actions should serve, orders such as nations, the state, the market, a city, a neighborhood of friends, family, a church or other religious institutions like a mosque or synagogue. Any teaching of ethics that does not attend to the correlation between social orders and ethics does students a disservice by inviting them to conceive of their lives in terms of such orders without giving them the tools to acknowledge that they are doing so.
Now we find teaching ethics, especially in a diverse context, to be veering into precarious territory; ethics has become inseparable from politics. When we ask students what is a well-lived life, they may give a diversity of answers, but with those answers also comes a tacit affirmation of the goodness of social orders and their arrangements. Students might suggest that the good life is one that pursues and achieves, wealth, honor, pleasure, or health. Thus, anything that discourages or impedes this pursuit is evil and anything that enhances it is good. From Aristotle to Aquinas, however, the pursuit of wealth, honor, pleasure or health was insufficient as an answer to what it means to be human because it could not lead to human flourishing. If students gave such an answer, they stood in need of correction. Perhaps Aristotle and Aquinas could make such a claim because they lived in societies in which there was a common conception of what human flourishing is. We do not, and for that reason making judgments on students’ answers to the question “what is a well-lived life?” is often perceived as inappropriate. How are we to proceed?
One way to do so is to let each student define his or her own answer to the question “What is a well-lived life?” without subjecting it to examination. Then the purpose of an ethics course is to encourage them to find the right means to achieve their end no matter what that end might be. This procedure is to my mind deeply flawed. Although it might appear to honor each student’s particular history and refuse to impose moral norms on them, it actually does the reverse. The assumption that ethics is about an autonomous decision to choose your own way of life and pursue it consistently is one ethical option among others. To assume that a course should proceed along these lines is to narrow down ethical possibilities, not expand them. It also neglects the inevitable link between ethics and politics. The answer to the question of a well-lived life will assume some underlying social formation that is worthy of our lives.
Normative ethical judgments should not be imposed on students, but how one teaches them without imposition—implicit or explicit—is exceedingly difficult. I once had an ethics teacher who was well known for beginning his course by stating, “In this class you do not have minds to make up for yourself about ethics. Your purpose is to think like me.” Most students were immediately appalled and raised their resistance to whatever he said next. His purpose was to challenge the default position of emotivism that he found among students, as if whatever they felt or thought about ethics was somehow in itself sufficient to the task. He did not say that students were to arrive at the same normative judgments that he did, although I think he hoped they would. He stated that they should follow a way of thought that he had inherited from others in order to think better about ethics. Part of that way of thought was to recognize that living one’s life for wealth, pleasure, honor, or health was insufficient for human flourishing, and to trust those forms of social life whose end was wealth, pleasure, honor or health alone were insufficient for one’s loyalty. Another part was to dissuade students that ethics was a pursuit of individual preference. These two parts are, however, negative. They tell us what should not to be done, not what should be done. Can we do more than this?
What is a well-lived life? What is human flourishing? What is the purpose for human existence? If ethics is to become more than a description of the diverse ethical sources student already have, and engage the normative task present in the second assumption, then it cannot avoid these questions. No single answer to the purpose for ethics suffices in the university, but below are ten well-known possible answers.
1.The purpose of ethics is to maximize utility.
2.The purpose of ethics is to honor and respect the dignity of every individual.
3.The purpose of ethics is to cultivate virtue in order to be a loyal citizen.
4.The purpose of ethics is happiness, learned within a context of friends.
5.The purpose of ethics is to obey Torah.
6.The purpose of ethics is to submit to Allah.
7.The purpose of ethics is to love the Blessed Trinity, enjoy God forever and in so doing love one’s neighbors and enemies.
8.Ethics has no purpose. It only expresses subjective values or preferences of approbation or disapproval.
9.Ethics is a practical skill to match means to ends whatever end one chooses for one’s self.
10.Ethics is nothing but a disguised form of power by which the privileged take advantage of those without privilege.
Let me offer a brief commentary on each of these possible answers. The first two are the dominant forms ethics takes in the modern university. They assume an isolated individual as the basic subject of ethical action, and provide a formal, putatively universal account of ethics. They tend to be reductive. The first answer makes individuals into utility maximizers, but no discrimination is made about the content of utility. The second also assumes the basic subject for ethics is the individual, but rather than a utility maximizer, the individual is now a rights bearing entity whose rights should be respected by all other rights bearing entities. It too is formal in that it does not attempt to give content to those rights. The first option is an ethics for the marketplace; the second for modern democratic nation-states. Both options do not take a person’s history as her or his moral starting point, but abstract from it by reducing persons to individuals.
The third and fourth answers take a more manageable political entity or small association of friends as the subject of ethics. We would need to know the content of the political entity in which the person is a citizen or friend to know what virtues matter. Large modern nation-states have a difficult time offering this kind of content because they are too big to facilitate the encounters necessary for the cultivation of virtue. Smaller units such as cities, villages, parishes or neighborhoods would provide the proper size, but they would need to have venues for political engagement with each other to determine what a good citizen is in specific contexts. Broad based community organizing is one place where virtuous citizenship is cultivated.8 Association of friends is an even more manageable size for the cultivation of virtue. It assumes that one’s ethical possibilities will in part depend upon the character of one’s friends and the common objects of love that they share. For instance, friendships determined by a shared passion for drug use will inevitably be vicious. Friendships determined by a shared passion to assist the poor, or to bring aesthetic joy to others bear great potential for virtue.
The fifth through the seventh answers obviously place the ethical life within religious institutions. There are well defined disciplines of Christian, Jewish and Islamic ethics. To police them out of any ethical conversation is to make the secular the default position. While a secular ethic has its advantages, it should not simply be assumed as the norm without some attempt to explain why it is preferable to religious ethics. One such attempt, one that has been discredited in practice and theory, is that a secular ethics is not as violent as religious ethics.9 Religions have, undoubtedly and unfortunately, contributed to violence. As the twentieth century amply demonstrated, secular polities did so as well. So what is the advantage to a secular ethic over a religious one? Anyone who argues for it will need to explain what the secular is and why it is preferable to religion. One common answer is known as the “subtraction thesis.” The secular is what remains once superstition is removed and only reason remains. Here the secular is a narrative of inevitable progress in which “secular reason” is primarily understood as negative. It is what you have once the world is disenchanted from all religious influence. Both the first and second answers could be forms of a secular ethic; God or religion is not necessary for them. Nor are they a priori opposed to God, which leads
