1Ethics, the Renaissance

Ethics, the Renaissance Introduction CHAPTER OUTLI N E Ethics, Science, and Values The Good News 1 Science and “Scientism” War, Terrorism, and Globalization New Determinants of Ethical Thinking Reinvigorating Ethics Wonder Justice, Class, and the Common Good Practical wisdom Power, Affluence, and Fertility Religion The Urgency for Ethical Action Regaining Our Ethical Sense Dire Consequences in the Absence of Ethics To follow the fate of ethics in the modern the philosophic study of the social and political Western world, take a trip to the library of Am- relations of the individual to his fellow citizens herst College. If you open the 1895 catalog of and to the State, to promote that moral thought- courses, you will discover that ethics held an fulness . which is the strongest element in true honored primacy in the curriculum. The entire patriotism.”1 first page of the “Course of Study” is devoted to In the thinking of that time, no one who was the course on ethics. It was taught by the presi- not sophisticated in moral-value questions could dent of the college (!) to seniors, and you can see wear the cap and gown. This was faithful to a long by the grand prose used in describing the course tradition. Probing the mysteries and intricacies of that it was enshrined as the capstone of the entire morality was long seen as the supreme challenge educational process: “The aim of the course is by for the giants of genius. Arthur Schopenhauer 3 4 ETHICS wrote in 1848 that “all philosophers in every age way. Legalism, however, would signal a deteriora- and land have blunted their wits on the question tion into needless bickering and nitpicking. of the moral.”2 So the 1895 Amherst catalog was So, too, scientism is the freighting of science heir to a distinguished tradition. with burdens it cannot bear and should not try to • But wait! Back to Amherst we go. By 1905, just carry. Science is strong on whats and hows, but P art ten years later, ethics had been dethroned from its weak on whys and oughts. Science gives awesome O front-page billing and was relegated to the nether powers, but it does not tell how to use them or ne regions of the catalog as an elective for sopho- whether they should be used at all. An ethics that mores . and thus even lowly sophomores could humbly and sensitively searches out the whys and avoid it. oughts of our gargantuan talents is the natural spouse of science. When the two are divorced, the separation is bloody. Take a look at the record of this fatal estrangement. It has been said that the prodigious powers Ethics, Science, and Values of science have created the end of the world and stored it in our nuclear silos while stuffing our Ethics is simply defined as the study of what is soils and foodstuffs with a hundred thousand good or bad for people and for the rest of nature. chemicals. Most of these chemicals have not The unseating of ethics was not just limited to been tested for safety, and it is estimated that as this one venerable college in Massachusetts. This many as half of them are toxic to humans.4 As revolution and denigration of the study of ethics we are out jogging for health, the groundwaters was the symptom of a cultural pandemic in which below may contain the ingredients of our bodily moral evaluation yielded place to an intoxicated undoing. Human breast milk often contains more trust in science as savior. As science and social toxins than are permissible in milk sold by dair- science were unearthing greater and more intrac- ies. And take note! Toxins are so ubiquitous and table moral-value questions, the systematic study permeating that some are even permitted by dair- of values (i.e., ethics) was moving into oblivion. A ies. Human bodies at death often contain enough chimeric quest for value-free objectivity opened toxins and metals to be classified as hazardous the door to a world where upstart cleverness waste, and sperm counts worldwide have fallen thrived and wisdom waned.3 by 50 percent since 1938. Whales and dolphins and birds and little fungi are among our victims.5 Science and “Scientism” Only science could double-baste the planet in Poor ethics. Even those who stubbornly plied this CO2, melting mighty glaciers and ancient ice path took to calling their books something like caps. The Science of Ethics in a brave effort to be taken Environmental scientist Duane Elgin predicts seriously. The devil here, of course, is not science. that in this twenty-first century, if current trends Science is a noble enterprise of human genius continue, we might drive 50 percent of the world’s that gives us gifts of comfort, ease, and longev- plant and animal species to extinction.6 (And re- ity that would make the Caesars of ancient Rome call that death is the end of life; extinction is the green with envy. Scientism is the culprit. “-ism” is end of birth.) The planet is now a coal mine with a nasty suffix. Legal, for example, is a wholesome all kinds of canaries dropping. Elgin also com- word, referring to the conscientious effort to sort pares our wiping out of other species on whom out the conflicts and possibilities of life in a fair we depend to rivets popping out of the wings of an 5 CHAPTER 1 / INTRODUCTION airplane. How many rivets can a plane lose before ordering, balancing, and organizing. But the right it crashes? Twenty-five percent of the drugs pre- brain is where compassion, kindness, nurturing, a scribed in the United States derive from wild or- synthesizing sense of the whole, intuition, meta- ganisms.7 Science has discovered cures hidden in phor, and, yes, humor and laughter flourish.9 The nature and enhanced our lives and longevity. An left brain, says Shlain, reasons, gives us speech and obscure fungus found in the mountains of Nor- order, but it hugs less and laughs less. An overly way produces a powerful suppressor of the hu- left-brained culture is lamed. It is less equipped man immune system, allowing transplants to take to do effective ethics since ethics involves both hold.8 As we destroy our natural environment, are right- and left-brain powers and becomes insipid we not behaving like a stupid fetus devouring the or worse if either dimension of human cognition womb that bears us? is slighted. • Ethics, the Renaissance New Determinants of Ethical Thinking Practical Wisdom. To put this talk of ethics dif- What a dear companion ethics would have been ferently, and in the way Aristotle would, ethics is on the long march of science. Ethics can be more nothing less or more than practical wisdom. Any- formally defined as the effort to bring sensitivity one who finds that description off-putting should and method to the discernment of moral value. remember that the alternative would be imprac- More simply yet, it is the struggle to figure out ticality and stupidity! Ethics is no more threaten- what is good and bad for us and for this gener- ing to science and human progress than is a light- ous host of an earth, tucked away in this privileged house to a mariner. The dumb things we do when little corner of the universe. Ethics is not a dicta- moral questions are not asked is proof of their tor. It is a mind-expanding, questioning art that necessity. Human affairs do not unfold in a moral brakes the blind momentum fueled by unasked vacuum. Yet even an intelligent, serious scholars questions and untested assumptions. like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. could write an article some years ago entitled “The Necessary Amoral- Wonder. This big-brained species with its humon- ity of Foreign Affairs.”10 Why would a serious and gous promise becomes deadly when we lose the sensitive scholar like George Kennan warn against ability to stop and look and see and say “Wow!” making “constant attempts at moral appraisal” in And “Wow,” after all, is the very first step of eth- international politics and warn against “making ics; wonder is the beginning of wisdom. Healthy ourselves slaves of the concepts of international ethics champions our essential capacity for awe. law and morality”? The problem is not that these Done well, ethics is the cure for squinting, nar- are immoral men; the problem is that they show rowed eyes fixed on texts and tasks while losing confusion about the nature of morality and the the ecstasy of wide-eyed wonder. It is the cure for role of ethics. In the half century following such an arid technopolis, where the prizing of beauty confused references to morality and ethics, we withers and where art and poetry lose their saving, have, while avoiding serious “attempts at moral life-expanding allure. The perception of beauty appraisal” and “the concepts of international law may be the crown jewel of human intelligence. and morality,” started brutal and unwinnable wars Surgeon and author Leonard Shlain argues that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; blocked in- as we grew in technical skills, culture lost its bal- ternational efforts to heal the environment; and ance, opting for “left brain” accents rather than failed to address world poverty seriously. “right brain,” the yang over against the yin. That Carol Bly compares our long-time aversion to makes sense since left-brain talents are in analysis, discourse on morality and the common good to 6 ETHICS sexual suppression and notes how our literature religious institutions as we know them today mirrors this eerie emptiness: serving a significant role in solving the environmental crisis.

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