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Process Ethics: A Constructive System
By Kenneth Cauthen
New York, Edwin Mellen, 1984. 353 pp. $49.95.

Kenneth Cauthen, professor of theology at Colgate- Rochester/ Bexley Hall/Crozer, has published before in the area of ethics, notably Christian Biopolitics (Abingdon, 1971) and The Ethics of Enjoyment (John Knox, 1975). The present work differs from its predecessors in two respects: it is a full-scale work of a systematic or constructive nature, and the construction's dependence on process metaphysics is acknowledged and even advertised. Cauthen writes as a Christian theologian and a process philosopher. He is seeking a "mutual transformation" of the two realities he brings into dialogue.

He sets forth a scheme of philosophical ethics using the tools, methods, and criteria characteristic of that discipline. He then develops a theory of Christian ethics based on the biblical witness to Jesus. With this Christian natural ethic in place, he considers questions of justice by invoking three principles: maximize the good, maximize the equality of all, maximize the liberty (freedom) of each. He adds an appendix on "Economic Justice in a Capitalist Society" in which he develops his conviction that "a major task of the clergy and the institutions they lead is to develop in persons of every age and social role a devotion to the common good which can moderate the quest for special advantage on the part of individuals and groups."

What is to be made of the book's connection with process thought? Cauthen suggests that the book is an effort to fill the gap James Gustafson has identified in remarking that "no one has published a systematic, inclusive theory of ethics based on process theology." Process thinkers certainly have worked in and around the field of ethics. One thinks of John Cobb (Process Theology as Political Theology), David Hall (The Civilization of Experience), and Robert Neville (The Cosmology of Freedom). Already in 1977, Barry Woodbridge could list ten or more unpublished doctoral dissertations in ethics in his Alfred North Whitehead: A Primary-Secondary Bibliography. One might reasonably claim that many of the conferences held at the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, are concerned with ethics concretely. One thinks of the strong emphasis on ecological concerns and of the dialogue with Marxist thought on matters of justice, to mention only two. The essays in John Cobb's and Widick Schroeder's Process Philosophy and Social Thought (Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1981) represent an important conversation in social ethics. Nonetheless, such work in ethics has lagged behind process studies in, say, aesthetics. Some critics might argue that this lag is systemic rather than simply historical, that justice cannot rival beauty in Whitehead's

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ranking. A major systematic ethic based on process thought would be an important development.

It is not quite clear that Cauthen has provided that work. There is here almost no specific employment of Whitehead's elaborate scheme of notions. Moreover, an important Whiteheadian impediment to formulating the notion of ethical responsibility, the difficulty of securing a "macroscopic" self in distinction from the subordinate "microscopic" concresent occasions, is not addressed. Cauthen simply acknowledges the absence of "a completely coherent, adequate, and applicable theory of selfhood" and proceeds to meet the need he feels to describe a person "as a real individual." Furthermore, he may actually depart from Whitehead in his reference to "the Creative Purpose of an Ultimate Power." The distinction Whitehead made between God and creativity seems obscured by references to the "creative activity at the basis of all things" and to acting in harmony with "what is most real." He does speak of "metaphysical limitations on the power of God," but this seems more a traditional matter of finite free will than a more dualistic reference to an other-than-human "dark impediment" to which Cauthen himself referred in Science, Secularization and God (Abingdon, 1969).

Cauthen acknowledges that the process thought which he employs is "more generalized" than that of the Whitehead of Process and Reality. He hopes to appeal to the larger audience who may acknowledge the values of interpreting the world in "dynamic, organic, telic, and theistic terms." Thus process-like formulations do occur: order is not static; value is to be understood in the terms of the experiencing subject; the abortion controversy is to be discussed in the light of the view that the person emerges in the process; Whitehead's linking of morality and the future is invoked to critique the "unenlightened unselfishness" of "nominalistic immediacy" in a plea for wider frames of reference for moral action. And throughout, "maximizing satisfactions" means to "increase the range and intensity of vivid contrasts into larger patterns of harmony."

There is certainly a process spirit and tone about this ethic, even though we do not here find out what full ethic can be "based" on a process metaphysics with such features as a metaphysical dualism and a non-substance self. What Cauthen has done is to argue persuasively for some philosophical ethic and to offer at least a full sketch of what such an ethic might look like. In doing that, he makes many insightful comments. His criticisms of Reinhold Niebuhr (for failing to distinguish clearly enough between finitude and sin, and for overplaying the prideful side of sin) are not novel, but are made with exemplary clarity and are carried through in helpful detail. His suggestion that the conflict between teleology and deontology in ethics requires metaphysical explanation and religious resolution is intriguing, even though it remains unclear how those two moves themselves finally cohere. His work on the is/ought relationship and distinction is subtle and stimulating.

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All of this is done without harrangue and yet with such urgency and clarity as to call the reader into constructive ethical reflection. In that sense, the book may indeed by well titled, as it contributes to "ethics in the making."

Paul R. Sponheim
Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary
St. Paul, Minnesota