Rules, Results and Character

When a Christian says that something is wrong and is asked why, the answer usually sounds like one of five sentences. Because God forbids it. Because it goes against the way God made us. Because it is my duty, whatever happens. Because it will hurt people. Because a good person would not do it. Each of these is the seed of a method in ethics, and each has been worked out over centuries into a full account of how moral judgment should go. You already use all five, probably without noticing which one you reach for first. This lesson names them so that you can see what you are doing.

Philosophers usually group them into three families. The first asks about rules: what is required, permitted or forbidden, whatever the results. Its technical name is deontology, from the Greek deon, what is binding or needful. Divine command theory and Kantian duty belong here, and natural law lives partly here. The second family asks about results: which action will bring about the best state of affairs. It is called consequentialism, and its best-known form is utilitarianism. The third family asks about character: what kind of person acts well, and how does a person become that kind of person. It is called virtue ethics, and it is the oldest of the three in the Western tradition, running from Aristotle through Augustine and Aquinas. Natural law, as Aquinas taught it, joins the first and third families, which is one reason it has lasted.

Romans 12:2 is the anchor of this lesson because it describes what all five methods are trying to serve. Paul does not say that the renewed mind will receive a list. He says it will be able to test and approve, dokimazein, the good, pleasing and perfect will of God. The verb is used of testing metal, and it implies judgment: the believer, transformed from within rather than pressed into the world's mould, becomes capable of telling what is good. Every method in this lesson is a proposal about how that testing should be done. None of them is the renewed mind itself, and a student who masters the methods but is not being transformed has mistaken the tools for the workman.

One rule for reading what follows. Each method is set out at the strength its own best defenders would accept, with the texts they would cite, and then with the objections it must answer and the replies its defenders give. You will be tempted to choose a winner. Resist the temptation until the end of the lesson, and notice as you read which objections you find yourself wanting to dismiss quickly. That is usually a sign of which method you already hold.

Divine command theory holds that what makes an action morally required is that God commands it, and what makes it wrong is that God forbids it. Moral obligation is not a fact about the universe that God, like us, has to consult. It is the claim of a person, the Creator, on his creatures. The first moral instruction in the Bible has exactly this shape: 'And the LORD God commanded him, "You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil"' (Genesis 2:16-17). No reason is given beyond the command and its consequence. Adam was not asked to work out that the tree was bad; he was asked to trust the one who spoke.

The strengths of the view are real. It takes the sovereignty of God with full seriousness, and it explains a feature of moral experience that other theories struggle with: obligation feels like being addressed, like being summoned by someone, not merely like noticing a fact. It matches the way scripture speaks, where the law is given at Sinai by a God who says I am the LORD, and the prophets announce thus says the LORD. It gives the believer firm footing when the culture around him has changed its mind, because God's word does not change with the culture. And in the medieval period it was defended with great rigour by thinkers in the Franciscan tradition, John Duns Scotus in a qualified form and William of Ockham more thoroughly, both concerned to protect God's freedom from being bound by any standard outside himself.

The classic objection is older than Christianity. In Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether the holy is loved by the gods because it is holy, or is holy because it is loved by the gods. Put in Christian terms: does God command what is good because it is good, in which case goodness seems to be a standard above God; or is something good simply because God commands it, in which case God could have commanded cruelty and cruelty would then have been good? The second horn seems to make morality arbitrary. A related objection is practical: people have claimed God's command for terrible things, and Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, dwells on Abraham's journey to Moriah (Genesis 22) precisely because it seems to set the command of God against the ethical as such.

Defenders have a strong reply, and it is the one most Christian divine command theorists now give. The dilemma, they say, is false, because there is a third option: God commands what he commands because of his own unchanging good nature. Goodness is not above God, nor is it his arbitrary choice; it is who he is. The American philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams developed this into what he called a modified divine command theory, first in an essay of 1973 and fully in Finite and Infinite Goods (1999): the good is grounded in God's nature, and moral obligation, the wrongness of an act, is constituted by the commands of a loving God. C. Stephen Evans has defended a similar account in God and Moral Obligation (2013). On this view God could not command cruelty for its own sake, not because something stops him, but because he is not cruel. And as for those who claim God's command for atrocity, the defender answers that the problem there is false claims about what God has commanded, which every method must guard against, not the idea that God commands.

Two harder questions remain, and the theory's defenders work on them seriously. First, how do people without scripture know right from wrong, as Romans 2:14-15 says they do? Most divine command theorists answer that God's commands can be known through conscience and the created order as well as through scripture, which brings the view close to natural law. Second, what about the thousands of moral questions scripture does not directly address, such as most questions of medicine and technology? Here the theory needs a way of reasoning from the commands God has given to cases he has not named, and that reasoning will borrow from the other methods. Many divine command theorists accept this happily: the theory, they say, explains what obligation is, not every step of how to find it.

Natural law holds that God has made the world, and human beings in it, with a nature that has ends built in, and that the moral law is the rational creature's grasp of those ends. Thomas Aquinas, in the treatise on law in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, questions 90 to 108), defines the natural law as the rational creature's participation in the eternal law, the wisdom by which God governs all things. The first principle of practical reason, he says in question 94, article 2, is that good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided: bonum est faciendum et prosequendum, et malum vitandum. Then he names the natural inclinations through which the good is known: to preserve one's life, which humans share with all things; to beget and raise children, which they share with animals; and, proper to rational beings, to know the truth about God and to live in society.

The texts its defenders cite are significant. Paul says that Gentiles who do not have the law 'do by nature what the law requires', showing 'that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness' (Romans 2:14-15). He argues that God's power and nature are clearly seen from creation (Romans 1:20), and that those who do evil know God's righteous decree (Romans 1:32). When Jesus is asked about divorce, he does not only cite a command; he appeals to how things were 'from the beginning' (Matthew 19:4, 19:8), to the design of creation. Natural law thinkers read these as scripture's own warrant for reasoning from the created order.

Its strengths are the reason it has shaped Western law and the modern idea of human rights. It explains why people of every culture know that murder and betrayal are wrong, without supposing they have all read the Bible. It gives Christians a way to argue in public with people who do not share their faith, using reasons those people can in principle see. It treats morality not as a set of arbitrary rules but as the instructions that come with the kind of creature we are, so that sin is not only disobedience but self-harm. In the Catholic tradition it is central and remains so, developed in the late twentieth century by Germain Grisez and John Finnis, whose Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) set out a list of basic human goods, such as life, knowledge, friendship and practical reasonableness, which every person has reason to pursue. The Reformers also used natural law freely. Protestant scholars such as Stephen Grabill, in Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (2006), and David VanDrunen, in Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (2010), have argued that the Reformed tradition never abandoned it and should not now.

The objections come from inside the church and outside it. From inside, the sharpest is the effect of sin on the mind. Paul says that people 'became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts' (Romans 1:21), so how can fallen reason read the created order reliably? Karl Barth pressed this hard, and in 1934 answered Emil Brunner's defence of a point of contact for the gospel in human nature with a pamphlet titled simply Nein!, No. A second objection is that nature itself is fallen, so that what is natural is not always good; aggression and greed are natural enough. A third is disagreement: Paul asks whether nature itself does not teach that long hair is a disgrace to a man (1 Corinthians 11:14), and Christians have disagreed ever since about what that appeal to nature means and how far it reaches. From outside, the philosopher David Hume argued in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739 to 1740) that no statement of what ought to be can be derived from statements only of what is.

Defenders reply to each. On sin, they answer that Romans 2 itself says the law is still written on the heart after the fall, and that natural law has never claimed fallen reason is infallible, only that it is not wholly blind; this is why Aquinas held that God also gave the moral precepts in the law of Moses, because human reason had been darkened by sin and needed the help. On fallen nature, they answer that natural law means nature as God designed it and as reason discerns its purposes, not whatever humans happen to do. And on Hume, Finnis replies that the basic goods are not derived from facts at all; they are grasped as self-evidently worth pursuing by anyone who understands them. Whether those replies succeed is one of the live questions of the field.

The modern form of the ethics of duty comes from Immanuel Kant, whose Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals appeared in 1785. Kant argued that the only thing good without qualification is a good will, and that a good will acts from duty, out of respect for the moral law, not from inclination or for advantage. He stated the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative, in several forms. The best known are these, in plain paraphrase: act only on a principle that you could will to become a universal law for everyone; and treat humanity, in yourself and in every other person, always as an end and never merely as a means. A lie fails the first test, because a world in which everyone lied when it suited them would be a world in which no one could be believed. Using a person as a tool fails the second.

Christians have found much to honour here. The refusal to use people merely as means is close to the biblical conviction that each person bears the image of God, the ground on which Genesis 9:6 forbids the shedding of human blood. The insistence that some acts are wrong whatever good they might produce matches the absolute prohibitions of the Decalogue. And the American Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey, in Basic Christian Ethics (1950) and later work, argued that Christian love itself generates binding rules, so that love does not dissolve obligation but gives it its shape. The British philosopher W. D. Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), offered a widely used refinement for cases where duties collide: we have several prima facie duties, such as fidelity, gratitude, justice and not harming, each binding unless outweighed by a stronger one in the case at hand.

The objections are that duty-based ethics can be rigid when duties conflict, and that its foundation in autonomous human reason sits awkwardly with a Christian account of God as the source of the law. Kant himself, in a short essay of 1797 answering Benjamin Constant, maintained that it would be wrong to lie even to a would-be murderer asking where his intended victim had gone. Most readers, Christian or not, have found that conclusion hard to accept, and module 5 of this track returns to the question of lying under pressure. Ross's prima facie duties are one reply; another is that Kant's own conclusion does not follow from his principle, a case Christine Korsgaard argued in a well-known essay of 1986, The Right to Lie.

Consequentialism takes the opposite starting point. The right action is the one that produces the best overall outcome. Jeremy Bentham, in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), proposed that pleasure and pain are the measure, and John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, published as essays in 1861 and as a book in 1863, refined it into the greatest happiness principle, with a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. The method has an obvious appeal for anyone responsible for other people: a health minister deciding where a small budget will save the most lives, a pastor deciding how to spend scarce church funds, a parent weighing which school will be best for a child. Scripture uses arguments from consequences constantly: obedience so that you may live and prosper (Deuteronomy 5:33), the prudent who see danger and take cover (Proverbs 22:3), counting the cost before building a tower (Luke 14:28), not everything being beneficial (1 Corinthians 10:23). Love, its Christian defenders say, cannot be indifferent to what actually happens to people.

The best-known Christian consequentialist was Joseph Fletcher, whose Situation Ethics (1966) held that love is the only absolute and that in any situation the loving act is the one that produces the most loving result. In Catholic moral theology a movement called proportionalism, associated with Peter Knauer, Josef Fuchs and Richard McCormick, argued in the 1960s and 1970s that an act's rightness depends on the proportion between the goods and harms it brings about. Pope John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor (1993) rejected that method for acts the church teaches are intrinsically evil. The objections are serious. Paul rejects the slander that he teaches 'Let us do evil that good may result' (Romans 3:8). A pure calculation of outcomes seems able to justify punishing an innocent person if enough people would be calmed by it, and the gospel records that argument being made: 'it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish' (John 11:50). And no one can predict the results of an action with the precision the method seems to need. Its defenders answer that rule consequentialism, judging rules rather than single acts by their results, avoids sacrificing the innocent, since a rule permitting it would produce terrible results over time, and that Christians weigh consequences under God's providence rather than in place of it.

Virtue ethics starts with a different question. Instead of asking what I should do, it asks what kind of person I should be, and expects good action to flow from good character. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, argued that every human life aims at eudaimonia, usually translated happiness but better understood as flourishing, living well as the kind of creature one is. The virtues are the stable dispositions that make a person good and make him act well, and each lies in a mean between two vices, as courage lies between cowardice and rashness. They are acquired by practice: we become just by doing just acts, as a musician becomes a musician by playing. And all of them are guided by practical wisdom, phronesis, the trained ability to see what a situation requires.

Christian theologians took Aristotle up and transformed him. Augustine described the virtues as forms of rightly ordered love. Aquinas, in the second part of the Summa, joined Aristotle's moral virtues to the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which he held are not acquired by practice but given by God, and made love, caritas, the form of all the virtues. In the twentieth century, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) argued that modern moral argument had become interminable because it had lost the shared account of human purpose that virtue ethics requires, and the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in A Community of Character (1981) and The Peaceable Kingdom (1983), argued that Christian ethics is first of all the formation of a people by the story of Jesus, so that the church's chief ethical task is to be a community whose life shows what that story means.

Its defenders point to how much of scripture speaks this way. The fruit of the Spirit is a list of character traits, not of actions (Galatians 5:22-23), which lesson 4 takes up. Peter tells believers to 'make every effort to add to your faith virtue' (2 Peter 1:5), and builds a ladder of qualities. Paul says 'You are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ' (1 Corinthians 11:1), an ethic of example rather than rule. The New Testament's moral language is full of the heart, of being transformed, of growing up into Christ. Virtue ethics also explains how good people manage most of life without consulting any method at all: a person of settled honesty does not deliberate about whether to lie on a tax form. And it attends to moral perception, the trained ability to notice what matters, which the other methods tend to assume.

The objections are as serious as for the other methods. The first is that virtue ethics gives too little guidance in a hard case: being told to do what a virtuous person would do is no help if you do not know what that is. Rosalind Hursthouse, in On Virtue Ethics (1999), answered that the virtues do generate guidance, since each virtue and vice term carries instruction (do what is honest, do not do what is cruel), and that the hard cases are hard for every method. The second objection is whose virtues: different cultures prize different traits, and MacIntyre himself wrote a sequel called Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). Christian defenders answer that the church's virtues are defined by Christ, not by the culture. The third objection is aimed at Hauerwas in particular: James Gustafson, in a widely discussed essay of 1985, charged that his approach withdrew the church into a sectarian enclave that could not speak to the wider society. Hauerwas has always rejected the charge, replying that a church which is truly itself is the most important thing it can offer the world. And Protestants have long worried that an ethic of acquired virtue sits uneasily with salvation by grace; lesson 4 gives that worry its full hearing.

So which method is right? Christians who hold scripture's authority do not agree, and you should know where the lines run. Many Catholic and some Reformed ethicists treat natural law as the framework within which commands and virtues fit. Many evangelical ethicists treat God's revealed commands as the foundation and the other methods as servants. Many in the Anabaptist and Hauerwasian streams treat character and community as primary and are suspicious of public reasoning from nature. Some Christian ethicists, Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopal priest, the best known among them, give consequences a larger place than any of these would allow. And a common position, held in different forms across traditions, is that scripture itself uses all of these kinds of reasoning, as you found in Romans 12, so that a mature Christian needs all of them and must learn when each one leads. Defenders of each foundation reply that a mixture without a foundation leaves you with no way to settle conflicts between the methods, which is the very situation where you need help most.

Whatever you decide, three practical rules follow from this lesson. First, when you hear a moral argument, ask which family its reasons belong to, because two people who disagree about a conclusion often disagree, underneath, about method. Second, notice the weakness of the method you favour, since that is where your judgments will go wrong without your seeing it. A person who reasons only from rules will be cruel in a hard case. A person who reasons only from results will rationalise anything. A person who reasons only from character will be vague when the church needs a clear answer. Third, remember that Romans 12:2 puts the transformation before the testing. The methods are tools for a renewed mind, not substitutes for one.

Now open your casebook to your working case. Make five short headings down the page: Command, Nature, Duty, Results, Character. Under each, write one or two lines answering this question: if I reasoned about my case only by this method, what would I ask, and where would it lead? Under Command, which texts of scripture speak to it, directly or nearly? Under Nature, what about the way God has made human beings and communities bears on it? Under Duty, what obligations do the people involved have, whatever the results? Under Results, who would be helped and who harmed by each possible course? Under Character, what would a person of settled justice, mercy and humility do?

Then look at the sentence you wrote in the inquiry, before you read this lesson. Write beside it which family it belongs to. Finally, write two lines at the bottom of the page: where do the five methods agree about your case, and where do they pull apart? The place where they pull apart is the real moral question in your case, and it is the place the rest of this track will help you work.