Metaphors We Ration By An Interpretation of Practical Moral Reasoning

I was a first-year graduate student sitting in a class on religious ethics when James Childress, during a lecture on the meanings of Christian agapeic love, made a memorable assertion about what is taken to be the paradigm narrative of agape in Christian scripture, the parable of Jesus on the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). This central parable of the Christian ethic, Childress commented, is “morally uninteresting” insofar as the Samaritan was presented with no moral conflict. Suppose instead, he continued, the Samaritan had come upon not just one wounded traveler in need of care but a whole family or several strangers, all of whom were in need of assistance for their lives to be preserved, and the Samaritan had only the one donkey for travel and an insufficient amount of oil and wine to treat the life-threatening wounds of all the travelers. How would the Samaritan express his compassion in that circumstance, when there were more wounded travelers in need of life-saving care than the Samaritan could possibly help? What does the norm of love require in situations of scarcity, such that Jesus could then say to others, “Go and do likewise”? When morality encounters reality on the road to Jericho, whom should the Samaritan save when not all can be saved? (Childress 1985).

I begin with this story to illustrate that the practical reasoning in ethics articulated by Childress not only relies on norms, principles, or rules but also incorporates analogy, metaphor, images and imagination, and symbolic forms of rationality. While critics have concentrated on his principle- and rule-oriented reasoning methodology, they have neglected the totality of his practical reasoning method, which intertwines moral norms and analogical imagination, metaphor, and symbol (see Childress 1982, 37–38; 1996, 198). This intertwining of forms and resources in practical reasoning is clearly on display in his classic Soundings article, “Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live?” (1970) (hereafter “Who Shall Live?”). The procedural answer of randomness that Childress develops to the question in the article’s title is justified through “moral and non-moral values,” while the method of practical reasoning Childress relies on to support this position draws substantially on what he subsequently describes as “aesthetic dimensions of moral discourse” (1997, 3).

The present article will highlight and analyze the role of these aesthetic considerations—including analogy, metaphor, and symbolic rationality—in “Who Shall Live?,” while providing supplemental illustrations and amplifications drawn from a broader corpus of writings about moral reasoning and discourse over the past four decades. I argue that the elements of Childress’s model of practical reasoning (reasoning through moral norms that require moral vision, imagination, discernment, interpretation, and witnessing embedded in analogy, metaphor, and symbol) allow Childress to avoid several misplaced debates in biomedical, philosophical, and religious ethics. These either/or framings of moral reasoning include theory and casuistry, norm and context, absolutism and situationalism, principlism and personalism, and formal secular principle and narrative sacred text. I also contend that the interpretive practical reasoning Childress presents is more hospitable to incorporating moral perspectives from religious traditions than are most methods in bioethics, which are under the sway of an ingrained secular paradigm (Barry 2012, 54–73).¹ My aspiration is that through such an analysis, we can find a place for Good Samaritans in a morally interesting world. I wish first to consider some of the core elements of the model of practical reasoning in Childress’s ethics prior to turning to their manifestations in “Who Shall Live?”

Moral Vision in Practical Reasoning

In a retrospective appraisal of “Who Shall Live?,” Childress observes that the article is “essentially an extended reflection on the analogy between our judgments about real and hypothetical lifeboat cases and our judgments about the allocation of scarce lifesaving medical resources” (1997, x; emphasis added; see also 183). This perspective, offered during the time period in which both theoretical and casuistic critiques vigorously challenged “principlism” in bio-ethics, represents an affirmation by Childress that even from the earliest of his writings, practical reasoning encompasses both principle-based...