From Sound-Bite Ethics to Virtue Ethics

Part 1 in a 3-Part Series

By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra

August 8, 2004

Today I am beginning the first in a 3-part series of sermons on ethics. I will pick up with the next 2 parts when I get back from vacation. The series is based on a week of lectures and sermons I was privileged to hear at Chautauqua this summer. This series was facilitated by Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, who is chair of the Dept. of Religion there, and by Father Raymond Carey, who is a Roman Catholic priest, psychologist and professor who teaches and serves as a consultant in ethics.

Like so much of what happens in America today, modern day ethics are often reduced to sound-bites. A sound-bite is just seconds long; it’s the kind of attention getter we are fed on television. It’s meant to grab your attention and hold it briefly, since people today tend to have very busy lives and short attention spans. Complicated issues are condensed to a 1-minute summary by newscasters, and complex situations are reduced to 3-minute analysis by talk show hosts whose ratings rely on capturing the interest of people. So they tend to pursue a heightened anxiety level instead of calmly looking at every side of an issue and then presenting the nuances of alternate opinions.

Take for example, the debate in Oregon over whether it is right to assist a terminally ill person to end their own life. This is a very complex ethical issue, both sides of which include good arguments. Yet, Dr. Carey told us, he has seen this debate reduced to bumper stickers that say, "If you don’t believe in assisted suicide, don’t have one!" as if there are no implications to a society that adopts these measures. The ethics of individuals affect our society.

Ethics is the discussion among people of good will seeking to discover what is right behavior for human beings. Unfortunately, there has been a reduction to consumer level ethics in American society. Where someone stands on abortion or on the death penalty becomes the single issue whereby people judge others, as if these were black and white issues that define us. Often ethics are used as a political litmus test. For example, a staunch opponent to abortion might discount a candidate who has an impeccable ethical career but favors legal abortion under some circumstances. Never mind that the candidate effectively cares for the "already born" children, teenagers, adults and elderly people of the nation. There is also in our country today, the tendency to demonize people for holding a different opinion.

The result of these sound-bite battles is that it’s difficult for dialogue to take place among people of good will who just happen to disagree. It’s also difficult to develop an ethical system that guides behaviors.

Dr. Carey described two camps of people. One camp holds that there are immutable, unchangeable truths. Thou shalt not kill, for example. The other camp believes that ethical behavior depends on the situation and circumstances, and every situation must be assessed. For example, if you are in the first camp, you might be absolutely against all abortions, you might even be against the death penalty, since one could argue that both result in the taking of a life.

If you are in the second camp, you would let the situation help guide your opinion of what is ethical behavior. For example, if a young girl was pregnant as the result of incest, then an abortion might be seen as the better or two bad choices—the destruction of the fetus vs. the damage done to the young girl by forcing her to carry and deliver a child conceived by immoral actions. For situation ethicists, the experience, i.e. the situation, weighs heavily in the discussion about what is the moral choice.

Dr. Carey advocates a concept of ethics that brings together these two camps, the people who believe there are immutable moral laws and those who believe we must let the situation help determine what is moral. About 25 years ago, a number of Christian ethicists from different denominations began to think about ethics together, even though they disagreed on morals and ethics. They developed the concept of virtue ethics, which brings these two poles together.

I believe what Dr. Carey meant was this: in virtue ethics we give high regard to principles that have been valued through the ages, but we also consider the situation by asking "Who are we becoming as people? What makes a human being a good human being? What virtues can we agree upon, and how can we find a common ground and form a dialogue?"

Virtue ethics builds bridges by helping us establish habits of the heart that make us better human beings. Instead of just avoiding this or that "evil", we help each other grow by focusing on who we are becoming as a society. And it must be good for ALL the global village to be virtuous. In a sense they are looking for moral principles, but only as those moral principles bring about the actual experience of goodness in people’s lives.

"Who more than Jesus of Nazareth beckons us to consider who we are becoming?" Dr. Carey asked. It’s on almost every page of the Gospels. Jesus’ way of being in the world always involved behavior. He talked frequently about bringing into being the kingdom of God. Jesus moved us into thinking about a conversion of the heart that leads to a new way of being. It was not enough to think right things; it was necessary to do what is good. Let’s look at some key parts of the manifest ethic of Jesus.

The first characteristic of Jesus’ ethic is the reverencing of persons. To reverence someone is to treat them with great respect. This is not just using good manners; it’s not just showing southern hospitality. If every person is made in the image of God, we have an obligation to treat that person with reverence. It implies that virtuous people do not demonize people who disagree with them. It implies that we refuse to listen to talk show hosts who diminish their guests or the people they talk about. To reverence persons as children of God implies that we don’t even gossip about people, but practice, practice, practice showing the utmost respect to even those whom we find it difficult to love. What would that do to negative political advertising if we had a public commitment to reverencing persons? Dr. Carey was appalled at the recent prisoner abuses in Abu-Graib prison in Iraq, perpetrated by American soldiers in violation of the Geneva Convention, which is based on respect for the common dignity of all human beings. He said, "Why isn’t there an outcry and moral debate about this?"

The implications of the reverencing of persons, each made in the image of God, are endless. To respect and reverence even those whom we find it difficult to like means we have a moral obligation to be decent to them, and that extends far beyond our legal obligation. Let me tell you a story that Dr. Carey told, which illustrates the difference between legal and moral.

It seems there was a woman in his church who really needed to get a divorce. She was in a very destructive marriage and her priest actually recommended she divorce her husband. Her husband, however, was very wealthy and powerful. So he went to every single attorney in that town and retained each one, paying each one a small amount so they would be ethically unable to take his wife on as a client, having already been retained by him for some little piece of work.

She went to the priest and said, "I can’t do this. I can’t even get an attorney to represent me." The priest said, "I know an attorney in another town. He’s as tough as a junkyard dog; we’ll call him." They did. She hired him and he got her a 6 million dollar settlement.

What the husband had done retaining all those lawyers, was legal, but it was not moral. By the way, after Dr. Carey finished telling this story at a seminar, 4 or 5 women raised their hands. They wanted to know if he would give them the phone number of the junkyard dog lawyer!

The second virtue that Christians can and should model is a commitment to becoming who we are meant to be. We have an obligation to be the best person we can be, given this gift of life by God. Each person should, then, be asking themselves regularly, "Am I becoming holier? Am I becoming who God intends me to be?" What would you do differently today, if every morning as you looked in the mirror you asked yourself, "What might God want me to do today?"

Another virtue Dr. Carey described, and stressed the most of all, is generosity, generosity, generosity. He said that true generosity takes the form of loving service; it is much more than just writing a check to charity. It is spending time and energy and talent in blessing others. It is a longing to give more, which comes out of the habit of giving as much as out of the converted heart.

He told us a story from his own experience. It seems there was a priest in his parish named Father Frank who started a street ministry for hungry people in Portland. He arranged to get leftovers from local grocery stores and swiped one of the parish coffee pots too. He had a grocery cart from Safeway, and one day Dr. Carey asked him how he managed to get the store to give the cart to him. He said, "Did you go there on Palm Sunday and just say, ‘My master hath need of it’ ?" To which Father Frank, a crusty old priest, growled, "Mind your own dang business."

Awhile later there appeared in the newspaper a photo of Dr. Carey’s associate giving out sandwiches. Feeling a little remorseful about the grocery cart remark, Dr. Carey sent Father Frank a note saying he’d seen his picture in the paper and enjoyed the article. And he wrote about how Father Frank was a good model to him in serving others so generously. Dr. Carey enclosed a generous check and sent it with the note.

Four or five days later, he got a note back from Father Frank. As he opened it, the check fell out. The note said, "Make your own dang sandwiches!"

We read in the gospel of Luke: From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.

As Dr. Carey looked out on his audience of mainly retired people, he ended his lecture with a blessing, saying, "May we never outlive the willingness to spend ourselves for others." To that I can only add—Amen.