Ethics, Tradition and Hermeneutics  

Oleh:

Van Tongeren, Paul

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network vol. 3 no. 4 (Dec. 1996), page 175-183.
Topik: Tradition; Ethics; Relativism; Theological Ethics
Fulltext: Paul van Tongeren.PDF (96.39KB)

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Perpustakaan Pusat (Semanggi) Nomor Panggil: EE45.2 Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 0) Tandon: tidak ada

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ETHICS : Ethics is practical philosophy in a double sense: it is about human practice, and it is for the sake of human practice and its improvement. But this orientation towards practice does not mean that ethics is merely an instrument for something else. As a philosophical discipline it is always also oriented towards insight: towards theoria, as distinguished from any kind of techne. The instrumentalisation and fragmentation in professional ethics that we have seen recently are the consequences of a particular conception of what ethics is and what is considered to be its meaning for (professional) practice. I am referring to a conception of ethics that disengages ethics from its philosophical or theological roots, and takes it to be a kind of problem-solving technique. Some ethicists dare to speak of ‘ethical engineering’, and develop techniques and procedures to solve problems through reaching consensus among as many as possible of those concerned. This type of ethics reduces itself into an instrument for the solution of problems. And because problems are to a large extent determined by particular circumstances and conditions of the domain in which they emerge, this type of ethics will have to become highly specialised and even further fragmented into these different domains from which the problems to be solved are taken. Although business ethics, biomedical ethics, the ethics of communication, of management and so forth, and all the different subspecialisations in which they break up, do work with the same set of moral principles, they nevertheless develop more and more into separate specialisms. In contrast with this type of ethics, I would like to propose a hermeneutical ethics, or an ethics conceived of as a hermeneutics of moral experience. This ethics aims at the articulation and interpretation of moral experience and at the enrichment of this experience or the refinement of our moral sensibility. The experience to be interpreted is found in the great texts of our cultural traditions, but also in their institutions and in our own perception of the world and of ourselves. The aimed-at experience consists largely in a consciousness of one’s finitude and the ability to deal with that in an appropriate way. In the following presentation of this conception of ethics, I will primarily focus on the meaning of tradition within its framework. TRADITION : The meaning of tradition for morality appears to be just as evident for some as it is disputed for others. On the one hand, it is clear that people can only have the capacity to develop a moral life because they are not obliged to decide for themselves or justify at every turn what constitutes the good or right thing to do. Generally speaking, we have a tendency to work from a predominant moral position, a moral tradition. Without being directed by a tradition which, for example, confers fundamental rights on the human person as such (and thus on every human person), or a tradition in which courage and fidelity and all such virtues possess an obvious meaning and significance, or a tradition from which authenticity and autonomy emerge as having a palpable appeal, or a tradition which ordains that justice must also imply solidarity with the powerless — without all those traditions or elements of a single tradition, we would not know what we are obliged to do. A culture must preserve and pass on what it has discovered or developed in the form of a tradition on pain of condemning itself to constantly repeating those discoveries. Moral values also belong to the culture which reflects them. Education, which always has an implicit or explicit dimension of moral formation, consists in inserting initiates into a tradition and teaching them to interpret and understand themselves, their potential and their questions in terms of that tradition. At the same time, the appeal to tradition is frequently taken to be rather suspect. It is questionable in our contemporary culture when people refer to the length or nobility of the descent of something. The old has primarily its value as a museum piece. People today are imbued with the distinction between what is truly valid and what is actually operative; tradition belongs to the latter, a fact which is underlined more and more by the apparent subjectivisation of the former. The fact that something has been done in a particular way for a long period of time is often experienced as a challenge to do it otherwise for a change. In the world of economics as well as the world of art, renewal has become something of a necessity for survival. Things are no different in the world of morality — tradition points to conformism which appears to contradict personal responsibility, that moral independence which, for contemporary people, is not only one aspect of morality but the apparent foundation of every moral value. The contrast between both positions is perhaps less absolute than has been suggested. The strong anti-traditionalist movement which our period in history shares with past eras rules itself with the force of a tradition, endeavouring at a variety of levels to make people conform to the norm of non-conformism. It is highly doubtful whether our current understanding of tradition is an adequate one. The association between tradition and conformism and conservatism, as well as the notion of ‘working from’ a particular moral tradition both suggest an over-simplified and too onesided image of what tradition is and does. I would like to defend a notion of tradition according to which it is not an imposed immutable form but rather an ongoing process in which the participants actively shape that in which they participate. If we might use the image of the parasite, tradition is a form in which the parasite and the host need each other, as is sometimes also the case in nature. The parasite can only keep its source of nourishment alive by not only conforming but also by keeping its distance. Let us consider more carefully the role tradition has with respect to human life in general and to philosophical-ethical reflection about human life in particular. In the first — and main — section of this paper I will point out the concept of a hermeneutical ethics and focus mainly on the concepts of ‘meaning’ and of ‘tradition’. In a shorter second section I will briefly phrase three sets of questions from the outlined position.

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