Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change Series I. Culture and Values, Volume 12 Ethics at the Crossroads Volume II Personalist Ethics and Human Subjectivity Edited by George F. McLean The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy 1 Copyright © 1996 by The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Gibbons Hall B-20 620 Michigan Avenue, NE Washington, D.C. 20064 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Personalist ethics and human subjectivity. vol. II of: ethics at the crossroad / edited by George F. McLean. p.cm. — (Ethics at the crossroads ; vol. 2) Cultural heritage and contemporary change. George F. McLean, Gen. ed.; Series I. Culture and values ; vol. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Christian ethics. 2. Subjectivity. 3. Personalism. I. McLean, George F. II. Series. III. Series: Cultural heritage and contemporary change. Series I, Culture and values ; vol. 12. BJ1012.E8935 1995 vol. 2 92-13188 [BJ1251] 170s—dc21 CIP [170] ISBN 1-56518-024-0 (pbk.) 3 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Part I. Subjectivity and Ethics: Transcending Objectivity 1. Affectivity: The Power Base of Moral Behavior 9 by Sebastian A. Samay 2. A Phenomenology of Moral Sensibility: Moral Emotion 49 by John D. Caputo 3. Conscience as Principle of Moral Action 71 by Austin Fagothy 4. Aesthetic Sensitivity as Completion of Ethical Freedom 91 by George F. McLean Part II. Ethics in the Human Context 5. Psychological and Psychosocial Factors in Ethical Commitment 123 by William L. Kelly 6. Process Thought in Ethics 151 by Eulalio R. Baltazar 7. Process and Normative Ethics 169 by John B. Cobb 8. Ethics and Social Values: Scheler and Ricoeur 179 by Robert D. Sweeney 9. Ethics and a Secular Christianity 207 by Paul M. Van Buren 10. Absurdity versus Ambiguity: Reflections on the Ethical Views of Sartre and Camus 219 by Joseph J. Kockelmans Part III. Ethics a Religious Context 11. The Ethical Person as Source of Religious Insight 253 by Maurice Nédoncelle 12. On the Integrity of Morality in Relation to Religion 271 by David Schindler 5 13. Is There a Christian Ethics? 295 by James M. Gustafson 14. Ethics, Religion and Christian Faith 303 by John B. Cobb 15. Ethics and Moral Theology 335 by Charles Curran 16. Christianity and Moral Values: A Clarification of Their Status and Priority, 351 Hierarchy and Application by Bernard Häring Appendix: Contemplation as Fulfillment of the Human Person 365 by Gerald F. Stanley Acknowledgements 6 Introduction George F. McLean The first volume of this study was focused upon the objective dimension of ethics. The introduction to that volume noted that to understand and direct human action it is necessary to comprehend the human person as part of nature and as being-in-the-world. One's powers of knowledge and feeling are sensitive to changes in one's surroundings and respond to these as promotive or destructive, that is, as good or bad. But an intensively self-centered, self-enclosed, and solipsistic human life would be inert and meaningless, insufficiently alive to be ethically engaged. We are social beings, born of others, developing with others, and depending upon our community for life, sustenance, learning and expression. Indeed, one might initially summarize the content of ethics as the project of emerging out of the self as the center and unique object of one's concern. Nonetheless, in order to be ethical it is not enough to be other-directed. The tornado that is about to devour a house in the prairie, the avalanche crashing down upon a mountain chalet are, in a sense, other-directed, but the relation is not ethical. As a member of a family or larger community, the person must also decide and will freely but responsibly. This is precisely where ethics, as the correct direction of one's free action, is focused. It is the reason why the person has always been the subject of prolonged and careful education. Basically, this is to recognize that one's internal character or subjectivity has always been at the heart of the objective orientation of ethics discussed in volume I, Normative Ethics and Objective Reason. This was central to Plato's project for educating future leaders for the polis. It was the essential principle for the division of the material and spiritual levels of life in Aristotle's De Anima. It was the key to the notion of synderesis, which was intensified in the schools of Western Christian spirituality and it has received predominant attention in modern times, especially the last half century. Subjectivity, as that which enables the object to be, not merely the result of action, but consciously known and responsibly willed always has been at the heart of the project of ethics and, indeed, of mankind. From this it can be seen that any development in the appreciation of subjectivity, as well as any advance in the quality of the self-awareness this implies, would radically transform the character of ethics. This can be sensed in the shift in sensibilities from one generation to another, but it stands out at those points at which a radically new level of self-awareness is achieved. One of these was the advent of Christianity as a call to resurrection and new life; it was the task of each person and community to internalize and realize this in his or her lifetime. This not only brought out the eternal implications of the ethical. Correlatively, it radically heightened the intensity of drama of the internal struggle to overcome selfishness in order to live more fully one's personal relations in the image of the relation of Christ to the Father in the Spirit of love. The direction: to be holy as the heavenly Father is holy, moved the emphasis beyond the Greek attention to polis and law and focused it upon person and love. The modern age has been marked by an intensification of this sense of the subject as the source of knowledge. By attending carefully to ideas and their upon the sensible origins through Lock's "historical plain method" or upon the order of clear and distinct ideas through Descartes' mathematical method, the search for a unified science pushed forward with remarkable success. Inevitably, this caused and reflected a new and ever more intense attention to the role of the subject. 7 As enriched by Kantian formalism and Hegel's idealistic dialectic, this became an intricately detailed articulation of reality. Nevertheless, this notion of the subject was restricted to being the source of the epistemological object. The concern with what is known hid, or distracted attention from, the subject; proposals by Pascal and Kierkegaard that one attend to what is proper to the subject were submerged by the concern to construct a clear and certain system of knowledge, a science. Hence, it was of great moment when, in this century, Edmund Husserl developed a method focused upon intentionality itself as the core orientation of the person to meaning and the good. This is to be made manifest or brought into the light; as `phe' expresses light, this would be termed `phe-nomen- ology'. Through the application of this method access was opened to the uniquely self-conscious, free and responsible life of the subject. Gabriel Marcel helps to bring out the character of this step. To restrict knowledge to objects leaves unattended the life proper to the subject. But to attempt to correct this by making the proper life of the subject itself into an object of knowledge would once again miss the distinctive subjectivity of knowledge, and so on. This can be remedied only by moving beyond the subject- object structure of objective knowledge in order to attend to the subject not as the termination of an act of knowing, but as its distinctive point of origin. This is the subject as the point at which being emerges as intentional and evolves as self-conscious, and thus as self-directive and free. This new sensitivity to the being of the subject has been brought out particularly in this century; its implications are immense. Subjects treated as scientific and technological objects can be written into laws and structures, state policies, production systems and educational objectives. But such treatment is not appropriate for human persons taken precisely as subjects; indeed, they would be oppressed by it. Hence, the more the technological structuring of our life succeeds, the more it generates a sense of being threatened on the part of persons. This is not a matter of mere external reaction against systems; if the subject as such is not alive, alert, free and creative, the genius needed to develop the various economic, political and social systems and to adjust their structures begins to fail from within. Systems in which success is measured only in terms of efficiency become wasteful. Moreover, stagnant structures, which as such oppress freedom and creativity, generate dissatisfaction in proportion to the rise in the degree of sensitivity to personal subjectivity. Hence, in retrospect, it is possible now to see how scientific Marxism could be designed as a total objective philosophy of life in the last century, and why it was doomed to fail in this century precisely to the degree that it was applied with its own objective scientific rigor. What emerges from recognition of this new dimension of human sensibility, namely, attention to subjectivity, is a project for the development of ethics. Its task will not be to supplant the objective reference of human action or its evaluation: hence, the work done in volume I, Normative Ethics and Objective Reason, remains essential, indeed foundational.