Ethics and Moral Reasoning E-Book

C. Ben Mitchell

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 147

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Gay marriage. Embryonic stem cell research. Abortion. Such generation-defining issues loom large in our society and demand a thoughtful response. Helping Christians to interact with our morally confused world, Ben Mitchell challenges the relativism so rampant in the West today. In addition to examining the history of ethical reflection from Moses to Immanuel Kant, Mitchell also incorporates the voices of current Christian ethicists such as Stanley Hauerwas and N. T. Wright, proposing a holistic approach to ethics—one based on biblical principles, historical views, today's leaders, and Christian virtues.

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“I cannot think of a subject more important to this generation than ethics or a person better to treat it than C. Ben Mitchell. I’m very happy to recommend this welcome and important volume.”

Eric Metaxas,New York Times best-selling author, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

“In a world filled with test-tube babies, living wills, and drone warfare, Christian ethics can seem like quicksilver, with positions irrelevant almost as soon as they are articulated, due to fast-changing circumstances. This book demonstrates why and how every believer is called to Christ-conformed ethical reasoning. C. Ben Mitchell, one of the most significant Christian ethicists of our age, shares C. S. Lewis’s gift for communicating complex issues in easily understood terms. This book brims with insight that transcends the ethical squabbles of any given moment. Most importantly, this book shows us how to be moral without surrendering to mere moralism by rooting and grounding our ethics in the gospel that saves.”

Russell D. Moore, President, The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; author, Tempted and Tried

“C. Ben Mitchell has written what a volume appearing in a student’s guide series should be. Both concise and precise, his guide to ethics and moral reasoning within the Christian tradition will give readers a sense of the questions they should explore and the resources to use in that exploration. For students whose cultural context leaves them adrift in a sea of conflicting moral claims, Mitchell is a seasoned, reliable navigator.”

Gilbert Meilaender, Senior Research Professor of Theology, Valparaiso University

“C. Ben Mitchell has written a concise, surefooted guide to ethics and moral reasoning from an evangelical perspective that takes both the Scriptures and the history of ethical discussion seriously. The text is written with admirable clarity and scholarly competence. For Mitchell, the triune God’s divine design for human life is our flourishing as persons who are members of a moral community. This short book contributes to that flourishing, and I commend it enthusiastically.”

Graham A. Cole, Dean and Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“Every beginning student of ethics should rejoice at the publication of this book. Mitchell excels at describing our complicated ethical landscape without sacrificing depth or accuracy. I wish this introduction had been available when I was an undergraduate!”

Christina Bieber Lake, Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English, Wheaton College

~SERIES ENDORSEMENTS~

“Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition promises to be a very important series of guides—aimed at students—intended both to recover and instruct regarding the Christian intellectual tradition.”

Robert B. Sloan, President, Houston Baptist University

“Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition is an exciting series that will freshly introduce readers to the riches of historic Christian thought and practice. As the modern secular academy struggles to reclaim a semblance of purpose, this series demonstrates why a deeply rooted Christian worldview offers an intellectual coherence so badly needed in our fragmented culture. Assembling a formidable cohort of respected evangelical scholars, the series promises to supply must-read orientations to the disciplines for the next generation of Christian students.”

Thomas Kidd, Distinguished Professor of History, Baylor University

“This new series is exactly what Christian higher education needs to shore up its intellectual foundations for the challenges of the coming decades. Whether students are studying in professedly Christian institutions or in more traditionally secular settings, these volumes will provide a firm basis from which to withstand the dismissive attitude toward biblical thinking that seems so pervasive in the academy today. These titles will make their way onto the required reading lists for Christian colleges and universities seeking to ensure a firm biblical perspective for students, regardless of discipline. Similarly, campus pastors on secular campuses will find this series to be an invaluable bibliography for guiding students who are struggling with coalescing their emerging intellectual curiosity with their developing faith.”

Carl E. Zylstra, Former President, Dordt College; Executive Director, Association of Reformed Colleges and Universities

RECLAIMING THE CHRISTIAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

David S. Dockery, series editor

CONSULTING EDITORS

Hunter Baker

Timothy George

Niel Nielson

Philip G. Ryken

Michael J. Wilkins

John D. Woodbridge

OTHER RCIT VOLUMES

The Great Tradition of Christian Thinking, David S. Dockery and Timothy George

The Liberal Arts, Gene C. Fant Jr.

Political Thought, Hunter Baker

Literature, Louis Markos

Philosophy, David K. Naugle

Christian Worldview, Philip G. Ryken

Ethics and Moral Reasoning: A Student’s Guide

Copyright © 2013 by C. Ben Mitchell

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Simplicated Studio

First printing 2013

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture references marked NEB are from The New English Bible © The Delegates of the Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1961, 1970.

Scripture quotations marked NJPS are from Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, © 1985.

Scripture references marked PHILLIPS are from The New Testament in Modern English, translated by J. B. Phillips ©1972 by J. B. Phillips. Published by Macmillan.

Scripture quotations marked TEV are taken from the Good News Bible in Today’s English Version – Second Edition, Copyright ©1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3767-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3768-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3769-1 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3770-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchell, C. Ben.

Ethics and moral reasoning : a student’s guide / C. Ben Mitchell, David S. Dockery, series editor.

1 online resource. -- (Reclaiming the Christian intellectual tradition)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-3768-4 (pdf) — ISBN 978-1-4335-3769-1 (mobi) — ISBN 978-1-4335-3770-7 (epub) — ISBN 978-1-4335-3767-7 (tp)

1. Christian ethics.  I. Title.

BJ1151

241—dc23

2013032903

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To Nancy, the wife of my youth and the most ethical person I have ever known.

CONTENTS

   Series Preface

   Author’s Preface

   Acknowledgments

   1   The Challenges of a Relativist World

   2   The History of Moral Reasoning, Part 1

   3   The History of Moral Reasoning, Part 2

   4   Enlightenment Ethics

   5   Evangelical Ethics

   6   Using the Bible in Moral Decision Making

   Conclusion

   Appendix

   Questions for Reflection

SERIES PREFACE

RECLAIMING THE CHRISTIAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

The Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series is designed to provide an overview of the distinctive way the church has read the Bible, formulated doctrine, provided education, and engaged the culture. The contributors to this series all agree that personal faith and genuine Christian piety are essential for the life of Christ followers and for the church. These contributors also believe that helping others recognize the importance of serious thinking about God, Scripture, and the world needs a renewed emphasis at this time in order that the truth claims of the Christian faith can be passed along from one generation to the next. The study guides in this series will enable us to see afresh how the Christian faith shapes how we live, how we think, how we write books, how we govern society, and how we relate to one another in our churches and social structures. The richness of the Christian intellectual tradition provides guidance for the complex challenges that believers face in this world.

This series is particularly designed for Christian students and others associated with college and university campuses, including faculty, staff, trustees, and other various constituents. The contributors to the series will explore how the Bible has been interpreted in the history of the church, as well as how theology has been formulated. They will ask: How does the Christian faith influence our understanding of culture, literature, philosophy, government, beauty, art, or work? How does the Christian intellectual tradition help us understand truth? How does the Christian intellectual tradition shape our approach to education? We believe that this series is not only timely but that it meets an important need, because the secular culture in which we now find ourselves is, at best, indifferent to the Christian faith, and the Christian world—at least in its more popular forms—tends to be confused about the beliefs, heritage, and tradition associated with the Christian faith.

At the heart of this work is the challenge to prepare a generation of Christians to think Christianly, to engage the academy and the culture, and to serve church and society. We believe that both the breadth and the depth of the Christian intellectual tradition need to be reclaimed, revitalized, renewed, and revived for us to carry forward this work. These study guides will seek to provide a framework to help introduce students to the great tradition of Christian thinking, seeking to highlight its importance for understanding the world, its significance for serving both church and society, and its application for Christian thinking and learning. The series is a starting point for exploring important ideas and issues such as truth, meaning, beauty, and justice.

We trust that the series will help introduce readers to the apostles, church fathers, Reformers, philosophers, theologians, historians, and a wide variety of other significant thinkers. In addition to well-known leaders such as Clement, Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards, readers will be pointed to William Wilberforce, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, Johann Sebastian Bach, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, George Washington Carver, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Michael Polanyi, Henry Luke Orombi, and many others. In doing so, we hope to introduce those who throughout history have demonstrated that it is indeed possible to be serious about the life of the mind while simultaneously being deeply committed Christians. These efforts to strengthen serious Christian thinking and scholarship will not be limited to the study of theology, scriptural interpretation, or philosophy, even though these areas provide the framework for understanding the Christian faith for all other areas of exploration. In order for us to reclaim and advance the Christian intellectual tradition, we must have some understanding of the tradition itself. The volumes in this series will seek to explore this tradition and its application for our twenty-first-century world. Each volume contains a glossary, study questions, and a list of resources for further study, which we trust will provide helpful guidance for our readers.

I am deeply grateful to the series editorial committee: Timothy George, John Woodbridge, Michael Wilkins, Niel Nielson, Philip Ryken, and Hunter Baker. Each of these colleagues joins me in thanking our various contributors for their fine work. We all express our appreciation to Justin Taylor, Jill Carter, Allan Fisher, Lane Dennis, and the Crossway team for their enthusiastic support for the project. We offer the project with the hope that students will be helped, faculty and Christian leaders will be encouraged, institutions will be strengthened, churches will be built up, and, ultimately, that God will be glorified.

Soli Deo Gloria

David S. Dockery

Series Editor

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

WHY ETHICS MATTERS

Few people need to be convinced of the importance of ethics. We live in a tragically flawed world where we are confronted daily with moral failures. People lie, commit adultery, steal from their employers, and pollute the environment. At the same time, we all know people whose lives reflect personal integrity, sacrificial love, and unimpeachable virtue. We know that ethics is important at all levels of society. Whether presidents or members of Congress, CEOs or their employees, doctors or nurses, teachers or pupils, or parents or children, we all believe it is important to make good moral decisions, to be ethical people.

What might take some convincing is the notion that we could ever come to common conclusions about ethics. There is deep skepticism in our culture about moral agreement. In his study of the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults ages eighteen to twenty-three years old, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith found that

emerging adults have been raised in a world involving certain outlooks and assumptions that they have clearly absorbed and that they in turn largely affirm and reinforce. Stated in philosophical terms, their world has undergone a significant epistemic and axiological breakdown. It is difficult if not impossible in this world that has come to be to actually know anything objectively real or true that can be rationally maintained in a way that might require people actually to change their minds or lives. Emerging adults know quite well how they personally were raised in their families, and they know fairly well how they generally “feel” about things. But they are also aware that all knowledge and value are historically conditioned and culturally relative. And they have not, in our view, been equipped with the intellectual and moral tools to know what to do with that fact. So most simply choose to believe and live by whatever subjectively feels “right” to them, and to try not to seriously assess, much less criticize, anything else that anyone else has chosen to believe, feel, or do. Whether or not they use these words to say it, for most emerging adults, in the end, it’s all relative. One thought or opinion isn’t more defensible than any other. One way of life cannot claim to be better than others. Some moral beliefs may personally feel right, but no moral belief can rationally claim to be really true, because that implies criticizing or discounting other moral beliefs. And that would be rude, presumptuous, intolerant, and unfeeling. This is what we mean when we use the terms crisis and breakdown. . . .

Many know there must be something more, and they want it. Many are uncomfortable with their inability to make trust statements and moral claims without killing them with the death of a thousand qualifications. But they do not know what to do about that, given the crisis of truth and values that has destabilized their culture. And so they simply carry on as best they can, as sovereign, autonomous, empowered individuals who lack a reliable basis for any particular conviction or direction by which to guide their lives.1

This state of affairs sounds dire because it is. This is the world many of my students inhabit. And, in most cases, it’s not their fault. They have inherited this worldview from social media, schoolmates, pop culture, and sometimes even from their parents. They intuit that this is not the way it’s supposed to be, but it’s the only way they know. When they look to my own Boomer generation, they do not see many attractive alternatives.

Because the culture is largely relativistic, we also often trade ethics for legal compliance. If someone asks, “Is it ethical to do X?,” it is likely that someone will respond, “The policy [or the law] says do X.” Ethical right and wrong are confused with legal right and wrong. But to comply with law and/or policy is not necessarily to act ethically. The law or policy could be wrong. Just because what Hitler did was legal in Nazi Germany does not mean it was right. Just because chattel slavery was legal in the South in the 1860s did not make it right to own slaves. Sometimes it is right to disobey the law. Sometimes we are morally obligated to quit a job or blow the whistle over immoral policies.

These are some of the issues we will explore in this volume. The terrain is not always easy to traverse, but perseverance has its rewards. As a great Catholic thinker, A. G. Sertillanges, once said, “Truth serves only its slaves.”2

THE LANGUAGE OF ETHICS

Before we go further, I should point out that like every other discipline, ethics and moral reasoning have their own language. Ethics and moral reasoning fit in the category called “axiology.” The big three questions of philosophy include metaphysics (What is?), epistemology (How do you know?), and axiology (What is value? and What is valuable?).

Axiological questions may apply to economics if we ask how we determine value monetarily. Axiology may also apply to art if we explore aesthetic value. Axiology applies to ethics when we think about moral value. So if metaphysics asks, “What is truth?,” axiology asks, “What is beauty?” and “What is good?” The true, the good, and the beautiful are important subjects indeed.

This book is a guide to thinking about the good. We can think about the good in several ways. First, we may describe good behavior, decisions, or attitudes. Descriptive ethics attempts merely to describe a certain moral state of affairs. For instance, “Dr. Jack Kevorkian ended the life of at least 130 patients through physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.” This statement merely describes Dr. Kevorkian’s behavior without making a judgment about whether it was good or bad, right or wrong.

Prescriptive or normative ethics takes us into the realm of words such as right, wrong, good, bad, ought, ought not, should, should not, obligated, and nonobligated