Hey everybody,

John wrote:
>Once I had became friends with an older man who owned a woodlot. He and I
>agreed on some important environmental issues such as water, etc. Then one
>day when I went to speak to him about protecting a forest nearby for future
>generations, he said to me quite bluntly: "As far as I am concerned they
>should log the whole damn mountain. It is not anything but a pile of rock
>anyway. We need to keep the sawmills running." After that he was not very
>friendly with me after that...despite the reality that we each expressed and
>revealed a 'gradient of values respecting the environment'. It became
>apparent to me that keeping the timber supply at an all time high was a
>priority in his sense of 'instrumental values'. He and I were in agreement
>on many issues respecting the environment: organic farming, clean water,
>etc., but it was - in his view - timber was the most important since it kept
>food on the table so to speak and this was 'sacred' for him. What was sacred
>to him was 'scary' for me. I am not against all logging, but only the extent
>and the nature of the negative impact that it has on the 'natural endowment
>of natural capital' here.
>

This last paragraph of John's reminded me of a story told by Stanley
Hauerwas.  With your indulgence, I'll just copy it here.  Hauerwas is an
ethicist who specializes in theological ethics (Christian in this case).
usual disclaimers apply: delete at will.  But in some ways the story
illustrates just how closely feminist ethics and theological ethics are
related (cf. Vanessa's post).  Perhaps this story also hints at differences
between morality and ethics . . .  honesty and lying . . .  edifying vs.
systematic ethics . . .  etc. etc.
:-)
Jim

*********

My father is a good but simple man.  He was born on the frontier and grew
up herding cows.  Living with a gun was and is as natural to him as living
with an automobile is for me.  He made his living, as his father and five
brothers did, by laying brick.  He spent his whole life working hard at
honest labor.  It would have simply been unthinkable for him to have done a
job halfway.  He is after all a craftsman.

I have no doubt that my father loves me deeply, but such love, as is often
the case among Westerners, was seldom verbally or physically expressed.  It
was simply assumed in the day-to-day care involved in surviving.  Love
meant working hard enough to give me the opportunity to go to college so
that I might have more opportunity than my parents had.

And go on I did in abstruse subjects like philosophy and theology.  And the
further I went the more unlike my parents I became.  I gradually learned to
recognize that blacks had been unfairly treated and that the word "nigger"
could no longer pass my lips.  I also learned that Christianity involved
more than a general admonition to live a decent life, which made belief in
God at once more difficult and easy.   And I learned to appreciate art and
music which simply did not exist for my parents.

Married to a woman my parents would always have difficulty understanding, I
then made my way to Yale Divinity School, not to study for the ministry,
but to study theology.  During my second year in divinity school, every
time we called home the primary news was about the gun on which my father
was working.  During the off months of the winter my father had undertaken
to build a deer rifle.  That meant everything from boring the barrel and
setting the sight, to hand-carving the stock.  I thought that was fine,
since it certainly had nothing to do with me.

However, that summer my wife and I made our usual trip home and we had
hardly entered the door when my father thrust the now completed gun into my
hands.  It was indeed a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.  And I
immediately allowed as such, but I was not content to stop there.  Flushed
with theories about the importance of truthfulness and the irrationality of
our society's gun policy I said, "Of course you realize that it will not be
long before we as a society are going to have to take all these things away
from you people."

Morally what I said still seems to me to be exactly right as a social
policy.  But that I made such a statement in that context surely is one of
the lowest points of my "moral development."  To be sure there are ready
explanations supplied by the Freudians to account for my behavior, but they
fail to do justice to the moral failure my response involved.  For I was
simply not morally mature enough or skillful enough to know how to respond
properly when a precious gift is being made.

For what my father was saying, of course, was someday this will be yours
and it will be a sign of how much I cared about you.  But all I could see
was a gun, and in the name of moral righteousness, I callously rejected it.
One hopes that now I would be able to say, "I recognize what this gun means
and I admire the workmanship that has gone into it.  I want you to know
that I will always value it for that and I will see that it is cared for in
a manner that others can appreciate its value."

I have not told the story to give an insight into my family history or
because I get some pleasure from revealing my moral shortcomings.  Rather,
I have told it because I have found it illuminating for reflecting
generally about moral growth.  For the insensitivity of my response to my
father did not reflect my failure to grasp some moral principle, or to keep
the maxim of my action from being universalized, but showed that I did not
yet have sufficient character to provide me with the moral skills to know
that I had been given a gift and how to respond appropriately.  On the
surface my response was exemplary--I was straightforwardly honest and my
position was amply justified.  But in fact what I did was deeply dishonest,
as it revealed a lack of self, the absence of a sustaining narrative
sufficient to bind my past with my future.

For my response was meant only to increase further the alienation between
my father and myself in the interest of reinforcing what I took to be more
"universal" and objective morality.  I discovered that the person who
responded so insensitively to my father was not "who I was" or at least not
what "I wanted to be."  I was and am destined to be different from my
parents, but not in a manner that means I no longer carry their story with
me.  But my own self, my story, was not sufficient to know how that might
be done.

And I am struck by how little I would have been helped by becoming more
sophisticated in ethical theory or even by conforming my life more
completely to the best ethical theory of the day.  My problem was not that
I lacked skill in moral argument and justification, but that I lacked
character sufficient to acknowledge all that I owed my parents while seeing
that I am and was independent of them.  Indeed it has taken me years to
understand that their great gift to me was the permission to go on, even
though they sensed my "going on" could not help but create a distance
between me and them that love itself would be unable to bridge.

Equally interesting to me has been the attempt to explain to myself how I
could have been so unbelievably self-righteous.  My temptation has always
been to think that what I said "was not the real me."  Moreover there is
some good reason to accept that kind of explanation, since I certainly
would not have said what I did had I "known better."  Therefore, I was not
responsible for what I did, though I clearly did it at the time.

But such an explanation is a "temptation," as it is equally clear to me
that my moral growth depends on taking responsibility for what I said as
something done by me.  Not to take responsibility for my response is to
remain the person who made that kind of response.  Philosophically that
seems to be a puzzle, for how am I to explain that I must take
responsibility for what "I did 'unknowingly' " in order that I can now
claim responsibility for what I am and have become?  As puzzling as the
philosophical problem is, the moral intelligibility of claiming such an
action as mine is just as sure.  For retrospectively all my actions tend to
appear more like what "happened to me" than what I did.  Yet to claim them
as mine is a necessary condition for making my current actions my own.  Our
ability to make our actions our own--that is, to claim them as crucial to
our history--even those we regret, turns out to be a necessary condition
for having a coherent sense of self--that is, our character.  But such a
coherence requires a narrative that gives us the skill to see that our
freedom is as much a gift as it is something we do.

For our freedom is dependent on our having a narrative that gives us skills
of interpretation sufficient to allow us to make our past our own through
incorporation into our ongoing history.  Our ability to so interpret our
past may often seem to require nothing less than conversion as we are
forced to give up false accounts of ourselves.  Because of the pain such
conversions often entail, the language of discontinuity tends to
predominate in our accounts of moral development.  But the freedom acquired
through our reinterpretations is dependent on our having a narrative
sufficient to "make sense" of our lives by recognizing the continuity
between our past and present and our intended future.  In order to see
that, we need a story that not only provides the means to acknowledge the
blunders as part of our own story, but to see ourselves in a story where
even our blunders are part of an ongoing grace, i.e. are forgiven and
transformed for "our good and the good of all the [community]."


*************

from
Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive
Christian Social Ethic  (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981),
pp. 145-147.