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WEB EXCLUSIVE:
Ethics and Moral Action
January 10, 2007 Episode no. 1020
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Ethics and Moral Action
by Benedicta Cipolla
Amidst a swirl of recent news stories on escalating American military involvement in Iraq, violent crime boiling over in New Orleans more than a year after Hurricane Katrina, and the medical promise of stem cells that are not derived from embryos, the urgent realities of the world came face to face on many fronts with the work of hundreds of Christian and Jewish ethicists meeting this month in Dallas.
While much of the debate at the annual joint meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics and the Society of Jewish Ethics is theological and philosophical, ethicists say their work inevitably moves into the realm of the practical and contemporary.
"There was lots on war," notes William Werpehowski, president of the Society of Christian Ethics and a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University.
Nearly four years on, the Iraq war continues to confront ethicists with questions about just war theory and conduct, torture, interrogation methods, military obedience, and post-war obligations. Brian Stiltner, associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, led a session on "Christian thinking about preemptive war." Initially he supported the invasion of Iraq, but last year he publicly changed his mind. He says President Bush has dangerously broadened the concept of preemption in Iraq, and he urges returning to a stricter definition that hews more closely to just war tradition.
"The classical concept of preemption is when you really have some clear evidence and moral certainty that the enemy intends to strike, and you don't have much time to do something else," says Stiltner. "The Bush doctrine was pushing this much farther forward, saying we have to intervene before the threat becomes imminent." Iraq, Stiltner warns, has proved the dangers inherent in rushing to a military approach, and it has discredited this looser, more expansive concept of preemption that is also described as "anticipatory self-defense," forcing scholars to reconsider the Iraq invasion's ethical implications.
"Even if you are not sure diplomacy will work, time is always your ally," suggests Stiltner, the co-author of a forthcoming book on FAITH AND FORCE: A CHRISTIAN DEBATE ABOUT WAR (Georgetown University Press). "How carefully did we really query the evidence" that justified the invasion, he asks. "It was presented to the American public as though there was little doubt, whereas there was doubt."
In a session on ethics and the war on terror, Pamela Brubaker, a professor of religion at California Lutheran University, offered a sharp critique of one of the most prominent supporters of the U.S. military response to terrorism, political philosopher and University of Chicago ethics professor Jean Bethke Elshtain.
"I look at Elshtain's interpretation of American power and argue she has too sanguine a view," says Brubaker. "She doesn't take account of times the U.S. has acted not to promote democracy or human rights, but out of economic and corporate interests." While American actions never justify terrorist attacks, Brubaker says more awareness of the role the United States has played in other countries and the antagonism that has sometimes created against the U.S. must play a part in thinking ethically about the fight against terrorism.
"We need a spirit of contrition," Brubaker cautions, chiding Elshtain for being "relatively oblivious" to the fact that "we tend to go into war without realizing that the violence that is going to ensue will go beyond what the moral bounds are."
Elshtain did not attend the Dallas meeting, but in an interview last March with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, she was asked about the terrible cost of civilian casualties in Iraq: "I think you could still say that there's some proportional good, if the situation gets stabilized. You make that assessment if you still have the hope and if you are convinced that the outcome finally is going to be a minimally decent society where there is a rule of law and so forth. If that doesn't happen, and if what the Iraqi people wind up with is conflict without end, then we can, looking back, say the costs were too high and this was a mistake. And if that happens, I think those of us who supported the war will have to acknowledge our error as well. Still, I think one has to take upon oneself the burden of the judgments one makes, and we're not there yet."
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"Katrina Revisited" was the subject of a major session on ethics and natural disaster, even though the hurricane and its grim aftermath have mostly faded from ongoing news coverage and national consciousness. While many discussions of the disaster focus on political, economic and social factors, Laurie Zoloth, a professor of medical humanities, bioethics and religion at Northwestern University, offers a theological view. "The way to construct theological ethics is to be attentive to interruptions," she says. "Our lives are mostly non-interrupted. We live mostly in a seamless narrative of daily life, but Katrina really did stop everyone's life. It showed us the importance of our ability as a society to think collectively and seriously about the meaning of poverty and our responsibility to help."
For Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, a professor of theology and women's studies at Shaw University, Katrina's aftermath raised important ethical questions such as who is my neighbor and what does community mean. "People who teach ethics can keep these issues before the public," she says. "We do not like to deal with poor people. We are doing nothing about dealing with the trauma they face, just like soldiers face, and this topic needs to not go away." Kirk-Duggan has edited THE SKY IS CRYING: RACE, CLASS AND NATURAL DISASTER, a collection of sermons and essays published by Abingdon Press, and she says all royalties from the book will go to support the rebuilding of Dillard and Xavier Universities in New Orleans.
Zoloth acknowledges "the extraordinary response of ordinary Americans" to the victims of Katrina, including organizations such as Wal-Mart and the  Salvation Army that ethicists "don't usually speak about." She says "the call that Katrina offers us is actually being offered all the time," and it confronts us in other cities around the country: "Do we want to rebuild New Orleans below sea level? Why rebuild the Ninth Ward and not rebuild Detroit, or Baltimore, or Camden, New Jersey?"
Werpehowski, who moderated the discussion on Katrina, described it as "a call to arms to ethicists" and said the Gulf Coast disaster in 2005 revealed both "the unjust risks to which we put certain populations" and "the moral challenges of massively disrupting human communities and rendering poor people invisible." The unanswered ethical question, he says, is "after you mess up a community, how do you restore it?"
In the area of bioethics, ethicists say the ongoing stem cell debate has begun to move beyond disagreements over the moral status of human embryos to the anticipation of many ethical questions that will arise if stem cell research succeeds. As work advances, despite continued opposition by some religious groups, there are emerging questions about research trials and regulation, intellectual property, and extending the human life span. "One of the most important issues to think about is whether to pay to use the eggs of women in research," says Zoloth, who is also working on international stem cell research guidelines. Other open questions include the ownership and control of human stem cells, safety standards for stem cell lines used for human applications, and access to genetic patents.
For Zoloth, all of these debates have implications beyond medical ethics. "I'm more interested in social justice than in moral status issues," she says, "because as a Jewish scholar the issue is how one treats the other. Notice it's the same conversation we are having about Katrina: what do you do about poverty, and what do you do about the poor?"
Benedicta Cipolla, a writer in New York City, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on torture, the ethics of exit in Iraq, and church-state issues.
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