ORLAPUBS P. R141: ETHICS IN ONTOLOGICAL & JURIDICAL FRAMEWORKS

Does the reader believe that God wills anything he wishes and that that makes is right or good? Or should we believe that what God views as right and good is what promotes the true natures of His creations? The issue can be made more concrete by considering the views (a) that God condemns newborns as guilty of Adam's sinning, and the view of some one hears of (b) that we should not spend money curing aids in Africa since kids born with AIDS are destined by God to suffer for their parents misbehavior. In a juridical view of morality, the basis of ethics is a set of willed commands--though of course not every situation can be covered; and conflicts of opposed commands relating to a given situation require a hierarchy of which command applies when two conflict. (That's what casuistry deals with.) The juridical approach contrasts with the view that certain things are good or bad according as they promote the well-being of created nature, i.e. of a given human or group of humans. Conflicts arise in this kind of ethics just as much, or more, than in the juridical approach. In practice, this approach is seldom severed from rules and commands that guide ordinary humans who are not experts in ethics. For children and simple-minded adults, it's easier to memorize a rule or mantra than to think things out. Tyrants foster rule-based ethics, since what they decree is ipso facto defined as good; and those who resist them are, in their view, ipso facto evil.

     In the animal and fish world, some species like the tilapia in my pond keep overpopulation at bay either by eating the young or by abstaining from the laying of eggs. No one shoujld be able to claim that this aspect of "nature" applies to humans of a rational nature and capable of freely willing, though it has no doubt been argued that couples should refrain from child-bearing in over-populated regions.
    Consider the consequences in Europe of governments' taking such adequate care of the sick, out-of-work, and elderly that erstwhile motivations for having children no longer obtain and the populations are decreasing at such a rapid rate that there are not enough young workers to pay the cost of maintaining the elderly. There are natural fixes for this--have more children or invite workers in from other countries--who are affected by the offer or no offer of citizenship.
     No matter which approach one takes to ethics, there will arise false analogies, problems, etc. The main problem is that the nature of one person or group or species conflicts with the promotion or well-being of the nature of another person, group, or species. Some ethicists have advocated a quantitative view--the greatest good for the most people . . . but even that begs the question of which "greatest" applies when a conflict arises between the greatest number of people and the greatest good per person. And how is "greatest" measured?

ethics courses (and casuistry). If there are problems with the natural approach, the idea that God can make something that strikes everyone as bad good simply by willing it is vastly greater impediment to ethics, at least the approach conflicts with claims that he is loving and merciful. The ontological view is problematic when a conflict of natures occurs. (Some go so far as to condemn the eating of meat and fish because that is harmful to the natures of animals and fish.) But it often happens that what helps one human hurts another. And there are instances of humans' sacrificing themselves to save others--which we regard as noble. Suicide in cases where suffering is destroying one's nature and euthanasia in cases of total dementia pose further problems. Questions arise whether ending a life works against nature more than letting a person live in a manner that is totally recreant to nature. Pat answers are easier than thoughtful approaches. Traditionalist (non-Protestant) Christianity as well as liberal Protestantism has based ethics in being--in ontology.

Some distinctions are in order. One has to do with bad ontology--the relation of guilt to taboo and the miasm or curse that purportedly results from violating a taboo. (Cf. the accounts of Eve's eating the "apple" or the accounts of Uzzah in Gen. 3:3,6, 2 Sam. 6:6-7, and 1 Chron. 13:10. The other has to do with the role of will (not that of the legislator but of the doer of a deed), where responsibility is generally held to be necessary for guilt: One is not guilty of what one hasn't done knowingly, unless one is guilty of the ignorance, i.e. of not doing what is proper and indeed obligatory for finding out what is right and wrong. An extreme juridicalism would pay no attention to intention and ascribe guilt to a newborn for wrongs committed by an ancestor. A victim of rape who blames herself is basing her thinking on the wrong premises. There is also a moral condition of scrupulosity, i.e. of being over-conscientious, of hunting for one's own guilt where there is none or of exaggerating it beyond reason.
Little respect is now accorded to trials by fire or some other hazard or by lot--the throw of dice--of the Urim and Thummim.

Orthodoxy distinguishes (in the singular, if not in the plural form) in Greek 'amartema "a sin" from 'amartia "a sin-prone condition"--the state of humanity, ontologically cut off from the uncreated Energies of Grace (God's Life) following the Fall. A basic Orthodox moral concept is that of katányxis “contrite or remorseful consideration.” It has a negative side in its sustained awareness of one’s finitude and a pricking of the conscience with remorse for one’s failings; it has an affirmative side in one’s recognition that one is united with Christ as His member and in the firmness of one’s resolve to abandon whatever might distance oneself from Christ.

      Why, if one cannot be guilty of a misdeed that one has not willed (see Deuteronomy 24:26, Yezekiel 18:20, Galatians 6:5) or of an act that has been committed through inculpable ignorance, do the Orthodox confess “sins voluntary and involuntary”? Culpability for an offence is based on intention—will, which in turn presumes freedom of choice. There are two kinds of freedom. Sheer freewill is the ability to accept or reject. But rational freechoice involves knowing what the choices are—which are good, neutral, and evil—and what the foreseeable consequence of each possible choice is. (Cf. “informed consent” in civil law as a ground for determining responsibility; cf. also Aquinas, Compend, Ch. 120, where we read that sin is diminished in proportion to the admixture of the involuntary.)
     If a driver gets intoxicated and kills someone without the intention of doing so, the driver is still guilty of a grave “involuntary sin” because of one’s voluntary drinking alcohol and one’s knowledge of the likely consequences of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Alcohol and drugs reduce one’s ability to will evil. Those who know themselves to be impaired with respect to sight or hearing and nevertheless drive are guilty of any untoward result. When one has been given a narcotic without one’s knowledge, one can hardly be regarded as responsible for any untoward acts that one commits under that influence. Sins are of course not equal (except where viewed as imputed, as in Protestant theology).
     An unintended killing that results from drinking alcohol or taking drugs could be an unknown sin, say, in case one went through life not knowing what one had done. Another unknown sin could be a certain item of (false or even true) gossip passed along that has caused harm that one might never learn the consequences of. These are nevertheless sins that a person bears the consequences of.
     Note, however, that, like the Bible, the Orthodox reject the pagan Greek view that sin is simply ignorance, as though will and intention were not necessary at some level. If one is culpable for one’s lack of knowledge about the ill consequences of an act, then that act is, to the extent of one’s culpability, sinful. Conversely, as St. Gregory Palamãs wrote in his Treatise on the spiritual life (transl. D. M Rogich [Light and Life Publishing Company, 1995], p. 102), “for that which is involuntary, one is not held accountable.”
     A person who commits an immoral act is not guilty of the act if the one in question has had no way of knowing of a precept or principle prohibiting the act or of its wrongness, if one has not been in a position to be aware of untoward consequences of the act, or if one has been coërced or tricked into committing an immoral act. But one’s act will be culpable if one’s ignorance is due to an inexcusable failure on one’s own part to find out the necessary information about the act’s immorality or ill consequences. To the degree of one’s culpability in all of this, one is guilty of the immoral act; and to the degree one could not have known of the act’s nature or its consequences, one is not guilty. We can eat something containing food that should be avoided, say, on a Wednesday or Friday, either because we have forgotten that it is the day in question or because we are unaware of milk or eggs in what is eaten.
    One can fast, say, on a Thursday thinking it is a Friday. Given the intention, it is not lost piety despite the unintended and in some instances perhaps not easily avoidable error.

     There is no moral way that a baby can be guilty of Adam's or of any sins; that today’s Jews can be responsible for anything that any Jews did to Jesus two millenniums ago (see Yezekiel 18:20; that descendents of the Crusaders can be guilty of the atrocities the Crusaders committed against the Orthodox and Muslims; that individual Germans of today can be responsible for what those of Hitler’s time did; that individual Southerners today can be responsible for the slavery of the nineteenth century. Though individuals are not guilty (Deuteronomy 24:16, Yezekiel 18:20; cf. Galatians 6:5) of their ancestors’ sins, all are responsible for learning from their ancestors’ errors. And continuing institutions have a collective responsibility for past failings, including institutions that have burned people at the stake for honest dissent.
      Avoiding a sin simply out of the fear of being caught or punished is hardly an act of virtue, though not avoiding sin for that reason is better than what Luther recommended--to “sin mightily [fortiter].” There is no virtue in committing an act having a good outcome if one’s intention has been to commit a sinful act. More complicated is the converse—the commission of an act having a bad result while intending a good one: One’s virtuousness is reduced if the act is carried out without paying such attention to the situation as may be warranted (say, when one gives money instead of food to an alcoholic beggar), or when a deed is due to an avoidable failure to consider the likely results. Even in civil law, one can be sued for bad results caused by well-intended acts.
     There can of course be mitigating circumstances that diminish one’s ability to will a deed, including mental debility and being under the influence of a medication prescribed by a well-intentioned physician. Unlike Reformation Protestantism, conservative Christians agree that some sins are worse than others.

     The Church forbids the interruption of a pregnancy simply to prevent the birth of a child. (Although there seems to be no officially promulgated policy on whether to preserve the life of the existing mother or a child-to-be in case both lives cannot be preserved, some Orthodox theologians might say “Let nature, or God, decide”—in which case both would die; this seems to shirk one's responsiblity of acting according to some principle to preserve some life where not both can be preserved). The Church opposes positive euthanasia, i.e. measures to end a person’s life, though palliative medications to make dying easier are of course in order. It is generally accepted that a person suffering from an incurable disease and unable to received proper medication can refuse sufficient nourishment to prolong one’s life. Stem-cell use depends on where the cells come from, and the uses to which the cells are put. As for suicide, it is countenanced when one risks one's life with the aim is of saving others (1 John 3:16), as in a war or a similar contingency, when the intention is not purely and simply to cause one’s own death.   Jumping to one’s death from a burning building in order to avoid an inevitable and more horrible death is hardly immoral in the view of various theologians. Some teachers, but certainly not all, would consider it a mercy to shoot a person inescapably caught in a fire. Not all killing is murder. As people were being burnt at the stake in England, their friends tied a bag of gunpowder around their necks, so that those who could bend over could let the gunpowder catch fire and breathe in the flames, thus shortening their torture by dying more quickly. Burning heretics (or anyone else) at the stake of course lacks the justification of former Western ecclesiastics and anyone else. (If you have not read Foxe’s Martyrs, you should.)
     Neglect of one’s duties, such as a failure to prevent evil from taking place when one has the knowledge and means of preventing it, is of course reprehensible. It is the same with a simple failure to fulfill the duties and responsibilities that one is paid for or to follow through on one’s promises or commitments to any other person, especially when that results in ill consequences for the person one has made promises to.
     In a properly ordered system, natural law defines the scope and goal of positive law—i.e. laws legislated by a law-giver.    A good positive law is one that fulfills the purpose of natural law, for natural law ascribes goodness to what promotes a things’s nature.

One needs to remember that natural law is a naïve concept about “whatever exists in ‘nature" but that which promotes nature. It is an error to suppose that morality is about normality--a statistical matter. In our fallen world, normality is probably more often unnatural than not. Nominalism (the "modernist" philosophical outlook of the Protestant Reformers) recognizes neither natures (in the sense under consideration) nor natural law. The juridical orientation elevates positive law above all else. Rightly understood, natural law specifies ontological goals, whereas positive laws are the will-based means that, if they are good, are intended to achieve the goals of natural law.

One can be surprised by those who cannot see the difference between what is normal (a statistic) and what is natural (nature-promoting) and between ontological judgments (judging that this X is a Y) and moral judgments—something based on intention¾knowledge-formed volition).

The Orthodox do not categorize sins as mortal and venial sins; but neither do they treat all sins as equal the way those who teach that all human acts are equally predestinated or imputed to a person. Morality is more than obeying a set of rules, contrary to some prevalent assumptions. Telling the truth under the wrong circumstances can be harmful and sinful. Why, if intention is what makes an act good or bad, do the Orthodox confess sins willed and not willed? Sometimes, one has got to choose one evil or another and opts for the lesser evil. One can do something that one can reasonably expect to eventuate in something else that is wrong without actually intending that wrong as such¾as when one drinks before driving and then kills a child. Leaving a loaded gun on a shelf where children can find it and do harm to themselves or to others is a sin.

There are two aspects of obeying Biblical injunctions about judging that easily get confused. Consider the following often-cited passages:

Mat. 7:1, Luke 6:37: “Do not judge, in order that you all may not be judged.” (Cf. Jesus's own forgiveness of the woman caught in adultery.)

AND
2 Tim. 2:15: [“Zealously presenting yourself as one approved in God's eyes] . . . [as one] rightly discerning the truth [i.e. distinguishing it from error].”

    We are not to judge individuals from a moral standpoint, but we are to judge ideas and things objectively in order to label them correctly. Is such-an-such an act something that falls into the category of doing good (or evil)? Is such-and-such a teaching true or false? Is a given kind of activity normal but not natural because it does not promote the well-being of a person’s (or thing’s) nature? What is natural is often used far too loosely. We should distinguish from unnatural traits or behavior conditions that are just statistically abnormal like being left-handed or being born deaf or blind—conditions that can hardly be changed, though some types of deafness and blindness may be amenable to some new cure or to prayer. There are those who cannot see the difference between a moral and an ontological judgment or between a generic moral judgment and the moral judgment of an individual. It would be helpful if preachers clarified the difference.
     We are not forbidden to judge actions or matters of truth and ontology. It is moral judgments of persons that are to be avoided, since we can hardly really penetrate the inner being of anyone (see Matthew 7:1-4, Luke 6:37), even when the person in question tells us what one’s intention is in a given act. In judging persons, we can, besides remembering our own failings, avoid being judgmental by forming our judgment in terms of an if-then assertion: “If [a person] really intended X, then that person is good or bad as the case may be.” We should avoid trying to make a determination of a person’s intention and hence that person’s moral goodness or badness. We may say that someone is a bad (inept) mathematician or a poor (or incompetent) administrator or bad in other non-moral ways. Morality depends on will and intention of a different kind from the intention to perform a mathematical calculation correctly. What must be kept in front of us is that we can hardly be certain about a person’s intentions (which determine whether one’s act is morally good or bad). The circumstances may (have be)en different from what one assumes. We may not be able to ascertain whether any mitigating circumstances may have existed. Some circumstances (a perpetrator’s being in a position of authority) enhance the guilt of ill-doing.
     Moral judgment of individuals is left to God and one’s confessor or spiritual advisor, and even they should give more advice and less judgment. Whether an act has been legal or not (rather than morally lawful or not) is something that should be left to a court of law. Whether a canon has been breached is left to ecclesiastical judges, whose job it is to listen to a penitent’s own words. What one can say without determining the motives of the doer of a deed is that such-and-such an act has resulted in good or evil consequences . . . and that if it was done with a bad intention, it is sinful. If a lack of love is bad, it is far worse to hate anyone, as 1 John 3:15 and 4:20 make evident.

Two misconstruals of good and ill warrant mention. One is to confuse an utterance itself with the way that it can be taken by someone to constitute an unintended insult. This is like any unintentional harm¾unfortunate, but not something one is guilty of unless one is culpable of failing to foresee the consequences. We may or may not be able to judge the objective goodness of an act; but it is a lot harder to judge the subjective intention of its doer—which is where the moral quality of the deed basically resides. If someone offends us, we need not feel insulted when the offence has been done in ignorance or has otherwise not been consciously intended as an insult. And this is true even when the agent of the deed should have known better.
The sentiment that seems to come as close as possible (outside of the Bible) to the summit of Orthodox morality is found in the life of Father Arseny, a Russian priest who died in a concentration camp in 1975 (the subject of books published by St. Valadimir’s Seminary Press in 1997 and 2001) and on Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic, a Serb who was imprisoned at Dachau for his opposition to Nazism. I excerpt a few sentences concerning Bp. Nikolai from the longer quotation (beginning on p. 95 of F. Matthewes-Green’s The illumined heart [Paraclete Press, 2001]): “Bless my enemies, Lord. . . . Enemies have driven me into Your embrace more than friends have. Friends have bound me to earth; enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world. . . . Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of Your garment.”