Beyond the Pale: Reading Ethics from the Margins ed. by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Miguel A. De La Torre (review)

Full disclosure: I am a contributing author to a companion volume edited by the same team on reading theology from the margins. As a Latino liberation theologian I am sympathetic to the overall project envisioned and realized by the two editors while still capable of offering a critical assessment of the completed project. From the outset, the editors are aware that a critical retrieval from the underside of history of the major figures in Western philosophical and Christian ethics is likely to offend many in the academic establishment, as evidenced by their use of Karl Popper in an epigraph: “If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them” (vii).

The overall argument of this primer in Christian ethics is that the academic discipline of ethics is thoroughly Eurocentric and—dare I say it—even white supremacist. Therefore, it is necessary for scholars located within the margins of the white male academy to reevaluate the canon of ethicists in order to articulate how one can reconcile the belief that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God (Gn 1:27) with the ethical reality that, in the works of many of the men whose works comprise the canon of philosophical and religious ethics (and, yes, the canonical sources interrogated in this volume are all men), large sections of the human population are excluded from the “unalienable rights” due them as imago Dei. Consequently, this work is not just a historical reevaluation of the canon through the lens of liberative ethics; it is a measured appeal for the very reconstruction of the canon along more liberative lines through the incorporation of previously marginalized and silenced perspectives. To that end, this volume is offered as a conversation starter for the very difficult work of revising the canon that lies ahead for the discipline, a mere marking of a trail in a largely unexplored wilderness.

Simultaneously, the text also serves as a good general introduction to the discipline of Christian ethics, as the editors have selected a representative selection of key figures matched to relevant themes (i.e., Augustine on just war, John Rawls on justice, John Howard Yoder on pacifism) that easily lends itself to an introductory or survey course at the undergraduate or graduate level. Furthermore, despite providing subtle and complex readings of canonical texts from a variety of critical perspectives, the text is accessible enough to appeal to a broad Christian audience beyond the academy. Although the quality and length of the articles varies, the project provides a crucial reassessment of classical figures in ethics that embraces the contributions these historical figures have made to the discipline while exposing the problematic biases and prejudices contained in their thought. The cumulative impact is to undermine the dominant assumption within the discipline of Christian ethics that an objective and universal perspective is desirable and attainable, in favor of affirming the contextualized and interested nature of every ethical perspective, thus demanding a hermeneutics of suspicion when reading all received texts and traditions. Perhaps a generation from now scholars will point to this volume—in particular, George Tinker’s piece on John Locke and property rights and Miguel A. De La Torre’s essay on Stanley Hauerwas’s ecclesiology—as a turning point for the discipline of Christian ethics, contributing to a Copernican shift in the construction and assessment of the ethical canon.