Extract 5: Paul Ramsey on love and justice

November 13, 2012
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Joseph Fletcher quotes Paul Ramsey's Basic Christian Ethics in a number of places, calling it " a brilliant exposition of the radical intensity of the agapeic love ethic".  But he sees Paul Ramsey as being forced to concede the calculating nature of love, for example on page 243 below, as agape "is honour bound to figure the angles".  Ramsey considers particularly the relationship between love and justice.  PB

Ramsey, Page 243

No longer deriving duty to others from considerations of value but from basic rational "intuition," Sidgwick nevertheless defined "justice" as "treating similar cases similarly." "Benevolence" or love was but a sub-case of justice: for him the rational intuition of benevolence meant, "Each man is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own," i.e., similar to his own. Nothing could be clearer than that Christian ethics must judge quite insufficient such fifty-fifty division of the ground between a man and his neighbor, whether duties to others are derived from self-love, from love of value, or from rational intuition. The meaning of Christian love may be stated in sharp opposition to Sidgwick: It means"treating similar cases dissimilarly,""regarding the good of any other individual as more than your own," when he and you alone are involved. Moreover, instead of benevolence being a sub-case of justice, for Christian ethics the reverse is true–love is always the primary notion, justice derivative, since justice may be defined as whatChristian love does when confronted by two or more neighbors. Justice perhaps means treating similar cases similarly ( Aristotle's corrective justice) when aChristian judges, not between himself and his neighbor, but between two or more neighbors, or it may even mean treating them dissimilarly, taking into account essential inequalities between them, as Aristotle's distributive justice requires.6Without entering further into the idea of justice so important for social ethics, it should be clear that just as any who are "but men" are apt to exercise partiality when judging their own cause, so Christian love (which is self-love inverted) judges with partiality the neighbor's cause, treats his case as exceedingly dissimilar from one's own. The extremity of this contrast between the Christian and a typical philosophical perspective in ethics is to be understood first of all in terms of the suggested distinction between preserving and creating community, the latter being the special role Christian love assumes.

Page 347
The reason Brunner has such difficulty in relating love to "the world of systems" is that in purging love of selfish concern for one's own rights he tends to eliminate from it also all enlightened concern for the neighbour's right. Like Tolstoy, he seems to think that a love which by nature has no selfish partiality can find no reason forever preferring the cause of one neighbor to that of another but must serve them all at random or as they happen to come. Consequently, Brunner concludes, "Love in itself establishes no order, on the contrary when it is about its business it transcends all orders, all laws. It inquires neither into its own right nor into those of others, for to all it gives itself, whole and undivided and beyond all limits." But love which is unselfish need not therefore be unreasoning or unenlightened or accept no distinctions in its vocational obligations.It is true that love which does not inquire into its rights need not wait on determining the just rights of another against one's self. But such love, itself whole and undivided and limitless, will need to know all that can be known about "the others," since in actual life not all of them can be served effectively. Love which seeks not its own may very well seek the neighbor's own. It must establish some order, and to do so may employ all available ways of determining what may be the neighbor's own in comparison with another. Once this is allowed, then nothing inthe nature of biblical "justice" prevents it from becoming "worldly justice." Such justice may be defined as what Christian love does when confronted by two or more neighbors. Justice perhaps means treating similar cases similarly ( Aristotle's corrective justice) when a Christian judges, not between himself and his neighbor,but between two or more neighbors; or it may even mean treating them dissimilarly,taking into account essential inequalities between them ( Aristotle's distributive justice), preferring some to others especially on account of their manifest good will and potential neighbour-regarding service.

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