Christian Ethics: WE503 Christian Ethics: A Biblical ... · Theories of Obligation - pt. 2 Christian Ethics: A Biblical Theology of Morality This is lesson five in our series and

Christian Ethics:

Transcript - WE503 Christian Ethics: A Biblical Theology of Morality© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

1 of 12

LESSON 05 of 23WE503

Theories of Obligation - pt. 2

Christian Ethics: A Biblical Theology of Morality

This is lesson five in our series and in this lesson we’re going to continue our discussion of Theories of Obligation. Please recall that our purpose is to answer questions about obligation from a philosophical perspective, and then to do the same about Value Theory. When we have completed that task, we will go on and answer the same set of questions doing it from a Biblical Theological perspective so that we can come up with a Biblical Theology of Obligation and a Biblical Theology of Value. We have indicated that Theories of Obligation can be divided into two categories. The first is Deontological Theory of Obligation. We cover that last time in the lecture. We indicated that in Deontology, the main thesis is that other than consequences are relevant to the rightness or wrongness of an act. We found that this was handled under two sub-thesis. In the first one, consequences are totally irrelevant to the rightness or wrongness of an act or a rule. In the second sub-thesis, consequences are partially relevant to the rightness or wrongness of an act or a rule but not solely relevant. The second major category into which theories of obligation can be divided is commonly called Consequentialism and/or Teleological Theories of Obligation. Consequentialism has become a very dominant viewpoint in the recent past, especially through the writings of Richard Rorty and Richard Bernstein. This material as we cover it will touch a little bit more from a historical perspective then from the contemporary perspective.

All forms of Consequentialist ethics basically assert that the rightness or wrongness of an act or rule is limited solely to the consequences of the act or rule. That means in general terms, that no act is right or wrong in itself. And that you can never evaluate an act, independent of the consequences of the act. In any kind of consequential system you must have some criteria that you apply in order to determine whether not the consequences of the act live up to a particular criteria. Let me illustrate that in the thought of Joseph Fletcher. For Joseph Fletcher the rightness or wrongness of an act is completely determined by the consequences of the

Dr. James M. Grier, Th.D

Experience: Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Theology at Grand Rapids

Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Transcript - WE503 Christian Ethics: A Biblical Theology of Morality © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


2 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

act. And for Joseph Fletcher the basis to evaluate consequences is love. Therefore history of obligation would sound something like this, in every moral choice it is your duty to maximize love and minimize pain for all persons affected by your moral act. You can see that Joseph Fletcher has an absolute. His absolute is love. Somehow you must be able to quantify it because you have to use the words maximal and minimal and you must be able to predict how much love will actually come to pass as a consequence of your moral choice. Now all forms of consequential ethics work in this way, really doesn’t matter what the intrinsic value they have – love, pleasure, happiness, self-fulfillment – all of them operate by indicating that the rightness or wrongness of an act or rule is extrinsic to the act or rule and intrinsic to the consequences of the act or rule.

The criterion used to evaluate the consequences usually constitutes the intrinsic value of that particular consequential system. Now it’s important to understand that in my judgment, every ethical theory of obligation I have ever encountered can be classified as either Deontological- subset one or subset two, or it can be classified as a consequential system. This means that in ministry as well as in education, one of the first things one tries to learn when one is talking to other people is what is the basis for obligation within the framework of their ethical understanding? The simplicity of having but two categories to deal with certainly simplifies the task of making these kinds of judgments. The form of Consequentialism I wish to discuss with you is commonly called Utilitarianism. In Utilitarianism, usually the viewpoint goes something like this. You ought to choose that act which maximizes the most intrinsic value for the most amount of people. For you see as soon as you talk about maximizing, minimizing consequences, you must ask a question, for whom? There are those with egoistic in their understanding of Consequentialism and say maximize the value for the agent of the action and forget the other people. So you end up saying in every moral choice I ought to do that which is in my own best interest regardless, if it’s in the best interest of other people or not. Now in very practical terms there is great deal of people in Western culture who act from that premise of ethical egoism. But as far as finding any kind of cultural approval for that notion, that hasn’t happened. And therefore saying it is only the consequences on the agent of the act has generally been rejected as an acceptable consequential theory of obligation.



3 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

The second way you could do it would be to argue from an altruistic stance. That you predict the consequences of the act on everyone affected by the act except the agent of the act and if everybody gets good consequences and the agent gets bad consequences then it really doesn’t matter because the rightness or wrongness of an act excludes the consequences to the agent. You could imagine how well that view would be accepted in Christendom today. The more normal way is to be a universal Utilitarian, where you basically say that you must predict the consequences of the moral action on the agent of the act as well as on everyone affected by the action. So that is, in the general sense that we are most interested in dealing with Universal Utilitarianism. Universals simply indicating to us that it’s a form of consequentialism in which the agent plus everyone affected by the act is involved in the evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of the act.

Another general consideration that’s important to think about is the fact that all consequential systems must have at least one intrinsic value. Something that is good in and of itself which becomes the criterion for the evaluation of consequences. Now, intrinsic value is something we talked a lot about but definitionally it is very hard to get your hand on. There are things that we value because they lead to other things. For instance, in my wallet right now, I have a number of pieces of plastic. These pieces of plastic give me a lot of latitude and a lot of freedom in the marketplace. If I concluded that these pieces of plastic are good in themselves and that the money that stands behind it is good in itself, then you would say that I was a miser, that from me money wasn’t end value. It wasn’t a means to something else when I got it, that’s what I was after and if I could sit down in it like Scrooge Mc Duck does and throw up over my head and swim in it I would find that to be the happiest moment of my life. Now most of us would conclude that those pieces of plastic or those dollar bills and $10 bills are instrumental values. They get their value by what they lead to and therefore there is a distinction between instrumental values and intrinsic values.

There are derivative values that get their value by what they lead to, and there are end values that are non-derivative that when you have received that value that’s what you were after, and it doesn’t lead to anything else. Now in every consequential system, there has to be at least one end value, and that end value is the basis whereby you evaluate the maximalization or the minimalization of your intrinsic value. Now of course this varies systems by system. If you’re a hedonist then indeed your end



4 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

value is pleasure. And you will make your moral judgments on the basis of which moral choice will maximize the most pleasure for the most amount of people and pleasure here needs to be carefully thought about. We shouldn’t just put it into a playboy philosophy or things like that. They can very often be a refined notion, yet nevertheless it is a consequential way of doing ethics. You might be eudemonistic that kind of Utilitarian. Eudemonia is the Greek word for happiness, and therefore you would say that your intrinsic value is happiness. And you would judge a right act to be an act that maximizes happiness for all the persons affected by the act including the agent of the act. Very often, I think that we have actually turned Christianity into a Utilitarian Eudemonistic approach, when it comes to discussing the value of God.

Very often I get the impression as I read tracks, as I listen to sermons that are psychologically based that God is an instrumental value in the Christian’s life and the end value to which belief in God leads is personal happiness and satisfaction, and therefore God becomes a means to an end. Obeying God becomes a means to an end. Going to church, worshiping in the community of the redeemed is a means to an end. Most certainly, we have had a great impact in Western Christianity from consequentialistic forms of ethics.

The third normal position would be called Agapistic utilitarianism. In this position, “good” is the intrinsic value. In either of these three positions, what you argue is an act is right if it brings the intrinsic value, and negatively if it prevents bringing the intrinsic disvalue. For hedonism, the opposite of pleasure is pain, in Eudemonism the opposite of happiness is unhappiness, in Agapistic utilitarianism the opposite of good is evil. An act therefore would be wrong if it brings intrinsic disvalue or to state that negatively would be wrong if it prevents bringing intrinsic value. Now those are the general principles that are involved in all forms of Consequentialist ethics. What I’d like to do next is discuss with you just two of these systems a little bit, get familiar with how they operate, what procedures they use, how they justify themselves and ask some basic questions about them and see if this approach is the right approach for us to think about doing Christian ethics.

First of all let’s talk about the procedure, and in particular, we will focus eventually on hedonism. The first thing one has to do in a moral choice is to specify all the alternatives that are open to us. Once we have identified the alternatives that we could choose then



5 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

we must predict the consequence of each of these alternatives. We must ask how much probable pleasure or happiness or how much probable pain or unhappiness will come to me and to all those affected by my doing this possible act. When we have predicted these consequences then we compare the consequences of each possible act and determine which act leads to the greater good for the greatest amount of people. Now frankly, that all sounds very nice, and it sounds like it might be easy to do. But by the time we work through the system going to find it very difficult to do, cause it’s very hard to actually come up with units to maximize and to minimize and to make those kinds of judgments. Therefore in the procedure we have just described, the general maxim that stands behind all the forms of utilitarian ethics is this: the act which maximizes intrinsic value and minimizes intrinsic disvalue is the act that we are morally obliged to do. To choose any other act would be to act immoral. Please always understand that when we talk about the Theory of Obligation we are always talking about something which tells you what you ought to do, what constitutes your duty, what your obligation is. It isn’t good advice. It isn’t somehow to give you some guidance in difficult circumstances; it is intended as something that will enable you to determine what is right and wrong in the situation of moral choice. Now of course as we have described this procedure, you can see that this can be a time consuming. If you have to come up with a mental ability to write down each alternative and to predict the consequences of each sometimes you’re going to be paralyzed trying to use the system. Of course, it’s very easy to argue that one should use the system for a while. You can make very quick analogies between the present circumstance and former circumstances and not take as long to make these kinds of judgment.

What procedure basically is causing us to have to conclude, is that no act is morally right or wrong in itself. If you happen to be a Christian theist and you hold consequentialist ethics then you would have to hold that having more gods than Yahweh, leads to bad consequences and that’s what makes it wrong. It’s not wrong in itself, it’s wrong because the consequences that leads to. You would have to conclude in the seventh commandment, that no adultery is a command that is based on the fact that when you commit adultery intrinsic disvalue goes to people and what makes adultery wrong isn’t the act itself. It is the consequences of the act. And therefore consequences are solely relevant to the rightness or wrongness of an act. Obviously this kind of view is going to produce a great deal of difficulty for many of us who claim to hold to some form of Christian absolutism. For instance,



6 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

let me suggest a scenario that has become all too common in hospitals and in healthcare facilities. Suppose you have a patient who is undergoing intense pain, and there is absolutely no way known to medical science for this patient to survive. And this patient, no matter what drugs you give to him still continues to experience intense, debilitating pain. That kind of dehumanizes him. His wife and children want him to die, he wants to die. There is available to the doctor a drug that will painlessly kill him. If you’re a consequentialist, how would you respond to this moral choice, would it not be that the use the drug to take that patient’s life will maximize intrinsic value for everybody? The patient wants to die. He doesn’t want anymore intrinsic disvalue, the intensity of that dehumanizing pain. The family can’t stand to watch their loved one undergoing all of this agony and the doctor certainly has no vested interest in any of these. And therefore as a consequentialist you could clearly argue that not only is it possible to have euthanasia – mercy killing but it might even be the doctor’s moral obligation to take life under that circumstance. That will give you at least a little feel as to how the system operates.

Let me move then and focus in, first of all, on hedonism as a consequential system. In here, I would like to talk with you for a little while about the thought of Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham was an English ethicist who concluded that all pleasure is qualitatively the same and therefore pleasure only has quantitative differentiation. Or you can ever measure in pleasure as the quantity of pleasure present. Now he’s not arguing that everybody receives the same incremental pleasure from the same kinds of things. One of the culinary delights of my life is English hot mustard. I love it on such things as wrappers and things like that. When we have guests at our home and they see me smear that mustard on, I always warned them that it is very hot, and they are not used to it, they’re apt not to like it. Invariably their conclusion is, if he can take it I can take it. So they kind of put it thick on their bratwurst, and they take a bite and they start to cough and the tears run down their face and they wonder if they’re going to die. Well for me, I find great pleasure, now they’re finding great pain. The difference isn’t the quality when they get pleasure, what makes something pleasurable for them is the same as what makes it pleasurable for me. Therefore Bentham argues, you can only measure quantity, pleasure does not come in qualitatively different modes. To do that Jeremy Bentham developed what we have commonly joked about as a form of hedonistic calculus. In point of fact, you may want to take your calculator at some point



7 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

in life and put these hedonistic things down on it so that you can sit down and actually use your calculator to determine your moral duty.

His first criterion is “Intensity”. How intense will this pleasure be? Apparently, the more intense, the greater the quantity. The second is duration. How long will it last? If I can have a very intense pleasure that lasts for 20 minutes over a less intense pleasure that lasts for 22 minutes, which one should I choose? Please understand that again we are talking about a theory that supposed to tell you what you ought to do in every moral circumstance. Now it does seem to me that duration is measurable, that’s a time concept. I’m not sure that intensity is measurable. In point of fact, I know no way to measure the intensity of a pleasure. You’ll excuse me if this seems crash to you I do not intend it to be that way. In sexual fulfillment in marriage there is very short but very intense physiological and emotional pleasure experience. If you talked about intensity that maybe one of the most intense experiences of pleasure that the human has. Yet when I go to the Grand Rapids Symphony and I sit through a concert of composers who predate contemporary periods, I find myself having very, very high levels of satisfaction that last for quite a time of period. How do you measure that intensity? The third criterion is the certainty that it will follow or the uncertainty that it will follow. That is, if I have the opportunity to choose a pleasure that is 90% chance that it will follow my choice as opposed to a pleasure that may be more intense and last longer, but there is only a 40% chance that it will follow my choice, then which one should I choose? Well you all know the old adage “a bird in a hand is worth two in the bush”. So you better take the one that is 90% chance of coming. The fourth criterion is probably a new word to you it’s the word “Propinquity”. This word means nearness in time and space. Could I choose to undergo severe pain and suffering as a martyr for the sake of Jesus Christ, because I know that someday in the sky by and by, I’m going to have a great big dose of intense pleasure? Is it possible that I could choose to do that when the pleasure is so far removed from my present action? Propinquity says, how soon will the pleasure come? Certainty says what probability is there that it will come? Duration asks, for how long will it last? Intensity, I’m not sure how to state what it’s driving at. The fifth is another new word for most of us it’s the word “Fecundity”, F-E-C-U-N-D-I-T-Y. That has the concept of the chance that this pleasure will be followed by other pleasures of the same kind. The word basically means fruitful or productive or prolific. If I can choose alternative A and it will give me an immediate form of intense pleasure and



8 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

it will be followed by other forms of intense pleasure, because it happens to be fecund then obviously that is to be preferred, yeah that’s my duty to choose because that better maximizes intrinsic value. I’m sure by now as you’re listening to this material. You’re asking yourself a set of question like this, is it possible that this is actually determining for me? What my duty is? This sounds much more like preference, much more like satisfaction, and not at all like it is something that is actually determining for me what I ought to do in every moral circumstance. The sixth criterion is “Purity”. That is how unalloyed will this pleasure be with its opposite. You can’t help but think of the person who gets great pleasure out of ingesting large amounts of alcohol. And while the blood level of alcohol is up he seems to be having a very wonderful time having a great time relating to people, and laughing and just having a great time. But the next morning when he wakes up with a hangover, he finds out that the pleasure is mixed with some intrinsic disvalue, because it now is going to bring pain. And you drink those strange concoctions of tomato juice with raw eggs and all those kinds of things. Well, that’s not a very pure pleasure. A pure pleasure is one that is unalloyed with any kind of disvalue, with any kind of intrinsic disvalue. The seventh and final evaluation is the “Extent” – the number of persons who will receive pleasure or/are affected by the choice. Apparently, the more people who get intrinsic value, the better it is. And therefore if one alternative maximizes intrinsic value for a few more people than another alternative that maximizes intrinsic value for less people then you ought to choose the one that distributes it to more people.

Quite frankly class, you learn very, very quickly when you look at Jeremy Bentham, that this system is almost impossible to operate. To operate a system like this, you would have to be able to define what a unit of pleasure is and how to measure it. Now I have jokingly referred to units of pleasure as hedons. If it is hedonism then we have to be able to talk about what is a standard hedon? How do you measure it? How do you quantify it? How do you predict that 30 people will get 80 hedons to the fourth power if you choose alternative one. Frankly, it’s impossible but it sounds like it’s a measuring quantity. But quite frankly the only thing that measures quantity in this sevenfold criterion that had been given is “duration”. Intensity isn’t really a measure of quantity, probability isn’t a measure of quantity, nearness in time and space is not a measure of quantity, its prolificness is not a measure quantity, its purity is not a measure of quantity perhaps extent measures quantity when it comes to persons.



9 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

The reason that this form of utilitarianism did not last very long in the marketplace of ideas is because its culpability is obvious to most people. Now, as soon as I say that I need to tell you that there are hundreds of thousands of people who live by a Utilitarian Ethic called hedonism, that the intrinsic value of their life is pleasure. They don’t know anything about Jeremy Bentham, they don’t know anything about quantifying, they don’t know anything about evaluating, and making moral decisions. They would just tell you that the goal of their life is to experience as much pleasure as they can, and whatever brings them pleasure is what they choose. So although theoretically, this system never cut on at the grassroots level, hedonism is alive and well not only in America, but in all of Western culture. Someone wrote a short poem, to summarize Jeremy Bentham’s universal hedonism. The poem goes like this,

“Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure

Such marks and pleasures and in pains endure.

Such pleasure seek if private be your end.

If it be public then let the pleasure wide extent.

Such pains avoid which ever be thy view.

If pain must come, let it extent to few.”

Well, it’s a cute little poem but I’m afraid it doesn’t help us learn how to maximize intrinsic value in a hedonistic system that deals with quantity. The second utilitarian system I would like to talk with you about is the thought of John Stuart Mill. And for John Stuart Mill, his viewpoint is Eudemonistic that is happiness is the intrinsic value. He rejects Bentham’s notion that happiness and or pleasure are all qualitatively the same. He believes that there are qualitative differences in happiness and or pleasure. That some happinesses or some pleasures are higher than others, and we need to develop a way to determine which pleasures are high and which pleasures are lower. So that in Mill’s thought we’re going to have a hierarchy of pleasures. Mill’s principle is known as the greatest happiness principle. An act or rule is right when it maximizes happiness for the most amount of people, and it is wrong when it maximizes pain for people. Now, he is unwilling to say that happiness and pleasure are identical, but they are related. For him happiness is that which does have a



10 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

physiological base, but it is not limited to a physiological base. He developed the notion that’s kind of interesting. He said, the more complex and developed one’s abilities are, the more prone they are to suffer and the more difficult it is for them to achieve happiness. When you come home on a summer afternoon after work and you’re exhausted and your dog is lying there on stoop in the afternoon sun and you look and you say, “Oh for the life of the dog. Oh! If I could just be content to lay on the sun and not have to go through what I go through in the workplace day in and day out”. I don’t think we really mean that. I don’t think any of us would trade our developed capacities, our verbal capacities, our aesthetic capacities for the capacities of a dog. What we mean is our capacities make life more intense and more complex and Mill argues therefore that humans need higher levels of happiness in order to be happy than animals do. That man has post animal faculties which demand happiness, and therefore happiness is much more difficult for men to achieve. Now if this is true, if happiness is more difficult for man because of his capacities and if happiness can be qualitatively different then we must ask Mill to tell us how to determine which happinesses are higher than others. His general rule is this: “the one to which most who have experienced both, gives a decided preference. This is the higher happiness, this is more desirable.” Now you can say that Mill is a good egalitarian. The principle to determine which happinesses are higher than others is a democratic principles in which persons who have experienced both happinesses have decided preference for one of them over the other then the one that is preferred is qualitatively higher kind of happiness than the one that isn’t preferred. Now please note, this can only involve a consensus of people who have experienced both. In other words, there is some elitism involved here. If a person hasn’t experienced both then he’s not competent to be involved in the majority judgment as to which is preferred. Now competent and acquainted, capable of enjoying both, having a marked preference for one, always involve our higher faculties. We’re not going to let Rover vote on this when we boot him off the porch and he finally gets up and stretches and walks out under the tree, and lies down again. We’re not going to allow him to be a part of the consensus because he doesn’t have the capacity to judge both. If we see a person who has been mentally handicapped and who finds very simple things make them happy, we’re not going to allow that person be a part of the consensus because obviously that person is not competent to experience both. And in point of fact, if you haven’t developed your aesthetic sense and you have no capacity to appreciate art and you go to an art museum and you walk through the galleries



11 of 12

Lesson 05 of 23

and you look at it and you walked out and say, that’s terrible, that’s rubbish, that’s useless, that doesn’t have value, we’re not going to let you participate in a consensus either because you don’t have developed capacity to appreciate art and therefore your judgment will not be involved in the consensus. If you’ve got a feel for the fact that there is some elitism here, that’s certainly what I’m wishing to communicate to you now.

Being of higher faculties requires more in order to make him happy. He is capable of more acute suffering and is vulnerable to suffering because of what it takes to make him happy. Yet, that being of higher capacity would never choose a lower form of existence, would never step down for a complete lower levels of fulfillment, because the higher capacities will always bring to man, also great satisfaction. In other words, better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig. And if that pig disagrees, we just simply set him aside, because the pig is not competent to make the judgment. Now when Mill takes this concept, this general rule which says, “I will apply this rule and determine higher levels of happiness from lower levels of happiness, this is how it works out. When one applies the rule, one finds that certain things have greater value than others. Communion with God has greater value than anything else, and therefore the ability to communicate and to have social intercourse with God is one of the highest happinesses that men can have and qualitatively that belongs up at the top of the scale. When you come down one step, then nonsexual human intercourse, the ability to relate to other persons – to speak, to communicate, to bear burdens, to share, to do all of those kinds of things that’s very, very valuable so that relationship with God and its implementation through communion, relationship with older people, which engages your higher faculties. Relationship with beautiful objects like sculptures or graphic art, or music, these take you to your higher capacities in bringing to you a higher kind of happiness than just the happiness you get at the physiological level having eaten a good meal and feeling satiated or having worked out in the gym and jumped into the hot tub and have everything worked out well. So when it comes to Mill’s distinction we have qualitatively different kinds of happiness. These qualitatively different kinds are that in which competent people prefer one over the other and refined people prefer social relationship with the transcendent God, horizontal relationship with other persons, relationships with that which is beautiful either in music or other art forms, and then you can go on down the scale into the physiological aspects of things. So little more refined than we thought, but again, how you determine, maximize,

Transcript - WE503 Christian Ethics: A Biblical Theology of Morality© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

12 of 12

Theories of Obligation - pt. 2Lesson 05 of 23

minimize with the qualitatively different set of happinesses is still very, very difficult to judge.

Documents

Christian Ethics: WE503 Christian Ethics: A Biblical ... · Theories of Obligation - pt. 2 Christian Ethics: A Biblical Theology of Morality This is lesson five in our series and