The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human by Michael Banner (review)

What should the opportunities and demands of my spouse’s work mean for me given the opportunities and demands of my own work? Should we move away from our extended family for a better job? Should we have children now? What kind of education do we owe our children? How do we balance the demands of our aging parents with the demands of our children? Do my spouse and my children really know how much I love them? How much should we be giving to the church and to this or that cause? Is it okay to drive this safer car and to drive it as much as I do given how much CO2 it emits? Should I really order a steak? I suspect that these are the sorts of moral questions that bedevil a majority of individuals most of the time—nothing glamorous, nothing exciting, only the warp and woof of our daily lives. We want to live faithfully and well, knowing that to live such a life will require a thousand little decisions that may have unintended ethical consequences.

The typical class in ethics, even Christian ethics or moral theology, and the typical anthology used in such a class follows a standard formula. The first part of the class/book is devoted to an examination of the major theories on offer and includes an account of deontological or nonconsequentialist theories (the nature of the act is what makes it wrong or right) with the greatest attention devoted to variations of Kantian ethics. It also includes various permutations of consequentialist or utilitarian ethics (do the greatest good, however that is understood, for the greatest number of people). This, in turn, is typically followed by an introduction to virtue ethics in some shape or form. After this groundwork is laid, students are then given the opportunity to sink their teeth into the juicy bits, namely the “application” of these theories and their guiding principles to a fairly standard set of moral problems, many of which are bioethical problems, including beginning of life issues such as cloning, in vitro fertilization and Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and abortion, and end of life issues such as euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Other issues include the intentional taking of human life in war and capital punishment; hunger and poverty; and environmental responsibilities and animal welfare.

Students who complete such a class may emerge relieved that morality, having so little to do with their daily lives, is not quite as demanding as they had feared. After all, how likely is it that they will come face to face with any of these hard moral problems, much less more than one? And if they should perchance encounter one of these problems, they need only to plug the moral principle into it. “Ethics is really pretty simple,” they may think.

Michael Banner, Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, is hardly the first to notice how distorting and unhelpful is the reduction of ethics to an attempted resolution of a hard moral problem. Moral quandaries are but a minor part of the moral life. Unlike earlier critics like Alasdair MacIntyre, who turned to Aristotle to forge a retrieval of an ethics of virtue as an alternative to an ethics of hard cases, Banner commends an “everyday ethics,” an ethics of the course of life (and says not a word about virtue). And where earlier critics, especially MacIntyre, find modern morality, both in theory and in practice, incoherent, Banner is dismissive only of the practices of most modern moral theorists (in particular, bioethicists), and not modern moral practices themselves. Indeed, moral theory should attend to moral phenomena. Furthermore, because cultural anthropology (in Britain “social anthropology”) is the discipline in which moral phenomena is most closely examined and...