402 - The The Moral Revolution: A Christian Humanist Vision

The Moral Revolution: A Christian Humanist Vision
By Daniel C. Maguire
New York, Harper & Row, 1986. 299 pp. $14.95.

Of the nineteen essays collected here, all but one have been published previously. The earliest appeared in 1968: "Catholic Ethics in the Post-Infallible Church"; the great majority, including the provocative "Visit to An Abortion Clinic" of 1984, were published during the eighties.

To achieve focus and coherence is always a problem, of course, when publishing a book of essays on diverse topics which were written over a long period and which range from the scholarly to the popular. That problem is exacerbated here, however, because the author provides no

404 - The The Moral Revolution: A Christian Humanist Vision

overview of the assumptions, arguments, and concerns that he sees as recurring in the essays and hence as providing unity to the collection. There is no introduction, and the very brief (one-half page) prologue provides not even a hint, let alone a definition, of what is meant by the ,'moral revolution" and "Christian humanist vision" of the title. Given the content of his various essays, what might Daniel Maguire have in mind by these terms?

The nineteen essays are organized under seven topics, most of which focus on specific ethical issues: war and peace, sexual mores, feminism, medical ethics, and conscience and church authority. The first essay in the Medicine and Morals section, "The Moral Revolution in Health Care," has prima facie claim to special significance, in that it is the only essay to employ the term "moral revolution" in its title. It discusses the "current revolution in death consciousness" (that is, current tendencies to face rather than evade the threat of death, on both personal and cosmic levels) that "shakes the foundations of our thought," not solely in the held of health care, but in ethics and religion as well. "Our new awareness of death goes to the depth of ethics. No questions are more basic than those that address our moral dominion over dying."

Nonetheless, in his three essays on feminism, grouped together under the heading The New Morality of Feminism, Maguire seems to believe he is raising questions that are even more basic, hence more productive of a moral revolution. In his introductory note to this section, he says the new feminism represents "a seismic revolution of moral consciousness." He argues in "The Feminist Turn in Ethics" that "ethics is turning an epochal corner. The main event is epistemological. Changes in what we know are normal; changes in how we know are revolutionary. Feminism is the major event in ethical theory in our day."

The epistemological contribution of feminist consciousness is that it "reaches the affective depths of moral knowledge." This is, I think, the key to what Maguire means by the contemporary moral revolution, and its significance for ethical reflection. Feminism affirms that moral sensitivity is rooted in bodily existence, in the affections, in a fundamental affirmation of life, in the experience of suffering. Hence, it promises to undermine what Maguire sees as a heretofore dominant "intellectualist fallacy" in ethics that mistakenly separates moral experience from body and emotion, and moral judgment from commitments of faith. Maguire's argument, clearly, is an important one-important enough, surely, to deserve explicit statement in a careful, systematic introductory chapter. Even the most affective of ethics will require careful intellectual analysis and argumentation-especially if it is genuinely revolutionary in character.

William H. Becker

Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania