so far in this course we've spent a lot of time focusing on what we might call christian ethics we've given attention to how religious and theological sources primarily christian scripture guide a particular group of people the community of christian disciples to live faithfully and creatively in light of the christian narrative or story we've discussed how christianity orients christ's followers toward an ethic of agape encapsulated in the double love command love the lord your god with all your heart soul mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself we've discussed how this involves reordering of disordered
loves and affections we've noted that because of sin this reordering must involve divine insistence but that it may also involve moral formation through habits and practices that orient us toward what is good and best rather than toward lesser goods for christians this primarily happens within the context of the church the worshiping community in which the story of god is regularly told and heard and where practices like prayer confession singing preaching giving baptism and communion orient one's affections toward god and neighbor now i might hazard a guess that for many of you this is not what
you picture when you think of the word ethics perhaps instead ethics is figuring out what you're supposed to think about key hot button topics or maybe it's about how to live in a morally upright fashion how to be honest or how to have integrity in situations where one might be tempted to do bad things generally speaking when most of us talk about ethics we have in mind moral dilemmas or moral quandaries which involve choosing between two less than ideal options in these cases we all believe we should do the right thing but it's not obvious
what the right thing is so ethics is about how we go about justifying whichever option we happen to think is best now there's a story to be told about how ethics came to mean something like solutions to ethical problems meaning situations which it is difficult to know what one should do this is not how plato and aristotle thought about ethics it's not how augustine or aquinas thought about ethics either why is it that it's how we tend to think about ethics of course we'll have to simplify matters greatly here but at least part of the
story has to do with a cluster of broad-scale social changes which impacted the religious and philosophical landscape of the west in which together more or less go under the name modernity we can date the origins of modernity in different ways perhaps beginning in the year 1439 with the invention of the gutenberg press and movable type or 1520 and luther's rebellion against church authority or 1638 peace of westphalia which marked the end of the 30 years war in europe or perhaps the 1680s and isaac newton's development of modern science or even the french revolution of 1789.
now during this period nature society and the human self came to be reconceived in fundamental ways in part these changes are driven by developments in science and technology which coincided with the development of a mechanistic and mathematical approach to knowledge the search for regular laws and causal explanations of natural phenomena and the exaltation of empirically verifiable knowledge during this time there was also an increasing amount of religious pluralism both as a result of material and economic causes but also as a result of the protestant reformation the encounter with the religious other has been deeply formative
to modern consciousness it led to a greater sense of historical and cultural relativism and gave rise to ideals about religious freedom during the enlightenment including eventually freedom to be non-religious religious and cultural pluralism has only continued to increase in the hundreds of years since as our world becomes more mobilized connected and globalized now it's said that we live in a secular age what does this mean now there's a sociological theory called the secularization thesis which states that as societies become more modernized they become more secular and less religious the idea is that as science and
technology increase thinking rationally takes the place of religious belief and erodes religious authority therefore as societies progress they become less religious now this theory which was dominant in sociology in the 1970s has been largely debunked it is simply not the case that modernization leads to the replacement of religious belief with non-religious forms of rationality as a matter of fact what has happened is not exactly the decline of religion but an explosion in the diversity of its expressions this sometimes goes underappreciated because new forms of religious expression are not always recognized as religious as with the
rising identification with the category of spiritual but not religious now honestly if you want to know where a large portion of religious energy has gone over the last 10 to 20 years look at phenomena like fitness culture or eco-consumerism or digital finance the new religious traditions are not christianity hinduism and buddhism but crossfit whole foods and bitcoin but the decline of religious belief is only one way of defining the secular secularity can be defined in other ways as well so we do indeed live in a secular age but the secularity we encounter is of a
different form related not primarily to the decline of religion but to the intensity and frequency of the pluralism we encounter according to philosopher charles taylor secularity in this sense refers to a move from a society where belief in god is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others and frequently not the easiest to embrace secularity in other words names the conditions whereby participants in a given context are not in a position to take for granted that those with whom they interact are making the same religious assumptions
that they are theologian luke brotherton notes how this entails a commitment to an institutional configuration of a religiously plural and morally diverse common life so in a secular culture certain shared institutions will adopt a position of neutrality with regard to ultimate matters though the degree of neutrality that's possible will depend on the particular context now all of this connects back to our previous video about the status of the church we noted there that the early church was a minority religious community in a fairly diverse religious world in that context the church did not expect to
be in charge and things changed drastically with the conversion of constantine and the christianization of the empire for roughly a thousand years in the west christianity was established as the framework for both the church and society now the status of christianity in relation to society is ambiguous it lies at the foundation of many of the ideals that we take for granted and in some interesting ways at the foundation of modernity itself but christianity or religious adherence more generally cannot itself be taken for granted this has had an important effect on moral deliberation how do we
discuss ethics in a world in which we cannot take for granted the same vision of the good life when we do not share those formative stories or narratives exemplars and understandings of character virtue that we discussed earlier in this sort of situation we will tend to shift toward a set of terms that we hope will apply to everyone this may take the form of highly general principles or some set of supposedly agreed upon rules or legislation and we'll also tend to focus on moral dilemmas on the face of it a moral dilemma presents us with
a conflict between principles or laws that might be faced by any individual who finds him or herself in a particular situation and who will face a more or less similar process of moral decision making moral discourse then focuses on how we justify our solutions to these moral problems this is how ethics is taught and learned in professional education especially in business and medicine but also in professions like counseling journalism and education today later on we're going to discuss particular moral issues in business and medicine but for now i just want to draw our attention to
some of the features of the way ethics is discussed in these spheres the ethicist thomas mcmahon has written a history of american business ethics in it he tells the story of how religious underpinnings of business were replaced by a set of procedural and legal requirements at one point in history merchants and business owners largely understood themselves as stewards with responsibility before god for working toward the common good with success in business being understood as a mark of divine favor over time this evolved into adam smith's quasi-religious notion of an invisible hand whereby enlightened self-interest would
providentially work toward the good of all now industrial capitalism and increasing alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor however led to the erosion of the ideal of stewardship and a more antagonistic relationship between business owners on the one hand and workers and consumers on the other this was checked through political and legal mechanisms aimed at protection of workers and consumer rights ethics in business became a matter of avoiding legal troubles and managing liability concerns the bigger questions like what is business 4 faded out of view notably however with the rise of the notion
of corporate social responsibility over the last few decades this may be changing or consider principalism the dominant framework for discussing ethics in medicine this framework developed by tom beechum and jim childress suggest that even though we live in a highly pluralistic world there is such a thing as common morality that is affirmed by all morally serious and responsible people but the morality that is supposedly shared by all remains at a highly general level of moral principles respect for autonomy beneficence non-maleficence and justice these four principles can be further specified in order to articulate rules like
doctors should keep confidentiality or do not murder etc but as the specificity increases these rules apply to fewer and fewer situations and become more and more contested these four moral principles according to beecham and childress are universally binding but not absolutely binding in other words they always assert a moral claim on us but they are only binding in a prima facie manner we should always seek to be just to respect people's choices to avoid harming them or even to do them good but we cannot always do all these things all the time to the degree
that we would like to one reason for this is that sometimes these moral principles conflict with one another we want to respect someone's choice to keep certain information confidential but doing so may harm that person or harm a third party or in a public health crisis we want to distribute scarce medical resources fairly but we also want to prioritize medical professionals so that we can maximize overall benefit or to use a more mundane example you want to respect your friend by being honest with her but you also don't want to hurt her feelings by telling
her that her new boyfriend is a scuzzball who flirts with all her friends what do you do you have to weigh and balance these moral obligations deciding which one is strongest in this situation and then you have to override the weaker principle when you do so however the overridden moral obligation doesn't go away you still feel its weight and you try to express it to the best of your ability so you tell your friend her boyfriend sucks but you do it gently or you don't tell her but you try to convince her to drop him
for some other guy principalism gives us a way of accounting for the fact that we have common moral duties even when we cannot perfectly express them all in every situation it affirms ethical realism now there is a right and wrong rather than ethical relativism even if there is no clear-cut way of proving what that right course of action is principleism is a useful framework in a highly pluralistic context in which you cannot assume someone's deep moral or religious framework and that is partly why it's been so wildly successful in professional ethics but it has some
drawbacks it relies on intuitions about cases but it does not investigate those intuitions themselves it seeks agreement and common language but in order to do so it remains fairly vague and general in this box from view other important questions that precede and shape our intuitions the types of questions we've been talking about in this course so far questions about the narratives and stories we live by the exemplars we follow and emulate and the types of people we hope to become and the trick is to find a way to do both seek the common ground for
talking about hard decisions and to investigate the deeper questions about meaning purpose and our vision of the good
