DUKE UNIVERSITY CHAPEL William H. Willimon, Minister to the University and Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry "A Good Name" September 11, 1988 (~ good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold. " Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9 Do you believe that? It's from the book of Proverbs. You get this sort of moral platitude there. "A good name is better than silver or gold." Sounds a little quaint, this talk of "a good name." But this is typical of Proverbs. Here is ethics done the old-fashioned (600 B.C.) way-- an older person telling a younger person how to live in order to have a good life. The book of Proverbs is, among other things, a great collection of this sort of wisdom - practical advice on how to get along in the world. Some of it, like any parents' advice, is valuable. Some of Proverbs, you can get along without. "A soft answer turns away wrath." Okay. "Fine speech is not becoming to a fool." "A fool take no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinions." (You're thinking of someone who lives down the hall from you.) "A wife's quarreling is a continued dripping of rain." "Like a diamond in a pig's snout is a beautiful woman with no sense." To which some of you will quote, "Like a lame man's legs,...is a proverb in the mouth of a fool." Well, you get the picture. Proverbs is advice to the young on how to get on in the world. Experience really can be a good teacher, says Proverbs. Listen to your elders. Let them give you advice. That way, you won't have to make it by yourself. You won't have to "reinvent the wheel" as far as life is concerned. This is ethics from the Proverbs perspective. "Whatever happened to ethics? Assaulted by sleaze, scandals, and hypocrisy, America searches for its moral bearings." These were the words on the cover of an issue of Time last year. The contents of the article were a devastating rev.elation of moral crisis. Sleaze in high places, two
presidential candidates forced to withdraw, one for plagiarism, another for adultery, scandals on Wall Street. When offered the choice between silver, gold or a good name -- we go for the gold. This campus was shaken last year when one of our own graduates and benefactors was found guilty of stock market fraud. An article in the Duke Chronicle quoted one of us as saying of this unfortunate young man's years at Duke, "He was always ambitious and didn't care what it too~ to get where be wanted." And when we read of his conviction, I think a chill went down our collective spines, for we know that we are here because, we are also ambitious. How are you going to get on in the world? So, here we are another Sunday in the Chapel, again in the Book of Proverbs, talking about ethics. Right, wrong, good, evil. Ethics is bot. In the past two years we have had, at Duke Commencement, a TV reporter and a. newspaper cartoonist. One talked on the Ten Commandments, the other on the Golden Rule. Ethics. The discredited presidential candidate asked, "Why should higher personal standards be applied to me than to everyone else?" Which led one cynic to remark, "He should have campaigned on the platform: It takes a sleaze to lead sleazes." What happened to ethics? One thing that happened, before many of you were in diapers, is that we began having ethical dilemmas. Your parents were the first to debate abortion, contraception, nuclear power, sexual in vitro fertiliza~ion. Our grandparents bad ethical quandaries, but never before have people bad so many quandaries, we are told. We live in a brave new world where technology, urbanization, the pill, have changed the world so much that everything is now up for grabs. In the new world, you can't trust what Mama or Daddy told you. They didn't live where you live, know what you know. Their values, what everybody else says is right, is not necessarily right. You must decide. You must choose. This we named Situation Ethics. There was an influential book by that title by Joseph Fletcher. I read it my Sophomore year of college. Ethics, Fletcher said, consists of a string of decisions. "What ought I to do? How should I choose?" Fletcher said that it's a mistake to decide on the basis of what you've always done, or what your parents or your society told you. How could they know your situation? You must decide for 2
yourself, now, afresh, in this situation. After all, before 1960, "everybody'' thought it was right for Black people to sit at the back of the bus. Everybody was wrong. Fletcher told stories of courageous people who had acted in ways that conventional m?rality might condemn: Jean Val jean in Hugo's Les Miserables steals a loaf of bread to save his family. Did Val jean do wrong? Stealing is wrong. Yes -but consider the situation. A man's family is hungry. Is it still wrong? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pacifist p~tor in Germany, participated in a plot to murder Hitler. Bonboeffer failed. But if he had succeeded, would we have condemned him for murder? Not in that situation, said Fletcher. Fletcher told of people who lied, stole, a mother who smothered her own child (so that she might save her other two children from attack by Indians)- all to demonstrate that one must take each new situation in:to account before one can say what is right and what is wrong. If murder, stealing, lying are sometimes right, then what is the control on our behavior? Is everything possibly right? "No," said Fletcher. How can we tell? "By applying the 'Law of love,' Jesus didn't come preaching rules and regulations; he came preaching love,'' said Fletcher. Love. When faced with a tough choice, the Christian will ask not, What does society say? What have I always done? What would mother do? The Christian asks, "What is the most loving thing in this situation?" I read Situation Ethics my Sophomore year of college and I loved it. To tell a college Sophomore, when he is faced (say on some Saturday night) with some ethical dilemma in the backseat of a Chevrolet, don't worry about what your parents taught you -- do the loving thing in this situation! It was wonderful. It was just what I wanted to hear! It was what we all wanted to hear. Situation ethics wasn't new. It was the modus operandi for the average American. We modem Americans enjoy thinking of ourselves as living in a fresh, totally new world. We value the individual, the free, independent individual above all else. For us, "growing up" is defined as learning to detach yourself from Mama and Daddy, home, roots, community, and learning to "be on your own." In such a world we create our values as we go - to fit each new situation, ad hoc. Cut off, without history, detached from any community, we are free to twist this way and that -- depending on the situation. All we ne~ded was a vague 3
principle like "love" to give us the philosophical justification for making ethics a matter of personal opinion. The trouble is, such a view of the self does not foster ethics. It defeats ethics. For ethics is not simply a matter of choice and decision. "What ought I to do?" is an unanswerable question without reference to something else. How do we know "What ought I to do?" until we first answer "Where ought I to go?" Where are you going? If life is nothing more than a string of detached, unrelated choices and decisions without reference to any goal or purpose -- you are going nowhere. You aren't becoming a more ethical person. Your life is little more than a string of choices without coherence or depth. You haven't made yourself free -- you have become enslaved to the urges and whims of the moment. A few years ago, "Dear Abby" received a letter which began in the following.way: "I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It's getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half of the expense, but I don't him well enough to discuss money with him." In deciding to listen only to ourselves for our ethical guidance, we wake up one day and realize that there is no "self' there. We haven't grown; we've shrunk. We haven't become free; we're enslaved. Our selves are the creation of an accumulated past. We are historical creatures. Each of us bas a past. Our decisions are significant as they accuii?-ulate into a picture of a person who is doing the deciding. Your decisions are important, not because they fit each situation, but because they cumulatively create character. So when faced with an issue, like abortion, it doesn't help too much to ask, "What ought I to do?" until you first ask, "Who do I want to be?" It doesn't help much to ask, "Is it right to love in this situation or not?", as if the situation itself could determine the value of what you do..1}.. better question is: "Who do I want to look like when I'm sixtyfive?" That's the question because your decisions, your choices, will either reinforce your development into that person, or detract from it. So your choices do make a difference, not so much in what they do to the world, but in what they are doing to you. The most pressing ethical question is not "What ought I to do?" It's "Who do I want to be?" We're talking about that rather old-fashioned quality called 4
"character." Character is the accumulation of certain dispositions, certain dependable virtues, over a life time. "That's just what I would have expected her to do" is an everyday affirmation of character, a recognition that she is a "Character'' - a coherent, purposeful personality whose life is more than unrelated, knee jerk reactions to "one damn thing after another.", Ethics is not only heroic choice and decision -- that is a modem fiction designed further to fragment our lives, to deceive us into thinking that our real problem is in making right choices rather than in living right lives. For most of us, ethics is not so much what we decide but the little, unselfconscious way we live our lives, the habits that give our lives unity and direction. In my first ethics course in college, I was told that your ethics isn't much good unless you think about it, unless you learn (preferably in college ethics classes) to rationally, intelligently think through each situation and then to decide and act. But that, I have come to feel, is a much too limited view of ethics. We don't live like that. Most of us live, not by abstract thought, but by habit. Most of us don't steal out of habit. Most of you have not had to agonize over whether or not to steal the wallet from the person who sits next to you in the pew. There are some things you can be counted upon just not to do. We don't have to think about it. And that's ethics, too, of the deepest, most dependable kind. So Aristotle noted that it was too much to ask of most people to be good. About the best that could be expected of ordinary people (like us) is that we learn good habits. A good person, said Aristotle, is someone who has learned good habits. For Aristotle, ethics is not a democratic phenomenon. Goodness doesn't come naturally, is not some innate human ability. Goodness is a virtue which is present in those who have trained under a master. It takes time to be good. Philip Hallie wrote of the little village of Le Chambon in France, a town whose people, unlike others in France, hid their Jews from the Nazis. Haille went there, wondering what sort of courageous, ethical heroes could risk all to do such extraordinary good. He interviewed people in the village and was overwhelmed by their ordinariness. They weren't heroes or smart, discerning people. Haille decided that the one factor which united them was their attendance, Sunday after Sunday, in their little church where they heard the sermons of Pastor Trochme. Over time, they became habituated 5 '
into people who just knew what to do and did it. When it came time for them to be courageous, the day the Nazis came to to~ they quietly did what was right. One old woman, who faked a heart attack when the Nazis came to search her house later said, "Pastor always taught us that there comes a time in every life when a person is asked to do something for Jesus. When our time came, we knew what to do." "Aristotle was right," says Haille. "Good people are mostly the people of good habits." Many of us have been neglecting our habits. Having convinced ourselves that our world is so new and demanding, that we are faced with problems our parents never knew, that there are no guides or values other than the ones we make up as we go, we haven't gro~ we have shrunk into detached, incoherent, untrustw~rthy slaves, never able to rise above our situations because we have no view of ourselves or the good beyond the confines of the moment. Our "selves" are but a bundle of detached ad hoc decisions rather than a life that has focus and meaning. Not long ago, a congressman, in a state in which I was living, was convicted for bribery. I was surprised. "I'm not," said a friend of mine. "I was in college with him. He bad no morals then. I'm sure be has even less now." His was an everyday observation of character, or the lack of it. What will they say about me at sixty? I have a hunch it will be something based upon who I was at twenty and so will it be for you. "A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches,..." 6