Wariboko - Methods of Ethical Analysis

This book is a tutorial in ethical analysis and reasoning. Master of divinity students will be brought into the finer points of ethical analysis, of mastering the ins and outs of ethical methodology, by immersing themselves in critical social-ethical analyses of prominent scholars in the American academy. Students will be guided toward how to develop their own voice in social issues, hone their capability in social analysis, and critically engage the social sciences, history, philosophy, and literature as they embark on ethical analyses. There is no single way of teaching the methodology of social ethics and no single theory of ethics that satisfies all, therefore ethics and its methodology are better understood by enabling students to view the field through multiple windows. Simultaneously they will learn to view social reality from different perspectives. The seven chapters of this book explore the different ways American ethicists have interrogated their nations moral systems or crafted methods for understanding them.

The very first chapter is a distillation of what I believe is the most prevalent methodology of social ethics in the American academy. It paints a portrait of ethical methodology in the academy. This portrait of ethical methodology in the academy serves as a frame or space through which the thoughts of the five scholars in the remaining chapters are seen. In addition, the chapter provides a lens through which to see their orientations and to appropriate their perspectives.

Chapters investigate the work of five scholars: Jeffrey Stout, Max Stackhouse, Paul Tillich, Peter Paris, and Martha Nussbaum as exemplars of ethical methodology. In choosing these ethicists/theologians from a long list of well deserving scholars, I make no claims that they are the single most important ones to study. For our purposes, they represent five distinctive approaches to doing ethics and are representatives of different schools of thought. They were chosen also for the perspectives they bring on different social issues, trends, and events of our times. Indeed their works not only elucidate social issues, they also develop frameworks, procedures, and protocols for navigating and appreciating the diversity of voices, perspectives, experiences, and the kinds of knowledge that stake claims in the public square.

Above all, they were chosen because of the fundamentally different issues of ethical methodology they bring to the field and the public square. Each ethicist challenges students or scholars to examine how they interpret reality and the methods they bring to such an exercise. Thus, the works of these five scholars are part of an ongoing dialogue on methodology.

Some words of caution are in order at this juncture. None of the five scholars set out explicitly to write on ethical methodology. They had other tasks in mind, and whatever methodology I have culled from their works is based on my own reading and my interest in showing seminary students how every ethical analysis supervenes on or provides a window on methodology.

One other thread that holds these five scholars together is that their works demonstrate how ethical reasoning is not a form of scientific understanding. Each articulates different aspects of a coherent picture of ethical deliberation. Each is concerned with articulating the notion of the good human functioning that dynamically perfects or completes human life in a community.

To start, Jeffrey Stout examines the nature of public reason that guides ethical deliberation and moral judgment in a democratic public domain. Max Stackhouse argues that to understand globalization we must describe it with the concreteness of historical details, missing nothing of its Christian-spiritual shading and relevance. By this move, Stackhouse is not reducing ethics to history or historiography, but asking us to see ethics as a high type of vision of a particular trajectory of Christian narrative or as meeting of the new of todays globalization with the responsiveness and imagination of the prophets of New Jerusalem. The interpretation of Paul Tillichs ethics via the lens of emergence shows that the subtleties of complex ethical situations suggest we ought to reject calculative, systematic scientific understanding as the best method of ethical reasoning. The chapter on Peter Paris explicitly interprets his work from the perspective of the elimination of racism in the United States as necessary for good human functioning of all persons. Martha Nussbaum, working from an Aristotelian conception of the ethical, offers an alternative scientific understanding of ethical reasoning, the perceptive equilibrium . This is an equilibrium in which concrete perceptions hang beautifully together, both with one another and with agents general principles; an equilibrium that is always ready to reconstitute itself in response to the new.

The thoughts of these five scholars in chapters - are arranged in two parts. In the first part I group together the more philosophic/theological (abstract and generalized) approaches to ethical methodology. This means approaches to ethical methodology that are not to specific social issues or social location but can be applied to any issue or location that is at stake. Here I start with Stout with a generalized American focus on public reason; moving to Stackhouse in chapter with a global focus on the providential movement of history, and ending with Tillich (chapter ) on his global philosophic (metaphysics) argument and its connection to science of emergence. These three philosophic-theological arguments, as good as they, are not useful for all things and they tell us only half of the story. We need to complement them with more concrete methodological options. For the ethical methodology that I have laid out in chapter combines both philosophical-theological and concrete-particular approaches to ethics. The last two of the five chapters illustrate what the ethical methodology looks like in particular, concrete moral contexts. The first of these two chapters examines the concrete context of racism in the United States. The other shows how novelists attention to the particular and concrete enriches our understanding of the vision of the ethical methodology. In part two I bring together the works of Paris and Nussbaum in chapters and respectively. Paris reveals the relevance of the particular African-American narrative context and the experience of racism in the study of ethics in the United States. From Nussbaum we will learn the importance of particular literary approaches to ethics. This sequence is informed by the need to start the learning process from the very philosophical issues of public reason, to encompassing concerns of theology of history, to the benefits of multidisciplinary perspectives that science brings to social ethics, to the contextual issues of racism in the United States, and finally literature as particular aid to public reasoning in particular, concrete situations.