Can Social Justice be Justified?

Can Social Justice Be Justified ?

            Glen Beck once told his listeners that if their church teaches social justice, they should leave that church. Beck walked his talk by leaving the Catholic Church          

            The mention of social justice, sometimes called economic justice, arouses controversy, not only in terms of what is right and wrong, but even in terms of what the concept means. Some deny that the concept has any meaning.  Another name for social justice, “distributive justice,” evokes the question of how the material goods of the world should be distributed. The views on this issue vary from those who argue that the current situation is radically unfair and that redistribution is a moral imperative, to those who argue that the whole notion of social justice is fraudulent and that no one has the right to distribute anything except his or her own property. A representative expression of the dismissal of social  justice by some conservatives is found in a column by economist Thomas Sowell: “What does ‘economic justice’ mean except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?”

            Is the present system just? When offered to a class of college students, or to a group of adults, my experience shows that this question can produce a lot of heat and unproductive opinions unless we can achieve some clarity on the meaning of justice. Some assume that justice means equality and point out that the current situation is patently unjust. Opponents of social justice agree that social justice means equality, and so they reject the notion of social justice as a theft against those who have earned wealth. Also, those who reject social justice often depict it as a disguise to increase the power of government.

            The whole notion of social justice requires clarification. Justice generally means the right distribution of benefits and burdens. Differences abound on the question of what constitutes “right distribution” As a step toward clarification we can express the notion of justice as follows: “Every person should get what he or she deserves. No one in a society should be arbitrarily deprived of its benefits nor arbitrarily made to carry its burdens.” The question remains as to what benefits and burdens, if any, belong to an individual simply by being a member of a society. Clearly, we do not all receive equal benefits or carry equal burdens. This fact of inequality does not necessarily constitute injustice, but it provides an opening into a better understanding. Taking factual inequality as a starting point, we ask whether any reasons justify the unequal distribution of benefits and burdens.

Capitalism and Justice

            Some defenders of capitalism argue that the inequalities brought about by a free market, are justified by the fact that those who receive more are precisely those who contribute more as judged by the market. A Capitalist view of justice, playing on the Marxian principle of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” states, "From each according to his willingness to participate in the system; to each according to his success in participating.” In capitalism, the principle is not simply “from each according to his or her ability,” but from each according to his or her ability and willingness to contribute. The willingness consists not only of a general willingness to work, but to do a particular kind of work, or develop a particular kind of skill, or a particular entrepreneurial idea. For example, one person might learn a construction trade such as brick-laying or carpentry and wish to work in construction; another may want to start a small business such a restaurant; a third might want to work in management for a corporation.  If these each achieve what they set out to do, they will receive a wage, profit, or salary, and the economy will benefit from their particular skill and work. Anyone may fail because of lack of ability or because their skills are not needed at a given time. In the example above, a business recession may lead to a loss of livelihood for all three. According to the capitalist or free-market theorist, such a loss is a misfortune but not an injustice.

            The terms “capitalist” and “libertarian” often overlap and sometimes are used interchangeably. Libertarians generally believe that individual freedom should be maximized and that government activity should be limited to the military and police work of preventing force and fraud. Of course, not all capitalists are libertarians, nor do they necessarily reject the notion of using public funds to help people in need. While the libertarians reject the notion of social justice, capitalists may defend the value of social justice but affirm that the free market is the most just distributor of wealth. They base their arguments on the fact that a person’s ability and willingness to work create wealth not only for that person, but for the whole society. The successful capitalists, while becoming rich, also provide jobs, products, and tax revenue. Without the activity of the capitalist, everyone would be less well-off, including those who are relatively poor.

A Reasonable Approach to Economic Justice

            Given the libertarian argument that no one has the right to distribute any property other than his or her own, and given the capitalist argument that the market can distribute goods more justly than any other human mechanism, is there a need for a separate category of social justice? In fact there are two moral principles that create a mandate for clear thinking on social justice. These principles are the notion that the goods of the earth belong to all, and the notion of moral equality, meaning that every human being has the right to be treated with respect. Merely stating these principles does not necessarily disprove the argument that a free market provides the best distribution, nor does it prove that any existing inequalities are unjust. But the principles do require us to examine what constitutes social justice and to work toward its implementation.

            One of the strongest arguments for social justice, if not for equality, stems from the notion that the goods of the earth belong to all. This argument did not arise in pre-modern times when the land was thought to belong to the king, or to a feudal strongman who was literally a land lord. This notion changed drastically with the Enlightenment when thinkers such as John Locke argued that things in their natural state belonged to all. But he laid down the basis for private property by arguing that things have value only when mixed with human labor. Since the work of our hands is ours individually, the product of that work is also ours as private property. This principle established both the basis for justice and the approval of inequality. Inequalities result from some persons working more effectively than others thus creating more value. But the inequalities have to be justified since the goods begin by belonging equally to all.

            A second Enlightenment idea that leads to a notion of social justice is the moral equality of all human beings. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of equality referred to moral, political, and legal equality, but not to economic equality. But if we are by nature equal as human beings, some justification must be given if economic inequality is to be morally acceptable and not merely a result of  the more powerful grabbing more than they deserve. While few people today argue for a simple equality, we differ widely among ourselves as to how much inequality can be tolerated, and on what grounds. The libertarians argue that any inequality is justified as long as there is no force or fraud involved.

            I contend, to the contrary, that there is a place for public policy that can rightly be called social justice. Although problems that can be solved by individuals and communities should not be taken over by government, nevertheless there are some problems that can be dealt with only in the public sphere. We can discern injustice in the structures and laws of society, and therefore we can define what constitutes social justice. Some of the more obvious historical examples of social injustice include slavery and discrimination. But others examples include omissions, such as the failure on the part of the public sector to protect individuals from the results of environmental destruction, dangerous or exploitative working conditions, and inferior educational opportunities.

            Any person’s concept of justice is based on his or her concept of what a human being is and why we should be concerned with treating each person justly. The view of the human person presented in this blog  maintains that our capacity for membership in any genuine community rests on the fact that we are rational, free, capable and in need of meaningful work, communal, and needing the opportunity to realize our full physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capacity. Therefore any structure or practice that inhibits a person from realizing his or her human nature is unjust, and that which promotes it is just. Justice as a moral task can mean doing whatever we can to assure that each person has an opportunity to realize his or her human potential. This entails much more than removal of obstacles such as discrimination.  Real equality of opportunity must include providing the conditions that make realization possible. If a person has the ability and desire to develop productive skills, but lacks the opportunity, does this constitute an injustice? The role of justice lies in determining what each person has the right to and who has the obligation to provide it.

Integrity and Integration in the Economy

            The key to understanding social justice consists in recognizing that we are mutually interdependent. Each of our lives has an impact on countless people of whom we are not aware, and the activities of other people impact each of us. No one in isolation and relying on only his or her own native ability can become an engineer, an accountant, a steamfitter, a golfer, or a musician. All of these things require physical and social structures and involve imitation and intense education, both formal and informal. While those who deny social justice may agree that we have an obligation as individuals to people whom we immediately affect, our universal mutual interdependence requires us to also pay attention to how we collectively impact other people through our political, economic, educational, and civil institutions.

            Any society that excludes some part of the population either by design or by neglect, to that extent suffers a deficiency of justice. Although giving a person a handout, by the state or by private charity, beats letting the person starve or freeze, such largess falls short of justice. The goal of achieving a just society requires that we, individually and collectively, do what we can to assure that each person can take a productive social and economic role.  To achieve this level of inclusiveness would be very difficult if not practically impossible. Nevertheless it is a standard against which we can measure our level of success and failure at building a just society.

            The theme of this blog is purposive integration or “teleological harmony.” We can rate our society as a just society to the extent that each and every individual has a place in the society that enables them to develop their full human potential. There will probably always be misfits, sociopaths, and criminals. The question of social justice requires that we ask whether we are giving each person a chance to be productive and prosperous, and how we treat those who reject or neglect the opportunities that are provided. Whether their problem is physical, psychological or moral, they still belong to the human community. We can move to seek ways to incorporate them although there is no guarantee of success.  Or we can reject or neglect them with the self-assurance that their problem is their fault not ours. As in every aspect of ethics, we can integrate or disintegrate

Common Ground on Pro-life and Pro-choice

Again, I sent a letter to the wheeling Sunday News-Register and again they did not publish it.

I am posting it here

Editor: Sunday News Register,                                     February 6, 2017

What could we learn from the two large demonstrations that took place within a week of the Inauguration? One was a March for Women that included a demand to keep abortion legal; the other was a March for Life that demanded protection of the unborn. Both groups consisted of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights for causes they passionately believe in.  Both groups gathered some very good people looking beyond their narrow self-interest. A problem arises because neither group easily concedes the goodness of the other.

For several years there have been voices describing common ground. But these voices are most often drowned out in the clamor of confrontational politics. But let’s look at some of the pro-life beliefs that most pro-choice advocates might agree with.

First, women should be able to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Although there is some disagreement on contraception, nearly everyone would agree that it is preferable to abortion. Second, every woman should have health insurance and availability of pre-natal, natal, and pediatric care. Third, our concern for pregnant women and their off-spring should extend to all women including undocumented immigrants and Syrian refugees.

            The pro-life movement often embraces conservative politicians who promise to end legal abortion. The irony is that a large portion of pro-life advocates are Catholics, and the Papal teachings on social justice are more liberal than almost any American politician. How can we reconcile these two positions? My suggestion is to recognize that trying to make abortion illegal is not the only way nor the most effective way to end abortion. But working together to create a society that is more welcoming to all pregnant women and prepared to help them give birth and raise children would lead to a healthier and less antagonistic society.  Abortions have been declining without the heavy hand of government bans. Building bridges instead of walls, literally and figuratively, could speed this process.

The Beloved Community

The previous post showed that the basic choice that determines our life is not egoism vs altruism or individualism vs collectivism Rather we become free, creative, unique individuals only in and through our participation in community.

Josiah Royce taught that we can achieve the highest potential for ourselves, for other individuals and for our society only by practicing a thorough-going devotion to a fully integrated community. Ethics requires us each to strive to create a self who devotes his or her life to a chosen cause that contributes in a unique individual way to the ultimate human integration that Royce called “The Beloved Community.”

A better understanding of the meaning of the “Universal Beloved Community” requires a grasp of Royce’s notion of any community. A mere crowd or collection of people does not constitute a community. There are several conditions for a genuine community, the kind of community that is necessary for developing unique and free individuals. A community comes about as a temporal process involving interpretation so that the individuals understand the meaning of the community and their place within it. Since communities develop in time, a community must have a past. It must have a more or less conscious history, real or ideal, and this history is part of its very essence.

 Secondly, it must have a future that consists of shared hopes and expectations. The community consists of a number of distinct individuals, each with a distinctive past and set of aspirations, who engage in mutual communication among themselves. The extended pasts and futures of members include some events that are identical, and each member has a loyal love of the community.

The term “beloved community” refers to the community that rescues the individual from alienation. It comes to individuals as a free gift, a grace, and saves them from desolation. Of course, small groups such as gangs or cults can give the isolated individual the sense of belonging and being saved. But tendencies toward disintegration persist. Antagonisms arise among individuals, between individuals and the community, and among warring communities. Individuals struggling with conflicting loyalties may be thrown back on to conflicting motives within themselves. In order to achieve genuine integrity of self the individual needs loyalty to a community that overcomes all divisions. We do not find such a community in the visible world, but we can know the ideal and integrate our lives by loyally working toward it.

The Beloved Community is the ideal unity of all humans in a Universal Community. Every act that Royce, following Peirce, calls “interpretation” brings two divided ideas together and unites them into a higher unity. As this process goes on in our finite world, it moves us toward the universal beloved community. In our natural dealing with other people, we have feelings of hate as well as love for individuals and for the communities of which we are a part. This ambiguity holds even for our own lives. We may love our life and yet feel a sense of discontent and disappointment toward it. For us to develop a permanent steady unbroken love for our community we need to receive the love as a gift from something higher. Royce explains that, in Christian terminology, this would be expressed as a grace from God. While Royce sees historical Christianity as an example of this gift of community, he contends that the idea is larger than Christianity or any historical religion and expresses a universal human doctrine of life. Whatever name we give to the higher being, or if we leave it nameless, we can still experience the senses of love for the community as a gift.

            In developing this idea, Royce uses the startling phrase “falling in love with the universe.” This term connotes that reality consists of something worthy of our love and devotion as opposed to being just dead matter. The notion of a lovable universe means that we can interpret our own attempts at harmony within our individual selves, within our communities of history and hope, and among all communities, as working parts of a universal beloved community. Such an outlook allows for the greatest possibility of fulfilling the ethical task of creating an integrated self.

Freedom and Creativity

             We can exercise freedom only if the possible futures outnumber the eventual outcomes. If there are two choices as when we come to a fork in the road or find ourselves torn between two career paths or two job offers, we have a degree of freedom. But freedom can sometimes be much richer than merely choosing among the given options. We can sometimes view the future as malleable and we can imagine real possibilities that had not previously occurred to us. Such a view greatly expands our freedom. We can, to some degree, shape our reality. Of course reality does not yield to all of our desires and ideas, but it might yield to some. We can see the malleability of reality by looking at the work of creative people from artists and scientists to business founders and nation builders.  We can find the limits of our own creativity only by testing them.

            The creative potential of each human person presents a source of hope and even exhilaration, but also imposes a moral duty. We have the psychological and moral need to take part in meaningful work that carries on the process of creation. Failure to do so constitutes what traditional moral writers called “sloth” or laziness.  More recently, psychiatrist and spiritual writer Scott Peck called laziness the “original sin” because it prevents us from achieving our purpose in life.

            American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839 – 1914) described creation as the process by which the world becomes more reasonable, by which he meant more orderly and integrated. He provided an empowering view of the creation of the world and the part that we humans play:

The creation of the universe, which did not take place during a certain busy week in 4004 B. C., but is going on today and never will be done, is this very development of reason…Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to exercise our little function in the operation of creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is up to us.

This insight of Peirce, on taking a role in creation as the ideal of conduct, presents a leading ethical idea for us.

            Josiah Royce, following Peirce, offers a very fertile ground for creative thinking in the process of interpretation.  Interpretation consists of a mind revealing the meaning of a sign to another mind. A sign can be anything that has meaning, for example, a traffic signal, a spoken or written sentence, a painting, a facial expression, or a cloud formation. We find the prototype and most common expression of interpretation in a language translator. The translator reveals the meaning of, say, a Russian novel to an English speaking reader. The English translation becomes a new sign, which a literature professor interprets for her students. The professor’s lecture becomes a new sign and the process can go on indefinitely. The two minds need not be two separate people. For example, a student of language may be using his new skill and knowledge to interpret a foreign phrase to his old monolingual self.                

            Royce sees interpretation as the key to great world-changing creativity in science, religion, and art. But creativity through interpretation applies not only to the world-changing works of prophets, artists and scientists, but also to the growth and development of each person.

As stated in a previous post, we begin life, not as a unified self, but as a meeting ground of many, often conflicting, drives, desires, and ideas.

             For example, young person may hold a strong sense of self and desire to flourish in her personal and professional life. At the same time, she may have a nagging sense of social responsibility and feel the need to help others. The dichotomy between egoism and altruism looms before her. But the “third idea,” in this case, is loyalty. The loyal person is not selfless but rather has a strong sense of self. The more self she has, the more she can contribute to her cause. Her work in promoting the cause in turn strengthens her personal development. Royce summarizes the relation between our individual and social sense in his answer to the question of whether we have duties to our selves:

“Yes, precisely in so far as I have the duty to be actively loyal at all. For loyalty needs not only a willing, but also an active servant. My duty to myself is, then, the duty to provide my cause with one who is strong enough and skillful enough to be effective according to my own natural powers. 

Royce includes among these powers, the care of health, self-cultivation, self-control, and spiritual power. His exemplar of the loyal person was Ida Lewis, the light-house keeper whose strength and boating skill saved many shipwrecked sailor from drowning.

            The relationship between a strong individual and well-developed sense of social responsibility applies to any man or woman in business, health-care, education, politics, science, art, or any profession.  To cite some examples, you cannot become a better teacher, physical therapist, or home-construction tradesman without enhancing the good of students, clients, or home owners. Persons who are loyal to the purpose of their professions may see them as causes and not merely jobs. The loyal person flourishes personally and contributes to the common good. Becoming a fully integrated person requires the creative act of bringing opposing forces of self-development and social concern into harmony.         

            Human creativity carries several important ethical ramifications, all of which can be enhanced by a clear understanding of interpretation. One of the key aspects of creativity that life presents to all of us is “moral imagination.” Life often presents dilemmas in which we have to choose between two goods or between two evils. Ordinary thought may direct us to choose the greater good or the lesser evil. Or there may be a clear choice between right and wrong, but the “right” choice leads to a lot of harm or sacrifices a lot of good. Sometimes reality limits us to one of two choices. But there are also time when our moral imagination may happily reveal three, four, or many possible paths. Moral imagination should permeate the discussion of every ethical issue. For example, suppose a child commits an infraction of his parents’ rules shortly before an important opportunity, such as a field trip or a summer camp that means a lot to the child. A parent may feel trapped between ignoring the infraction and taking away a good learning opportunity for the child. It might not occur to the distressed parent, caught up in the situation, that there are ways to teach the child that his infraction was a bad decision without taking away a good life experience. A satisfactory study of ethics will encourage each of to look for ways not only to choose the better of two decisions, but also to exercise moral imagination to enhance the good.

             Royce’s notions of interpretation and loyalty provide a way to train moral imagination. Interpretation always involves the mediation of a third term that bridges the gap between two terms, as a translator is the third term who bridges the gap between a language and person who does not know the language. In the example given above, of the offending child and the offended parent, the parent himself can be the mediator between his own offended self and the child. If he is able to step back and take the position of mediator, he will take care to correct the offending behavior in a way that benefits the child and does not damage the parent-child relationship. The same dynamic applies to any relationship between unequal parties such as employer-employee, or teacher-student, or between equal partners such as spouses, friends, or adult siblings. In each case loyalty to the good of the family, the educational process, the workplace, or the friendship enables a person to overcome the dangerous and destructive relationship of two angry or hurt individuals.

Taking the role of mediator both requires and trains moral imagination whether the mediator is one of the two parties stepping back and taking the role of a third person, or an actual third person such as a mutual friend or a counselor. Imagination, which Royce saw as one of the leading teachers of loyalty, enables the third person to see what the relationship could be, a vision that is likely to be blurred if not erased in the heat of the immediate conflict. Closely allied to imagination as a teacher of loyalty is sorrow for the loss of what had been. Remembering the love, the friendship, the good times, can reignite the awareness of what could be. If the loss is irreversible, sorrow can motivate a person to re-configure relationships to avoid or at least minimize future harm.

Loyalty to loyalty evokes the duty to seek mediation in every conflict. An attitude of respect for people with whom we disagree, enhanced by recognition of their loyalty to a cause, enriches our own understanding of the good as teleological harmony. Such respect may enable us to see the good in the other’s cause to which we might have been blind. Increased insight may also awaken us to a weakness in our own perception of reality. For example, the task of ethics involves interpreting the pro-life position on abortion, and euthanasia to a pro-choice person, and the pro-choice position to a pro-life person. A pro-life advocate might be insensitive to the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies, and a pro-choice person can fail to appreciate the reality of pre-natal life. Although the two sides may never agree on the morality of abortion, a softening of positions may lead each to care about the mother and the unborn child in ways that are more conducive to a better life for each.

Other conflicts that interpretation can help to heal are between environmental and industrial interests, and between libertarians and social justice advocates. All of the social divisions that we face on issues such as capital punishment, immigration, the environment, the economy, and health care, can be alleviated through mediation rather than by politicians posturing with winner–take-all stances. Mediation may not solve the problems or end the divisions, but it will move our understanding forward better than the ethical doctrines that see their own side as right and the other as wrong.   

Potential as the key to ethical understanding

Potential as the Key to Ethical Understanding

While each of us is a work-in-progress, we are not blank slates. Some empiricist philosophers described the mind as tabula rasa, or blank slate. This makes a poor metaphor because reality does not write ideas on passive minds. Rather, we actively develop ideas as we interact with our environment. For example, the fifteen-month-old toddler approaching a step down may create the idea that she is less likely to fall if she turns backward and crawls down. The complex idea of turning around and crawling was not written on her mind by experience; she had to conceive the idea to prevent the unpleasant experience from ever happening. The same dynamic takes place in the most sophisticated adult thinking in science, business, health-care, education, or anything else. The potentiality of our mind does not imply blankness and passivity but rather a specific power. "Potential" stems from the Latin word for power, potentia. The Greek word used by Aristotle, dynamis, provides such English words as dynamo and dynamite. We can learn to make better decisions on what we make of our lives, by looking at our capabilities, our potential.

What can we know about the potential of each human person and specifically the person that we call our “self?” The answer to this question requires that we find out what we can know about human beings in general, and the more difficult question of what we can each know about our particular selves.  Each of us is unique, but the following beliefs about the human nature have developed over time and express general truths.  

            Human nature includes those characteristics that we share with all animals. Ancient and medieval philosophers defined us as rational animals. While the notion of what this means has changed over time, the reality of our animal nature has certain constancies, especially our mortality. Because we are going to die, our life is precarious and limited. Awareness of vulnerability can awaken us to the obligation to treat ourselves and all others with the utmost respect. Our time and our life are precious. We can learn to see that time quickly slips away and that missed opportunities constitute moral problems. In dealing with other people, we would treat them with greater care if we thought they were going to die.  In fact, they are going to die. This awareness increases our moral burden but also releases our moral energy.

            Awareness of personal mortality underlies the human need for loyalty. Those who live for their own individual pleasure or power inevitably meet defeat as death takes away their perceived goods. In contrast to the individualists whose insatiable desire for pleasure or power meets frustration, Royce depicts the meaning of mortality for the loyal:

They, too, are indeed subject to fortune; their loyalty, also, is an insatiable passion to serve their cause; they also know what it is to meet with tasks that are too vast for mortals to accomplish. Only their very loyalty, since it is a willing surrender of the self to the cause, is no hopeless warfare with this fate but is a joyous acceptance in advance of the inevitable destiny of every individual human being.

The person who lives loyally for a cause can live and die in the hope that the cause endures.

            In addition to mortality, our animal nature requires that we obtain food and other necessities, that we watch out for our health and safety and that of our neighbor, and that we reproduce sexually and take care of our young. In later posts I will look at each of these human needs with suggestion how they may be met in a way that nourishing the good.

            While we humans have much in common with other animals, reason is our defining characteristic. The classical definition of humans as rational animals does not depict us as mere animals but rather emphasizes the qualification of rational animal. Writers and teachers often make reference to reason without stopping to say what it is. Reason may be something so familiar to us that it needs no introduction. But since the term is so often used and misused, readers have the right to know what each writer means by reason. Reason consists of the ability to form concepts so that we can be aware of things that are not present to our senses. It goes beyond memory and imagination in that we are not limited to pictures of things, but may also form logical and mathematical connections by which we unite things into greater and greater generalizations. Our rationality provides us with a desire to learn and to find or create meaning in our world. We need to find a way to connect the rich variety of experiences into a whole, or at least into a manageable number of parts. Without such connections or meanings, experience would overwhelm us. In the words of William James it would be a “big, buzzing, blooming, confusion.”

            Royce defines reason as “...the power to see widely, and steadily, and connectedly.” He illustrates the meaning of reason by showing the distinction between a reasonable and an unreasonable person. In ordinary language, when we consider a person to be unreasonable we usually mean that the person sees only one side of an issue or one aspect of a problem. Or if the unreasonable person sees several things, he does not see the connections between them or does not think consistently. Such a person might have one set of standards for him or herself and another set for everyone else. The reasonable man or woman sees as many sides of an issue as possible and sees them as a whole and how they develop over time. By rationally connecting our experiences, we can form ideas about how to live our lives personally and in cooperation with other people. Reason gives us the desire and the ability to deliberately seek goals and to find ways to live with others justly and beneficially.

            Our nature as rational animals connotes mortality and rationality. But other qualities that spring from our nature endow us with a sense of community, freedom, creativity, and the potential to be something more. First, we can depict ourselves and our neighbors as social animals. Like many animals we like to live together. But our rationality expands our sociality beyond our immediate tribe. We belong to many interlocking communities ultimately including the human race and, in fact, the whole biosphere. We depend on these communities and they depend on us. This awareness provides us with moral guidance on how we play our many roles to the benefit of ourselves and our community.

            The next post will explore the human potential to be free and creative, and the ethical implication of these potentials.

The Self as an Ethical Task            

One of our most important ethical tasks is to become the best person that we are capable of becoming  We can understand this as realizing our potential. A student realizes his or her potential to become, say, a nurse, doctor, accountant, teacher, lawyer, business leader, mechanic, or full-time parent. Also, as we perform acts of beneficence, honesty, courage, diligence, and loyalty, we develop good habits, called virtues, which enable us to realize our potential to be beneficent, honest, brave, diligent and loyal. Knowing what we want to become, what potential we want to actualize, serves as an indispensable tool for knowing how to act day in and day out.

Our very personhood depends on our decisions. We often hear terms such as “the human person” and “the individual,” and may think of them as given, as ready-made objects. But in reality we each begin our life with potential, and as long as we are alive some of our potential remains unfulfilled. Our “self” does not emerge ready-made like Venus from the head of Zeus. For each of us, our self presents a task to be completed. We create our selves by finding a cause or purpose to live for and by developing a life plan to reach that fulfillment. We are not limited to single cause. Our cause may in fact be a system of causes that cooperate in promoting our loyalty. We may choose well or badly, wisely or foolishly, for life or for death. The study of ethics intends to make each person a better judge of what constitutes a good choice. The burden of making the actual choice falls on each of us.

Further, while ethics permeates our individual destinies, it also has rich social dimensions, and requires acts of loyalty. Each of us depends on the various communities to which we belong for everything from our bodily life to our psychological well-being to our deepest spiritual meanings. While we depend on community, community also depends on us. Our ideas and our life plans can help to build or destroy communities.  The ethical judgment of all that we do depends on our intended impact, not only on our own lives, but the lives of others and to the communal structures on which we all depend.

In my next post I will discuss potential as the key to ethical understanding.

Reverence for our Relationship with non-human nature

Reverence for Our Relationship with Non-human Nature

            The consequence of the modern anthropocentric utilitarian view has been that we look at nature acquisitively and ask "What's in it for us?" instead of looking at it contemplatively and asking "What is it?" We might expect traditional religion to be a countervailing force against the lack of reverence for nature. But even Christian thought has to a large extent succumbed to the modern reduction of the non-human world in spite of the Gospel observation that the Creator cares about every sparrow.  The exclusive human-centered attitude of the enlightenment contrasts sharply with an earlier natural law theory. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, stated "God's goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone. God produced many and diverse creatures so that what was wanting to one in the manifestation of divine goodness might be supplied by another" The neglect of the intrinsic goodness of the non-human world coincides with a shallow understanding of our own inner world. When the outer world is reduced to an object of quantitative calculation, the human is reduced to a calculator.  As economist E. F. Schumacher observed, all traditional wisdom emphasizes self-knowledge as a condition for knowledge and the love of others:                                                                 

The Christian (and other) saints knew themselves so well that they could “see into” other beings. The idea that St Francis could communicate with animals, birds, and even flowers, must of course seem incredible to modern men who have so neglected self-knowledge that they have difficulty communicating even with their wives.

Farmer philosopher, Wendell Berry, in describing what he names “the sin of abstraction" argues that the Devil's work is found not in love of material things but in a love of quantification. A real lover of the material world would not sacrifice the natural environment by making profit maximization the only moral goal; the lover of quantification would. Perhaps we can put a finer edge on Berry's point by saying that the sin is not quantification but reductionism that leaves out everything except quantification.

Berry, in developing a Christian approach to environmental care, cites the Buddhist notion of right livelihood and contends that Christianity has so far been inadequate in giving us a sense of right livelihood. One of the reasons, he argues, stems from the emphasis on other-worldliness. Christianity sees charity as a gift of God, but Berry points out that we need to learn how to put it into practice. Speaking from the view point of a farmer he asks; “How can you love your neighbor if you don’t know how to build or mend a fence, how to keep your filth out of his water supply, and your poison out of his air?” He gives some suggestions of right livelihood.

Real charity calls for the study of agriculture, soil husbandry, engineering, architecture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, the making of monuments and pictures, songs and stories. It calls not just for skill but for the study and criticism of skills, because in all of them a choice must be made: they can be used either charitably or uncharitably.

It is clear that the charitable or desirable way to do each of these enhances the good of yourself, your neighbor, and the land on which all of us depend. To know exactly what the best way consists of requires careful study and criticism with an eye to the totality of our good and bad effects, and not just on the one narrow good of profit-making. We have a moral duty in the consumerist society to be not only ethical consumers, but also ethical producers.           

We find another sin of logical reduction that leads to moral wrongs in the all-or-nothing fallacy. Modernism has held that non-humans have no value in themselves because they are not rational beings with rights. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a form of environmentalism that mirrors modernism sees that non-human things have value and concludes they have rights in the literal sense in which humans have rights, and further, that all things with rights and values are equal.  Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First, argues that the life of a human is not intrinsically more valuable than the life of a grizzly bear, and that apparent enemies like malaria are a valuable part of the biotic community.

We can rant against this and make jokes about it, but our ethical thinking will advance beyond comical bickering only if we recognize that some things may have value, but other things have more value. As James Nash argued after rejecting the all or nothing approaches that holds that either animals have no value or that they have value equal to humans.  “In contrast, a graded model claims that all creatures are entitled to ‘moral consideration,’ but not all have the same ‘moral significance.’”

Nash attributes value to all forms of life but on an ascending value based on each organism’s ability to experience and create value. If we can go beyond a humanistic hedonism we can see that there is a value in all living things.  According to environmental ethicist Holmes Rolston: “Something more than physical causes, even when less than sentience, is operating within every organism.” [ii] Bio-ethics must be based on a bio-logic. This means that we need to think from the premise that in every organism and in every bio-system there is an ontological reality with a definite order and program that demands respect. This does not mean that we owe them the same respect that we should show to humans or even to higher animals. We are not acting wantonly when we put our needs above the needs of other animals and plants as in eating food or combating disease. But we must recognize that living things have an intrinsic value that does not depend on whether they serve human wants and needs.  We cannot live and “do no harm.” But we can strive to minimize harm and to live with a sense of reverence and gratitude toward the living things that sustain us.

Ethics requires us as citizens to support public policy that protects and improves both the land and the people. Since technology moves constantly the best ideas as to how to do this will change rapidly. Therefore it would not be appropriate to speculate on the exact way in which our use of energy ought to change. Currently it is not clear what will be the best way to power our production of electricity or our transportation, although it seems clear that we will want and need sources of power for both of these activities. We might cling to the current practice of burning massive amounts of fossil fuel including imported oil until the system breaks down completely. If the ethical analysis presented in this chapter is correct, then finding and implementing more environmentally friendly production and use of energy ought to be a priority of the government of the United States as well as that of all national governments. Since war contributes so much to pollution and destructive use of resources, along with the massive destruction of life and the unspeakable grief that it imposes on populations, avoiding and preventing war remains at the top of ethical imperatives. The technology for achieving a significant reduction of pollution as well as independence from foreign oil is available in concept. So far we have not shown the political will to implement any solution. The 2016 election may indicate that many Americans do not even consider it a problem

One task of ethics is to remind us that our consuming as well as our producing material goods has effects beyond ourselves. We use our purchasing power ethically by being aware of our impact on ourselves, the producers and the whole social and natural environment. In our work life we need to discover what the Buddhists call right livelihood.  A desirable work life leads to greater integrity and integration. We have an unprecedented capacity for destruction but also an opportunity for building the human and biotic community. A major ethical mandate for us in the twenty-first century requires us to develop and live out a philosophical view that combines scientific and technological know-how with a reverence for our relationships with each other and with the natural world.

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