Ethics without Transcendence?

It is philosophers—or so it seems to me—rather than historians, literati, and sociologists who are these days unable to treat the questions that concern them from a superhistorical point of view. This situation is ironic, given that the claim of classical philosophy, beginning with Plato, was that philosophers, even when concerned with ethics, can speak as philosophers only atemporally. But today, discussions of ethics start locally and historically—not necessarily from an examination of the specific state of local morality or from statistics about crimes (or worse, sins) committed during the preceding years or decades. But owing to recent developments (by which I mean changes) in philosophy, the paradox arises that ethics—long conceived as dependent on a knowledge of immutable being—is now in a state where it must attend to historical context, while the sciences, which Plato saw as less abstract and less ideal than philosophy, still reason away in terms of laws and structures (which, though probabilistic, are as rigidly fixed as Plato could have wished). That the relationship between ethics and transcendence at the present time rests on this paradox is not only a premise of my method here but the first substantial claim that I submit for conversation.

No matter which other characteristics are specific to the present situation of ethics (which is not the same thing as the ethical situation), I believe that one of its most noticeable features is a growing attention to the social aspects of moral rules. I am referring not simply to the macroscopic fact that, when the discourses of "applied ethics" (medical ethics and so forth) attend to the behavior of individuals, they do so to frame actions that have social effects. Even those aspects of euthanasia, abortion, cloning, and genetic engineering that relate essentially to decisions by private individuals are discussed chiefly in terms of the social legitimacy of various behaviors. In a sense, the question of individual choice is resolved, or put aside, by the useful, and so far uncontested, right to conscientious objection: whether it is "ethical" for a terminal patient to choose to die is not really a question under debate. The problem for which solutions are sought is how an impersonal subject (constituted by a government, a hospital, an insurance company) should behave.

It appears, moreover, to be the case that the ethics of major religions—here I am thinking particularly, as an Italian, of the ethics of the Catholic Church—are today less exclusively dedicated to defining good and evil in terms of the individual's behavior. The preaching of premarital chastity has lost much of its centrality in Catholic education since the 1960s. (The last enemy—a "deadly" sin that the church has continued to stigmatize, with excessive and perhaps suspect force—is homosexuality in males.) The advocacy of Christian family values by politicians has more and more replaced that kind of preaching, and even though many such politicians are divorced or separated or live in cohabitation, they are held up as champions, in Italy and other Catholic societies, of those values even by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The tendencies I am describing could be characterized as evidence of looseness, inconsistency, immorality (though the immorality of our politicians pales in comparison with that of Renaissance popes). But there is a parallel set of evidence that calls for a different kind of interpretation: the documentary evidence of the morals handbooks used in Catholic seminaries. Just preceding and in the wake of the Second World War, and especially during the second half of the twentieth century, social ethics began to appear prominently in those handbooks and, more generally, in the preaching of Catholic organizations. Young Catholics today are exhorted far more often to involve themselves in voluntary work for the poor than they are urged to struggle on behalf of chastity. Even the stigmatization of homosexuality and of promiscuous, uncommitted, transient sexual intercourse is accounted for, increasingly, in terms of respect for the other, of the cultural and...