THE ORIGINS OF ETHICS

The study of ethics begins with critical reflection on a way of life. Christian ethics has its roots in the work of the Hebrew prophets, who called people to renew their covenant with God by living with justice, kindness, and humility. It grows from the teaching of Jesus, who taught love of God and neighbor. Christian ethics is also closely connected with another tradition of critical reflection that begins with Greek philosophy and asks what it is that everybody is seeking. Thus, Christian thinking about ethics develops as shared human questions find specifically Christian answers.

At some point, most people begin to ask questions about the way of life they have lived. They start to wonder whether they really should obey the rules they have been told to follow. They ask whether the ideas they have been taught about the world and their own place in it are really true. They look at the dreams and the goals they have been pursuing, and they have to decide whether the life they have or the life they want really is a good life. Many things lead to this kind of critical thinking. Sometimes, it happens as a person matures and leaves the familiar surroundings of home and family for further education, marriage, or a new career. People encounter new cultures, new religions, or new neighbors, and as a result, they see their own lives and beliefs in a different way. Illness, war, or natural disaster can change lives suddenly and so completely that people ask whether they can return to the life they were living before, and whether they want to. Sometimes, too, the questions come slowly, out of quiet reflection, as we recognize the choices we have already made about our own lives and begin to discern the possibilities still ahead of us.

However the questions arise, the people who ask these questions have begun doing ethics, even if they do not know what to call it. They are thinking critically about their own lives and the social world in which they live. They are asking how they can be good people and how they can make the right choices. They are thinking about how they ought to treat the other people around them, and how they can together build a just society, where everyone will have a fair chance to ask these questions and find the answers. The words themselves—good, right, ought, just—are signals that moral thinking is going on. We can do what we have always been told to do, or we can decide for ourselves what things are really important and what deeds are worth doing.

Something like that happens in history, too. For as far back as we can go, people have had rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, ideas about things that are good and worth pursuing, and words for character and virtue to tell them what kind of people they ought to be. For most of human history, people would not have thought to separate some of these ideas from the rest of what they did and believed and call those beliefs "ethics," any more than they would have thought to identify some of their ideas and activities as "religious." Most human beings have lived their lives as part of a culture, where they learned how to grow their crops, pray to the gods, ward off diseases, deal with their neighbors, and keep track of the seasons, all as part of a unified way of life. Modern thinkers might divide these practices into agriculture, religion, medicine, magic, science, etiquette, and ethics, but those distinctions probably would not occur to people for whom the whole way of life came as a package. To an Israelite praying in Solomon's temple, a Native American hunter, or a scribe copying magical and medical information onto a scroll in ancient Egypt, our categories would probably have seemed a strange way to divide up a life they experienced as a unified whole.

At some point, however, the accumulation of cultural memories, the growth of literacy and written records, and contacts with other people and other ways of life through warfare, trade, and travel reached a point at which questions became inevitable. Globalization moves at a very rapid pace in our world of Internet connections and air travel, but globalization happens even when the exchanges are by way of handwritten scrolls and camel caravans. People begin to reflect on their way of life. They start asking what is really important among all the rules, stories, and rituals that make up the way they live. They want to know if there is something that holds this way of life together across time, something to which they might remain faithful, or from which they might drift away. Is this just the way we do it? Or is there some deeper connection to reality behind all of these practices?

We might say that the history of ethics begins when there are records that allow us to follow this critical reflection on a way of life. Out of the whole array of customs, courtesies, rules, and rituals, people start to identify some as really important. These are the things that make them who they are, the beliefs and actions that help them find their place in the universe. These beliefs and actions also give individuals their own character, so that others around them think of them as good when they live according to these practices and as bad when they do not. These things are so important to identity and relationships that people hold on to them, even when they are no longer easy to follow; but they can also become the basis for a new way of life, when the details of the old life no longer work.

That kind of critical reflection grew out of changes in many cultures and religious traditions that began about 800 years before the time of Jesus. During this period in history, India, China, and Greece developed their characteristic systems of philosophy. The religious movements that became Buddhism and Zoroastrianism began, along with many other religions whose rituals and beliefs spread along the trade routes that connected Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean world.

During this time, too, the Hebrew prophets transformed the religious life of their people by focusing on the requirements of justice in relations with fellow Israelites and reverence for God before all other loyalties. Through centuries of upheaval that divided rich against poor, subjected the people of Israel and Judah to foreign rulers, and introduced them to foreign gods, their prophets and teachers challenged them to return to the Law of Moses and to the covenant that formed them as a people. Central to this covenant was a relationship between persons that also involved a right relationship to God.

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
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