The Demand to Choose

To recap: I hate conflict. I hate when people get angry or upset in reaction to something I've done or left undone. And I think that, thanks in no small part to the Western dramatic tradition, conflict as a virtue can too easily be overrated. I just don't buy the "If you're making everyone angry, you're doing something right" line of thinking.

Nevertheless, I do believe that ethics--Christian ethics particularly--necessarily involves the risk of conflict. Philosopher Simon Critchley, in a gloss on Alain Badiou's theory of ethics, writes about ethics not (as Badiou does) as fidelity to an Event but as the recognition of a demand. Here he means a demand not in the sense of authoritarian bossiness thundering down from on high but demand a situation that imposes the responsibility of response. Seeing a child drowning in a river, for example, produces a sense of demand. Once apprehended, the situation presents an undeniable reality. The drowning child can't be un-apprehended.

Our action or inaction to this un-un-apprehendable reality inevitably acquires an ethical dimension. If we leap in to the river to save the child, risking our own life (as is probably the case--it's not recommended that untrained, unassisted folk leap into a rushing river to save someone drowning)--our act is an ethical response to the demand. If we do nothing, turning back to our own affairs--this too carries an ethical charge. The situation, the demand, colors every act subsequent to it.

Departing from Critchley's specific argument, I would venture that what makes the demand ethical is that the demand doesn't dictate a specific response. Suppose someone holds a gun up to your head and says, "Dive in and save that child, or I'll blow your brains out." Alternately, to move us closer to certain strains of Christianity, suppose someone presents you with the threat of Eternal Hell and says "Dive in and save that child, or you'll burn in unending fire for all of forever." In both these cases we're dealing with something other than an ethical demand of the kind I'm talking about. In the former case, we're dealing with a threat, a force imposed on us. We have no choice, really, but to dive in. Ethics has little or nothing to do with the decision. In the latter case, we're dealing with a subtler but nonetheless still dictatorial kind of force.

Ethics, as I'm using it, suggests a less straightforward, more inquisitive process than the simple application of a moral law. The Ten Commandments, in this sense, represent a kind of morality--here's what to do. The Golden Rule, on the other hand, presents a general guideline to be adapted to different situations in different ways. It is not quite a relativist, there's-no-right-or-wrong philosophy; neither, however, is it a comprehensive instruction manual for navigating each and every situation.

Ethics, in other words, implies a zone of uncertainty about the right thing to do. It's the exploration of that zone in the face of a demand that constitutes the risky ethics I'm interested in here. But--and here's the rub--the demand imposes a kind of time limit on ethical exploration.

Let me retreat to a realm I'm more comfortable with. One of the first things you have to learn as an actor, designer, or director in the theatre is the necessity of making a choice. The director Ann Bogart, for example, speaks of the need for directors to "choose death" (a notion she borrows from aikido, if I remember correctly). In deciding how to stage a scene, she explains, a director has an infinity of choices. The chair could go here, or there, or there, or there--or there could be no chairs or a hundred chairs. At the end of the day, though, the director has to make one single choice: the chair goes here and nowhere else. By making that one choice, the director essentially "kills off" all of the other multitude of possible choices that were available. This can be painful, especially when on opening night the director realizes, oh, the chair should have gone THERE, not where I put it. Nonetheless, it is impossible not to make a choice. The reality of opening night exerts a demand.

There's little in the way of strict guidelines about where to put the chair; no rulebook will explain to you where chairs go. The choice is open, and there's no guarantee that the choice you make will be "right." In this demand-situation, though, the wrong thing is to not make the choice. If a director is too frightened of criticism, too afraid of risk to make a choice, then the director should reconsider careers.

How, then, might the ethical demand perspective reframe the GLBT issue debate I've been writing about?

More tomorrow,

JF