Relational Ethics (and theology, too)

Currently I'm teaching as an adjunct instructor at a local university campus.  It's not for the money, nor because I'm bored, but rather trying to keep in practice and add to my teaching resume', so that in retirement I can point back to classes I've taught and hopefully get some adjunct work to bring in a little extra cash when my full-time job days are behind me.

I only teach one class per academic year, which in the last couple of years had been a World Religions course.  This year its an Ethics course, so there's a good measure of philosophy built into it.  We're studying anything from Aristotle to modern day feminists, from Virtue Ethics, to Deontology (Duty Ethics) to Utilitarianism (the greatest good) to Natural Law Ethics.  As I've been working my way through these systems with the students I noticed that in one way or another all of these major systems are dependent in one way or another on reason for their basis.  Even those ethical systems which may have a religious foundation rely on reason.  Both Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant were religious scholars, believing in a Creator God, but both argued that ethics can be derived absent a particular Theology, simply by reasoning from what distinguishes humanity as a species from the rest of the "created order".

And yet, as human beings, relationality precedes both reason and faith; we learn to feel before we learn to think, before we learn to pray.  We have a warm and meaningful relationship with our parents and siblings before we can distinguish between right and wrong, and well before the age of accountability.  Should not, then, an ethical system first consider relationships prior to reason and religion?

It seems to me that there is an element missing in ethical discussions thus far and that is the emotion involved in moral decisions, which grows in importance the closer you are to the moral quandary (family member, loved one, self).  Because we are relational beings, close relationships affect us more than do distant ones.  An ethical system like Utilitarianism, which is used so much in public policy debates, is relatively distant and cold in the way it "calculates", in an economic sense, what is the greatest good that can be achieved in an ethical dilemma.  What is needed as a counterbalance is an ethical system that recognizes the emotional component to decision making.  The "rational man" argument used so much in economics and law is flawed because it assumes detachment.  But in real life we are not detached; rather, we are emotionally invested in moral choices, and no less so than when those choices involve us and those we love.  We need an "emotional man" argument in addition to a "rational man" one in order to fully account for how people choose a course of action or react to another person's choice.

What I am calling for here is a system of ethics I'll refer to as Relational Ethics.  In a subsequent post I'll point out some of the features of this system (which I may in fact be inventing, because I can't find anything like it out there in the literature.  Maybe there's a book, or at least a thesis, in this for me!)   I think there is also a system of Theology that parallels this, Relational Theology, which I'll also try to articulate in posts to come.