One of my friends sent me a Q&A about "religious ethics" that she wanted me to answer for a research project she's doing in our field. I answered them, obviously in inadequate, overly terse and telegraphic ways. Because I'm all about amor sui, I thought you should get a chance to be provoked by them as well.
1) How did you end up in the field of religious ethics?
I think like a lot of people I was influenced both by accidents and by deep impulses. Accidents include who I took classes with and when. I ended up taking a series of classes with a teacher who was an ethicist and who thought about ethics in a capacious sense, sort of as addressing who we are as creatures, and how we flourish. I found her classes and the questions driving them totally gripping, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
But there were also deep impulses from my past. My family lived overseas when I was a kid, and I was exposed to a lot of ways of life, and I never took any particular one for granted, or as the “natural” one from which all others were flawed copies. Then we lived in a place of some political and religious precariousness, so we paid attention to the world and what was going on in ways that kept us alert to the complexity of events and the actors within them. Finally my parents were foundational to my mind, and gave me a powerful impulse to ask questions, and different—and quite rival—senses of what you could call a “tragic sense of life.” So from the scale of international geopolitics to intimate domestic matters, questions of meaning and moral order, of plausible forms of normativity and the different ways people can inhabit and/or experience the same phenomena, shaped me from the beginning.
2) Can you list three of your favorite or most influential works that impressed you as a thinker?
Well there’s a lot! I would say certainly Augustine of Hippo—his Confessions is actually incredibly hard to understand, but in a devilishly subtle way; I recommend students start with the far more massive City of God, whose difficulty is at least visible from the first page. So, Gus. Second probably would be Hannah Arendt, whose liberty of mind and intelligence and fearlessness still amazes me; her The Human Condition is perhaps her most wide-ranging book, though I have to say I think Eichmann In Jerusalem will stand the test of time as the most aesthetically powerful work she ever wrote. I still find it incredibly moving. Third? A philosopher, GEM (Elizabeth) Anscombe; her essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” is the toughest piece of philosophical beef jerkey I ever chewed. But it is, in its own, ingrown, Oxbridge way, a quiet masterpiece.
Beyond those three, I would recommend two American writers, Reinhold Niebuhr and James Baldwin, who have both written the kind of non-fiction prose that seems to me still necessary for thinking and living today, for the academic discipline of religious ethics but for anyone who wants to be conscious in our world; I’d put Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness and Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work.
Many other books and thinkers have been powerful for me, but from those, a lot of other stuff has been organized.
3) What are the main ideas or questions that guide your work?
There are two descriptive sets of questions that occupy me, one about the nature of the different ways distinct human communities have imagined what it is like to be human and live in this world, and one about, well, what is going on in the world? What is happening to us? I think that, ever since I would sit at lunch in the fourth grade and listen to the AP (or UPI?) world news with my mom, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with figuring out what was about to happen, and why. We needed to know it to figure out if we should flee the country where we lived (long story), but even as the rationale for it has changed, the serious urgency has stayed with me.
More normatively, I think, I am interested in a couple questions: what does it mean to be a human agent in this world? and, why do I feel that the world is fundamentally good, despite all the evidence that weighs against that judgment, and what does that goodness entail about the cosmos and my response to it? I think the mystery of what humans are is a matter of humans “in motion,” in action; and I think the languages we have for thinking about ourselves as actors are really quite thin right now, and not likely to get much thicker. And—maybe like the filmmaker Terrence Malik, and behind him Arendt, Heidegger, Augustine, Aristotle, a lot of people—I find the sheer wonder of the world remarkable, truly remarkable.
4) How can students best succeed in your religious ethics courses?
The virtues most immediately demanded are patient attention, bordering on devotion, to the object of study and to your own reactions and responses to the object of study; careful listening to the arguments of those with whom you think you agree and those with whom you think you disagree; meticulous scrutiny of those arguments; and honesty about the strengths and weaknesses of those arguments; and a willingness to explore the weaknesses of positions you think you agree with, and the insights of positions you think you disagree with. All of these virtues need to be developed intentionally; we are not naturally reflexive beings, and such hesitation as this entails does not confer any evolutionary advantage on us.
Once we begin, we have different questions to ask and it will be important to know the questions. There’s a normative task in “religious ethics” and an ethnographic task. Normatively, we have a lot of questions that are more or less “immanent criticism” of the positions we study. What do we think is the right thing to do? How should we achieve our aims, and what should our aims be, and why? What is decency? What is immorality? What is inhumanity, and what is generosity? These are all questions we will find in religious ethics, and we cannot avoid them. They may be questions we ask in an instant, and only for ourselves, or in the context of a class, but they are real questions.
Ethnographically, we have to ask: How are the traditions and communities we study (when we study them) organized? What intuitions or insights do they build upon or appeal to for legitimacy? What do they affirm? What do they deny? In this ethnographic dimension, and maybe even in the normative one as well, I think of ethics as about intimacy and estrangement. It is about becoming familiar enough with a position to feel its “grip” upon your understanding of why and how people act, so that you can begin to inhabit, intellectually and perhaps empathetically, an overall stance or worldview—so in this way it is about gaining intimacy with ways of being human. But it is also about recognizing that there are different “grips” and each of them can be as compelling to those susceptible to them as any other is as compelling to you—so that the world is maddeningly susceptible to different construals that all seem sufficiently plausible and inhabitable to their various adherents.
5) What do you believe will be the most important moral issues of the next generation?
I think of three big things.
First, issues broadly around “the politics of recognition.” How will we manage to recognize, and honor, difference? This is obviously roiling our world. Religious difference is a big one, but racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, sexual difference—this is all a huge challenge.
Second, issues broadly around agency. What kinds of creatures are we, and how do we understand our actions in the world, how are they prompted/provoked by our environment, are we “ex nihilo” actors, are we driven/determined, what? This is broadly a question of moral and religious anthropology, I think.
Third and more indirectly—the question of our relationship to our past. Walter Benjamin said, “Thee is no document of culture which is not also a document of barbarism.” The resources of my teaching—of “humanistic” teaching more generally, I think—are broadly historical resources. Can we learn from documents and artifacts that we think are deeply morally compromised, perhaps utterly corrupt? Can we inhabit institutions we find to be morally terribly compromised? In my tradition: once we have begun to see the depths of sin, what then?
6) Anything else?
We live in a world of enormous technical accomplishment and tremendous human ignorance. We in religious ethics, like we in the humanities as a whole, are working on the final clause of that sentence. We should never let ourselves, teachers and students, forget that what we do matters, matters desperately. I think the questions we are asking are descendants of questions humans have asked for millennia, and we need to honor that and also recognize we may be able to learn from the past, but we also need to find the answers that help us today. Reiterating what others knew is not likely to be of great benefit. And on the other hand, our technical knowledge will only be as good, or as bad, as our humanity enables it to be.