Situation ethics the new morality by Joseph Fletcher Ситуативная этика
VIII Любовь находит время и место
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VIII Любовь находит время и место Смутная область «Когда мы сталкиваемся с реальными проблемами совести, теми, что не просты и не очевидны, мы попадаем в «этические полусвет, полутень (penumbra)» – в которых очертания вещей недостаточно определенны. В промежутке между ярко освещенной стороной спутника, на которую падают солнечный лучи, и его темной стороной, скрытой от них, лежит затененная, частично освещаемая площадь – полусвет, полутень. Столь много жизненных решений относятся к этому роду; они попадают в этот промежуток. Указанная проблема «полутеневого» («penumbric») в ситуативной этике аналогична Бонхефферовской проблеме «предпоследнего» (penultimate) в истории и мире.1 Она встречает вещи такими, какие они суть здесь и сейчас, без романтической обращенности в прошлое или уводящей от действительности обращенности в будущее. Вот – место, где призыв «греши смело» звучит острее всего. ...» 1 Ethics, pp. 84 ff. When a lady in Arizona learned, a few years ago, that she might bear a defective baby because she had taken thalidomide, bow was she to decide? She asked the court to back her doctor and his hospital in terminating the pregnancy, and it refused, to the judge's chagrin, since the law prohibits nonmedically indicated abortions without exception. Her husband took her to Sweden, where love has more control of law, and there she was aborted. God be thanked, since the embryo was hideously deformed. But nobody could know for sure. It was a brave and responsible and right decision, even if the embryo had been all right. It was a kairos, a fullness of time, a moment of decision. In 1841 the ship William Brown, out of Liverpool for Philadelphia, struck an iceberg off Newfoundland and began to sink. Two boats got away; the captain, some of the crew, and a passenger in one were picked up after six days. The other, the longboat, was in charge of the first mate. He, seven seamen, and thirty-two passengers were twice what it could hold. Rain and rough seas doomed them. The mate ordered most of the males into the sea; they refused and Holmes, a seamen, pitched them out. The rest were finally picked up. In Philadelphia, Holmes was convicted of murder, mercy recommended.185 Regardless of the kairos, says legalism, Holmes did an evil thing, not a good thing. Situation ethics says it was bravely sinful, it was a good thing. When Captain Scott's expedition to the South Pole ran into trouble and they were making it back to the coast with no time to spare, one of his men was injured and had to be carried. The stretcher would slow them dangerously. Scott decided to stick with the man, not abandon him, and they all perished. But it was an authentic kairos, and assuming Scott was not simply legalistic in his decision, it does him as much honor as Holmes's or the Arizona lady's. We can't always guess the future, even though we are always being forced to try. This contextual, situational, clinical case method (or neocasuistry), this way of dealing with decision, is too full of variables to please some people. They like better to latch on to a few well-anchored constants, sanctioned in law, and ignore all the variables. That is law's way. But it is not love's way. And added to this difference, which has always existed, is the further fact that life and culture in a technical civilization is becoming increasingly complicated, either very specialized or very wide-scoped and interdisciplinary, so that ethical problem-solving and decision-making are growing knottier all the time, with the "gray area" between the black and white spreading. Through the increase of professional expertise and special knowledge, perfectionism is being banished progressively from Christian ethics; and, for the same reason, petty moralism is forced to come of age and to face the complicated facts of life. Under the pressures and revelations of the "information explosion" in this era, prefab code morality gets exposed as a kind of neurotic security device to simplify moral decisions. It may be, on some balanced view, that true order presupposes freedom and freedom presupposes order, but just the same, it is the order that looms largest in the legalist's eye. The End of Ideology Political and social establishments feel safer when buttressed by an ethical establishment, a fixed code. In some circles there is a growing hunger for law; it can be seen in cultural conformism, and in the lust for both political and theological orthodoxy. Like the existentialists to an extent, situationists are in revolt against the cultural stodginess of "respectable" and traditional ethics. They rebel against the reigning ethics of American middle-class culture because of its high-flown moral laws on the one hand and its evasive shilly-shallying on the other; it is often and acutely described as "the leap from Sunday to Monday". Nothing in the world causes so much conflict of conscience as the continual, conventional payment of lip service to moral "laws" that are constantly flouted in practice because they are too petty or too rigid to fit the facts of life. Many people prefer to fit reality to rules rather than to fit rules to reality. Legalism always bears down hard on the need for order, putting its premium on obedience to law, even statutory law. It would, if it could, immobilize Martin Luther King and the sit-in demonstrators or civil rights protesters, whereas situation ethics gives high-order value to freedom, and to that responsibility for free decision which is the obverse side of the coin of freedom. In ethics as in politics we can see that ideology has come to a dead end. Doctrinaire by-the-book theory and practice is too confining, too narrow. "The point is," says Daniel Bell, "that ideologists are terrible simplifiers. Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues in individual situations. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formula".186 Substitute "law" for ideology in Bell's statement and we have the nub of the matter.
A committee set up by the late President Kennedy to deal with questions of business ethics, of which the writer of this book was a member, got nowhere at all because it was code-minded, wrote a code to cover all business, and found itself possessed of nothing but platitudes. For real decision-making, freedom is required, an open-ended approach to situations. Imagine the plight of an obstetrician who believed he must always respirate every baby he delivered, no matter how monstrously deformed! A century ago Thomas Huxley rather thought he would prefer being accurate and correct as a moral decision maker, even if he had to be as mechanical as a clock wound up for the day, than assume the burden of mistakes entailed by freedom. What an irony to compare his opinion to Tik-Tok's in The Wizard of Oz! There the mechanical man had the special grace of always doing "what he was wound up to do," but wanted instead to be human. And what did he lack? Freedom to choose. No wonder that Jesus, in the language of a French Catholic moralist whose concern is contemporary, "reacted particularly against code morality and against casuistry", and that his "attitude toward code morality [was] purely and simply one of reaction".187 Modern Christians ought not to be naive enough to accept any other view of Jesus' ethic than the situational one. When Edmund Wilson ran his famous article in The New Yorker some ten years ago on the Dead Sea Scrolls he made quite a splash by saying that Jesus' teaching was a copy of the Essenes' teaching at the Qumran community.188 Actually, the quickest way to expose the error in all such uncritical comparisons is simply to point out that the legalism and code rule of the Qumran sect put even the Pharisees to shame, whereas Jesus boldly rejected all such legalisms. «Нет ничего удивительного в том, что Иисус, на языке одного французского моралиста-католика, занимающегося проблемами современности, «восставал в особенности против кодифицированной моральности (code morality) и против казуистики», и что его «позиция по отношению к кодифицированной моральности явно и четко значила протест».4 Современные христиане не должны быть столь наивными, чтобы принимать какую-либо иную точку зрения на этику Христа, кроме ситуационистской. Когда Эдмунд Уилсон (Edmund Wilson) выступил со своей знаменитой статьей в «Нью Йоркер», примерно десять лет назад, о Свитках Мертвого моря, он сотворил подлинную сенсацию своим заявлением, что учение Христа есть копия ессейского учения, записанного Кумранской общиной.5 На самом деле, вернейший способ выразить ошибочность всех подобных некритических сравнений – это попросту указать на то, что легализм и кодифицированная мораль (code rule) Кумранской секты могли бы посрамить даже фарисеев, тогда как Иисус жестко отрицал всякий подобный легализм.» 3 The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, new rev. ed. (Collier Books, 1962), p. 17. 4 J. LeClercq, Christ and the Modern Conscience, pp. 59, 61. 5 Republished as The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (Oxford University Press, 1955). As we know, for many people, sex is so much a moral problem, largely due to the repressive effects of legalism, that in newspapers and popular parlance the term "morals charge" always means a sex complaint! "Her morals are not very high" means her sex life is rather looser than the mores allow. Yet we find nothing in the teachings of Jesus about the ethics of sex, except adultery and an absolute condemnation of divorce—a correlative matter. He said nothing about birth control, large or small families, childlessness, homosexuality, masturbation, fornication or premarital intercourse, sterilization, artificial insemination, abortion, sex play, petting, and courtship. Whether any form of sex (hetero, homo, or auto) is good or evil depends on whether love is fully served. The Christian ethic is not interested in reluctant virgins and technical chastity. What sex probably needs more than anything is a good airing, demythologizing it and getting rid of its mystique-laden and occult accretions, which come from romanticism on the one hand and puritanism on the other. People are learning that we can have sex without love, and love without sex; that baby-making can be (and often ought to be) separated from love-making. It is, indeed, for re-creation as well as for procreation. But if people do not believe it is wrong to have sex relations outside marriage, it isn't, unless they hurt themselves, their partners, or others. This is, of course, a very big "unless" and gives reason to many to abstain altogether except within the full mutual commitment of marriage. The civil lawmakers are rapidly ridding their books of statutes making unmarried sex a crime between consenting adults. All situationists would agree with Mrs. Patrick Campbell's remark that they can do what they want "as long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses". Situation ethics always suspects prescriptive law of falsifying life and dwarfing moral stature, whether it be the Scripture legalism of Biblicist Protestants and Mohammedans or the nature legalism (natural law) of the Catholics and disciples of Confucius. One American theologian has complained that situation ethics fails to realize that people are unwilling to grapple with what he calls "paradoxical ambiguities"—that they want something more definite and exact than ethical relativism offers.189 Of course; they want the Grand Inquisitor. T. S. Eliot was right to say that people cannot bear too much reality. But there is no escape for them. To learn love's sensitive tactics, such people are going to have to put away their childish rules. Fanatic Virtue As the old adage has it, "Virtue never goes out of style," i.e., the disposition toward honor, chastity, loyalty, patience, humility, and all the rest. But situations change. There is another old saying, Semper sed non ad semper (Principles are always sound but not in every case). What is constructive in one era may not be in another; James Russell Lowell's hymn is right, "Time makes ancient good uncouth." Humility and gentility once meant that women should be ignoramuses, but it doesn't anymore! As Raymond Bruckberger, a French priest and student of American culture, puts it, "Fanatic love of virtue has done more to damage men and society than all the vices put together".190 Who could ever forget that "virtue" can serve the devil, after seeing Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck} Young Gregers Werle did far more harm to far more people than his lying father had, simply by telling the truth about the past, thereby destroying a girl, her mother and father, his own father. And Dr. Relling, the situationist, alone protested that the truth must not be told, for love's sake. In every milieu we have to know and to calculate. It is entirely possible to be calculating without being loving, but it is not possible to be loving without calculating. If it is true, as under the New Testament rubric, Jesus' Summary, that actions are only right because they are loving, it follows that they are only right when or while or as long as they are loving! The righteousness of an act (i.e., its rightness) does not reside in the act itself, but holistically in its Gestalt, in the loving configuration, the aggregate, whole complex of all the factors in the situation, the total context. Theology or theologizing is done at the point of encounter between faith and life, church and world. Tillich has insisted that true theology arises where a question in the situation is posed and calls for an answer from the "message," making for a situational theology. In the same way true ethics arises where a situation poses questions. What Tillich calls the method of correlation applies to all of theology, moral as well as doctrinal. As the Christian situationist sees it, his faith answers for him three questions of the seven always to be asked. These three are his "universals." He knows the what; it is love. He knows the why; for God's sake. He knows the who; it is his neighbors, people. But only in and of the situation can he answer the other four questions: When? Where? Which? How? These are, as we have suggested, the kairos factors. There and then only can he find out what is the right thing to do. The Christian ethic is a love ethic primarily, not a hope ethic (although it has its eschatalogical meaning). This means it is for the present, here and now. By faith we live in the past, by hope we live in the future, but by love we live in the present.191 Legalism is wrong because it tries to push love back into the past, into old decisions already made. Ecology is the study of the relation between an organism and its environment. We may say, then, that situation ethics is an ecological ethics, for it takes as full account as possible of the context (environment) of every moral decision. This means looking carefully at the full play of ends, means, motives, and result. The rightness is in the Gestalt or shape of the action as a whole, and not in any single factor or ingredient. Is adultery wrong? To ask this is to ask a mare's-nest question. It is a glittering generality, like Oscar Wilde's mackerel in the moonlight: it glitters but it stinks. One can only respond, "I don't know. Maybe. Give me a case. Describe a real situation". Or perhaps somebody will ask if a man should ever lie to his wife, or desert his family, or spy on a business rival's design or market plans, or fail to report some income item in his tax return. Again, the answer cannot be an answer, it can only be another question. "Have you a real question, that is to say, a concrete situation?" If it has to do with premarital sex or libel or breach of contract or anything else ("you name it"), the reply is always the same: "You are using words, abstractions. What you are asking is without substance; it has no living reality. There is no way to answer such questions". Here we are in direct opposition to the detachment of the mystics and abstractions of metaphysics, to be seen for what they are in a Buddhist sutra: "Our mind should stand aloof from circumstances, and on no account should we allow them to influence the function of our mind".192 Nicolas Berdyaev may have been less than coherent at many points, but at least he saw clearly that contrary to the generalizers, "every moral action should have in view a concrete living person and not the abstract good".193 When Rights Are Right When love reigns, not law, the decisions of conscience are relative. Love plots the course according to the circumstances. What is to be done in any situation depends on the case, and the solution of any moral issue is, therefore, quite relative. What is right is revealed in the facts: Ex factis oritur jus. But once the relative course is chosen, the obligation to pursue it is absolute. We cannot blow hot or cold, or lukewarm, sounding an uncertain note about the obligation itself. The obligation is absolute; only the decision is relative. Only the how is relative, not the why. This is why we have said that the task is "to find absolute love's relative course". The metaphysical moralist of the classical tradition, with his intrinsic values and moral universals and code apparatus, says in effect, "Do what is right and let the chips fall where they may." The situational decision maker says right back at his metaphysical rival: "Ha! Whether what you are doing is right or not depends precisely upon where the chips fall." Only the unwary will be taken in by the pseudobravery and bogus prophetic courage of those who drive ahead to an ideal regardless of the pain or price involved. It is right or wrong to follow a principle only according to who gets hurt, and how much. John Kasper, a racist agitator and anti-Negro demagogue, was convicted in a Tennessee court of inciting to riot because of his activity in resisting school integration in Clinton, in east Tennessee. Kasper appealed to the First Amendment on a personal liberty and free-speech basis. But in his instructions to the jury, Judge Homer Weimer pointed out that while we all have a right to make public speeches, we all have an obligation to calculate the consequences for the general welfare. A Christian situationist, sitting on the bench, might have said to Kasper, "You may claim a 'natural' or 'God-given' or constitutional right to speak, if you want, but whether you have a right to exercise your right, i.e., whether you have a right at all in the situation, depends—it all depends". Using classical terms, which even a situationist can do honestly, the juridical order never exactly coincides with the moral order. They never manage to reach a true "fit," and the moral order, with love in the driver's seat, always takes first place whenever the fit is lacking. Love can even love law, if law knows its place and takes the back seat. Legal rights are subordinate, and so are legal prohibitions. Under Aristotelian influence, classical Roman Catholic moral theology has tended to treat love as the "form" and law as the "matter," regarding them as coinherent and inseparable. But in the situationists' view such an ontological metaphysic only misreads and misdirects love and law. For although law may sometimes be the matter of love, there are other times when law denies love and destroys it. The core difference, however, is that love's decisions are made situationally, not prescriptively. Когда права правы «Используя классические термины, – то, что даже ситуационист может делать с чистой совестью, – юридический порядок никогда в точности не совпадает с порядком нравственным. Они никогда не могут достичь полного соответствия, и нравственный порядок, с любовью у кормила, всегда идет впереди, как только этого согласия не хватает. Любовь может даже любить закон, если закон знает свое место и следует за ним. Законные права, так же как и запреты, занимают подчиненное место. Под влиянием Аристотеля, классическая римско-католическая моральная теология пыталась трактовать любовь как «форму» и закон как «материю», рассматривая их как неотъемлемо присущие друг другу и неразделимые. Но с ситуационистской точки зрения, подобная онтологическая метафизика только искажает и сбивает с истинного пути и любовь и закон. Ибо, хотя закон и может быть иногда предметом любви, существуют другие случаи, когда закон отрицает любовь и губит ее. Сущностная разница, как бы то ни было, в том, что решения любви принимаются ситуативно, а не прескриптивно.» IX Postscriptum: Why? What are we to say now of the girl in our first chapter who was offered so much money to sleep with a rich man? Now that we have covered the ground in between, how shall we respond to the question whether extramarital sex is always wrong? Or even paid sex? Women have done it to feed their families, to pay debts, to serve their countries in counterespionage, to honor a man whom they could not marry. Are we not entitled to say that, depending on the situation, those who break the Seventh Commandment of the old law, even whores, could be doing a good thing—if it is for love's sake, for the neighbor's sake? In short, is there any real "law" of universal weight? The situationist thinks not. IX Постскриптум: Почему? Что мы теперь можем сказать относительно той девушки из первой главы нашей книги, которой была предложена такая куча денег за ночь с богачом? Теперь, когда мы уже разъяснили суть подхода, как мы ответим на вопрос, всегда ли внебрачный секс есть зло? И даже – за деньги? Женщина может пойти на сближение с мужчиной затем, чтобы прокормить свою семью, расплатиться с долгами, послужить своей стране в разоблачении шпионажа, или в благодарность человеку, за которого не может выйти замуж. Не имеем ли мы теперь право утверждать, что, в зависимости от ситуации, те, кто нарушает седьмую заповедь Ветхого Завета, даже блудницы, могут совершать доброе дело – если это делается ими ради любви, ради ближнего? Короче говоря, имеется ли вообще какой-нибудь действующий «закон» универсального применения? Ситуационисты считают, что нет. A Neocasuistry The Situations-ethik more and more openly wins a place in nonfundamentalist Protestant ethics. It is sparking or cultivating a kind of neocasuistry. Occasionally leading Protestant writers take issue with the relativism of the method, but this appears to be a mood objection rather than genuinely critical. Two such moralists in America, John Bennett and Daniel Williams, have made the mistake of thinking that the situational method procedurally is antinomian, and that it works without any principles at all.194 But, they say, they have no quarrel with it substantively. Compared to the right-wing Evangelicals and their antisituational posture, employing such epithets as "moral nihilism" and "sneaky minimalism," there is an imposing array of American Protestant moralists in the situational camp.195 None has appeared without running into bad weather in the Roman communion yet, but Bernhard Haring, C.Ss.R., and Gerard Gilleman, S.J., have come a long way toward putting love at the ethical helm instead of nature, and personalism rather than legalism gives the work of many others a situational quality heretofore absent. There are many nontheological ethicists who do not consciously theorize as situationists, but that is what they are in actual practice. It may well be, on careful thought, that in effect most men are situationists and always have been! Неоказуистика Ситуативная этика все более и более явно завоевывает место в нефундаменталистской протестантской этике. Она обихаживает или культивирует некую разновидность неоказуистики. Порой ведущие протестантские авторы выступают против релятивизма этого метода, но это выглядит скорее как смутное неодобрение, чем как настоящая критика. Два таких американских моралиста, как Джон Беннет и Даниэль Уильямс (Daniel Williams), совершают ошибку, полагая, что ситуативный метод в своем применении есть метод антиномианистский, и что он работает вовсе без каких-либо принципов.1 Но, по их словам, по сути они с ним не расходятся. В отличие от правых евангелистов с их антиситуационистскими установками, использующих такие эпитеты, как «моральный нигилизм» и «коварный минимализм», американские протестантские моралисты составляют внушительный отряд в лагере ситуационистов.2 Хотя еще и приходящиеся не вполне ко двору в римско-католическом сообществе, но Бернард Харинг (Bernhard Haring), C.Ss.R. <член Конгрегации Святейшего Искупителя, или редемпторист. - А.К.> и Джерард Джильмен (Gerard Gilleman), S.J. <иезуит>, прошли долгий путь к тому, чтобы поставить у кормила морали, вместо природы, любовь, и персонализм, а не легализм, придал трудам многих других ситуационистские качества, до сих пор отсутствовавшие. Существует множество нерелигиозных этиков, не мыслящих осознанно как ситуационисты, но являющихся ими на практике. Вполне может быть, если вдуматься, что по существу большинство людей – ситуационисты, и всегда ими были! Situationism, it appears, is the crystal precipitated in Christian ethics by our era's pragmatism and relativism. Historically, most men really have been situationists, more or less, but the difference today is that we are situationists as a matter of rational and professed method. Gone is the old legalistic sense of guilt and of cheated ideals when we tailor our ethical cloth to fit the back of each occasion. We are deliberately closing the gap between our overt professions and our covert practices. It is an age of honesty, this age of anxiety is. Ситуационизм, как представляется, это кристалл, выращенный в христианской этике нашей эпохой прагматизма и релятивизма. Исторически, большинство людей всегда были на практике ситуационистами, в большей или меньшей степени, но сегодняшнее наше отличие от них в том, что мы ситуационисты на почве разумного и открыто заявленного подхода. Ушли в прошлое архаичные легалистическое чувство греховности и следование обманчивым идеалам, когда мы кроили наши моральные одеяния годными на все случаи жизни. Мы решительно закрываем брешь между нашими заявляемыми убеждениями и замалчиваемой практикой. Настал век честности, этот тревожный век. All of this "new morality" is a neocasuistry. G. E. Moore said in his Principia Ethica that "casuistry is the goal of ethical investigation," but if one is quite wholeheartedly a situationist, he will insist that we begin with cases, too, empirically. This neocasuistry is, like classical casuistry, case-focused and concrete, concerned to bring Christian imperatives into practical operation. But unlike classical casuistry, this neocasuistry repudiates the attempt to anticipate or prescribe real-life decisions in their existential particularity. The Christian conscience is not a vending machine, with handles to pull and prepackaged answers to spew out of a slot. As Whitehead remarked, "The simpleminded use of the notions 'right or wrong' is one of the chief obstacles to the progress of understanding".196 We have to make a new effort to appreciate what Brunner calls, as we have noted, "the occasionalism of love". Все в нашей «новой моральности» есть неоказуистика. Г. Е. Мур сказал в своем труде «Principia Ethica», что «казуистика есть цель морального исследования», но если человек до конца и чистосердечно ситуационист, он будет настаивать на том, что мы и начинаем тоже с отдельных случаев, эмпирически. Неоказуистика, как и классическая казуистика, сфокусирована на отдельных случаях и на конкретном, ее задача в доведении христианских требований до практики. Но в отличие от классической казуистики, неоказуистика отвергает попытки предварить или предписать реальные жизненные решения в их экзистенциальной неповторимости. Христианское сознание не какой-то торговый автомат с рычажками, за которые достаточно дергать чтобы получать в окошке готовые расфасованные ответы. Как заметил Уайтхед (Whitehead), «наивное (simpleminded) использование терминов 'верное и ложное' есть одно из главных препятствий к прогрессу понимания».3 Мы должны заново попытаться осмыслить то, что Бруннер (Brunner) называл, как мы уже упоминали, «окказионализмом любви». Looking back in the history of Christian ethics from this vantage point, we can see that there is, after all, no discredit to the old-fashioned casuists, nor to the Talmudists, in the old saying that they continually made new rules for the breaking of old rules. They were pulling out of the nets or traps of their own precepts and principles, trying desperately to serve love as well as law. Inevitably the only result was a never-ending tangle of legalism. Code law always fails in the end to be corrected in favor of loving kindness. The rabbis throttled hesed and zaddik, the canonists strangled agape. They simply and foolishly forgot that it is love which is the constitutive principle—and that law, at most, is only the regulative principle, if it is even that. Even today, in spite of a revival of Biblical theology, three difficulties about an agapeic ethic remain: (1) People do not understand the concept itself; (2) it is resisted philosophically and ethically even when it is understood; and (3) it is not central in Christian church teaching despite its centrality in the New Testament. Оглядываясь назад, в историю христианской этики, с этой высокой точки зрения, мы можем увидеть, что в конце концов никакой тени на казуистов в их древнем понимании, даже на талмудистов, не бросает и то, что, согласно известному высказыванию, они постоянно создавали новые правила для нарушения старых правил. Таким образом они вырывались из сетей или ловушек своих собственных предписаний и принципов, отчаянно пытаясь служить <задачам> любви и одновременно закону. Неизбежно, единственным результатом этого был бесконечно разматываемый клубок легализма. Писаное право никогда не может быть окончательно скорректированным в пользу любящей доброты. Раввины душили в своих объятиях (throttled) хэсэд (hesed) <благотворительность> и цаддик (zaddik) <святость>, знатоки церковного права – любовь-агапе. Они простодушно и неумно упускали из виду тот факт, что именно любовь и составляет основной принцип – и что закон, по большей части, составляет лишь регулятивный принцип, если вообще какой-то принцип и составляет. Вплоть до сего дня, вопреки возрождению Библейской теологии, остаются не преодоленными три трудности, касающиеся агапической этики: (1) люди не понимают саму эту концепцию; (2) она встречает сопротивление философов и этиков даже в том случае, когда ее понимают; и (3) в христианской церкви эта концепция не является центральной, несмотря на ее центральную роль в Новом Завете. It must be confessed that the neocasuists do not always render justice to the classical casuistry. For example, Edward LeRoy Long confuses the old casuistry with compromise.197 This is a serious error because the old moralists were always careful to stress that their solutions of problems of doubt and perplexity involved no compromise of principles and precepts, but rather their proper ordering. The old casuistry was not motivated by any desire to cut corners or to water the milk. Nor was Dietrich Bonhoeffer entirely correct when he identified what he called ethical "formalism" with casuistry.198 Bonhoeffer's discussion reflected a great deal of confusion about casuistry, just as Karl Barth's does in his Church Dogmatics.199 Надо признаться, что неоказуисты не всегда воздают должную справедливость классической казуистике. Например, Эдвард Леруа Лонг (Edward LeRoy Long) путает древнюю казуистику с компромиссом.4 Это – серьезная ошибка, поскольку древние моралисты всегда тщательно подчеркивали то обстоятельство, что их решения сомнительных и сложных проблем не вовлекает принципы и предписания ни в какие компромиссы, но являются скорее их собственными прямыми следствиями. Древняя казуистика не была мотивирована ничем похожим на сглаживание углов или разбавление молока. Не был вполне прав и Дитрих Бонхеффер, когда идентифицировал то, что он называл «формализмом», с казуистикой.5 Рассуждения Бонхеффера отражают изрядную долю путаницы касательно понимания казуистики, так же как и рассуждения Карла Барта в его «Церковной догматике».6 As a matter of fact, Bonhoeffer's own plea for the necessity of being "concrete" and his treatment in the excursus on "What Is Meant by 'Telling the Truth'" in his Ethics is as radical a version of the situational method as any Christian relativist could call for. He has the heart of the matter, at least: "Law always engenders lawlessness; nomism leads to antinomism; perfectionism to libertinism".200 And so with Barth, who says quite succinctly, "There is a practical casuistry, an active casuistry, the casuistry of the prophetic ethos. It consists in the unavoidable venture ... of understanding God's concrete specific command here and now".201 We have already seen that Brunner, a third "Big B" of modern theology, saw not only the core truth of situationism (which he called "occasionalism") but also its vitality and creative power in the lives of men. Бесспорно, собственный довод Бонхеффера в пользу необходимости быть «конкретным» и его рассмотрения в экскурсе «Что имеется в виду под требованием 'говорить правду'» в книге «Этика» представляют такую радикальную версию ситуационистского метода, какой только мог бы пожелать любой христианский релятивист. По крайней мере, он находится в самом сердце проблемы, говоря: «закон всегда насаждает беззаконие; номизм ведет к антиномизму; перфекционизм к либертинизму».7 И то же самое Барт, который заявляет совершенно четко: «существует практическая казуистика, активная казуистика, казуистика пророческого этоса. Она состоит в неизбежном рискованном предприятии ... понимания Божьего конкретного специфического требования здесь и сейчас».8 Мы уже видели, как Бруннер, третий из «Больших Б» современной теологии, усматривал не только внутреннюю правду ситуационизма (который называл «окказионализмом»), но также его жизненность и творческие возможности в жизни людей. Theological moralists such as Bonhoeffer and Barth and Brunner are, in any case, clearheaded and plainspoken about the central thesis of situation ethics, i.e., the absoluteness of the word of love and the relativity of the deed, and their recognition that the total context of decision is always "circumstances under the law of love." Their mistake, which is even so not a serious one, is their lack of historical sophistication. To cite but one theory among Christian moral systems which are very close in temper to what we are proposing, there are the principles of so-called "compensationism." Two are most pointed for our purpose. Stodgy and system-oriented as the compensationists were (e.g., Dominic Priimmer), they made it their rule in complex cases (1) to do their ethical choosing between alternative courses according to the concrete and individuating particulars; and (2) to choose the course productive of the greater good. This method, which they called "the system of sufficient reason," they put in the place of probabilism and probabiliorism. They even accepted the label, "the moral system of Christian prudence." But it was always to be a "natural" prudence that bowed obediently to the authority of "supernatural" love, not the other way around. Теологи-моралисты, такие как Бонхеффер, Барт и Бруннер, во всяком случае, ясно мыслят и прямо высказываются относительно центрального тезиса ситуативной этики, именно, абсолютности слова любви и относительности поступка, и признают тот факт, что общий контекст морального решения всегда есть «обстоятельства под законом любви». Их единственная ошибка, и даже не столь серьезная, в недостатке исторического подхода. Приводя лишь одну теорию из числа христианских моральных систем, весьма близкую по духу к тому, что предлагаем мы, – это принципы так называемого «компенсационизма». На два из них следует в особенности указать, в нашем контексте. Косные и склонные к систематизаторству, каковыми были компенсационисты (например Доминик Прюммер (Dominic Prummer)), они взяли за правило в сложных случаях (1) совершать нравственный выбор между имеющимися альтернативными путями следуя конкретным и индивидуализированным частностям; и (2) выбирать тот путь, который обещает наибольшее благо. Этим методом, который они назвали «системой достаточного основания», они заменили пробабилизм и пробабилиоризм. Они даже приняли <для своих взглядов> именование «моральная система христианского благоразумия». Но это благоразумие обязано было оставаться «естественным», послушно сгибающимся перед властью любви «сверхъестественной», и никак иначе. No More Tablets of Stone Our modern situational approach to ethical decisions has a fundamental parallel in the ancient world, in the epieikeia (or epikeia, as the medieval writers wrote it), i.e., equity. It was conceptualized by Aristotle and, following him, by Aquinas in his Summa.202 Kenneth Kirk called it "a just interpretation of the law with due reference to the circumstances of the particular case".203 The Jesuit Henry Davis quoted Aristotle's ancient description of epikeia: "Equity makes allowance for human weakness, looking not to the law but to the meaning of the lawgiver, not to the act but to the intention, not to the part but to the whole".204 Luther saw it (epieikeia, aequitas, clementia, commoditas) as the spirit of the love ethic facing law and concrete situations.205 This is how any person-centered ethic "condenses" into guidance insights in particular cases.206 жүктеу/скачать 1.01 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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