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Responsibility and Christian Ethics
The purpose of this book is to formulate a way of thinking about issues of power, moral identity, and ethical norms by developing a theory of responsibility from a specifically theological viewpoint; the author thereby makes clear the significance for Christian commitment of current reflection on moral responsibility. The concept of responsibility is relatively new in ethics, but the drastic extension of human power through various technological developments has lately thrown into question the way human beings conceive of themselves as morally accountable agents. It is this radical extension of power in our time which poses the need for a new paradigm of responsibility in ethics. Schweiker engages in an informed way with what is therefore a highly topical discussion. By developing a coherent theory of responsibility, and inquiring as to its source, the author demonstrates the unique contribution of Christian faith to ethics in our time.
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First published September 29, 1995
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About the author
William Schweiker
42 books19 followersWilliam Schweiker is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago. Born in Des Moines, Iowa (1953) he holds degrees from Simpson College, Duke University and also the University of Chicago. Besides teaching at Chicago, he has also been guest professor at Uppsala University and the University of Heidelberg. Schweiker´s writings engage theological and ethical questions attentive to global dynamics, comparative religious ethics, the history of ethics, and hermeneutical philosophy. Schweiker has published five books, numerous articles and award-winning essays, as well as edited and contributed to six volumes, including A Companion to Religious Ethics (2004), a comprehensive and innovative work in the field of comparative religious ethics. He has a forthcoming book on Christian faith and new humanisms and is also currently working on a volume Religious Ethics: An Introduction. On-going research is for a book on theological ethics and the integrity of life.
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November 9, 2022
William Schweiker’s creative defense of responsibility as the means to relate “systematically the dimensions of moral inquiry” (38) remains one of the most comprehensive and useful accounts of responsibility more than two decades after its publication. As Schweiker himself concedes, responsibility is an extremely complex topic in ethics; analytic philosophers interested in freedom, praise, and blame, Christian personalists, and ordinary people in their everyday lives use the term and reference the concept in a myriad of different, sometimes contradictory ways. In this book, Schweiker explores how a whole host of thinkers that includes Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Hans Jonas, and others conceive responsibility, particularly as it addresses the relation between value and power in an era when humans wield more power than ever before. Given this focus on power, and especially due to Schweiker’s own emphasis on responsibility as it relates to the non-human environment, this book remains a vital source of requisite moral reflection on the topic of responsibility and its relationship with Christianity.
In addition to the positive contributions Schweiker makes to the academic discourse on responsibility in this book, he also helpfully maps for his readers the current state of play in responsibility studies and the difficulties any theory of responsibility must address. With respect to the latter, Schweiker demonstrates how contemporary “beliefs about fulfillment, authenticity, and responsibility are at odds with each other. Given this, [modern human] societies are unable to address the problems posed by the reality of human power” and its relation to value (30). Schweiker explains how critics of responsibility claim that the demands required by moral responsibility undermine first, the importance of the search for fulfillment, “not defined in terms of obedience to social roles, cultural ideals, or the perfection of a certain set of virtues,” but rather as part of an effort to enhance the richness and complexity of an individual’s life (12). And second, critics also claim that responsibility threatens individual authenticity, “understood not in terms of fidelity to objective moral standards, values, or codes of behavior,” but rather in terms of commitment to one’s “true self” (12). In addition to fulfillment and authenticity, Schweiker similarly identifies a source of conflict between responsibility and moral pluralism, which, as part of a moral conviction that stipulates the importance of and need for pluralist moral outlooks, potentially threatens the commensurability of various moral attitudes. For some moral anti-realists, a robust commitment to pluralism results in moral relativism, which either contends that “moral principles are valid only for the cultures in which they are found” (soft relativism), or more stridently, that “no moral beliefs can be shown to be true or false” (hard relativism) (22).
To the first set of concerns about fulfillment and authenticity, Schweiker seeks an imperative of responsibility that incorporates transformed versions of authenticity and fulfillment that avoids subjectivism and therefore moral anarchy. He accomplishes with a focus on moral integrity, specified as the wholeness of life with respect to the commitment to respect and enhance life in all actions and relations with all others (human and non-human). Schweiker derives this object of commitment from the idea of God who, as the creator and sustainer of finite reality, respects and enhances all life, God’s creation. Humans can achieve wholeness insofar as they faithfully commit themselves to the moral project to respect and enhance all life, such that true fulfillment, now understood as wholeness, arises from this faithful commitment. Similarly, authenticity arises from sustained fidelity to the imperative to respect and enhance life. In other words, the duty to self is transformed into a duty to the moral project (the imperative of responsibility to respect and enhance life, specified below) from which one’s true self “appears.” Thus moral integrity, Schweiker claims, “is about the fulfillment of life but with respect to a commitment of self to be true to a specific moral project” (122), a project that imitates God’s own commitment to creation. Identity is therefore conferred via such faithful commitment to responsible existence.
To the second concern about pluralism, Schweiker develops a theory of what he calls hermeneutical realism, intended to “render productive the conflict between realism and anti-realism in ethics. It asserts that we neither invent morality nor simply discover it.” Rather, Schweiker claims with a nod toward Paul Ricoeur, “in ethics we invent in order to discover the truth of our moral condition.” (113-114). While moral value is multidimensional and diverse in different human contexts and while humans do invent moral ideas based on their experience of value and their perception of others, there is, he insists, a realistic dimension to moral reflection—we seek to understand the reality of a moral situation and how to act in specific situations of choice. Consequently, while humans invent rules and norms for social action that often differ, these efforts strive to make sense of basic moral facts. Schweiker’s own account of responsibility overcomes relativism in that it posits a moral imperative—“to respect and enhance the integrity of life before God” (125, author’s emphasis)—yet at the same time allows for what Schweiker calls descriptive relativism with respect to how moral values are understood and interpreted: “[descriptive relativism] insists on historical and pluralist consciousness in ethics,” in contrast to twentieth-century Christian moral theories, yet nevertheless “does not entail normative relativism” when it comes to what humans value (24). Ultimately, contra contemporary valorizations of authenticity and fulfillment and their implicit idolization of power as the sole moral value—“truthfulness to self places no constraints on the self and the quest for power since the concept of authenticity introduces no new commitments or values beyond that of fulfillment” (28)—Schweiker identifies God as the condition for the possibility of the imperative of responsibility. This is because God, conceived in the Christian tradition as the ultimate power, is committed to the flourishment of finite existence—in Schweiker’s terms, “the divine reality . . . [binds] its identity to the respect and enhancement of finite reality” (49). Thus “the idea of God,” Schweiker contends, radically “conjoins power and value.” If God is God as Christians believe, then power exercised for its own sake is neither the sole nor the ultimate moral value. God, then, “is the symbol in Christian faith for the unconditional source and possibility of moral responsibility,” and responsibility must therefore be “reformulated theocentrically” (208). Such is the central claim of this book.
There are many other important ideas presented in this book that I cannot account for here. These include, to name just a few, the concept of radical interpretation (in brief, the idea that moral self-criticism must have a moral end or object which in turn makes such self-reflection a moral imperative), Schweiker’s helpful elucidation of the dimensions of ethics, his proof to stress the need for theistic discourse in ethics, his modification of Hans Jonas’s account of responsibility, and his discussion of personhood and freedom. For a relatively short book, Schweiker addresses a wide sweep of the most critical topics in ethics today and lucidly pinpoints the most salient issues at stake in ethical discourse. He also carefully outlines and charitably critiques prominent Christian theories of responsibility from thinkers no less than Paul Tillich, Stanley Hauerwas, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Karl Barth, which makes this book especially helpful to students interested in the history of Christian ethics. In short, Schweiker’s text is perhaps essential for students and scholars committed to the centrality of a robust and multifaceted notion of responsibility in ethics, despite rampant skepticism about its relevance for contemporary morality.
In addition to the positive contributions Schweiker makes to the academic discourse on responsibility in this book, he also helpfully maps for his readers the current state of play in responsibility studies and the difficulties any theory of responsibility must address. With respect to the latter, Schweiker demonstrates how contemporary “beliefs about fulfillment, authenticity, and responsibility are at odds with each other. Given this, [modern human] societies are unable to address the problems posed by the reality of human power” and its relation to value (30). Schweiker explains how critics of responsibility claim that the demands required by moral responsibility undermine first, the importance of the search for fulfillment, “not defined in terms of obedience to social roles, cultural ideals, or the perfection of a certain set of virtues,” but rather as part of an effort to enhance the richness and complexity of an individual’s life (12). And second, critics also claim that responsibility threatens individual authenticity, “understood not in terms of fidelity to objective moral standards, values, or codes of behavior,” but rather in terms of commitment to one’s “true self” (12). In addition to fulfillment and authenticity, Schweiker similarly identifies a source of conflict between responsibility and moral pluralism, which, as part of a moral conviction that stipulates the importance of and need for pluralist moral outlooks, potentially threatens the commensurability of various moral attitudes. For some moral anti-realists, a robust commitment to pluralism results in moral relativism, which either contends that “moral principles are valid only for the cultures in which they are found” (soft relativism), or more stridently, that “no moral beliefs can be shown to be true or false” (hard relativism) (22).
To the first set of concerns about fulfillment and authenticity, Schweiker seeks an imperative of responsibility that incorporates transformed versions of authenticity and fulfillment that avoids subjectivism and therefore moral anarchy. He accomplishes with a focus on moral integrity, specified as the wholeness of life with respect to the commitment to respect and enhance life in all actions and relations with all others (human and non-human). Schweiker derives this object of commitment from the idea of God who, as the creator and sustainer of finite reality, respects and enhances all life, God’s creation. Humans can achieve wholeness insofar as they faithfully commit themselves to the moral project to respect and enhance all life, such that true fulfillment, now understood as wholeness, arises from this faithful commitment. Similarly, authenticity arises from sustained fidelity to the imperative to respect and enhance life. In other words, the duty to self is transformed into a duty to the moral project (the imperative of responsibility to respect and enhance life, specified below) from which one’s true self “appears.” Thus moral integrity, Schweiker claims, “is about the fulfillment of life but with respect to a commitment of self to be true to a specific moral project” (122), a project that imitates God’s own commitment to creation. Identity is therefore conferred via such faithful commitment to responsible existence.
To the second concern about pluralism, Schweiker develops a theory of what he calls hermeneutical realism, intended to “render productive the conflict between realism and anti-realism in ethics. It asserts that we neither invent morality nor simply discover it.” Rather, Schweiker claims with a nod toward Paul Ricoeur, “in ethics we invent in order to discover the truth of our moral condition.” (113-114). While moral value is multidimensional and diverse in different human contexts and while humans do invent moral ideas based on their experience of value and their perception of others, there is, he insists, a realistic dimension to moral reflection—we seek to understand the reality of a moral situation and how to act in specific situations of choice. Consequently, while humans invent rules and norms for social action that often differ, these efforts strive to make sense of basic moral facts. Schweiker’s own account of responsibility overcomes relativism in that it posits a moral imperative—“to respect and enhance the integrity of life before God” (125, author’s emphasis)—yet at the same time allows for what Schweiker calls descriptive relativism with respect to how moral values are understood and interpreted: “[descriptive relativism] insists on historical and pluralist consciousness in ethics,” in contrast to twentieth-century Christian moral theories, yet nevertheless “does not entail normative relativism” when it comes to what humans value (24). Ultimately, contra contemporary valorizations of authenticity and fulfillment and their implicit idolization of power as the sole moral value—“truthfulness to self places no constraints on the self and the quest for power since the concept of authenticity introduces no new commitments or values beyond that of fulfillment” (28)—Schweiker identifies God as the condition for the possibility of the imperative of responsibility. This is because God, conceived in the Christian tradition as the ultimate power, is committed to the flourishment of finite existence—in Schweiker’s terms, “the divine reality . . . [binds] its identity to the respect and enhancement of finite reality” (49). Thus “the idea of God,” Schweiker contends, radically “conjoins power and value.” If God is God as Christians believe, then power exercised for its own sake is neither the sole nor the ultimate moral value. God, then, “is the symbol in Christian faith for the unconditional source and possibility of moral responsibility,” and responsibility must therefore be “reformulated theocentrically” (208). Such is the central claim of this book.
There are many other important ideas presented in this book that I cannot account for here. These include, to name just a few, the concept of radical interpretation (in brief, the idea that moral self-criticism must have a moral end or object which in turn makes such self-reflection a moral imperative), Schweiker’s helpful elucidation of the dimensions of ethics, his proof to stress the need for theistic discourse in ethics, his modification of Hans Jonas’s account of responsibility, and his discussion of personhood and freedom. For a relatively short book, Schweiker addresses a wide sweep of the most critical topics in ethics today and lucidly pinpoints the most salient issues at stake in ethical discourse. He also carefully outlines and charitably critiques prominent Christian theories of responsibility from thinkers no less than Paul Tillich, Stanley Hauerwas, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Karl Barth, which makes this book especially helpful to students interested in the history of Christian ethics. In short, Schweiker’s text is perhaps essential for students and scholars committed to the centrality of a robust and multifaceted notion of responsibility in ethics, despite rampant skepticism about its relevance for contemporary morality.
December 10, 2018
I first read this work a quarter century ago. Ostensibly difficult simply because it is erudite, this work is quite clear, learned, practical, and helpful. It refers to a particular interval of scholarship that has, perhaps, now faded a tad but for me it well deserves careful interactive reading. At my advanced age, summarizing it is difficult because even a brief precise requires defining extensively from the literature. The use of writers like Charles Taylor and Gadamer make reading intelligible but the narrative bubbles into many arenas making for a brilliant overview of ethical reflection.
Encyclopedic but straightforward, positive but open, in his presentation, Prof. Schweiker is a fine mentor and pathfinder in this lovely work. I highly recommend this work.
The entire series is massive and unfortunately individual volumes are often expensive and, thus, difficult to obtain. The books are not going to be in our public libraries.
Encyclopedic but straightforward, positive but open, in his presentation, Prof. Schweiker is a fine mentor and pathfinder in this lovely work. I highly recommend this work.
The entire series is massive and unfortunately individual volumes are often expensive and, thus, difficult to obtain. The books are not going to be in our public libraries.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews