BACKGROUND BRAINSTORMING FOR NO IMMEDIATE USE PRINTOUT OF DECEMBER 1996 FOR INTERESTED ETHICS STUDENTS JHYODER NOT FOR QUOTATION

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"What would you do ... ?" revisited

For fifty years 1 I have been bending over backward to be respectful in the face of the standard question which almost everyone thinks should easily refute the conviction of those who consider killing to be immoral2 : "What would you do if a brute were threatening a child?"

Yet the longer I seek to be serious with the people who use this stereotype response as an excuse for their not being serious, the harder I find the ecumenical exercize. People do not in similar ways challenge apriori the notion of making marriage vows, or mortgage contracts, or the renunciation of idolatry , or oaths of office, by asking ahead of time whether one can think of a possible situation where it would not be easy to see how to fulfil that obligation perfectly . There is something skewed, something conceptually dishonest, though probably not consciously or intentionally so, in thinking that that question proves something; proves it, in fact, so overwhelmingly that the question is closed rather than needing study.

For the question to be assumed to have that force, it must be postulated without question that those of us who reject the use of lethal force do so on the basis of a concept that morality is guided by a finite set of exceptionless prohibitions; to find one possible exception therefore refutes the prohibition. That has to be the assumption .

Then the needed discussion is not about the sacredness of my neighbor's life but about the sustainability of an ethic with

1 My first essay was a series of columns in the denomination magazine Youth's Christian Companion. Then in 1951? It became a pamphlet in french, in 0000 a scholarly article in the Journal of Religious Ethics, and in 1983 a pamphlet , which was expanded in a second edition in 1992.

2 Sometimes this position is called "pacifist" but that word has too many definitions to be helpful. For the purpose of this discussion I make no effort to itemize the many ways in which, or reasons for which people, Christians or not, may take such a position. My reasons are derived from my confession of J esu s Christ as Lord , but muc h of what I say here would also apply to others who have other reasons for honoring life.

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exceptionless prohibitions.

This logic does not represent any moral thinkers in the real world. There have been and are moral thinkers who speak and write about exceptionless negative norms. I respect them and their views more than some of their critics do. Yet after saying that there are exceptionless norms, they go on to talk about how to adjudicate collisions between absolutes, and they redefine just what it is that is exceptionlessly forbidden, so as to take account of what other people would call an exception.

E.g. most contemporary Roman Catholic moral theologians who consider all abortion to be the prohibited killing of a human being, always wrong, authorize killing when it is legitimized by the state.

My conviction that war is wrong is not derived from a meta-ethical commitment to exceptionless prohibitions or to any other one mode of reasoning. I honor the people who have expressed themselves in those terms 3 , while pointing out for present purposes that it is not the only way to argue . Only those who do all the rest of their ethics in terms of a logic of exceptionless prohibitions have the right to test the pacifist's consistency with this question.

"Can any law be exceptionless?" is a logical or mathematical puzzle at the edge of ordinary discourse. Anyone who really believes in debate on that rarified meta-ethical level would need to apply it to all morality, not only to killing, and to saving all innocents, not only those threatened by a brute.

There is something paradoxical about the fact that the logic of exceptionless norms is most easily and frequently appealed to in this negative huypothetical argument, whose positive alternative is probabilist situationalism i.e . the notion that a "situation,'' especially an extreme and urgent one, dictates selfevidently the right thing to do, and that one breach in absolute e xceptionlessness suffices to permit anything. Cf Daniel Ma guire on abortion (classical "debate" with J.T.Burtchaell at Notre Dame years ago) ; if the defenders of fetal life can ever countenance any exceptions, then all decisions about pregnancies should be left to the mothers and the medicos. 4 Thus this "lunge for the edge" presupposes the rigor it seeks to refute. If e xceptionless prohibitions were not the preferred idiom in t he first pla c e , the n the hard c ase would not r e fu t e t he generalization .

3 Cf. my desktop packet of essays Exceptio Probat on some of the many ways e xceptions can be argued .

4 I ha v e not y e t l ook e d up t he b e st Maguir e text. I assume that the Notre Dame talk was printed somewhere.

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My serious response to the standard quest i on has rou t inely b e en a matter of nonviolent etiquette, going t he second mile with someone coercing me (Mt. 5:41). My doing so involved accepting for purposes of that particular dialog an unevangelical understanding of how moral discourse ought to work. I have never granted that it is an intrinsically valid argument.

I did note some of the limits of the logi c within my response i n What Would You Do5 • I however did not pursue further t he paradox of negative quandarism as such. 6 If you bend rule (a) ("do not kill") to give more priority to value (b) ("defend the innocent victim"), what has changed is not the logic of moral choice but only the prior assumption concerning which value is trump. In this mode of argument there is always some trump . If it is not value (b) then it is the person who commands you (c) or the process (d) whereby you decide . Exceptionmaking does not prove that there is no superior value; only that value (a) is overruled by something weightier . Value (b) or (c) or (d) is in fact no less deontic, no less broad in its claims , no more s ubject to "proportional" adjudication , than value (a) which they overri de .

Instead of reasoning from the edges of casuistr y, evangelical moral witness begins at the center. How can I serve in real life the God who gave his Son to reconcile his enemies? How can I be for everyone, including the brutal or angry person, what Jesus was toward the bearers of power and agents of enmity, whether Romans , Zealots, or Saducees , in his time? The center of ethical discernment is finding the way to bear one's cross as He bore his. Christ i an fa i th in the Holy Spirit as teacher a nd enabler means that such a way can b e found.

The confession that Jesus Christ is Lord does ·not guarantee that there will not be, in my own life or in the world, situations for which I will have no easy answer, or value collisions where I c an avoid unsatisfactory choi ces. I may not be morally strong. Nor is there any guarantee that I will always be ale rt, or honest , o r creative, o r fully inf orme d, a s I should b e . I ma y no t thi nk o f all the possible alternatives. But none of the space that this modesty on my part leaves open for error and tragedy constitutes a reason for me to develop ahead of the challenge a r eadiness in principle to do the opposite of the Gospel when the ha r d case arise s . We must not forget t ha t the person who asks "wha t would you do to stop a r brute?" i s not in fact t hinking onl y about the b r u te. He assumes t hat the ques t ion constitu tes adequate reason

5 1992 edition pp. 12-24.

"Qua nda ri s m'' i s one l a be l recent ly give n t o the pre dilection for hard cases as t he way t o do moral argume n t. I ha v e taken the "second- milen conv e rsat ion with qu andarism still farther in my Sha lom Desktop packet Exceptio probat .

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for a civilization to have a military establishments, arms manufacture, professional military personnel and if necessary conscription. The argument will only work if it justifies institutional readiness for war. Yet the argument about the brute cannot prove that. The United States Department of Defense is not a far-out exception; it is a massively expensive institution. Even if I did justify killing the brutal intruder that would make no case for war. 7 This is what I meant by writing above that it is (though not consciously) a dishonest argument. It does not reach far enough to prove what it claims to defend. The exceptionmakers do not want a little play at the edge of the casuistry, to make room for defending innocent individuals; they want a generalized reduction of all moral argument to their preferred proportional consequential projections, and then they want to drive the Pentagon through the hole they have made.

Some of the broader method debate sets other exceptions in parallel with killing a brute. The dutch householder with Anne Frank in his attic should lie if the SS ask whether he is sheltering Jews. It was good that Frau Berg in a Russian prison camp committed adultery with a prison guard so that, released on grounds of pregnancy, she could rejoin her family. Each illustrates well the phenomenon I have called the lunge for the edge. Each falls short of accountable elaboration of how from that extreme case there should follow a general casuistry for . justified lies and adultery. The fact that the argument is punctual, shortrange, consequentialist, self-centered, does not make the far-out act morally wrong for that person then and there8 , but these limitations keep it from serving as a general argument against general prohibitions, to say nothing of being a paradigm for overruling particular prohibitions.

If the best or only or primary way to state the wrongness of war were that blood is shed and bloodshed is always wrong, then that absolute prohibition could be slightly modified by describing hard case, real or imaginary, where some act of killing would seem to be unavoidable. That would however not prove that war is

7 Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Thomas Merton left open the possibility of lethal defense of the individual innocent. I think that in making that concession they were less rigorous about the Gospel, but they may have been tactically right in not accepting "what would you do?'' as an argument against their commitment against violence in general. In any case they did not take that exception is disproving the rule.

8 We should note that at this point some will prefer to say the same thing in other terms; the act was sinful, but it was the right sin in the situation. It needs to be forgiven, but it was s till the thing to do. This is said in di f f e rent ways by Re inhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Jacques Ellul and Miroslav Vol f.

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not wrong, since war differs in important ways from that hard case.

But as a matter of fact most of those who have considered war to be wrong have given diverse other reasons for its wrongness. To these reasons, the hard case of saving a baby from a brute does not provide an exception.

War is not, as is the hard case, an individual emergency. War is committed by and against nations or nation-like groups, as a matter of purposive planning.

War is an act of idolatry. It sins against the first two commandments before it comes to the point of disobeying the sixth. Before we get to the point of evaluating behavior according to general moral rules, it participates in the cultic or celebratory nature of all deep human experiences. The value for the sake of which a given population are defined as enemy and their lives and other values declared negotiable, becomes an absolute. Is that value the glory of Napoleon's France or Hitler's Germany or the America of Nelson Rockefeller or Richard Nixon or the Soviet Union of Stalin or the Russia of Yeltsin - in any case idolatry is the functional definition of that for which people are ready to sacrifice other standard human values. It is especially odd that people who want to argue the non-absoluteness of the sacredness of individual human life (in the case of the brute and the baby) invest so little sensitivity in discerning that other values are absolute as well.

War is an act of hatred. Before we get to the point of evaluating behavior according to general moral rules, it is a disposition of the will. War sins against the second great commandment, to love the Neighbor as oneself, not first when the bombs are released, but when the intentions are formulated which prepare one group of people to deny the dignity of another group of people. For some, hatred is passionate; for others it is more cold- blooded; in either case it involves the premeditated plan to destroy one's fellow humans rather than seeking their welfare. There have been exceptional cases where a particular culture, or a particular class consciousness, could make war a more impersonal transaction between "gentlemen" who do not hate each other but only go through with a game according to the rules, like a tournament or a duel. But to name that possibility from history is to dramatize how impossible that would be today in Kuwait, in Bosnia, in Ruanda, or in Chechenya.

War is a pedagogical institution. It trains people for a certain image of themselves, and of others, and of good and bad causeB, and of how to get things done. It cheapens and flatten s the moral wor ld by dividing it between our side which must wi n, and may do wha t ever tha t t a ke s, a nd the other s ide , which mus t b e defeated a t a ll c o s ts. Us u a lly in addition the we / t h e y line which wa r

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reinforces is also a divide of ethnicity or religion or class , thereby working the diversity which is God's gift to humankind. It can happen within this process that the case for restraint can be taught. The dignity of the adversary and the immunity of the neutral and the innocent can be taught in the midst of struggle, by insisting that "whatever it takes" and "at all costs" must be removed from the previous statement. When that happens I am grateful for that improvement , but it is rare and utterly unr epresentative of war as a whole .

War presupposes, enacts, celebrates, and thereby teaches an eschatology or a vision of the meaningful direction of history. That might makes right, that the primary obstacle to the Good is the Other, that Good wins by crushing evil, that We are Good , that the Good wins out in the long run , are the components of a cultically reinforced world view . As lessons of history, some of these themes are sometimes true and sometimes false. From the perspective of the Christian Gospel they are mostly false. But if we make war because of them and teach them by making war, we are closed to learning about another structure of hope.

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