exodus text. Tablets of Stone The first one is: "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before [but?] me." This causes situation ethics no difficulty. "Aba", say the legalists, "how can you get around that one?" The situationist has no wish to get around it for two obvious reasons. (1) It is only a "law" in the sense that we can speak of the "law of love" or the "law of one's being." It is a tautology, not a true commandment. One does not worship idols, i.e., other gods, if one does not. It only says (to primitive Semitic henotheists) that if you have faith in one God, you won't have faith in any other! It only states a fact, a "fact of faith". It is an indicative, not an imperative. Monotheism cannot be commanded. Furthermore, (2) one could surely pretend to have no faith in God, or in any combination of gods, if it were necessary for loving cause. We could make a formal but false apostasy under persecution for the sake of dependents or the life of an illegal underground church. If the First Commandment is meant to prohibit atheistic or non-Yahwistic declarations, then it becomes like other laws and can be broken for love's sake. God knows the secrets of the heart; he knows when he is denied falsely and lovingly, and he also knows when he is acclaimed falsely and unlovingly. As to the second prohibition, "You shall not make for yourself a graven image ... of anything," if it is taken to be a prohibition of idolatry, love might technically, i.e., in a false way, violate it as it might violate the first prohibition. If it commands aniconic worship (no images), Catholic and Eastern Christians have always broken the law! Jesus is constantly shown in Christian worship, even though God as transcendent escapes being depicted. And there is some evidence that the Jews themselves used sacred images, even under Moses. (A Mowinckel says they did, an Eichrodt says they did not!) If it means there is to be no pictorial art at all (sculpture, painting, photography), as many strict Jews have interpreted it to the impoverishment of their culture, then we might reasonably and lovingly say it is a bad law indeed. Who would disagree? The third item in the Decalogue, "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain", presents exegetical problems but no ethical difficulty. Does it mean we must not take solemn oaths? If so, we all rightly violate it in court or, for example, as clergy do in being ordained. (They are violating in addition the injunction of the Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:34, 37: "Do not swear at all. . . . Let what you say be simply Yes' or 'No'. ") If it merely prohibits using the divine name for magical purposes or false oath-taking or irreverent expletives (swearing in that sense), we ought to obey it unless some real good can be gained by violating it. Jeanie Deans in Sir Walter Scott's novel The Heart of Midlothian was faced with the question whether she would tell a lie at her sister Effie's trial for the murder of her bastard child. She was innocent, as Jeanie well knew, but there was no honest way to rescue her from a false tissue of circumstantial evidence. Jeanie was torn terribly between her loving concern and her Calvinist legalism! K. E. Kirk once remarked blandly and piously, "We may doubt whether any serious-minded Christian could really have advised Jeanie to lie in cold blood," adding that we can feel the claims of sympathy for Effie in her danger but "an even greater claim is that of Jeanie's soul".104 Here, clearly, is the temper of soft legalism, i.e., soft on the surface but hard as flint underneath. The fourth of these laws, "Remember the sabbath day. . . . In it you shall do no work", is of course completely overthrown by Christians who make Sunday, the first day of the week, the Lord's Day, rather than the Old Testament's Sabbath or seventh day, Saturday. We still have a lot of Sabbatarians who like to make "the Lord's Day" a day of doom and gloom. But few even pretend to obey this prohibition of Sunday work. Who could or would in an interdependent society like ours, in which goods and services must and should be produced on Saturdays and Sundays? And why not, anyway? The situationist says not, "The better the day, the better the deed," but, "The better the deed, the better the day". The last six of the commandments, for filial piety (Honor your parents), and against killing (or is it murder?), adultery, stealing, false witness, and covetousness, are more "ethical" in the ordinary nontheological use of the word. All but the fifth (Honor your father and mother) are universal negatives. But situation ethics has good reason to hold it as a duty in some situations to break them, any or all of them. We would be better advised and better off to drop the legalist's love of law, and accept only the law of love. This solitary "law" is the Summary, understood as a successor to the commandments and not a compressor. (This is the point of Bornkamm's treatment of Mark 7:15, which tells how Jesus directly threw out all the "religious" dietary laws.105 "There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him". We can paraphrase Jesus and extend his logic: "There is nothing outside a situation which by going into it can prejudge it".) Bonhoeffer in his Ethics (p. 116) turns the maxim that killing is wrong into an absolute prohibition. That is, he makes it another norm alongside love! "All deliberate killing of innocent life is arbitrary," he says, and whatever is "arbitrary" is in his view wrong. He adumbrates this law from an examination of the ethics of euthanasia. But what then of Mother Maria's suicide (euthanasia is one form of suicide) in the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen? She chose to die in a gas chamber in the stead of a young ex-Jewish girl Communist. The Gestapo had arrested her in a Paris suburb for running an underground escape route for Jews. The girl survived the war and became a Christian. Mother Maria sacrificed her life on the "model" of Christ, and Bonhoeffer, who also died bravely at the Nazis' hands, would have loved her for it. Yet, absurdly, he had to invoke a rival law that says her love cannot follow her Master's example too closely! Incidentally, like Barth and many others, Bonhoeffer absolutized the general rule against killing one's self or others without ever facing the fact that to denounce "murder" is a very question-begging universal negative. It really means "immoral killing is immoral." It begs the whole question whether killing is ever possibly right. Bonhoeffer admits that in self-defense and war and capital punishment killing is moral because the victim in those cases is not "innocent." The Sixth Commandment of Moses is rendered as "Thou shalt not kill," but obviously the Jews killed for food, punishment, and war. It should be, "Thou shalt do no murder"—i.e., unlawful killing. No art is more skillfully adept at the use of weasel words than law. It has to be, because it is what it is—an attempt to absolutize the relative. A situationist might or might not agree on particular exceptions like capital punishment, but he would be sure to protest that, in principle, even killing "innocent" people might be right. Mother Maria, for example, who killed herself. What of Bonhoeffer's own decision that Hitler was not innocent and should be assassinated? Would he actually have turned his back on a man caught hopelessly in the burning wreckage of a plane, who begged to be shot? Neither Nature nor Scripture Christian ethics is not in truth and cannot long remain in appearance a systematized scheme of codified conduct. Every religious legalism, whether of the Catholic natural law variety or of the Protestant Scriptural law variety, is sooner or later repudiated. It is overcome by the spirit of Paul's insistence that what matters is not what is lawful but what is upbuilding. It is sub-Christian to imagine that the juridical order ever exactly, or even often, coincides with the moral order. Legalism is legalism whether it rests upon nature or upon Scripture. Both kinds are quicksand. Lindsay Dewar has pointed out recently, trying to preserve the idea of natural law, that even though "there be doubt as to what are the agreed principles of the Natural Law—and the doubt has been magnified by some writers recently106— there is, to say the least, no less doubt as to the exact interpretation of the Sermon [on the Mount]".107 Exactly so. Both are in the same bad fix. To those in the natural law camp we say, "Oh, yes. You may postulate the presence of right and wrong objectively in the nature of things, de rerum natura. But this does not entitle you to suppose that you can possess them cognitively—that you can know what right and wrong are and wrap them up neatly in formulas, thinking God's thoughts after him". No twentieth-century man of even average training will turn his back on the anthropological and psychological evidence for relativity in morals.108 There are no "universal laws" held by all men everywhere at all times, no consensus of all men. Any precepts all men can agree to are platitudes such as "do the good and avoid the evil" or "to each according to his due". What is good, when and how, and what is due, is always widely debated in theory and hotly debated in concrete cases. Besides this, the attempt to study nature and discern God's will in it is only a hoary old sample of the "naturalistic fallacy" of deriving ought from is, already referred to. A federal judge a year or so before the school integration decision of the Supreme Court in 1954 upheld the right, as "a" right, of a city to segregate its golf course on the natural law ground that birds of different kinds do not rest on the same limb of the tree. Cicero, in his De legibus, 1.17, 45, said seriously, "Only a madman could maintain that the distinction between the honorable and the dishonorable, between virtue and vice, is a matter of opinion, not of nature". This is nevertheless precisely and exactly what situation ethics maintains.
Любовь есть единственная норма <…> Ни природа, ни Писание «Цицерон, в своем трактате «Об обязанностях», 1.17, 45, говорит серьезно: «Только сумасшедший может утверждать, что различие между достойным и недостойным, между добродетелью и пороком есть вопрос мнения, а не природы». И это тем не менее есть именно и в точности то, что утверждает ситуативная этика.» To those in the Scriptural law camp we can say, "Oh, yes. You may sincerely believe that 'Holy Writ' is the 'Word of God'. But if you try to literalize the ethical sayings in it, you will soon find yourself in lots worse trouble than the mere headache of trying to figure out what some sayings mean ('Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's') or how to figure out what to do when you turn its maxims into rules ('Do not resist one who is evil')." Either cheap melancholy or utter frustration will follow if we turn the Bible into a rules book, forgetting that an editorial collection of scattered sayings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, offers us at the most some paradigms or suggestions. Only the Summary of the Law is the law! Brunner is quite right: "None of the commandments in the Sermon on the Mount are to be understood as laws, so that those who hear them can go away feeling, 'Now I know what I have to do!' "109 Love Has No Equals In its very marrow Christian ethics is a situation ethic. The new morality, the emerging contemporary Christian conscience, separates Christian conduct from rigid creeds and rigid codes. Some of its critics, both Protestant and Catholic, seem to fear that by dropping codes it will drop its Christian commitment.110 What it does is to treat all rules and principles and "virtues" (that is to say, all "universals") as love's servants and subordinates, to be quickly kicked out of the house if they forget their place and try to take over. Ayn Rand, the egoist and jungle-ethic writer, tersely describes the love ethic (except that it does not teach us to scorn a whore, only to help and redeem her): "A morality which teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers".111 Augustine was right to make love the source principle, the hinge principle upon which all other "virtues" hang, whether "cardinal" (natural) or "theological" (revealed). Love is not one virtue among others, one principle among equals, not even a primus inter pares. One theologian, Robert Gleason, S.J., in a full-dress attack on situation ethics, threw down the gauntlet most lucidly (and how different a challenge from that of Ayn Rand!) by asserting, "While the motive of love is a noble one, it is not in Christian tradition to present it as the exclusive motive for moral action".112 This succinctly challenges the view that love has a monopoly control. It flies directly in the face of Paul's "single saying" in Gal. 5:14 and the conclusion of his hymn to love, I Cor., ch. 13. But what else can the man of law do, trapped as he is in his intrinsic rights and wrongs and his collections and systems of virtues and absolutes? To illustrate what legalism does in the civil order, we might recall what happened a few years ago in an English court. The law reads that a marriage must be validated ("consummated") by sexual union. In the case before it, it found that a young wife had conceived a son by means of A.I.H. (artificial insemination from her husband) because he was suffering a temporary erectile failure, subsequently corrected. The court was faithful to its law and ruled that the little boy was conceived out of wedlock, i.e., that the child was a bastard, the mother an adulteress or fornicator, the wife husbandless when her child was born, the father without a son and heir, and the child an outlaw. All of this even though their child was seed of their seed, flesh of their flesh! Augustine was right again, as situationists see it, to reduce the whole Christian ethic to the single maxim, Dilige et quod vis, fac (Love with care and then what you will, do). It was not, by the way, Ama et fac quod vis (Love with desire and do what you please)!113 It was not antinomianism. Christian love is not desire. Agape is giving love—non-reciprocal, neighbor-regarding—"neighbor" meaning "everybody", even an enemy (Luke 6:32-35). It is usually distinguished from friendship love (philia') and romantic love (eros), both of which are selective and exclusive. Erotic love and philic love have their proper place in our human affairs but they are not what is meant by agape, agapeic love or "Christian love". Erotic and philic love are emotional, but the effective principle of Christian love is will, disposition; it is an attitude, not feeling.
Христианская любовь – это не любовь-желание. Агапе означает дарение любви – не во имя взаимности, а во имя ближнего – тут «ближний» означает «каждый», даже враг (Лк. 6:32-35). Агапе часто различают от дружеской любви (филиа, philia) и романтической любви (эрос, eros), каждая из которых избирательна и исключительна. Эротическая и дружественная любовь занимают свое место в человеческой жизни, но они не то, что подразумевают под агапе, агапической или «христианской любовью». Эротическая и дружественная любовь эмоциональны, но движущий принцип христианской любви есть воля, расположение; это установка, а не чувство.» 12 Ep. Joan., vii. 5, in J. P. Migne, Patrahgiae cursus completus, series Latina (Paris: Gamier Fr., 1864), Vol. 35, col. 2033. "Semel ergo breve praeceptum tibi praecipitur, Dilige, et quod vis fac". Situationists welcome the German label for this conception, Gesinnungs-ethik, an attitudinal ethic rather than a legal one. "Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5), and then, as Augustine says, whatever you do will be right! The mind of him whom Bonhoeffer called "the Man for others" is to be for others, for neighbors. That is agape. What a difference it makes when love, understood agapeically, is boss; when love is the only norm. How free and therefore responsible we are! The natural law moralists, just to cite an example of legalism, are trapped into cheating on love or even into altogether denying love's demands, in the matter of sterilizations. In the name of a "natural law" of procreation they have to prohibit obstetricians from tying off the tubes of a cardiac mother in delivery, for whom another pregnancy is a mortal danger. In the name of a "natural law" of secrecy they have been known to admonish a doctor to withhold from an innocent girl the fact that she is about to marry a syphilitic man. No such cut-and-dried, coldly predetermined (prejudiced) position could or would be taken by a situationist. At this juncture we might do well to look at the question whether a situationist can agree with legalism's effort to force people to be good. The answer is, of course, that "it all depends". It seems impossible to see any sound reason for most of such attempts to legislate morality. Yet there was a lot of furious surprise in a California city recently when the police found a wife-swapping club and learned there were no laws to stop it. The District Attorney saw no cause to be alarmed, even so. "Wife-swapping just doesn't violate any section of the penal code." It is doubtful that love's cause is helped by any of the sex laws that try to dictate sexual practices for consenting adults. The triple terrors of infection, conception, and detection, which once scared people into "Christian" sex relations (marital monopoly), have pretty well become obsolete through medicine and urbanism. There is less and less cause, on the basis of situation ethics, for the opinion that people should abide by, or pretend to, an ideal or standard that is not their own. It may well be, especially with the young, that situationists should advise continence or chastity for practical expedient reasons, but that is a situational, not a legalistic approach. Objections A common objection to situation ethics is that it calls for more critical intelligence, more factual information, and more self-starting commitment to righteousness than most people can bring to bear. We all know the army veteran who "wishes the war was back" because he could tell the good guys from the bad guys by the uniforms they wore. There are those who say situationism ignores the reality of human sin or egocentricity, and fails to appreciate the finitude of human reason. ВОЗРАЖЕНИЯ Обычное возражение против ситуативной этики состоит в том, что она требует большего критического рассудка, больше фактической информированности и больше личной приверженности к добродетели, чем могут проявить большинство людей. Всем нам известен пример того ветерана войны, который «мечтал, чтобы война вернулась», потому что тогда он мог различать хороших парней от плохих по форме, которую они носили. Есть такие, что говорят, якобы ситуационизм игнорирует реалии человеческой испорченности и эгоцентризма, и не учитывает ограниченности человеческого разума. People who think there was literally once a "Fall" (they abound in church circles) would say that law is needed now to control us, echoing Paul's famous discourse on law in Gal. 3:19 to 4:7, especially his thesis that law acts as a custodian, judging us until Christ comes, until we throw ourselves upon God's grace (i.e., the power of God's love). But Paul proceeded to say, "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery [i.e., law]" (Gal. 5:1). This might well be the slogan of Christian situation ethics. Люди, которые верят буквально, что однажды свершилось «грехопадение» (таких множество среди верующих) могли бы сказать, что с тех пор закон должен управлять нами, следуя знаменитому рассуждению Павла о законе в его Послании Галатам (Гал. 3:19 – 4:7), главным образом его тезису, что закон действует как детоводитель, отвечающий за нас до пришествия Христа, когда мы вверимся Божьей благодати (что значит, силе Божьей любви). Однако Павел продолжает: «Итак стойте в свободе, которую даровал вам Христос, и не подвергайтесь опять игу рабства [то есть закона]» (Гал. 5:1). Это высказывание могло бы послужить лозунгом христианской ситуативной этики. It reminds us of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov.114 It is Ivan's story to Alyosha about the terrible burden of freedom. Christ returned to earth, and the Spanish Inquisitor, recognizing him in the crowd watching a religious procession, had him arrested at once. In the dead of night he visited the Christ in secret, embarrassed, trying to explain that most people do not want freedom, they want security. If you really love people, he argued, you make them happy, not free. Freedom is danger, openness. They want law, not responsibility, they want the neurotic comfort of rules, not the spiritual open places of decision-making. They prefer absolutes to relativities. The Christ, he says, must not come back to start again all of that old business about freedom and grace and commitment and responsibility. Let things be, just let the church (the law) handle them. Let him please go away. Здесь вспоминается легенда о Великом инквизиторе из романа Достоевского «Братья Карамазовы».13 Это – <аллегорический> рассказ Ивана Алеше о страшном бремени свободы. Христос вернулся на землю, и испанский инквизитор, узнавший его в толпе наблюдавших за каким-то религиозным действом, немедленно же арестовывает его. Под покровом ночи, тайно, в смятении инквизитор является к Нему и пытается объяснить, что большинство людей хотят не свободы, а спокойствия. Кто действительно любит людей, доказывает он, тот постарается сделать их счастливыми, а не свободными. Они хотят закона, а не бремени ответственности, они желают душевного покоя послушания, но не духовного простора свободного выбора. Им нужны твердые основы (absolutes), но не гадательное и неопределенное (relativities). Христу, говорит он, не следовало возвращаться и снова начинать свое прежнее дело свободы, милосердия, выбора и ответственности. Пусть все остается по-прежнему, то есть пусть церковь (закон) продолжает править людьми. Пусть Христос сделает милость и уйдет. Psychologically, the Inquisitor's plea is suited to many people. But there are a lot it does not fit. People are, in any case, going to have to grow up into situation ethics, no doubt of it. The Christian is called to be mature, to live by grace and freedom, to respond to life, to be responsible. This is the vocation of all situationists, most certainly the "calling" of Christian situationists. The motive and purpose behind law, however hidden it may be, is to minimize obligation, to make it clear exactly how much you must do and no more. Grace, on the other hand, refuses to put a ceiling or a floor on concern for the neighbor. Love, unlike law, sets no carefully calculated limits on obligation; it seeks the most good possible in every situation. It maximizes or optimizes obligation. Психологически, позиция инквизитора устраивает многих людей. Но есть много такого, с чем она не согласуется. В любом случае, люди будут вынуждены дорасти до ситуативной этики, тут нет сомнения. Христианин призван обрести зрелость, научиться жить в благодати (grace) и свободе, отвечать на требования жизни, быть ответственным. В этом дело всех ситуационистов, и наиболее определенно это составляет «призвание» ситуационистов христианских. Мотивы и цели, стоящие за следованием закону, как бы глубоко спрятаны ни были, в том, чтобы минимизировать обязанность, выяснить точно, как много ты должен сделать и не более того. Милосердие (grace) же, со своей стороны, не ставит ни верхних, ни нижних ограничений в своем отношении к ближнему. Любовь, в отличие от закона, не устанавливает тщательно вычисляемых границ нашей обязанности; она ищет наибольшего возможного добра в каждой данной ситуации. Она максимизирует или оптимизирует обязанность. When a woman is viciously attacked, fifty neighbors watch without helping, without even calling the police. A farmer destroys his barn to keep a fire from spreading to his neighbor's property, but the neighbor won't help to compensate the farmer. An indifferent passer-by watches a baby drown. A motorist sees a wheel wobbling loose on the car in front of him but merely slows down to keep out of the way of a pileup. American and English law on principle do not have a "good Samaritan" provision (Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, France, do). The Anglo-American principle is "Mind your own business"; the law limits your obligation, you are responsible only for what you do—not for what you should or could have done. This is the prudence of self-centeredness and indifference, contrasted to the aggressive, questing prudence of agape. К женщине пристает насильник, а пятьдесят человек соседей наблюдают за этим безучастно, даже не зовут полицию. Фермер ломает свой амбар, чтобы предотвратить распространение огня на участок соседа, но сосед и не думает компенсировать убытки этого фермера. Прохожие равнодушно смотрят, как тонет ребенок. Водитель видит плохо закрепленное колесо у автомобиля, движущегося впереди, но просто притормаживает, чтобы не врезаться в него. Американское и английское законодательство в принципе не предусматривают случая «доброго самаритянина» (немецкий, итальянский, советский и французский – предусматривают). Англо-американский принцип – «не лезь не в свое дело» ("mind your own business"); закон определяет твои обязанности, ты отвечаешь лишь за то, что делаешь – но не за то, что мог бы сделать. Это – расчетливость эгоцентризма и равнодушия, контрастирующая с наступательной, ищущей расчетливостью агапе. Law may be indeed a necessary feature of community and can even be constructive. But when the motive of the law observer is to hide behind the letter of the law in order to escape the higher demands of its spirit or to escape the complexities of responsible decision, that is cheap legalism. An example is a canon of the Episcopal Church which, believe it or not, from 1868 to 1946 gave the right of remarriage only to the "innocent" party to a civil divorce.115 (Everybody knows that the courts employ utterly dishonest and false, conventional pleas in such cases, so that only too often the legally "innocent" are the morally guilty.) Законность, разумеется, может считаться необходимым признаком человеческого сообщества, и может быть даже конструктивной. Но когда мотивом лица, соблюдающего закон, является желание прикрыться буквой закона, чтобы избежать высших требований духа этого закона, или избежать трудности ответственного решения, это – низкопробный легализм. Примером может служить канон Епископальной церкви, который, хотите верьте, хотите нет, с 1868 по 1946 год давал право на вступление в повторный брак только «неповинной» в гражданском разводе стороне.14 (Всем известно, что суды используют крайне нечестные и фальшивые, условные предлоги в таких случаях, так что слишком часто именно «неповинные» являются нравственно согрешившими.) Massachusetts has a law under which, in collisions at intersections, the car struck from behind by the other's bumper is the aggrieved party. This evades the situation facts and only encourages drivers to race to intersections to get their noses out first in case of trouble! If Brunner is right, as quoted earlier, that people regard legalism as the most "serious" morality, the point of view of this book is that it is not anything of the sort; that in truth it only too often evades the depth, competence, and responsibility of free decision. В Массачусетсе действует закон, по которому, в случаях столкновений, автомобиль, ударенный сзади бампером другого автомобиля, считается пострадавшей стороной. Этим не учитываются многие ситуативные факторы, что только побуждает водителей, в случае опасности столкновения, беречь носовые части своих автомобилей! Если Бруннер прав, в приведенной ранее цитате, что люди рассматривают легализм как наиболее «серьезный» тип морали, то, напротив, точка зрения нашей книги та, что на самом деле – ничего подобного; правда в том, что легализм слишком часто уклоняется от глубины, компетентности и ответственности свободного принятия решения. Absolute negatives and absolute affirmatives alike have this neurotic character of falsifying complex realities. Albert Schweitzer is quite right to say that "the good conscience is an invention of the devil".116 Classical pacifism is an example; it holds the use of violence to be always wrong regardless of the situation. This is a legalism, even though many pacifists would be unhappy to think of it as such. The subtlety here is this: the pacifist knows that if, as in the "just war" doctrine, it is possible that some wars are just and some are not, the pacifist with his absolute prohibition is bound to be ethically right some of the time, whereas the situationist could be wrong every time, failing to recognize when a war is just and trying to justify one when it is not justifiable. The pacifist is safe ethically in a way, as all legalists are, whereas the situationist is always vulnerable to error in any decision-making situation. Nevertheless, we must favor a casuistry in which every man is his own casuist when the decision-making chips are down. Decision is "a risk rooted in the courage of being" free.117 Абсолютные отрицания, как и абсолютные утверждения обладают указанным невротическим свойством фальсифицировать сложные реальности. Альберт Швейцер совершенно прав, говоря, что «чистая совесть есть изобретение дьявола».15 Один из примеров этого – классический пацифизм; он утверждает, что применение насилия всегда дурно, независимо от ситуации. Это – легализм, хотя многим пацифистам отнюдь не приятно бы рассматривать свою позицию как таковую. Тонкость тут в следующем: пацифист знает, что если, как гласит теория «справедливой войны», возможно, что некоторые войны справедливы, а некоторые нет, то пацифист со своим абсолютным запретом воевать оказывается прав хоть в некоторых случаях, тогда как ситуационист может ошибаться всегда, не умея различить, когда война справедлива и пытаясь оправдать какую-нибудь войну на самом деле непростительную. Пацифист находится всегда в моральной безопасности (safe ethically), как и вообще все легалисты, тогда как ситуационист постоянно подвержен опасности ошибиться в требующей решения ситуации. И однако, мы должны приветствовать казуистику, в которой каждый человек есть свой собственный казуист в тех случаях, когда налицо необходимость принятия решения. Решение есть «риск, коренящийся в мужестве быть свободным».16 A noteworthy complaint is that situation ethics presumes more ability to know the facts and weigh them than most people can muster. It is true that all of us are limited in how much we know about things, and how competent we are to evaluate even what little we know or think we know. This is very plainly the case in foreign affairs. But the average person to whom this book is addressed is not an expert in diplomacy; he needs only to contribute his opinions to the democratic control of foreign policy (if it can be done anymore). Заслуживающее внимания возражение состоит в том, что ситуативная этика предполагает в человеке большую способность знать и взвешивать факты, чем большинство людей могут ее проявить. Это правда, что все мы ограничены в том, как много мы можем знать о вещах, и насколько компетентны мы оперировать даже с тем немногим, что знаем или думаем что знаем. Это очень явно в случае внешней политики. Но обычный человек, которому и адресуется эта книга, не эксперт в вопросах дипломатии; он должен лишь способствовать, высказывая свое мнение, демократическому контролю за внешней политикой (если это вообще может быть <в его стране> сделано). But in his more immediate situation he must make his own decisions, and should. If it is true that one's opinions are no better than his facts, then situation ethics puts a high premium on our knowing what's what when we act. We are always free and often well advised to call in expert and professional advice if we choose to call upon it. But if law cuts down our range of free initiative and personal responsibility, by doing our thinking for us, we are so much the less for it as persons. Law easily undermines political freedom (democracy) and personal freedom (grace). Однако в ситуациях, касающихся его более непосредственно, человек должен принимать свои собственные решения, и будет прав. Поскольку верно, что мнения человека не могут быть более качественными, чем факты, которыми он располагает, постольку ситуативная этика придает наивысшее значение нашему осознанию того, «что есть что» в том, что мы делаем. Мы всегда имеем возможность, и чаще всего самым разумным будет воспользоваться экспертной и профессиональной помощью, если мы сами предпочтем ей воспользоваться. Если же закон ограничивает пределы нашей свободной инициативы и личной ответственности, думая за нас, мы, в той же мере, принижены как личности. Закон с легкостью губит политическую свободу (демократию) и свободу личную (благодать) (grace). Situation ethics aims to widen freedom, which is the other face of responsibility. As much as he can, the situationist will prevent law's Procrusteanly squeezing down an iron system of prefabricated decisions upon free people in living situations. He is data conscious because the alternative is to be sub-Christian and subhuman. He faces the information explosion of this scientific era unafraid. One recalls with joy the candor of a Church Assembly Commission (Anglican) in 1962 which reported that the traditional legalistic prohibition of sterilization for nontherapeutic reasons should be acknowledged to be "wrong", after all, because of new data! Ситуативная этика имеет целью расширить пространство свободы, которая есть иная ипостась ответственности. Насколько это в его силах, ситуационист борется с прокрустовым ложем железных систем готовых решений, в которое пытаются уложить свободного человека в его жизненных ситуациях. Ситуационист отдает себе отчет в фактах (data conscious), ибо альтернатива этому – быть недо-христианином и недо-человеком. Он бесстрашно принимает информационную революцию нашей научной эры. Можно приветствовать честность Комиссии Церковной ассамблеи (англиканской) (Church Assembly Commission (Anglican)), которая в 1962 году сообщила, что традиционный легалистский запрет на стерилизацию в нетерапевтических целях должен быть признанным все-таки «неверным» ввиду вновь открывшихся фактов! If it is supposed that the situational method of moral decision-making is too open to a conscious or unconscious rationalizing of selfish and evasive motives, we need only to remember that self-deceit and excuse-making can exploit law too for its own purposes, often as easily as it uses freedom. Our real motives can hide as effectively behind rules as behind free contextual choices. Law is a common camouflage, and makes a much better disguise. It is harder to hide double-dealing when you have no protective cover of law. Being legally right may mean nothing at all morally, as any acquaintance with money lenders and technical virgins will show. H. G. Wells once said that a lot of moral indignation is "only jealousy with a halo." Если предполагается, что ситуационистский метод нравственного принятия решений слишком подвержен сознательной или несознательной рационализации эгоистических и недобросовестных побуждений, то нам следует лишь вспомнить о том, что самообман и самооправдание могут использовать в своих целях также и закон, зачастую и с большей легкостью, чем они используют свободу. Наши подлинные мотивы могут укрыться за правилами куда надежнее, чем за свободным контекстуальным выбором. Закон есть распространенный камуфляж, и наилучшим образом помогает менять облик. Труднее скрыть двурушничество, если у вас нет защитного прикрытия закона. Быть правым по закону может совершенно не означать быть правым нравственно, как это показывают примеры ростовщиков или «технических» девственниц. Х. Г. Уэллс сказал однажды, что моральное негодование во многом есть «лишь зависть в ореоле <добродетели>». No. The plain fact is that love is an imperious law unto itself. It will not share its power. It will not share its authority with any other laws, either natural or supernatural. Love is even capable of desecrating the Holy of Holies, the very tabernacle of the altar, if human hunger cries for help. Imagine an Anglo-Catholic or Roman Catholic being told that in serious need of food it is all right to open the pyx and eat the Blessed Sacrament! What a shock to law-bound piety! The pericope Matt. 12:1-8 (and parallels Mark 2:23-28; Luke 6:1-5) left no doubt about Jesus' willingness to follow the radical decisions of love. He puts his stamp of approval on the translegality of David's paradigm or exemplary act: "Have you never read what David did, when he was . . . hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God . . . and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him?" At least the Christ of the Christian ethic leaves no doubt whatsoever that the ruling norm of Christian decision is love: nothing else. Но нет. Голая истина (plain fact) в том, что любовь есть сама для себя всевластный закон. Она ни с чем не делит свой силы. Она не делит своей власти ни с какими иными законами, ни естественными, ни божественными. Любовь способна даже вторгнуться в Святая Святых, скинию в алтаре, если голодный человек молит о помощи. Представьте англо-католика или римского католика, которому сказали бы, что в случае серьезной нужды в пище вполне верным будет открыть дарохранительницу и съесть евхаристический хлеб! Каким бы это было шоком для законопослушной набожности! Перикоп из Матфея 12:1-8 (и параллельные Марка 2:23-28 и Луки 6:1-5) не оставляют сомнения в готовности Христа следовать радикальным решениям любви. Он скрепляет своей печатью универсальность Давидовой парадигмы или показательного поступка: «Разве вы не читали, что сделал Давид, когда взалкал сам и бывшие с ним? Как он взошел в дом Божий и ел хлебы предложения, которых не должно было есть ни ему, ни бывшим с ним, а только одним священникам?» По крайней мере, Христос как христианский этик (аt least the Christ of the Christian ethic) не оставляет никакого сомнения в том, что руководством (ruling norm) для христианского решения является любовь; ничего иного. 13 See Modern Library Edition (Random House, Inc., 1955), pp. 292-309. 14 See D. B. Stevick, Canon Law (The Seabury Press, Inc., 1965), pp. 158-159. 15Quoted in J. A. Davidson, A New Look at Morals (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1964), p. 21. 16 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I (1951), p. 153.
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