Thursday, April 01, 2004
ETHICS - WEEK 1
What the heck is all this talk about ethics anyway?
I suppose before this class began I thought I had a pretty good handle on what the word “ethics” meant. I understand now that what I knew was what an “ethical decision” was, not that “ethics” itself was. Now, to complicate that matter even further, we prefix the word “Christian”, ostensibly narrowing down the topic. I suppose all the ethical decisions I had made in the past were informed by my Christianity. Even those ones which were poor ethical decisions (therefore not following the rubrics of a Christian Ethic), I recognized as such and chose to ignore my feelings of guilt for the purpose of accomplishing whatever devious goal I had set out to do. But is it the same thing to say that “you and I both are Christians”, and “you and I both follow the same ethical code”? I think that it is not. Two people, both self-identifying as being a Christian, can seemingly have the same code of ethics as described by their purported religion, and arrive at opposite conclusions given an ethical problem, both of which can be carefully reasoned and sensible. So, it is hard to nail down what is ethical and what is not for the Christian given certain situations, but I suppose that is the point of the personal blog section of this virtual lab assignment; to demonstrate that all ethics are done within the context of the individual and on a daily basis. While reading Chapter 3 in the Blackwell book for Thursday’s class, I thought about Trevor and Dan’s discussion about limit situations. When I encountered the second whole paragraph on page 35, I came up with the following definition that can be applied to certain instances:
“Ethics is the sequence of events which we expect to have happen, informed by our own understanding, in order to prevent an incident from reaching a critical level and becoming a limit situation.”
If we have a “fender-bender” automobile accident, there is a particular sequence of events that I suspect we all immediately bring to mind that are “supposed” to occur. If they do not, the situation, rather mundane at first, escalates. What if the person who has hit us, scoots around us and speeds off? What if they stop, get out of their car, approach you as you get out of yours and begin a physical altercation? What if, after running into you seemingly on accident, they back up and hit you again? All of these would raise the critical level of the situation and confuse our sense of what was to happen next, because a particular sequence of events which we “knew” was to come next, based on our understanding of the code of ethics supposedly guiding the average person’s actions, did not occur. So, at that point, does a sub-set of our personal ethical code come into play? However we react, are we following another code of ethics, that seeks to prevent the situation from escalating further? And can that sub-set code be called Christian? By which I mean, do we as Christians, follow a particular model of ethics for everyday living, but revert to something less Christian when the first options fails or appears to fail? Again, each one of these answers is personal, based on prior experiences and the depth of one’s internalization of “the Christian ethical code”.
-R
What the heck is all this talk about ethics anyway?
I suppose before this class began I thought I had a pretty good handle on what the word “ethics” meant. I understand now that what I knew was what an “ethical decision” was, not that “ethics” itself was. Now, to complicate that matter even further, we prefix the word “Christian”, ostensibly narrowing down the topic. I suppose all the ethical decisions I had made in the past were informed by my Christianity. Even those ones which were poor ethical decisions (therefore not following the rubrics of a Christian Ethic), I recognized as such and chose to ignore my feelings of guilt for the purpose of accomplishing whatever devious goal I had set out to do. But is it the same thing to say that “you and I both are Christians”, and “you and I both follow the same ethical code”? I think that it is not. Two people, both self-identifying as being a Christian, can seemingly have the same code of ethics as described by their purported religion, and arrive at opposite conclusions given an ethical problem, both of which can be carefully reasoned and sensible. So, it is hard to nail down what is ethical and what is not for the Christian given certain situations, but I suppose that is the point of the personal blog section of this virtual lab assignment; to demonstrate that all ethics are done within the context of the individual and on a daily basis. While reading Chapter 3 in the Blackwell book for Thursday’s class, I thought about Trevor and Dan’s discussion about limit situations. When I encountered the second whole paragraph on page 35, I came up with the following definition that can be applied to certain instances:
“Ethics is the sequence of events which we expect to have happen, informed by our own understanding, in order to prevent an incident from reaching a critical level and becoming a limit situation.”
If we have a “fender-bender” automobile accident, there is a particular sequence of events that I suspect we all immediately bring to mind that are “supposed” to occur. If they do not, the situation, rather mundane at first, escalates. What if the person who has hit us, scoots around us and speeds off? What if they stop, get out of their car, approach you as you get out of yours and begin a physical altercation? What if, after running into you seemingly on accident, they back up and hit you again? All of these would raise the critical level of the situation and confuse our sense of what was to happen next, because a particular sequence of events which we “knew” was to come next, based on our understanding of the code of ethics supposedly guiding the average person’s actions, did not occur. So, at that point, does a sub-set of our personal ethical code come into play? However we react, are we following another code of ethics, that seeks to prevent the situation from escalating further? And can that sub-set code be called Christian? By which I mean, do we as Christians, follow a particular model of ethics for everyday living, but revert to something less Christian when the first options fails or appears to fail? Again, each one of these answers is personal, based on prior experiences and the depth of one’s internalization of “the Christian ethical code”.
-R
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