For as long as people have been living together in communities, a moral regulation of behaviour has been necessary to the community’s well being. We call it ethics, which can have several meanings. It could be a discipline, which deals with what we define as good and bad and with moral duty and obligation. It could be a set of moral principles or values or a theory or system of moral values. Depending on the social setting, the authority invoked for good conduct could be the will of a deity, the pattern of nature, or the rule of reason. When the will of a deity is the authority, obedience to the divine commandments, e.g. in scriptural texts, would be the accepted standard of conduct. Needless to say that it is here that Christians and Muslims would consider themselves to belong. But others find other sources of authority in relation to ethics. If the pattern of nature is the authority, conformity to the qualities attributed to human nature is the standard. When reason rules, moral behaviour is expected to result from rational thought.

If one asks the question, "What does ethics mean to you?" I think one would get answers like:
"Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong."
"Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs."
"Being ethical is doing what the law requires."
"Ethics consists of the standards of behaviour our society accepts."

The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the views many people have about ethics are most often not very solidly founded. Many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her feelings may give up from doing what is right. In fact, feelings are not best foundation for considering what is ethical.

Nor could one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behaviour of the atheist as to that of the saint. Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behaviour. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion.

Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical. History knows of societies and their laws, which legalized slavery. The South African society had laws that enforced apartheid and there are other grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical. There are societies, where the secondary role of women is enshrined in law. There are probably still women in Europe, who remember those days when the law said that they could not vote.

Being ethical is also not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behaviour in society can deviate from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany was a good example of a morally corrupt society.

Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of society and then apply my beliefs to whatever society accepts. The lack of social consensus on many issues would make it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist.

What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards, where the focus is on basic human needs. I refer here to basic human needs that Johan Galtung, after asking people in about 50 countries what they could not do without, listed as survival, well-being, identity and freedom.1 Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well founded reasons.

Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned earlier, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.

How are law and ethics related? One's interpretation of law will necessarily influence the interpretation of ethics, and vice-versa. Given a lack of consensus on what "ethics" refers to, we should not be surprised that attempts to chain this concept down long enough to see how it relates to "law" (itself no unitary, unequivocal notion) lead only to more questions.

Law and ethics form a problematic package but a package deal nonetheless. When Kant turns to explain what a legal duty is and how it should function, he appeals to much the same conceptual resources that he relies on when discussing ethical duties. Laws, he insists, must apply to everyone equally. It must also be possible for each citizen to embrace the reasoning behind the law, including any penalties for violating the law, and so on.

For Kant law functions as a system of externally imposed constraints on behaviour, whereas ethics functions as self-imposed constraints. Kant's description of persons as "self-legislators" when it comes to ethics is apt. Still, it may not get at the interplay of ideas and interests that arise in e.g. bioethics. Imagine the patient whose wish for assisted suicide is rejected by hospital staff and law. We face a challenge in understanding the magnitude of this philosophical problem if we restrict ourselves to Kantian terms of legislation, self-imposed or otherwise. And in the case of an apparent conflict between law and ethics, what is one to do? Kant lived and wrote in a time when protests against what might be considered an unethical law did not enjoy the social status that they do today. It is now almost taken for granted that one has an ethical obligation to protest against laws that are judged to be unethical. What is less clear is how we would distinguish an ethical law from an unethical one.

The common law makes little or no effort to specify what our individual duties are to each other in a positive sense, that is, in the sense that I have to do something for you. Rather, the law is heavily weighted towards rules that tell me what I cannot do, or must avoid doing to you. Ethics is no different in this regard. My primary duty is to leave you to your own autonomy.

In some cases the legal obligation conflicts with the ethical obligation. Law and ethics seem like a couple who cannot live together or apart, and we seem destined to accept their continual squabbles along with, one hopes, eventual compromise. The problem is that we cannot state where one ends and the other begins.

Yet do we think of the transplant surgeon, who knows that she can save only one of two patients, possibly because of a shortage of available organs? To insist that the surgeon rely on a personal ethical compass, with no oversight, seems to place a great deal of faith in the surgeon's ethical judgment. The law rightly steps into such scenarios, to protect society from the risks of misplaced trust of this kind. Law and ethics might reasonably be taken to depend on each other. This holds true regardless of their habit of disagreeing or attempting to supersede each other at times.

There is a Biblical ruling in Lev. 25:36-37, which in the Jewish tradition has resulted in a Talmudic discussion revealing the complexity of ethics and law. The Bible verses are: Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them, but fear your God; let them live by your side. You shall not lend them your money at interest taken in advance, or provide them food at a profit.

These verses were discussed by the Rabbis ending up in a moral dilemma: Two men are travelling in the desert. They have only one bottle of water between them. If they share it, they will both die. If one drinks, he will survive, but his companion will not. What are they to do? Ben Peturah contended that they should share their water, so that neither will witness the death of his fellow. Rabbi Akiva argued that the owner of the bottle shall drink. Doesn’t the law say "Let him live by your side.” It doesn’t say: “Let him live instead of you. Your life takes precedence over that of your fellow”.2 We have two contradictory interpretations with capital importance whatever way you go. How are we to consider the divergent views? Whose life takes precedence? What if one is a child and the other an adult? What if the travellers are a man and a woman? How do we measure the value of life? Akiva’s argument is according to the law but how do we live with such a law?

When we rush to answer one way or another one should not neglect the risk that we may be pressing our own specific interpretations of the relationship between law and ethics. It is of course true that in the final analysis, the application of ethical principles cannot be dissociated from the realm of personal judgement and not be confined only to a set of rules. Is there a way around this? Can we guard against law or ethics overly influencing the other?

Let me share with you another example from the same tradition. Another example of a law puts parents in front of a stark choice. The commandment appears in Deuteronomy 21:18-21:

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.

The sages of the Talmud found this passage quite objectionable and looked for ways to legislate the commandment almost out of existence. The child must be within three months of attaining maturity (younger than that, he was still a minor; older, he was not still a child). He must have stolen money from his parents, used it to buy a specific measure of meat and Italian wine, eaten and drunk it in one go, in a place other than his parent's house, and so on. The conditions that had to be satisfied for the law to be applied were so stringent that they could almost never have been met.3

Long and patient dialogue is necessary in order to glean wisdom how to resolve problems between ethics and law e.g. in bioethics.

I have given two examples from the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures as well as some examples of Talmudic inter-pretations. I have done so because there are shared moral, ethical and spiritual values inherent in the Abrahamic traditions. But we cannot limit our reflection to what our scriptures say, even if there are commonalities. We also share the implicit danger of religious bigotry and the threats to the essential fabric of contemporary society and therefore need to see how a constructive dialogue and mutual confidence that is relevant for our societies can develop. There is a need to overcome prevailing misconceptions and dispel longstanding misrepresentation. In our time of ongoing rhetoric and activities by extremist adherents (at least in name) of our religious traditions, it is important that a dialogue between people, who will shoulder the task to persevere in dialogue, also disown those who use their religious traditions for stereotyping and contempt.

Contemporary philosophical discussion of ethics has been dealing with the growing complexity of social life and the answer is not automatically given. Many scholars in the field of "ethics" search, independently of particular religious or ethnic traditions, for principles, which can help us deal with the hard questions that arise for human beings irrespective of their communal loyalties or backgrounds. This is a necessary enterprise for human well-being. Most of us live in situations where a plurality of religious and other traditions makes it impossible to build public policy on the moral reasoning offered by one religion. Even a supposed "overlapping consensus" representing many religions is easier said than done. Yet urgent issues arise which need for practical purposes to be resolved. Euthanasia, genetic manipulation, cloning are only some of the issues requesting ethical considerations. The typical work of a hospital "ethics committee" is a case in point: e.g. shall life support for this patient be terminated or not? Shall this patient receive a heart transplant ahead of that one?iv It is not easy to define a set of ethics for all times. There is not an autonomous and timeless and coherent set of rules and there are no ready-made answers. Changes in relation to society, community, production, political organisation, and ideology continue to raise a number of questions for which any traditional theological and ethical repertoire may be insufficient. One should also remember that both religion and philosophy fostering ethical considerations have an inbuilt inclination to congeal in perspectives of former times, which may not be useful for the issues we are confronted with today. As religious people, we should be particularly careful that we do not reduce God to be only the God of our fathers and mothers. The God of our fathers and mothers, the God of our traditions is to be our God today, which is not an affirmation of relativism, but of aggiornamento.

What is our responsibility in light of today's pressing personal and social ethical questions? How can we work more effectively together in facing difficult ethical issues? What are the limits of responsible Muslim and Christian ethical witness? What is distinctive about our ethical engagement? How can we work more effectively with those outside our communities who nevertheless share many of our values and goals?

Reflections on ethical issues are for Christians and Muslims always qualified by religious conviction and commitments. The ethics is scriptural and covenanted ethics and is not solely based on the precepts of law or the regularities of experience. There is law in ethics and ethics is law but law does not exhaust it. Christian self-understanding as moral agents is determined by their incorporation in Christ “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal.2, 20).

The self-understanding needs to be carefully interpreted lest it sounds arrogant and presumptuous. Words such as ‘Christ living in me’ should not be understood as privileges but as additional obligations. We should also see our self-understanding as a specific and distinctive contribution to the whole community. The interreligious dialogue has taught us the importance of space for the integrity and identity of those involved. One of the “commandments” of interreligious dialogue has been the insistence that everyone has the right to define him/herself but to do so in the midst of a world of religious and cultural plurality. We are best heard and best perceived when expressing our identity in dialogue. Any self-understanding, which insists on monologue, should be viewed with suspicion.

We are not alone in claiming an ethical commitment and obligation. There is in other religions as well as in philosophical work and among people of no particular religion or philosophical category an ethical reflection, which can be both enlightening and challenging for Muslims and Christians. The recent work of Hans Küng and the Global Ethics Manifesto demonstrates the various ethical considerations in the religious and spiritual heritage of our world. People of different religious traditions are today experiencing a changed world, where they discover the interconnectedness between religions. This is important in order that people of different religions be not obsessed with themselves in self-sufficiency and self-containment. We need to discover that we, although we can and should live a full life in the realm of our own religious tradition, may be enriched and helped by the other to discover unknown depths in our own religious traditions. Each religion can be a teacher to the other, providing ethical suggestions for common learning and growth, as a prophet challenging the other, as a mystic intriguing the other, shedding new light, hinting at new directions, provoking the other to a breaking up from that which has become congealed and hardened.

What is specific in Christian ethics? Leo Baeck once characterised Judaism as “ethical monotheism”. Could this be said also about Christianity? I would like to propose one aspect, which I think would be valid for Christian ethics without being the sole prerogative of Christians. It seems that one particular dimension of ethics in the Bible is forgiveness. It is the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in her classical study ‘The Human Condition’, makes a plea for forgiveness in social ethics.v She does not regard society as a construction of autonomous individuals, but as a network of relations, in which people participate in one another's life-story. Relations between people cannot be described in terms of means and ends. Neither can they be controlled. They have their own statute and exist only in the milieu of acts (praxis) and language. The trust of society consists of this vulnerable web of the intersubjective ‘in-between’ of action and language. However, it is characteristic of this action that in its factuality it is irreversible in principle and unpredictable in its consequences. The past cannot be revoked, the future is uncertain. The knife as an instrument could serve as an illustration. A knife is neither good nor bad in itself. It is an instrument to be used for good or bad. It can be used as a weapon to kill but it can also be used as a scalpel by the surgeon as a means to safe life. But even when put in the hands of a surgeon with the intention to safe life, it can all of a sudden turn out to become the instrument, which ends life. This makes living together a hazardous business.

There are, says Arendt, two remedies for the irreversibility and unpredictability of human action: forgiving and making promises. Arendt regards them as human possibilities, which are born out of the necessity to live together. Without forgiveness, the deeds from the past would remain hanging over the head of each new generation as Damocles' sword, and we would remain victims of the past. Without making promises we would not be able to start durable relationships with one another. There is a mutual dependence: we cannot forgive ourselves; neither does a promise we make only to ourselves mean anything. We are essentially dependent on other people.

According to Arendt, we owe the insight of forgiveness as a necessity in a community of people that want to live together durably to Jesus of Nazareth and to his influence on Western culture. He is the ‘discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs’.vi But forgiveness is not a Christian invention. Jesus is a Jew and brings his finding out of his own background, heritage and life. The Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament speaks compelling about forgiveness. Similar perspectives talk convincingly to us through the Qur’an. God is the compassionate and gracious God; slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin (Ex. 34,6f, cf. Joel 2, 13; Jonah 4, 2). Why, then, is Jesus put forward as the ‘discoverer’ of forgiveness? Arendt says that Jesus expressly lets forgiveness play a role ‘in the realm of human affairs.’ He makes that forgiveness is more than a religious category; to him, forgiveness becomes a demand of political ethics. Arendt places all the emphasis on Jesus' genial insight into the structure of durable human togetherness. Jesus takes forgiveness out of heaven and declares it to be a human necessity and possibility. The Promethean revolution is that Jesus fetched the divine fire of forgiveness out of heaven and that he has shown that it is enclosed in our own action as a possibility and a necessity. In this way he introduces forgiveness into ‘the realm of human affairs.’

Ethical considerations must underline this interrelationship. “No man is an island.” A vis-à-vis is required for our being what we are. Buber taught us through his philosophy of dialogue an existentialism, which is centred on this direct, mutual relationship, the “I-Thou,” in which each person confirms the other as of unique value. The I is accomplished in relationship with the Thou. Life is in itself an encounter. The importance of interrelationships is the truly effective tool for our journey through life. It creates a mutual responsibility between I and Thou. I am responsible for Thou in reciprocity, where I will be Thou and Thou will be I. There is an ethical interrelationship, where someone having the possibility of confronting the transgression of the other and for various reasons neglects to do so, will be held responsible in his or her place. There is a mutual dependence: we cannot forgive ourselves.

The concept of forgiveness puts us in a relational atmosphere, where we cannot look at or reflect on ethics without the perspective of the other. The words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount are significant. “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift” (Matt. 5,23-24). Reconciliation is more important than sacrifice as Hosea witnesses to, “For I desired loyal love, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6,6).

This perspective is necessary to avoid any cheap appropriation of forgiveness. ‘If you steal my pen and say “I'm sorry” without returning the pen, your apology means nothing,’ Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in his position as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.vii This aspect is important to avoid forgiveness as cheap grace, or forgiveness as a theological principle. The German Protestant theologian Bonhoeffer denounced cheap grace in the thirties, when the Nazi regime was preparing its crime and the church kept preaching God's forgiveness from the pulpit, Sunday after Sunday. It is no wonder that the world is rather ambivalent as to a church, which preaches more than lives forgiveness. It preaches forgiveness, but it should seek it first. Forgiveness costs something. There must be repentance for a restoration of broken relationships.

If we want to be taken seriously by people, who in many ways have given up on religion, we need to go beyond well-meaning declarations, lest we just fall back into “simply being integrated in the world market as its religious legitimation and accompanying music” (Jose Miguez Bonino).

Ethics is or rather should be the first aim of a valid philosophy or theology. If we allowed ethics to precede ontology, we would live subject to justice in all the moments of our lives and not be distracted and misled by the claim to “truth” of philosophy or theology. If I were to take ethical behaviour as my first obligation as a thinking person, my main concern would be the quality of my relations to other people, my responsibility for each of them. In The Brothers Karamasov, Alyosha says: “We are all responsible for everyone else, but I am more responsible than all the others”.

Rev. Dr Hans Ucko delivered this paper at a consultation with a delegation of Iranians Islamic intellectuals and Christians in September 2005 organised by the office on interreligious relations and dialogue.

Notes

i. Johan Galtung: “Human Needs, Humanitarian Intervention, Human Security and the War in Iraq”, keynote address, Sophia University, Tokyo, 2004:
http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/2004/Galtung_HumanNeeds.html
ii. Ba.ba Metsia 62a:
iii. Sanhedrin 71A
iv. Costly Obedience, Faith & Order, WCC, Johannesburg, 1996, no.12
v. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago / London 1957, 236ff.
vi. Ibidem, 238.
vii. Donald W. Shriver, Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, Oxford 1995, p. 224.

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