The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human

Abstract

What should the opportunities and demands of my spouse's work mean for me given the opportunities and demands of my own work? Should we move away from our extended family for a better job? Should we have children now? What kind of education do we owe our children? How do we balance the demands of our aging parents with the demands of our children? Do my spouse and my children really know how much I love them? How much should we be giving to the church and to this or that cause? Is it okay to drive this safer car and to drive it as much as I do given how much CO2 it emits? Should I really order a steak? I suspect that these are the sorts of moral questions that bedevil a majority of individuals most of the time—nothing glamorous, nothing exciting, only the warp and woof of our daily lives. We want to live faithfully and well, knowing that to live such a life will require a thousand little decisions that may have unintended ethical consequences.The typical class in ethics, even Christian ethics or moral theology, and the typical anthology used in such a class follows a standard formula. The first part of the class/book is devoted to an examination of the major theories on offer and includes an account of deontological or nonconsequentialist theories (the nature of the act is what makes it wrong or right) with the greatest attention devoted to variations of Kantian ethics. It also includes various permutations of consequentialist or utilitarian ethics (do the greatest good, however that is understood, for the greatest number of people). This, in turn, is typically followed by an introduction to virtue ethics in some shape or form. After this groundwork is laid, students are then given the opportunity to sink their teeth into the juicy bits, namely the “application” of these theories and their guiding principles to a fairly standard set of moral problems, many of which are bioethical problems, including beginning of life issues such as cloning, in vitro fertilization and Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and abortion, and end of life issues such as euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Other issues include the intentional taking of human life in war and capital punishment; hunger and poverty; and environmental responsibilities and animal welfare.Students who complete such a class may emerge relieved that morality, having so little to do with their daily lives, is not quite as demanding as they had feared. After all, how likely is it that they will come face to face with any of these hard moral problems, much less more than one? And if they should perchance encounter one of these problems, they need only to plug the moral principle into it. “Ethics is really pretty simple,” they may think.Michael Banner, Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, is hardly the first to notice how distorting and unhelpful is the reduction of ethics to an attempted resolution of a hard moral problem. Moral quandaries are but a minor part of the moral life. Unlike earlier critics like Alasdair MacIntyre, who turned to Aristotle to forge a retrieval of an ethics of virtue as an alternative to an ethics of hard cases, Banner commends an “everyday ethics,” an ethics of the course of life (and says not a word about virtue). And where earlier critics, especially MacIntyre, find modern morality, both in theory and in practice, incoherent, Banner is dismissive only of the practices of most modern moral theorists (in particular, bioethicists), and not modern moral practices themselves. Indeed, moral theory should attend to moral phenomena. Furthermore, because cultural anthropology (in Britain “social anthropology”) is the discipline in which moral phenomena is most closely examined and described, moral theology must partner with social anthropology. Moral theology will do its appropriate work only through its engagement with social anthropology, only insofar as moral theologians become ethnographers, and as social anthropology “challenges and corrects” moral theology as well as “deepens and advances” it. Moral philosophy has turned in upon itself and away from ordinary moral practices, the result of which is that it is of little use for moral theology. In contradistinction to this, social anthropology takes moral practices seriously and so illuminates the many and various ways of what it means to be human in the world. Through an engagement with and understanding of these practices, moral theologians may be able to imagine a Christian form of life with, as Banner puts it, real “therapeutic and evangelical” potential, may be able to offer an understanding of being human that can be received as good news and a balm for human sorrows.Unlike quandary or hard problems ethics, everyday ethics, informed by ethnographic descriptions of moral practices, wrestles with the most common and universal human experiences, experiences that are the standard fare of the social anthropology textbook, including conception, birth, suffering, death and burial, the very same moments of the life of Christ noted by the creeds, Banner points out. In describing the moral practices associated with these everyday human experiences, we uncover, to use Charles Taylor's term, “social imaginaries,” imaginations of human life carried in stories and images that inform and are expressed by moral practices and the different constructs or scripts that prescribe how to be human. The work of moral theology is to understand these everyday human experiences in light of a Christian imaginary.Having described what everyday ethics is and how moral theology should go about doing everyday ethics, Banner offers preliminary explorations in each of the ordinary human experiences mentioned above beginning with conception. The hard problems approach asks the question, “Are any (or all) forms of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTS) licit or illicit?” and, having named the good, the not so good, and the bad, quickly moves on to the next problem. Everyday ethics, on the other hand, learns from social anthropology the extraordinary importance of kinship in our social imaginary and approaches practices of conception by thinking first about kinship. We discover the contemporary social framing of moral problems of conception, at least in the affluent West, with “the desperation of childlessness” and the assumption that such desperation is best addressed by having a “child of one's own.” Contemporary anthropological studies suggest that even as ARTS have overthrown folk theories of kinship in which kinship is essentially a relation achieved either through marriage or a blood tie, in vitro fertilization and ARTS have, ironically, reinforced biological kinship insofar as they make some blood tie possible and are preferred for reasons of the blood tie. The traditional desire for a “child of one's own,” that is a child to whom one has some biological relation, may be satisfied through the use of in vitro fertilization or ARTS. This, in turn, raises an interesting question. How does the representation of conception and kinship in the Christian imagination differ from and challenge this contemporary imagination of conception and reproduction?To answer, Banner turns not only to Christian theology but also to Christian practices and creations, the makings and doings of individuals and communities within the tradition as they reveal the Christian imagination, in their creation of works of art, in their preaching, and in the rites and rituals of their community. In this case, Banner starts with the wisdom of Augustine, wisdom conveyed in Augustine's homiletics and theology. From Augustine, the Gospels, and the Christian rites of baptism (in which parents are displaced by the greater role of godparents), we discover a “troubling” reconfiguring of kinship. The “fictive kinship” of the church disrupts the ethnic and familial notions of kinship in our social imaginary. The Christian valorization of virginity challenges the tragic status of childlessness. In short, “Christian ethics looks towards a kinship that does not fall back on ‘classic’ ways of doing family, which privilege ties of blood. Instead, it commends a kinship framed by our conceiving our conception in the light of the conception of Christ, to whom Joseph was truly a father. Christian rites intend to unkin us, only to rekin us with new bonds that dispel childlessness as much as they eliminate orphanhood…. The rites of baptism (which displace kin by blood) and of the Eucharist (which makes us kin to Christ, and thus to one another by sharing in his blood) … are signs of the continuing purpose and power of a critical Christianity to fashion kinship among strangers” (59).Banner continues with a discussion of suffering, and humanitarian and Christian understanding and practices of care for the suffering, as well as the everyday issues of death, burial, and mourning of the dead, along with a discussion of memory in a chapter evoked by the creeds' rites of remembering the life of Jesus. These chapters are characterized by a profound reading of Augustine and Christian history and by sensitive and sometimes stunningly insightful discussions of art works, as in his discussion of Stanley Spencer's Travoys Arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station, Smol, Macedonia, September 1916. (I know of no other work in Christian ethics in which the publisher has been willing to include six plates; I know of no other work in Christian ethics in which the discussion of art is so worthy of the inclusion of the excellent reproductions.)Especially splendid is Banner's discussion “Dying and ‘Death before Death’: On Hospices, Euthanasia, Alzheimer's, and on (Not) Knowing How to Dwindle.” In Western culture, Banner notes, the imagining and scripting of dying and death is found primarily in the hospice and the euthanasia movements. Both critique the medicalization of dying; both affirm the moral import of “a self-conscious narrative and agency” in dying. However, neither hospice nor the euthanasia movement has a word for the many whose lives are not drawing quickly to a close, but who are, instead, slowly dwindling away, lacking any apparent self-consciousness and agency. Ethnographic studies of elder-care and Alzheimer's patients that suggest the isolated conditions to which we have abandoned the elderly may go a long way toward explaining the appeal of the euthanasia script. Furthermore, such studies suggest that Alzheimer's patients may not lack as much agency as we normally assume.There is a great deal to be learned from this rich and fascinating study, originally delivered as the Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2013, perhaps as much or more than from Banner's brilliant 1999 Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (which is about as good a go at quandary ethics as one will find). In closing, let me raise two concerns. First, while not asking for more discussion of his methodology, one wonders whether Banner's use of particular ethnographic studies is a bit too convenient. In Banner's deft hands we easily see the contribution social anthropology can make to the Christian imagination. But of the many communities and moral practices that might be described by ethnographers, what criteria inform our selection of the studies to inform, deepen, and challenge our construction of a Christian imagination? And how do we determine whether some particular moral practices are appropriately criticized by the Christian imagination and whether others appropriately criticize, challenge, and correct the Christian imagination?Second, although Banner makes no claim that his list of everyday human experiences is exhaustive, one might wonder whether the list and his discussion of those experiences are too little informed by human biology, that social anthropology has not only troubled, but has eviscerated biology. To be sure, in a culture that waffles incoherently about whether or not biology is destiny, there is something refreshing about a work in everyday ethics in which, at most, references to sex are oblique, even when discussing conception and childbirth. Still, does biology have nothing to tell us about how we ought to live and die?One can well imagine how, with less deft handling than Banner's, the engagement of moral theology with social anthropology could result in something a good deal less therapeutic and evangelical than the conceptual development of the Christian imagination Banner presents. And less deft handling there is certain to be! Given this probability, I highly recommend that readers interested in this topic take a look at this superb book.