Theology Today - Vol 22, No. 1 - April 1965 - CRITICSCORNER

119 - Comments on a Critique

Comments on a Critique
By Paul L. Lehmann

PROFESSOR RAMSEY'S critique of my book, Ethics in a Christian Context, in the January issue, singles out the instance of "truth-telling" in order to show that the argument of the book is, in part and as a whole, untenable. In his view, the book is a collation of words, full of sound and fury. Even the title tries to take the reader in. The reader must, of course, come to his own conclusion about where the sound and fury really are. But while he is making up his mind, he may welcome a comment designed to keep before him the difference between the little and the large confusions in Professor Ramsey's mind.

We may begin with the little confusions. In spite of Professor Ramsey, the title does express what the Preface states. The book is about the theological context of ethics. It is not "despite the title" but deliberately "only quite subordinately a book about the meaning of ethics in this context." The reason for this is that the book is about method in Christian ethical thinking as a possible fruitful preamble to the content of a Christian ethic. It is one thing to affirm that such a priority of method over content is unfruitful; it is another thing to set down a thinly-veiled charge that such a procedure is misleading. Ramsey has done the latter.

Again, Ramsey writes that "Christian ethics in almost all ages justified theft under circumstances . . . or assassination or war. . . " He seeks thereby to note that the tradition of Christian ethics also takes account of "exceptions" and of "a problem of compromise," as though the book under attack had denied or ignored these obvious matters of record. Such an allegation misreads the concern of the book, which lies at another point. This point has to do with the connection between the ethical norm and the ethical exception, which the book seeks to show cannot be adequately established by a

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normative approach either to ethical diversity or to the ethical exception.

It is further claimed, with reference to the book's criticism of the shift of ethical stress from action to intention, that "truth-telling is neither verbal veracity alone nor the intention alone, if it means actually communicating the truth (and, of course, intending to do so) to someone to whom the truth in question belongs." This is the author's point too, which even a cursory -reader could have discerned, The book, however, makes this point in trying to explain that neither verbal veracity nor intentionality can carry the "normative" weight assigned to them by the tradition of Christian ethics in the matter of telling the truth.

One more little confusion must suffice. With regard to the discussion on pp. 132-33 of the book, which deals with the problem of telling the truth to a dying person, Ramsey writes: "it must be recorded to my great astonishment that Lehmann writes that he avoided her question and changed the subject." Evidently, the reader is to note that the author is self-deceived and trying to deceive the reader again. A careful, non-tendentious reading of the passage must surely make plain that neither was the question avoided nor was the subject changed. Once again the point at issue has eluded Professor Ramsey. The point at issue concerns the right word as the bearer of the Truth (with a capital "T," sic!) with which the truth-concerns of a Christian ethic have to do. This is the Truth that is in Jesus Christ. It may properly be urged that any given attempt to express this Truth in -word and intention and action (or all three taken together) falls. But it cannot be urged that such an attempt "avoids the question" and "changes the subject." It cannot, unless optimum verbal veracity and intention are assigned a normative weight in the telling of the truth which, it is the contention of this book, they cannot bear. It would have been more germane to the issue 'Linder discussion, had Ramsey shown that optimum verbal veracity and intention can, in fact, bear this normative weight. Instead, he has chosen to confuse the issue by alleging that the book says what it does not say.

At least three large objections have been raised against the book Linder discussion. Only one of these objections has substantive merit. The first two exhibit Professor Ramsey's resort to sophistry.

The first objection is a logical one. Ramsey puts the matter rhe-

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torically. "The first question to be asked is how, by what logic, and with what justification Lehmann moves from the title of this book, Ethics in a Christian Context, to the title of this Chapter, 'The Contextual Character of Christian Ethics.' . . . Is there not a simple logical and grammatical illation involved when Lehmann writes that 'when the church is the context of ethical reflection, Christian ethics becomes contextual' "? The rhetoric is designed to elicit the reader's concurrence in Ramsey's judgment that such an illation has indeed occurred.

The attempt, by rhetorical innuendo, to expose a logical illation, and thus to demolish an argument to which one is opposed, is the ancient formula of the Sophists from whom Socrates had to rescue philosophy in order to restore philosophy to the love and service of truth. A Christian ethical thinker should have learned from Jesus, as well as from Socrates, that the risk of logical illation must be run in order to expose the point at which the Truth can begin to be discerned and responded to. This is why the author of the book has neither rested his case for a contextual approach to ethics upon the obvious grammatical distinction between adjective and noun, nor paused in a book on ethics to instruct the reader about what belongs in an elementary book on grammar. This point which Professor Ramsey has either bothered to ignore or not bothered to read is a clearly put methodological one. The sentence, "When the church is the context of ethical reflection, Christian ethics becomes contextual," is the outcome of a discussion of Christian ethics as a theological discipline. This discussion explicitly makes the point that the contextual character of Christian ethics is not derived from a general theory of contextualism applied to ethics, and thence, to Christian ethics. The contextual character of Christian ethics is derived from the fact that Christian thinking about ethics goes on within the church. From within the church, Christian ethics acquires a starting point and a way of thinking which give to ethical reflection both scientific possibility and sense. There are no rules of language or of logic which prohibit the use of terms which have diverse senses in a given specific usage, provided such a specific usage is clearly acknowledged. This acknowledgment is clearly stated in the book under attack. To obscure it by a belabored excursus upon a noun and an adjective is trivial; and triviality is the vestibule of falsehood. This, as Socrates showed, is the real threat of sophistry to philosophy.

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The second objection is an historical one. There is an element of sophistry about this too, although the sophistry is not so flagrant. Any reviewer of books is under the temptation to mistake refutation for criticism. As in the case of sophistry, so in the case of refutation, one would not have expected Professor Ramsey to succumb. Again Ramsey puts a question. He wants to know "who (since it was not Kant or Fichte or even that playful farce) ever defined truth-telling as 'optimum verbal veracity' . . . ? This is not a trivial point to bring up, because Lehmann places right after this supposed refutation of truth-telling as 'optimum verbal veracity' a supposed refutation of one of 'the most ingenious and tested and tried attempts to bring an absolutist ethic into line with the actual diversity and complexity of the ethical situation.

Ramsey is correct that the point under discussion is not a trivial one. This is why this attempt to demolish the treatment of it in the book by suggesting that there is no evidence from the tradition in support of the analysis in the book is puzzling. Suddenly, when an argument gets, by Ramsey's own admission, above the level of triviality, there is nobody around to take responsibility for anything. Apparently the current furor over the "New Morality" is the sheerest "tempest in a teapot." Apparently the absolutism which has become increasingly problematical in ethical theory and practice since Kant, or even since the Enlightenment, is a mirage of those who have lost confidence in it. The exponents of a "normative ethic" are to be allowed to deny everything.

One could, of course, remark that it all depends upon how one reads the record. But that would be to mistake refutation for criticism. It must also be noted that the above Strictures against Ramsey's exoneration of the absolutist tradition in ethics are also rhetorical. Therefore we must be very clear about the issue to which these strictures point. Otherwise we shaIl be in danger of following Professor Ramsey into sophistry. The point at issue is two-fold: (a) whether the absolutist tradition in ethics can be said to have functioned as described in the book; and (b) whether the ethical meaning of this tradition is the attempt to solve the problem of ethical certainty and guidance by means of a standard of conduct which applies to all people in all situations in the same way. Professor Ramsey denies both these claims; the book affirms them.

The careful reader will be able to discover that the book does not

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assert that anyone ever defined truth-telling as "optimum verbal veracity." The book states clearly that this is the author's own way of describing what the central ethical element in the matter of telling the truth comes to, when one tries to get at the question of truth-telling in a normative way. Kant does say, as the book notes, that "to be truthful in all declarations, therefore, is a sacred and absolutely commanding decree of reason, limited by no expediency." "Declarations," as Kant may surely be presumed to have understood them (although he doesn't say so in so many words), are verbal formulations. But whether they involved "optimum verbal veracity" expressly, or inferentially, is a minor consideration compared to the ethical meaning of truth-telling with which both Kant and Ramsey are concerned.

The book goes on to note that, on the record, the absolutist tradition has provided a remarkable clarification of the problem of the ethical norm and of its relation to ethical behavior. The book does not claim that the absolutist tradition ignores ethical diversity. The argument of the book is that there is an absolutist tradition which goes back at least as far as Plato, that this tradition gave normative ethical significance to an overarching ethical idea, the idea of the Good, that this idea functioned as a standard of conduct which was to be applied to all people in all situations in the same way, that precisely this functioning encountered the difficulty of the variety and complexity of actual ethical decision. In the area of truth-telling, this absolutist tradition means "optimum verbal veracity" and functions in such a way as to obscure the personal and liberating dimensions of the relation of "being in the Truth." For Professor Ramsey's information, Plato and Aristotle, St, Thomas, and Kant, and John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, have all dealt with the problem of truth-telling in this way. Ramsey obviously reads the historical record differently. But this does not entitle him to allege that nobody in the tradition ever said what the book claims. Thus Ramsey's refutation rests upon an historical confusion in consequence of which his words against the book may be adapted and turned back upon himself. He asks us to believe that in the ethical tradition, rules were never really rules, principles were never really principles, "and a meaning for truth-telling . . . was never the meaning of the truth to be told in ordinary transactions."

The third objection is a substantive one. Here Professor Ramsey has raised a point central to The third objection is a substantive one. Here Proffessor Ramsey raised a point central to the argument of Ethics in a Christian

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Context, a point which must be taken very seriously. In commenting upon what he rightly regards as "a radical shifting of the problem from truth-telling in 'mere business' transactions to telling forth the truth in interpersonal openness," Ramsey remarks that such a shift "comes as close to Lehmiann's definition of an 'absolute' as any principle that has ever been formulated preceptually. . . . The fundamental thing can still be exhibited and 'whatever is told is the truth.' That last word should have been capitalized or the article italicized to indicate the contextualist's absolute."

Perhaps Professor Ramsey is correct in suggesting that the argument of the book substitutes a contextual absolute for those absolutes which have been rejected (e.g. idealistic, pragmatic, humanistic, legalistic, etc.). In so far as the term absolute connotes a concern for the normative problem in ethics, and the contextual argument of this book also acknowledges this concern, Ramsey is correct. Indeed the book aims at a methodological clarification designed to give ethical reality and meaning both to the directional and the diverse factors in ethical behavior. If one wishes to denote the culmination of such an achievement by the phrase, contextual absolute, there is no contextual barrier against doing so. The reader should know, since Ramsey does not inform him of it, that the contextual critique of ethical absolutism offered in the pages under attack seeks to reformulate, not to demolish, the ethical importance of an absolute. In such a re-formulation, it has simply seemed clearer to reserve the term absolute for that approach to ethics which has given to the absolute high normative status. On this basis, a contextual absolute is at best a redundancy; at worst, a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the contention of the book is that the absolutist tradition in ethics has been unable to forge a creative link between the "normative" and the "variable" factors in ethics because on an absolutist basis, there is no way to overcome the cleavage between the ethical demand and the ethical act. It lies outside the announced scope of this book to exhibit the effectiveness of a contextual approach to ethics in this matter. But the book does try to provide at the methodological level the kind of ethical clarification which does bring Truth-telling into an integrating and liberating relation to truth-telling in human communication. A contextual approach to the problem tries to make ethical sense of the Truth which is to be told in telling the truth.

Here again, however, Ramsey contents himself with a mere insist-

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ance that it is the contextual account of ethics which abstracts the Truth to be told "from any important relevance to authenticity in spoken words or degrees of verbal integrity." He uses the paradoxical phrase, "contextual absolute," in order to deliver a coup de grace to an argument which lie has patently troubled himself more to rail against than to meet. What joins the author of this argument with John Stuart Mill is not the captatio benevolentiae which Ramsey bestows upon him but rather the instructive coincidence that Mill's reply to careless readers of his book on ethics bears an unexpected appropriateness to the present instance.

Ramsey interprets Mill as saying, on the one hand, that "the only reason for believing a thing is 'desirable' is the fact that it is desired"; and on the other hand, as meaning "clearly . . . more than this. . . . he meant 'worthy of being desired.' " just so, "contextual means . . . more than that the ethics we are talking about is in a Christian context. . . The parallel, however, exactly the contrary. "Contextual," as we have already said, never appears in the book as a mere affair of grammar. And Mill never made the mistake of saying that "the only reason for believing a thing is 'desirable' is the fact that it is desired." He always meant more than this. Two wrongs never do make a right. But a single explanation does cover two instances of the same erroneous interpretation. "The creed," Mill wrote, "which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, Much more requires to be said; in particular what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded, namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilization scheme as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. Now, such a theory of life excites in many minds, and among them in some of the most estimable in feeling and purpose, inveterate dis-like" (Utilitarianism, Chapter II)