I’m working my way through Bethge’s book on Bonhoeffer. I came to a lecture Bonhoeffer gave while he spent a year (between his Phd & post-doctoral work – c.1928), as an assistant to the pastor of a German Lutheran church in Barcelona. It was a lax congregation of Germans working abroad. Bonhoeffer was attempting to inject some passion and deep conversation, so while the pastor was on leave, Bonhoeffer planned as series of lectures. One of those was concerned chiefly with ethics.
Bethge says that for Bonhoeffer, ethics “is not a system of general principles of universal application, but it historically bound.” In other words, he is saying that the whole point of ethics is not to glean universal ethical principles from specific situations, then to attempt to follow those principles in all other situations. Instead, the point of ethics is always a specific situation in and of itself, and what it means to act ethically in a particular time and place. Bonhoeffer wrote, “The situation is this, that there is a will toward new ethical forms and exploration of life, and the only thing lacking is the correct point of departure, and our task should be to attempt to show this point of departure.”
I’ve been musing on this ever since I read it. Is the point of departure an ethical principle, an ethical situation, or could it be something else entirely? There is a certain appeal to what Bonhoeffer is saying here, that there might be an argument to be made against abstracted universal ethical principles; that it could be a mistake to generalize ethical principles because in some context generalized ethical principles could become unintelligible.
Are there absolute, universal, ethical principles that can be transferred from one context to the other?
I have always assumed that there are. Bonhoeffer is challenging that assumption. I’m not sure I’m ready to go there yet, but I did have an interesting chain of reasoning that has kept my mind occupied since I read this: If there are absolute, universal, ethical principles, then maybe they should only occur in the positive: love your neighbor, love your enemy, self-denial, sacrifice; and not in the negative: any and all prohibitions, including violence. It could work, if for no other reason than that the negative prohibitions are already contained in the positive (e.g., if the positive principle is to love, then hate is negated). This obviously bumps straight away into the Decalogue. However, the Sermon on the Mount seems to want to move ethics much more into the positive realm.
But what if the critique is applied even to positive ethical universals as well? The argument is that a “good” in some situations can actually be an “evil” simply because of the context. Is it possible that prohibitions were never meant to be general and universal at all, but only specific and contextual, arising only from concrete, actual situations? (not even the dreaded case study?)
Where this all took me was that if you let the critique of universal ethical principles go all the way through all universal ethical principles (positive and negative), then what you would be left with is not a set of universal ethical norms, but a set of virtues. What actually travels from situation to situation is not an ethical principle of some kind, but a set of virtues that can be embodied in any context. Perhaps the correct point of departure for ethical discourse is neither the universal ethical principle, nor the situation itself, but a set of virtues that must be embodied contextually.
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