2. Critical Political Ethics
Critical political ethics is opposed to any political-ethical decisionism because it fosters political authoritarianism. It takes up the postmodern critique of a foundational ethics when or insofar as this is immune to critique. It joins the critical deconstruction of truth claims and genealogies of ethical concepts that have contributed to the colonialist epistemology of superiority and inferiority among human beings, groups, and peoples.[6] Yet, as necessary as these analyses are, they are not sufficient from a political-ethical perspective, because it is not clear how they can motivate political-ethical actions: Not to play along in the cruel game of planetary destruction may well be an act of resistance, but actions are in part based on the ends that agents set. In the political realms, agents act together, aiming at collective ends that require particular means, strategies, cooperation, and coordination. If critical theory is correct, there is a certain drive to conformity and normalization that must be actively resisted: not to look the other way but to stand up requires political scrutiny, political-ethical virtues, allies who will take the role of political kin, and perseverance. It takes courage to stand up for one’s rights, for the rights of others, and for anybody to have the right to have rights. The role of ethics with respect to political practices is not to be confused with the moral practices, however. Rather, ethics must preserve its critical role of reflecting practices and subjecting them to the analysis of their normative justifications, as Ricœur aptly states in a comment to Habermas’ discourse ethics:
One might say, with Habermas, that the philosopher should not hold a discourse of citizens—practical discourse—but a discourse on the discourse of citizens—a discourse no longer practical, but critical—and that this critical discourse calls for reference to a regulatory idea which itself lays claim to truth and no longer to opinion.[7]
Following this argument, critical political ethics cannot evade the question of normativity and moral truth. If, however, theological ethics cannot return to an epistemology that points to divine law as legitimization of a particular kind of politics, morally justified by the sovereign authority of the Magisterium, what other route can ethics take?[8] I believe that a reflective justification of normative claims is possible, as long as this justification is either strictly formal or remaining open to infinite questioning when turning to substantial claims.[9] Kant’s ethics is indispensable in the universalization of moral claims regarding the dignity and freedom of human beings, which constitutes equality and reciprocity between agents. Yet, the concept of freedom does not only concern autonomy. I want to distinguish between four dimensions of freedom that need to be kept in play. I call them transcendental, existential, social, and political, and I claim that none of them must be discarded in ethical reasoning: First, Kant rightly showed that freedom is the foundational, transcendentalconcept of morality, i.e. agents’ capability to be held responsible for one’s actions. It does not exclude obligations towards those who are not agents, or the environment, for instance. Rather, it establishes the concept of responsibility as implication of moral agency. Autonomy in this sense is not merely the liberty to choose the courses of action but also the susceptibility to blame and praise by others who may hold the agents accountable and demand certain actions from them. Second, the existentialist interpretation of freedom from Kierkegaard to Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus entails the self-determination captured in the liberal autonomy concept but also goes beyond it. It stresses freedom as an existentialconcept that is captured in the concept of ethical identity. Freedom in this understanding is an infinite existential task of becoming oneself, of acknowledging the dynamic, future-oriented project of one’s biography that rests, at least in part, upon self-reflective choices one makes for one’s life.[10] Third, agents are necessarily embedded and entangled in the dialectic of self-other relations. Thus, although it is necessarily personal, freedom is re-active and responsive, constituting relations interconnection, of power, or domination and subjection. Whereas the existentialist tradition in the Hegelian tradition—Sartre especially—emphasizes the power over the self that emerges from the self-other relation, others who follow the theory of recognition, explore the spaces of social freedom that enable individuals to interact with each other.[11] Critical political ethics, however, insists that the denial of spaces of social freedom, or the exclusion from them, deprive individuals being recognized as subjects and moral agents, and hence are vulnerable to dehumanization by other agents. Because this is more often the reality than not, freedom is therefore, fourth, a claim on others, a moral demand to be seen, to be responded to, and to be respected in one’s dignity.[12] This demand is reflected in the struggles for liberation from violations of human dignity and structures of violence, which connects it both to the theology of liberation and to the theory of recognition, insofar as the latter addresses the multiple struggles for equal respect.
In theological thinking, the liberation from oppression has been interpreted as a path towards salvation, but reflecting the early modern history of Christianity, critical political ethics acknowledges that missionaries also used the theology salvation, blended with anti-judaist supersessionism and political colonialization, for their own missionary purposes. As a result, colonization is a political as well as a theological concept. Western Christian theology provided the narrative that entails, among others, the “racial contract,” as Charles Mills has called it,[13] and it is exactly this narrative that is promoted by the Christian Right in the USA today.[14] Critical political ethics must therefore break with a teleological and/or providential theology of salvation that returns as secularized philosophy of progress in history. Likewise, it must break with an apocalyptic theology of the end time and insist on the transformative policies in history. It must break with any political or ecclesial view that contradicts the above-mentioned understanding of freedom that embraces the capability to act and be held accountable, the quest for meaning in one’s life, the need to act together as persons and collective, and the political struggle for justice and equality.
Unfortunately, the Catholic Church often confuses the legitimacy of the Magisterium’s political-ecclesial authority of the Church with its assumed sacred authority that renders the Church immune to criticism. Furthermore, it conflates its ecclesial authority with the power to define what is morally right or wrong. The Church certainly has its own normative framework: the ecclesial law (Canon Law), comes with a sanctioning power analogous to secular laws, which is legitimate and legitimized by the ecclesial procedures—though often contradictory, insufficient, denigrative of women, but also little known by the faithful. The Catechism is a theologial and moral guide that summarizes and orients the beliefs of the ecclesia—but it is clearly open to criticism, interpretation, and change. Moral normativity, however, functions differently than the Canon Law or the Catechism: encountering a moral demand or claim coincides with the experience of moral agency, namely as the inability not to perceive the claim that others make on us. Morality entails the experience of the power to act, to take responsibility for one’s actions, and/or to be held accountable for them. Reacting to the concept of modern autonomy that it regards as a threat to morality, the Church reduces it to the almost unlimited freedom of choice that is, moreover, fostered in secularized liberal democracies. In contrast to this distorted view of freedom, moral agents experience all four dimensions of freedom mentioned above. Kant’s concept of autonomy is to a certain degree even compatible with the scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas whom the Church emphasizes as one of its most important guides regarding moral reasoning and virtues. The moral demand on Catholics to freely and obediently receive the moral imperatives from the Pope who speaks in the name of God, contradicts the very natural law of reasonthat Catholic ethics claims to adhere to. [./..]
[6] Jacques Derrida has offered multiple works that concretize deconstruction, e.g. of forgiveness, of justice, or universalism more general; Foucault has offered major works on truth regimes, e.g. concerning sexuality, madness, punishment, of policing. Both “paths” are indispensable for any ethical or political analysis and must therefore be taken up by a Christian ethics. They certainly offer a methodology that is akin to Adorno’s “negative critique” that the ‘new political theology’ embraced. J. Derrida, “Uninterrupted Diaglogue: Between two infinities, the poem,” Research in Phenomenology 34.3-19 (2004).
[7] P. Ricœur, The just, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 29.
[8] I have argued this at length in H. Haker, 2020.
[9] In his foundational ethics, Alan Gewirth has argued that it is possible to combine the formality of Kant’s ethics with substantial claims. While I applaud this approach, it still raises many questions about the meaning of freedom and well-being. Cf. A. Gewirth, Reason and morality, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
[10] Cf. for instance, S. de Beauvoir, The ethics of ambiguity, New York: Citadel Press, 1962.
[11] Cf. A. Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014; P. Ricoeur, The course of recognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
[12] Cf. J. M. Bernstein, Torture and dignity: an essay on moral injury, Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Cf. Also my interpretation of the concept of vulnerable agency in H. Haker, 2020, Chapter 5.
[13] C. W. Mills, The racial contract, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
[14] Cf. for an actual account of American Christian Groups that promote white, Christian supremacy: C. Hedge, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.