what remains once religious influence is removed, but religion becomes a private preference individuals choose. It is one option among others.10 This secular ethics is another form of emotivism or expressivism. A third account of the “secular” arises from Christian theology, especially from St. Augustine (354–430). The secular is the time between Christ’s first and second advents in which religious and non-religious people must learn to live together in harmony. They will share common objects of love such as peace, health, basic services like food, shelter and protection, but they will also differ in objects of worship.
To this point, I have not made a case for a religious ethic, whether it be Jewish, Christian or Islamic, but only attempted to question if a secular ethic should be given the default position as it often is in the modern university. Like religious ethics, it too should have to give an account of itself—tell us what it is, what purpose it serves, and why it will let us flourish as human beings more so than other kinds of ethics. What account might a religious ethics give for itself? At a minimal level, anyone who seeks to be conversant with the ethics of the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants should at least be aware of the ethical teachings among the world’s religions. Because each religion has contested teachings on ethics, it would behoove us to encourage the religious persons with whom we inhabit this world to be the best representatives of that religion’s teachings. For instance, I think it is preferable to encourage the world’s religions at least to take seriously their just war traditions over holy crusades. For that matter, a secular war ethics would benefit from the practical wisdom of the just war tradition.
Beyond this minimal reason for teaching religious ethics is the important ethical question of whether or not God exists, and what it matters in everyday life. For if there is a God, and a God like the transcendent deity at least in part shared among the Abrahamic faiths, then God is not one more object in the world. God’s existence will change everything, especially concerning the ethical life. What difference God would make to ethics as that knowledge is mediated through religions should be part of any quest for moral purpose. To police it out a priori is to force secular conversions upon the ethical conversation. A third important reason to make space for religious ethics is an important point made by Alasdair MacIntyre about the basic subject of ethics. To this point I have agreed with most ethical theories that the basic form ethics takes is action. As noted above, practical wisdom culminates in it. MacIntyre, however, has made the point that action per se is not the basic form of ethics but intelligible action. To act is not an isolated event, but one that arises from an ability to see and construe the world in specific ways. Ethics is as much about vision and narrative as it is about action. Narratives provide a vision by which we can see a situation that allows us to act within it. Part of the ethical task will be to get students to clarify the narratives that provide them with a vision to act in the world, and then ask if those narratives are worthy of their life? Religions offer narrative construals that render actions intelligible, but the same of course is true of secular visions.
The eighth through the tenth answers slightly differ in content, but are similar in kind. The eighth depends on the “emotivist” theory of meaning for ethics. Although it was once popular among scholars, and still has a resonance with popular culture, I find it misguided for the reasons already noted. Faced with horrible moral failure few people find it adequate to say “x is wrong because I don’t like it.” The ninth answer is one based on managerial expertise, a peculiarly modern form of instrumental reasoning that claims to be able to match means with ends without making judgments about the worthiness of those ends. Ends should matter; it avoids the reason for teaching ethics altogether. The tenth answer is less deceptive than the instrumental reasoning present in putative managerial expertise. It denies that we have purpose at all and thus claims to be “beyond good and evil.” This is the fascinating position of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) who claimed that morality was a “soporific appliance.”
Nietzsche wrote, “I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances—and that ‘virtue,’ in my opinion, has been MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything else; at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting!”11 Moral philosophy as a “soporific appliance” induces sleep in order to numb patients so that an operation can be performed on them without their knowledge. Moral philosophy masks what is really going on. There is no good or evil, no up or down, no purpose to life. We are on a little blue ball spinning aimlessly through the universe and the most we can do is what Nietzsche called the “artistic taming of the horrible.” Take the horrors of life and using aesthetic means make it as beautiful as it can be. Moral philosophy, like religion, soothes immature minds who cannot look upon our horrifying reality and affirm it for what it is. Answers eight and nine inevitably lead to ten when we look with the utmost seriousness at what they are suggesting because, in the end, they conceive of ethics as nothing but a will to power.
These ten answers are not the only answers to the question of moral purpose; others can be found. The difficulty in teaching normative ethics is the step that comes after presenting these possible answers. As I noted earlier, if we tell students to “choose” a moral purpose and live consistently with it, we are not giving them independence but imposing something like answer nine upon them. Such an answer will tacitly assume that the role of the bureaucrat-manager is the normative role for ethical practice and theory. We cannot divorce the teaching of ethics from proposing some form of good life within a social context.
Conclusion
So what should be done in teaching ethics? The first task is to take seriously the ethical formations students already bring with them into the class room, and help them gain the practical and theoretical wisdom to be able to name them. The second task is to have them subject it to scrutiny through an examination of human flourishing by attending to the question, What is a well-lived life? But if the answer to this question is not simply to be emotivist, it must be something more than subjective preference. Here is where not only the student’s history, but the history and tradition of the university should come into play. Students and teachers are not the only ones who have histories, so do universities. They exist in specific locations and have traditions of practical reasoning present through their ceremonies, architecture, monuments, mission statements, etc. They help us answer the question, What does this university stand for? Where does it want to take you ethically? Is it primarily to gain wealth, status, health, virtue, faith, abandon faith? What does it think a well-lived life is? If it has no answer to this question, then perhaps ethics courses will be unintelligible. Those answers are usually present and can be found, for better and worse, in those mission statements, monuments, and architectural structures. For instance, the motto at Southern Methodist University is Veritas liberabit vos (“The truth will make you free”). This motto is found throughout its history and marks significant moments and monuments of SMU’s life and architecture. It comes from Christian Scripture, John 8:32, and bears traces of SMU’s Methodist heritage.
This heritage is worth considering as an answer to the question, What is a well-lived life? The mission statement in the university’s strategic plan makes this explicit: “Among its faculty, students, and staff, the university will cultivate principled thought, develop intellectual skills, and promote an environment emphasizing individual dignity and worth. SMU affirms its historical commitment to academic freedom and open inquiry, to moral and ethical values, and to its United Methodist heritage.” Some debate and discussion about what that heritage is, and how it helps us answer the question of moral purpose should be noncontroversial. It can be done without assuming everyone must join the United Methodist church, sign some confessional document, or even have faith in God.
The university is a complex space where no single authority should define it. It has relations with many other “spaces”—the market, government, the military, church, other religious and civic institutions, but it also has its own identity. While it must have relations with each of these other “spaces,” it must also keep an arm’s length
