The Risks and Promise of Ethical Learning
by Barnabas Lin, 2024 Clergy & Religious Leaders Fellow
How do we learn to live well in our time?
Often, we engage with educational programs that focus on the concrete past—whether the recent past through case studies or the more distant past through history lessons—in hopes that we might glean wisdom to act more ethically in the present. In my opinion, this method is far better than its alternative: trying to learn a kind of abstract or detached ethics that is supposedly neutral and universal. While those systematic ethical models can be heuristically helpful (i.e., they helpfully simplify matters), they tend to overly reduce the complexity of real-life ethical challenges, while also occluding the particular circumstances of the bodies that produced those ethical systems.1 Instead, studying concrete cases disabuses moral agents of naïve, easy answers, bringing to life the multivalent challenges that press on human actors all the time, challenges which models of abstract ethics simply cannot account for. At the same time, they ground all ethical dilemmas in a particular setting and place with particular agents and thereby increase our own ethical agency in the circumstances we each face today. FASPE was this kind of helpful, concrete situational grappling.
It was helpful through FASPE to look at the multiple pressures facing German clergy in the 1930s, to wrestle with how the Confessing Church, which while laudable, was quite limited in its resistance to state policy, or how the mere presence of chaplains (or communication with the Vatican) helped legitimate the Nazi regime. As an evangelical minister, it helped me immensely to wrestle with the concrete situation now facing Germany, regarding the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Specifically, it helped to see how the state church is working to challenge the AfD through theology and ecclesial power. These ponderings led me to grapple with whether a church should draw lines that influence politics.2 And these are just a few concrete cases. FASPE immersed fellows in a context and a place to wrestle with ideas and glean together. It is without a doubt that educational experiences like FASPE are indispensable for strengthening the moral fabric of society.
However, for all its strengths and gifts, my concern here is to briefly name three liabilities present in this kind of ethical education. And not as an aimless critical exercise. But rather, with the belief that naming liabilities enables us to better account for them and thus manage them. With that hope, after naming these liabilities, I will explore a constructive suggestion from my faith tradition to strengthen ethical education programs like FASPE.
Three Liabilities of Case-Based Education
As mentioned above, learning from concrete cases highlights the particularity of contexts and sensitizes the learner to the complexity of real-life ethical decisions. Case education vindicates complexity. However, these facts together can also result in an agent’s being overwhelmed and becoming paralyzed, inadvertently leaving them feeling disempowered.
While it was undeniably important to walk in the shoes of the Holocaust’s perpetrators, one also gets a sense of how incredibly difficult it would have been to resist the normalizing rise of the Nazi regime and how truly rare heroic individuals like Elisabeth Schmitz were.3 This fact can result, as we saw at our closing interdisciplinary session of FASPE, in a sense of preemptive despair or defeat: how can one resist when the entire fabric of society is moving towards absolute horror? What really can be done to effectively change the direction of an entire people?
While there were some people that were arguably aware of the horrifying acts they were participating in (e.g., the doctors and nurses who covered up the “mercy killings” they were engaged in at Brandenburg), the truly horrifying reality that emerged, at least for me, was how truly imperceptible the immoral nature of German society was for many, even those who were themselves intimately acquainted with its inner machinations.4 If one cannot even perceive unethical behavior—for example the ways we have normalized our patterns of consumption in our economy today or the costs the planet incurs by our taking planes, driving cars, writing on computers or using AI—can one stand a chance at resisting it?
Second, this sense of disempowerment only emerges because learners truly desire to be ethical agents. Those that are selected as fellows for FASPE would heartily agree in saying “Never Again!” They choose to participate in FASPE because they want to be moral agents who are part of the solution. Fellows thus engage diligently in the case studies presented, to sharpen their ethical acuity and significantly reduce the possibility that they—that we—will ever be perpetrators. But that drive itself has liabilities. If the first liability is in possibly identifying too much with the vast majority of Germans in the 1930s—perhaps we can call them the powerless perpetrators of the Holocaust—the second liability is its mirror image: dedicating oneself to eliminating all possibilities that we could ever be complicit in horror. Ironically, it is the liability that comes from the drive to be moral heroes.
Studying cases, whether historical or contemporary, nurtures this (good) desire to be ethical agents. However, when it cultivates that desire without interrogating it, the desire can itself become the fertile soil for a new cycle of othering. The morally unenlightened or uneducated can easily, subtly and insidiously become a new Other to be fixed and solved. Our quest to be actors on the right side of history can blind us to the new configurations that are always emerging among us. While the past may instruct us, the injustices of the present and future are yet unwritten. In the end, they may not fall along the well-trodden paths of the past. Let us look more closely at a particular instance on the trip.
I found the session with Dr. Clemens Bethge (a pastor from the Evangelical Church of Berlin who presented while the Clergy cohort visited the Neimoller house) the most generative case study for clergy. After sharing about how the church has moved to discipline and exclude clergy who remain officially involved with the AfD, Bethge said, “we want to make sure that we’re catching this at 1933 and not 1939.” As we learned that the Catholic Church in Germany had also made similar moves, I found myself pondering what felt unimaginable: could Christian denominations in the US ever exclude ministers because of political party affiliation? Clearly doing so would transgress something deep in the American religious imaginary. But was that alone what made me uncomfortable?
While I found this an instructive case of how memory can launch agents into ethical action today—and to be clear, I don’t altogether disagree with the church’s decision and respect their decisions within their context—the over-identification with the past deserves scrutiny. The Nazi Party was the Nazi Party. While the AfD (and other far-right parties) may echo similar rhetoric, they simply (that is to say, ontologically) are not the Nazis. To read the situation as such and to respond to something new as if it were simply something old does a disservice to our present reality and to ourselves as ethical agents.
It may be politically effective (and psychologically rewarding) to read ourselves as the good guys acting to prevent the evil past from happening again, but that would be an instrumentalization and misuse of the past. The reality is that the past does not actually happen again. Each evil, while it can be similar to another, is unique and remains unanticipated. If our eyes are overly trained by concrete cases from the past—if we delude ourselves by thinking we can master ethics by studying cases in order to be good—it can constrain our imaginations, blinding us to how we might ourselves be participating in a new kind of evil in the present.5 As our ethical education aims to nurture better agents, how do we remain open to the possibility that we ourselves are possibly paving a new unethical path?
I wonder about this in the shadow of the 2024 US presidential elections. As we struggle to form a “more perfect union”—and we should struggle for that—how does our drive to be good, to be moral agents, inadvertently imagine the other side as morally unreasonable or reprobate? How might our drive to not-ever-be-Nazis-again form us to see potential Nazis everywhere, collapsing concerns of the other side unfairly into an incredible monolith. Might this approach not thus provide the moral justification for how the other side must be epistemically excluded or politically dominated and repressed? This matter is a significant liability that ethical education programs would do well to account for.
Third, critical educators know that it is not merely the content of a curriculum or the character of the educator that affect students but, significantly, the means and practices of instruction that powerfully form and malform learners.6 For me, this liability is the most important in case-based ethical education: while it is good to learn from cases, this form of pedagogy can also distance the learner from those studied. Rather than seeing the subjects as fellow human actors, the agents in these concrete cases (by implicit design) become objects for scrutiny. Case education by its nature transmutes subjects into object lessons.
This is where FASPE’s ethical theme of Role Morality (where certain roles precariously bring with them ethics that deviate from standard morality) is a helpful guide and should be brought to bear on ethical education itself. In a society that has fought to resist I-It relationships and to transform them into I-Thou relationships (our standard morality),7 concrete, case-based ethical education suspends this standard moral relationship in the name of moral formation. Without adequate awareness and reflection—and justified by the need for increasing ethical acuity—case-based ethical education can easily reify not just an I-It relationship with the past but also habituate learners to a way of objectifying others.8 As Parker Palmer puts it in The Heart of Higher Education, “every epistemology, or way of knowing, as implemented in a pedagogy, or way of teaching and learning, tends to become an ethic or way of living.”9 By relying on concrete cases as the primary way of teaching and knowing, we can overly distance ourselves from other actors, inadvertently habituating learners to a gaze that objectifies. At its extreme, non-reflective case education can shape a way of living in which agents move through the world as the supreme (and sole) subjects.
While concrete, situation-based ethical approaches are indispensable, they have liabilities: they can overwhelm and inadvertently disempower; they can feed a need to be good that can subtly justify (while blinding us to) new exclusions. They can distance us from and shape us to objectify other actors. What might the Christian tradition have to offer to help manage these liabilities?
While there are many resources that could be offered as a countervailing weight to strengthen ethical education programs, I’ll explore just one, showing how it highlights easily overlooked parts of ethical education and generates constructive suggestions.
Love’s Place in Ethical Education
Studying history and grappling with case studies is no doubt helpful in increasing our knowledge. It may even be the best path for developing more ethical agents. However, the Christian tradition invites members of the faith to subordinate growing in knowledge to growing in love. As the Apostle Paul puts it in the eighth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians: “We know that we all possess knowledge. But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves truly knows.”
One of the most memorable experiences of our FASPE trip was the interdisciplinary dialogue among clergy, doctors, and journalists where we discussed the case of Jahi McMath’s medical journey.10 It was memorable in part because of how dynamic and fruitful the interdisciplinary discussion was but also because of how surprised I was about how we discussed her case. Rather than responding to the grief of the tragedy of her life or empathizing with the painful dedication of her mother, we debated the time of her supposed death and voted on whether we would have behaved similarly if we placed ourselves in the case.
While this was a fruitful discussion, it was in sharp contrast to my reflexive instinct after having read the New Yorker article the night prior: I wept and then prayed. Not knowing whether Jahi was still biologically alive or dead, I reached out in the language of human limits to the mysterious beyond in grief and in love. Her life should not be primarily an object lesson to be studied. Though her experience can and should teach us, Jahi is first a young girl whose story and life we now remember and inherit as one of our own children. Jahi and her mother invite us to expand the tight circle which we draw around our family; they invite us to widen the circle of belonging, that we might be sensitive to the grief of their suffering and loss, to let ourselves be rewoven and remembered together.
The Bible, at least as I read it, tells a story not primarily of right actors or ethical people (though it does celebrate them and shows us how beautiful it is to walk in a good way). Ultimately, it communicates a story of hope, a story of how our alienation from one another, all our historic and understandable hostility, is digested and finally overcome by a love stronger than death. Rather than overcoming evil by power of intellect, arms, or superior morality, it entrusts us with a call to love our neighbors and, as we grow in maturity, to love even our enemies.
Talk of loving neighbors and enemies can quickly become too abstract. Instead of giving us overwhelming commands, the Bible offers narratives about what it looks like to love, beginning with our own families and problematic legacies. It asks us to remember and love the people we’ve come from, to forgive them for harming us, and in time to recognize that we are bound up with them and even those who hurt them. As Dr. King said, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” It is either non-violent love or non-existence. In the Bible, love calls us to own our ancestors as vicious, vindictive, sometimes heroic, and always vulnerable—even Samson and Nehemiah are remembered—to not disown them nor doom ourselves to live in fearful reaction to how we may become them. Instead, the Bible invites us to make their memory today, both the good and the bad, into a blessing in love.
The primacy of love has at least two practical implications for educational programs like FASPE. First, it provides a set of interpretive lenses for valorizing what can often be devalued in an educational program. Second, it can account for the liabilities outlined above and respond concretely.
Valorizing Relationships: A few months after our FASPE trip, there is much that I look back on with great appreciation. Congregants have enjoyed hearing about the ethical case studies and friends have marveled at the experience and historical knowledge I have gained. But for me it is the love that FASPE nurtured that continues to be most promising for my own ethical growth; it is the new affections and the unlikely friendships that have only just begun. When I think back on FASPE, it is the laughter around a campfire in Oswiecim in the shadow of Auschwitz’s memory and the sharing of good drink across all kinds of professional, religious, and political differences that ground our ethical case work. It is learning about the ethical morass that journalists must negotiate, and the crushing weight doctors must face as they arbitrate life that shines as FASPE’s greatest gift.
It is not because of ideas, but because of friendships I have made at FASPE, people I now trust, that I have the courage to attend an upcoming political and religious leadership conference that I normally would not go anywhere close to. Now, I have not just the courage to attend but an openness of heart to see anew.
As educational programs move more to distanced and remote learning, it is easy to overlook what love helps us to identify and valorize. It is easy after my FASPE trip to talk only about cool case studies and exotic historical sites. But love, friendship, and affection are indispensable for the development of ethical agents; love is the foundation of trust, which opens up the potential for another politics amid the polarization and demonization in our world. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes, reflecting on Bonhoeffer’s poem “The Friend,” “trust, the trust made possible by friendship, is for Bonhoeffer not a retreat into the private, but rather an alternative politics to the privatization of the self and friendship that is the natural breeding ground for totalitarian politics.”12 FASPE’s greatest gift is the love that it cultivates.
A Concrete Program Response: While case-based education programs can distance learners from those studied, programs like FASPE can leverage the relationships forged through pilgrimage and ask living subjects, budding friends, to offer ethical conundrums they currently face in their own professions to one another.
It is one thing to hear about how the Lutheran Church in Germany is struggling to deal with the rise of the AfD, and another to gather newfound friends around live ethical issues and to invite them to talk through their differences. I would have loved the counsel of diverse friends to speak to how I should preach on Mark 12 (whether it is lawful to pay Caesar’s imperial tax) to a congregation that is likely not to vote because they do not agree with how the American government is spending tax dollars on weapons. How should I think about moral neutrality, moral formation, and moral culpability in the sermons I have had to preach the past few months before the 2024 election?
In a setting like a FASPE trip, what elsewhere feels rife with possibility for non-constructive debate can be a possibility for the most potent kind of ethical learning, in which the case studies center around the life of subjects, friends whom you’ve walked through the shadow of Auschwitz with and who are trying to figure out what it means to do their best. Undergirded by trust, offering live (and vulnerable) professional situations to those whom you’ve come to know can fortify where there could be despair, disabuse us of heroic answers, and reground us as agents who exist interdependently
As we face new ethical challenges today, yes, we need to study the past, but I hope we also emphasize and teach the place of love, for it can help account for case-based education’s liabilities. Love warms up analysis, leaving us unable to heartlessly dissect, objectify, or utilize the past.13 It draws us close together, embraces us all—past, present, and future. Love does not disempower or discourage but strengthens and emboldens, lending us not only the diligence to look at past patterns but also the courage to listen with humility and improvise in each new moment. As we struggle to teach and learn, struggle to live well in our time, let us do so in love.
“Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”(1 Corinthians 13:7-8)
Barnabas Lin was a 2024 FASPE Clergy & Religious Leaders Fellow. He is a PhD candidate in Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary and serves as the theologian-in-residence at Bethel Community Presbyterian Church.
Notes
- For more on this issue, see the works of Pierre Bourdieu, An Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Enrique Dussel, The Ethics of Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); or Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South (London: Routledge, 2016).
- Arieke Smits-Luca, “German church struggles with radical right-wing AfD party,” Christian Network Europe News, May 21, 2024, https://cne.news/article/4263-german-church-struggles-with-radical-right-wing-afd-party (accessed August 9, 2024).
- Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, The German Resistance Memorial Center: Biography of Elisabeth Schmit, https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/biographies/index_of_persons/biographie/view-bio/elisabeth-schmitz/ (accessed August 9, 2024).
- See Sumner B. Twiss, “Can a Perpetrator Write a Testimonio? Moral Lessons from the Dark Side,” in The Journal of Religious Ethics, 38, no. 1 (March 2010): 5-42.
- Again, this is decidedly not a veiled critique of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia (EKBO). I am grateful for how they are taking seriously the danger of the AfD, and acting as they have discerned is wisest.
- For more exposition of this idea, see David Smith, On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018). Or one can see this in Paulo Freire’s work on banking models of education vs. conscientization in Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
- See Martin Luther King Jr’s work (particularly in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”) inspired by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s work.
- This problem has been historically endemic to the discipline anthropology, but also more recently constructively critiqued from within. There’s much to learn in how anthropologists have developed new ways of observing while participating, rather than from the outside
- Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, The Heart of Higher Education (San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass, 2010), 31.
- Rachel Aviv, “What Does It Mean to Die,” The New Yorker, January 29, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/what-does-it-mean-to-die (accessed August 9, 2024).
- Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html (accessed January 4, 2025).
- Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 283.
- See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Warming Up Reason: Corazonar and Intimate Sufficiencies” in The End of the Cognitive Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 97–102.