[./..] As the moral-theological tradition teaches, moral judgments are situated in concrete histories and traditions. Understanding, too, is necessarily historical, contextual, and experiential. The names and images of God found in the tradition must be examined, potentially critiqued, potentially contested, and reinterpreted, as Derrida argues in his works that I take to establish a critical hermeneutics.[15] Ultimately, no name or image can capture God, nor should that even be the goal of theology. Instead, language is the human way of interpreting one’s unique and existential freedom-in-relation, creating a web of belonging to forbearers in faith, one’s chosen kin. These include the witnesses of the Son of Man whom God chose as his Son, and whom God chose to become akin to every human. Critical political ethics reminds theological ethics (if not all ethics) that empire imageries—of the sovereign leader within a nation, or the empire nation among all nations—stand opposed to the images of those who have been morally injured by practices and structures of exclusion, racism, poverty, oppression, and isolation. Attesting to God’s special bonds with humans in history, Christian theology is reminded of the ongoing history of violence, domination, and exploitation of land and peoples: children, women, and men who are forced to succumb to those who enforce their violence as a political, if not theological right, without ever being blamed or held accountable. Learning from this history, critical political ethics is not only reflective and critical in view of moral practices. It is also constructive and creative. It seeks in the practices models of freedom that allow agents to break free from oppression, or conformity and complicity with institutional arrangement that constitute exploitation and oppression. In other words: it seeks models that show how engagement for liberation, solidarity, and justice is possible and effective.[16] Critical political ethics contributes to change by listening to the experiences and by imagining new, effective practices, new structures of social action, and potentially new institutional governance structures that are liberating rather than cementing the existing asymmetries between individuals, groups, and nations, together with the people who are most affected by the current structural sins, against humans, animals, and the earth,
Critical political ethics, it seems to me, is needed more than ever today. As theological ethics, it provides sources for political-ethical reasoning that point beyond the reified world. Claiming that the political is always and necessarily personal (though not necessarily private), critical political ethics takes the vulnerable agent as its starting point, and the (morally) injured at the normative center of its ethics. Critical political ethics is not naïve, and looking at the history of Christianity, it acknowledges that justice requires struggles. These struggles require the learning of courage, perseverance, and motivation in the midst of futility, as Camus’ ethics demonstrates so clearly. It requires the deliberate formation and internalization of political virtues, such as compassion (Anteilnahme) and solidarity, and the sensitization for injustice. As Christian ethics, critical political ethics has the experience and the means to foster these political virtues that enable individuals and groups to engage in concrete actions and practices. It seeks to contribute to the development a new habitus of response-ability, formed through the experiences of social, political actions, critically reflected upon in ethical scholarship. Like the theologians of the last third of the 20th century, i.e. political, liberation, feminist and mujerista and womanist, black, postcolonial, and decolonial theologies, took theology to the streets, critical political ethics is connected to the social movements, which it accompanies in critical solidarity. It is an ethics of and for the weekdays: the days of responses to moral injuries, suffering, and often death. Theologians and clergy often linger happily in the vicinity of political power. It must go out into the rubble of the streets, linger among the people whose dreams are being shattered again and again.
Like its kin, the theologians and clergy who have for decades acted in the midst of those on the dark side of the current world disorder, Western theologians and ethicists must not only act; they must themselves unlearn the language and habitus of coloniality, seeking their own response to the alienated, vision-less, individualized people who are also deprived of their own happiness by the global disorder. Like addicts to consumption, they stumble from promise to promise, and from crisis to crisis, often with no expectation that life can have a deeper meaning than consumption and conformity. Theologians and clergy in the West must attend to them to foster personal, social, and political transformation. Critical political ethics cannot discern one response but rather, it will generate multiple responses to the moral crises of our time. Furthermore, ethics cannot offer the answer to “the” meaning of human existence, because this is the task of freedom that every human being is endowed with. But Christian ethics can continue to tell the story of past human experiences and past interpretations of God which point to a future that is yet to come. These stories do not mirror the passive, obedient recipients of God’s word but the active witnesses of faith. Many witnesses of faith refused to choose between the love of God and the love of humans. Even the central symbol of female submission and obedience in Western Catholicism, Mary, invoked Hannah’s song right after the Annunciation, remembering her trust in God who will throw the powerful from their throne, and for this she is loved by millions of Catholics who pray in her name (1 Sam 2:1-10; Luke 1:46-56).
In light of this biblical and theological tradition, the critique of domination and theo-political authoritarianism must include the Catholic Church. Like any institution, it is not exempt from human fallibility and the sin of self-love, love of power and domination. My approach is therefore critical in two ways: it is critical of any political theory that legitimizes power over others by invoking the name of God, and of any theology that justifies violence and injustice in the name of the sacred power of the Church or, in fact, any religion. Instead, critical political ethics is bound to remember the God who regards the pain of others as her own pain, creating a bond of care that enables humans to trust rather than fear God. This bond breaks the chains, liberating humans to explore their finite, fragile, yet creative freedom together with others. Indeed, this bond does not force moral agents to dismiss their agency, nor violates it their freedom rights. Quite to the contrary, it is a bond that empowers humans to struggle with and for others, for liberation and justice.
[15] Cf. for a critical analysis R. Bernstein, “Serious Play: The Ethical-Political Horizon of Jacques Derrida”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 1.2 (1987), 93-117. For Derrida’s hermeneutics cf. J. Derrida, “Uninterrupted Diaglogue: Between two infinities, the poem”, Research in Phenomenology 34 (2004), 3-19.
[16] Iris Marion Young has pointed to the collective, social responsibility for justice, especially when no individual can be blamed for acting immorality, yet as a collective, multiple individuals contribute to institutional injustice. Cf. I. M. Young, Responsibility for Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
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Author
Hille Haker holds the Richard McCormick S.J. Endowed Chair of Catholic Moral Theology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on the foundations of ethics, moral identity, literary & narrative ethics, social and political ethics, bioethics, and feminist ethics. Recent books are: The Renewal of Catholic Social ethics. Towards a Critical Political Ethics. Würzburg: Echter, 2020, and Unaccompanied Migrant Children. Social, Legal, and Ethical Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019 (co-edited with Molly Greening).