Summary
1 The emergence of justice in sexual ethics
2 The emergence of justice hermeneutics in bioethics
3 Biotechnology
4 Global instability: militarization, migration, ecological crises, and the need for a new world (legal) order
5 New horizons in fundamental moral theology
6 Ignored themes that need attention for a new world order: race, inter-religious dialogue, and equality
7 Bibliographical references
1 The emergence of justice in sexual ethics
Over the last 50 years, a fundamental anthropological shift in moral theology has been observed: from the personal to the social. This extraordinary shift was made possible by the introduction of global hermeneutic justice into the fields of sexual ethics and bioethics.
The hermeneutics of sexual ethics generally focused on chastity, a virtue that basically concerned the individual before they had sexual relations with another person and only considered those relationships that are marital. Therefore, sexual ethics did not deal with relationships but was preparatory. While the virtue thus regulated only the conduct of those who were already disposed to it, more recently moral theologians have begun to focus on a virtue that concentrates less on the individual person and more on relationships. This decision, especially by feminists, to introduce justice into sexual ethics was innovative.
First and foremost, the introduction of justice into sexual ethics has led us to the issue of “gender equality,” and this theme will accompany us for the next fifty years as we deal with issues concerning sexual violence and/or rape. It also raised the question of whether “gender complementarity” should be at the center of moral teaching regarding marital relations. The issue of “women’s rights” will remain and emerge even more as a central theme of our time.
The development of these rights and movements will radically change our notions of gender, as well as our understanding of the masculine and the feminine, as the question arises whether the very descriptions of the two will remain. Furthermore, the entire understanding of family and commitment, along with the idea of marriage as an association, will need to gain more maturity as gender equality issues continue to emerge.
Secondly, the discussion about homosexuality today is changing, as the issue of a person’s sexuality is increasingly adjudicated by the themes of justice and equality. The question is no longer what the homosexual person should or should not do (stay in the closet, silent, or chaste – themes articulated through a hermeneutic of chastity); increasingly, now, the central theme is how society should treat homosexual people. As courts, legislations, and voting populations grant homosexual people more rights, we will see that, globally, their well-being will be protected. By extension, transgender people will also be considered, and the key question will be how society should treat them.
As gays and lesbians are emerging normally in our landscape, our more classical concepts of masculine and feminine stereotypes will be generally questioned, and moral theologians will need to pay close attention to “natural law,” the church, and local culture. However, modifications to natural law should be expected, changes that provoke us to reduce the rigid classical framework of natural law, whose philosophical foundation has an inhibitory effect. Finally, our understanding of our sexuality and its orientation will begin to be explored in a new way only when the already problematic distinctions between homo and hetero are seen as socially constructed and inadequate.
2 The emergence of justice hermeneutics in bioethics
In bioethics, the shift towards justice occurred on two platforms. First, in general, bioethics emerged in the world of strong economies, where people could afford to see a doctor and pay for their own insurance. In general, the hermeneutics of medical care developed in an elite system, where the patient-doctor relationship was predominant as a fundamental model. However, this relationship determined bioethics and also concomitant themes, namely, those of surrogate decisions, living wills, resuscitation, and the use of extraordinary means.
With the introduction of ethical medical justice, we were able to understand other more urgent medical ethics problems than those previously mentioned, especially those that arise when we realize that most people in the world do not have access to any type of medical care. Questions about access to medical care became more relevant with the emergence of HIV/AIDS.
With HIV/AIDS, a new medical care ethics emerged as a second platform, becoming its own field, and the language of bioethics began to speak to society in the language of human rights. The “human rights hermeneutics” as the language of medical care ethics is emerging today, but in reality, it was formed in 1997, when Jonathan Mann presented to public health officials a fairly recognized intuition, but until then rarely mentioned: “It is clear, through history and in all societies, that the rich have longer and healthier lives than the poor.” But immediately after this comment, he added: “A more important question, which follows from the socioeconomic proportionality between status and health, is: why does such proportionality exist.”
Poverty finally broke into the bioethical landscape. The response of public health officials to poverty issues meant that medical ethics specialists needed a hermeneutics that included issues of work, education, social and political stability, and fair wages, in addition to health issues. Public health specialists urged medical ethics specialists to recognize the growing utility of human rights language to encompass and analyze health-related issues as predominantly linked to social indicators.
The recognition of the connection between poverty and health became the fundamental intuition that ultimately led to contemporary bioethics. Soon the language of justice gave way to the language of human rights, and this had a direct impact on the people most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. From this, the global community could no longer talk only about providing shelter for those affected in the southern part of the global hemisphere. In fact, Brazil would show the way to give infected people the right to receive antiretroviral treatment.
Clearly, the ongoing question of whether there is a universal right to universal health is now emerging in some literature from India and Africa, but there is still no foundational consensus among moral specialists on this topic. Inevitably, ethics specialists will be forced to develop a health model for the future, in a world where most health care is paid out of the individual’s pocket. Such a model must also address financial issues (prices, research needs, tariffs) related to pharmaceutical corporations.
As we move towards universal health, ethics specialists will need to develop justice arguments to urge the health industry to find ways to eliminate curable diseases, especially in the global south. For example, there would be no more reasons for the existence of malaria and tuberculosis if there were a collective will to eliminate them. Here, the failures also reflect on ethics specialists because they have not led a campaign against these diseases.
As the world becomes more global, justice will have an evident place in responding to potential pandemics, such as the recent Ebola virus epidemic. The decision to simply close borders is no longer an option in the globalized world, where the language of public health ethics is justice. In the growing globalized world, the question is: will we develop an international protocol for “pandemic ethics”?
3 Biotechnology
Justice is also necessary for the development of biotechnology issues. In the past, questions about genetic engineering kept us in a simple paradigm that distinguished the ethical from the unethical. Similarly, the distinction between “therapeutic genetic manipulation” and “enhanced genetic manipulation” maintained this archetype. But this division is not viable, neither conceptually nor ethically. In fact, some enhancements are found precisely in therapeutic developments (e.g., prostheses, pharmaceuticals).
We must rethink how to draw moral lines and ask ourselves what makes some enhancements ethically legitimate. Because here, again, there has been a hermeneutic change. In the previous paradigm, we distinguished therapeutic from enhancement based on the idea, in truth quite simple, that we are not allowed to do it, as if, by performing any enhancement, we were “playing God.” An enhancement in itself is not a significant moral limit. Recurring concerns about enhancements do not concern the category itself, but rather its relation to limited resources, sustainable priorities that consider the needs of the most marginalized people, greater equality among people, and also the possibility of domination. Justice helps us see that enhancements that increase one group’s power over another are indicators of potential unethical behavior.
Furthermore, we need to be attentive to “transhumanists,” interested in using enhancements to alter the meaning and destiny of the human being. We need to review anthropology, so that, on one hand, it allows the use of certain enhancements, but on the other hand, it is aware of the fundamental purpose of transhumanists: to transcend death and deny bodily resurrection.
Biotechnology also needs to be examined regarding its assumptions. In biotechnology, much is geared towards the exotic or glamorous and very little towards the needs of the most marginalized. In a word, it tends to be “cosmetic.” If all ethicists remind biotech industries of distributive justice, the option for the poor, minimum health standards, and other relevant human rights issues, we may achieve a biotech world driven by research aimed at the general health of all people, not just those who have money and power to buy it.
A significant problem, unfortunately overlooked, is the growing intrusion of “military power” into the biotechnology field. For example, the Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program, a component of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with a budget of three billion dollars, is a well-funded agency whose primary goals are twofold: to treat, heal, and recondition wounded soldiers who lost a limb and, by providing them with an enhanced prosthesis, to prepare a super army, “an extended robotic army for soldiers.” We observe how the U.S. government, by providing highly sophisticated prostheses for wounded veterans, responds to the current needs and suffering of soldiers, only to later build a stronger and more efficient army in the future. This dual purpose is the fundamental modus operandi of DARPA: the incentive to develop prostheses for the wounded is to create, in the long term, an indomitable robotic army.
4 Global instability: militarization, migration, ecological crises, and the need for a new world (legal) order
Ethics specialists have not kept pace with the growth of the military-industrial complex. Arms sales are a gigantic industry that most ethics specialists have not been able to examine. These sales are problematic not only in a world of nation-states but even more so in a world of multiple governments and terrorist organizations.
Furthermore, just as the military takes advantage of the veterans’ situation to develop a robotic army, it is quickly entering other fields in the growing globalization of the world. This growing militarization needs to be examined because its access to technology is exponentially developing.
For example, “urban police forces in larger areas” are increasingly militarized with sophisticated weapons for crowd control, threatening citizens’ civil liberties. These technological capabilities have also been used by states to illegally listen to the communications of other sovereign governments, so that espionage scandals have become commonplace.
Similarly, the “militarization of space” and the issue of personal privacy have not been examined. The presence of drones in any aerospace is a clear indication of the planet’s militarization and its ability to make decisions based not on law but on power. Drones alone (and particularly their effectiveness in selective killings and assassinations) already require ethics specialists to urgently develop tools to assess the moral legitimacy of these military strategies.
The militaristic expansion runs parallel to the “migration movement” and, furthermore, countries with stronger armies tend to have stronger borders, so migration happens elsewhere, in nations that receive migrants without being able to offer a solution to such migratory movements. The migration of people generated by civil conflict, depressed economies, religious or political persecution, or environmental challenges leaves the world with increasing instability. To address this dangerous instability, nations, in increasing numbers, consider “humanitarian interventions” justified, even though they have evolved into the “responsibility to protect.”
The number of refugees and stateless people continues to increase, approaching figures that existed at the end of World War II, and now displaced people are confined for longer periods in very remote areas that do not present adequate solutions.
These situations are exacerbated by the continuous collapse of our ecology, which, like the issue of migration, goes unnoticed. The need to develop adequate economies continues to hinder the issue of responding to ecological crises. People and governments are much more interested in employment and sustainable economy than in whether our abuse of the environment is sustainable. Nevertheless, we risk our ecological future despite warnings: melting ice caps, rising sea levels, burning fluorocarbons, deforestation, universal climate problems experienced in droughts, hurricanes, and cataclysmic typhoons. The decision to look only at economic sustenance, without considering environmental sustainability, is the issue that most urgently requires an international conversion.
In this panorama, all those observing the unfolding ecological disasters fear entering a world where military power will protect those whom the world’s leaders choose as deserving of protection.
Well, we are in the 21st century, marked by expansionism and global instability like never seen before. In some way, this reminds us of the expansionism of 16th century Europe, in the conquest of the Americas and trade with the East. At that time, uncontrollable national ambitions motivated by military power might have gone unnoticed if people like Francisco Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Francisco Suarez had not presented a different vision.
We need international law and international economics ethicists. This is to reform the discourse for greater cooperation, a balance of power, the re-establishment of law above power, and a new vision of global order that knows how to value and prioritize the main intuition of the option for the poor. International participation and representation must idealize a fairer distribution of resources and wealth necessary for a life adequately considered dignified.
It is up to ethics specialists to work so that people, both in the world and in the Church, know how to reduce suspicions, prejudices, and fears to cultivate trust, respect, tolerance, and cooperation. For this, greater global cooperation among Catholic moralists is very important to model the cooperation that the world needs to engage in.
5 New horizons in fundamental moral theology
The field of fundamental moral theology has been affected by the enormous change in the anthropological profile of the person. The person was previously seen as a singular subject responsible for their sins and salvation. Today, however, it is understood as constitutively social and fundamentally relational. We cannot imagine a person who does not relate to another or to us.
This change in the view of the person as constitutively relational connected with the emergence of justice as the most important virtue in theological discourse, as mentioned in the previous paragraphs. This virtue was normally thought from social ethics, although it received some attention in fundamental moral theology.
The turn towards the virtue of justice in all these fields emerged in response to the irruption of suffering in theological discourse. This irruption first happened with the introduction of liberation theology in Latin America. Then, others appropriated it, especially in Africa, and also African American theologians and feminists. Responding to suffering became the decisive theme in all theological ethics, bridging the disciplines of bioethics, sexual ethics, social ethics, and fundamental moral theology.
For this reason, we are in great need of a fundamental moral theology in which the themes of sin and holiness are not thought from the individual but from the relational and collective. The notions of sin and grace, so often analyzed concerning the actions of the individual, are no longer adequate. The language of social sin should not be seen as secondary but should be put in the foreground. Furthermore, we need to think about virtues and commandments from their social aspect and action more from the perspective of participation, more institutional and structural.
Along with this, we also lack a much more robust notion of conscience, more attentive and vigilant to the needs and suffering in the world. We must develop within the Church an appreciation of conscience as recognized in Vatican Council II, and we need to instill in the laity and hierarchy an appreciation of conscience that is not primarily known for its capacity to disagree but for its capacity to be socially responsive. We also need a notion of conscience that goes beyond the “medieval notion of conscience as an act”: we need an idea that represents conscience as a durable and sustainable moral vigilance that is attentive to the needs of the times. Here we urgently need to think of ways to form the Christian conscience and, in this sense, the recovery of virtue ethics should help specialists address emerging issues around the contemporary formation of the Christian conscience.
We need to develop a moral theology that is global, that knows how to value the relational nature of the person and that maintains the formative influence of cultural and social forces. This new moral theology must be fundamentally biblical. Fifty years have passed since the famous admonition of Optatam totius 16, which instructed us to be more biblical. These steps are important, but we need more ethics specialists, especially Catholics, to enrich us with a new biblical ethics, which embraces the dual competence of biblical exegesis and complementary ethical hermeneutics, thus being able to apply biblical demands to contemporary life. This dual competence may require ethics specialists to collaborate more extensively with biblical theologians to remind them that, in the past, their attempts to realize a biblical ethics without adequate ethical hermeneutics showed that they should seek more extensive collaboration with theological ethics.
As we seek an appropriate ethical hermeneutics, contemporary biblical ethics writers instructively point to virtue ethics, because it represents the kind of instruction that the evangelists and Paul offer to faith communities. In this way, virtue ethics could help us articulate the virtuous traits that should be found in the contemporary disciple of Christ. We can imagine here how courage, mercy, vigilance, and solidarity are intimately connected with the evangelical call to work in building the Kingdom of God.
However, this new moral theology must be theological. The Church needs this new moral theology in its dioceses and parishes. It must clearly address the themes of grace and sin, creation and redemption, the mysteries of incarnation, the Trinity, and the promise of eschatological liberation; the call to discipleship and the Kingdom of God. And finally, it has to address the themes of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
This turn towards theological anthropology was accompanied by a shift in the development of virtue ethics. The development of virtue ethics requires that we not only develop the virtues that are properly configured with the image of Christ but also have a methodical awareness of how this ethics provides norms and functions as a concrete and prudent guide. In other words, if virtues tell us how to be, they also teach us what to do.
Simultaneously, we need to pay attention to the social structures in which we live and ask ourselves if these structures are adequately virtuous or problematically vicious. The language of social sin, by extension, should provoke us to observe social structures to evaluate what inhibits sin and what inspires virtue. We have a lot of work to do in this regard.
This turn towards virtue ethics, with the concomitant more social understanding of the person and conscience, raises an emerging question about the classical model of the four cardinal virtues and whether this model is adequate for people whose virtues should not lead them to perfection but to improve their relationships. For example, just as justice asks us to give each person what they deserve and to be impartial in judging people, fidelity asks us to recognize that friendship, family, and companionship (and other more intimate relationships) demand a fidelity in which we will treat people not with impartiality but with partiality precisely because we need to maintain these special relationships. Self-care could accompany justice and fidelity. But self-care only becomes important when we become aware of the just relationship because with justice we realize that we must be impartial towards everyone, giving each person what they deserve. And with fidelity, we realize that we must nurture particular, special, and partial relationships with friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens; and with self-care, we see that we are responsible for ourselves just as we are responsible for the stranger and the friend. The virtue of prudence teaches us how to handle these virtues, especially when they compete with each other. Will these then be the new cardinal virtues?
Still nascent, biblical ethics emphasizes the enormous impact that mercy had on the early communities. Mercy, understood as the will to enter into another’s chaos, had a clear relationship with the growth of Christianity, forming the defining mark of the early Christian community. More recently, other scholars point to humility, particularly an “epistemological humility,” which makes us consider the community, not ourselves, as the center of our world.
A third virtue that is receiving much attention is solidarity, a virtue that is not easily identified with tradition. Solidarity emerges when we know how to value the fact that we are in a global world. While prudence instructs justice to know what to give to each person, solidarity describes how, in the order of justice, we should be together, attentive to those on the margins or in more precarious situations.
As we build a global theological ethics based on the Bible, we hope to see in virtues, both old (mercy, humility, justice, and prudence) and new (fidelity, self-care, and solidarity), much that can help us in forming consciences in the 21st century.
6 Ignored themes that need attention for a new world order: race, inter-religious dialogue, and equality
These virtues should help us value and appreciate the immense number of challenges that present themselves on the horizon, not only those of ecology or militarism but also those that come from ourselves.
When we begin to understand ourselves in a global world, increasingly interested in cross-cultural dialogue, we need to pay attention to themes that can separate or alienate us and undo the steps that lead to solidarity. These three themes are rarely discussed by ethics specialists and now need to emerge as urgent issues.
We know that every culture has, at least, one group of people who are discriminated against because of their birth or race. The human capacity for prejudice is remarkable, and this prejudice often develops socially and eventually institutionalizes in pernicious and sinful structures. In many societies, skin darkness is the permanent measure of prejudice. In theological ethics – even if some specialists like, for example, Shawn Copeland, Jean Marc Ela, Bryan Massingale, and Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator challenged others to address this long-standing moral issue – ethics specialists must address this issue of race much more clearly, both nationally and globally.
Similarly, religious intolerance is a permanent challenge; more recently, efforts in comparative theology discourse show the value of inter-religious dialogue. It is noteworthy that Catholic ethics specialists have not provided a significant contribution to this discourse.
Finally, the issue of socio-economic inequality, a theme that is at the forefront for millions of people, is only now emerging as deserving of attention.
James F. Keenan S.J. – Boston College, Chestnut Hill, US. Original text in English
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