Dispatch Faith: Real Virtue Has Roots; Moral Abstraction Will Not Motivate Us To Care For Others, by Kevin Brown (President, Asbury University):
In 2018, 31-year-old Jamel Dunn tragically drowned in a Florida retention pond. Physically disabled and potentially disoriented at the time, Dunn waded into the water but struggled to stay afloat. The story drew national attention because as Dunn was thrashing in the pond, five teenagers were present who could have saved his life, but instead chose to laugh, taunt, and even film Dunn’s fight for survival.
Authorities did not charge the teens with a crime, because “there is no Florida law that requires a person to provide emergency assistance under the facts of this case.” Their (in)action was morally reprehensible, but not necessarily illegal.
Dunn’s tragedy has parallels to a famous thought experiment presented by controversial philosopher Peter Singer. In his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Singer asks readers to imagine approaching a pond where a child is drowning. Jumping in to save the child will likely damage or even ruin one’s clothes or shoes, but such inconveniences pale in comparison to the cost of not saving a life.
Risking your outfit to save a drowning child seems obvious and uncontroversial, but, says Singer, there is a principle in this thought experiment that has significant implications. If we are willing to have less to save a life in front of us, we should also be willing to have less to save a life across the globe. “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,” writes Singer, “then we ought, morally, to do it.”
The logic is clear and uncompromising. If the child in the pond demands our moral obligation, so does the “Bengali … ten thousand miles away.” Instead of spending money on frivolous enjoyments—such as from Starbucks, Netflix, or Amazon—Singer argues that the utility of discretionary income is maximized when spent on life-saving medicines or poverty reduction efforts in low-income countries.
It is a demanding theory. Singer is, in essence, suggesting that trivial consumer spending is morally equivalent to the derelict teenagers who idled as Jamel Dunn drowned. The theory requires that moral agents act in a rigorously impartial manner, prioritizing distant needs above our own everyday desires.
There is much to commend in Singer’s radical altruism, but something seems amiss. Moral obligations cannot be reduced to reason alone. Rational reflection can lead us to a principle or a standard, but the virtuous life requires a story. …
Like Singer, the Christian tradition also appeals to universal rules: the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount. Christians have long said that regardless of time, space, or place, there are just some things that are morally right.
But there is an important modifier for people of faith. Christians believe a moral reality characterizes our world in the same way a physical reality does—but moral vision and habits of virtue are learned and fostered in embedded, story-formed contexts.
While belief is at the heart of Christianity, we cannot reduce the faith to a set of propositions we are supposed to believe. Faithfulness, writes theologian Stanley Hauerwas in The Character of Virtue, is more constitutive of our Christianity than faith. In other words, it is not simply what we believe, but the interdependence of belief, action, and discipleship—the habituated embodiment of Christ’s character—that defines Christian life.
These beliefs and practices are adopted, internalized, and practiced in a social milieu of language, tradition, history, and place, as well as mediating institutions like families, churches, and schools. In short, a virtuous life is formed—not merely reasoned.
This is better understood by what New York Times columnist David Brooks describes as a “moral ecology” in The Second Mountain—cultural scaffolding that develops our moral vocabulary, orders our loves, grounds our identity, and channels these sensibilities into coherent actions. And it is fundamentally relational. As theologian James K.A. Smith writes, it includes “parents and teachers and aunts and uncles and priests and rabbis who walk with us on the road to character.” Moral education spans across “dinner tables, in classrooms, on football fields, in synagogues and churches.”
A moral life is a rooted life. …
If we want a society where bystanders care for others—even at great cost—we cannot simply talk about stand-alone principles or universal rights; we must talk about obligations. And obligations emerge in moral ecosystems.
To be clear, contemporary Christianity has not been immune from the detached individuality or moral relativism of Western culture. But that is a departure—not an outworking—of the classical Christian vision of a rooted life organized around the story of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
To assert that Jesus rose from the dead and then qualify that as “a personal opinion” is, remarks Hauerwas, one of the stupidest things a Christian can say. If Christ resurrected, this changes everything. All the maps have been redrawn. The world is upside down. Things are not as they seem.
The truth of this story demands, says the hymnist, “my soul, my life, my all.”
The Christian tradition has a word for this: discipleship. A call not merely to know what is right, but to become the kind of people who do the right thing. That is, both a desire for the good and the capacity to carry it out.
In a culture of weakening institutions and pervasive isolation, discipleship offers something deeper than thinly constituted reasoning—a story that shapes our moral imagination and directs our lives toward others. To be the kind of people who run toward those drowning, literally and figuratively, we need something beyond a universal precept or an ethics lecture.
