Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics

Environmental ethicists, philosophers, and moral theologians increasingly examine how anthropogenic climate change (linked to the burning of fossil fuels) poses questions of causality, responsibility, and agency in ways that stretch the capabilities of received moral traditions. This essay opens comparative religious ethical analysis on the topic of contemporary energy ethics for privileged populations, especially in the United States.

Climate change may be the most far-reaching manifestation of white privilege and class privilege to face humankind. Caused overwhelmingly by highconsuming people, climate change is wreaking death and destruction foremost on impoverished people, who also are disproportionately people of color. This essay first posits climate change as a compelling moral matter of "race- and class-based climate debt" and ''Global North climate debt." A second part draws upon the descriptive and transformative tasks of Christian ethics as a critical discourse to frame a moral response. Finally, the essay illustrates implications for public policy. I propose the concepts of "climate privilege," "climate violence," and "blinders of climate privilege" as tools for demystifying our situation; ''climate reparations" as a dimension of a moral response; and "atmospheric citizenship" as a tool for moral identity.

This essay explores some theological implications of cognitive-science research into moral reasoning. Evolutionary theorizing argues that human morality originated as an adaptation that enabled our evolutionary ancestors to function as members of a social species. Neuroscientific experiments suggest that utilitarian responses to the moral dilemmas known as "trolley problems" involve more activity in brain areas associated with reason and less in areas associated with emotion than do nonutilitarian responses. According to Peter Singer and Joshua Greene, these two areas of research, taken together, support utilitarianism. They might therefore also seem to challenge nonutilitarian theological ethics. However, drawing on Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it is argued instead that cognitive-science research on moral reasoning could offer a valuable hermeneutic of suspicion concerning ethics as a (merely) human project. Christians can welcome this critical function as an aid in the theological reconstruction of ethics without thereby being committed to the inferences drawn by Singer and Greene.

The latest trend in ethics, sometimes dismissed as a fad, is the effort to connect ethics to empirical science. Two different versions of this "latest thing'' can be found in the work of Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene. Their projects are, at least partly, unwitting recoveries of eighteenth-century Christian moral sense theory. Such similarities need not worry Christian ethicists but should instead inspire a careful retrieval of sentimentalism. It provides much of what today's empirical ethicists hope to deliver without the pitfalls.

Apologies are morally significant with regard to their form, function, and freight. Nevertheless, little work in Christian ethics considers apologies. Philosophical and social scientific literature on apologies focuses on the conditions for making valid apologies and the efficacy of apologies in moral repair but ignores the import of apologies for the offender. This literature is ill equipped to specify the relation between persons and their moral failures, minimizes the difficulty of understanding our own moral failure, does not adequately treat the relationship between explanation and apology, and neglects the way that apology making may comprise a process of moral repair for the offender. Relevant resources in Christian moral tradition can inform and enrich ethical consideration of apologies.

Conscience as an individual's nnoral self-awareness has received very little attention in recent decades. H. Richard Niebuhr developed a theory of conscience as moral self-awareness, but, after Niebuhr, interest in this particular understanding of conscience largely disappeared, generally because of its association with the practical philosophy and nnoral theology of Immanuel Kant. The common assumption is that Kanf s theory of conscience compliments his theory of autonomy: conscience is the means by which the autonomous individual rightly knows herself because it is the means by which she holds herself accountable to the moral order she has made for herself. In this essay I challenge this understanding of Kanf s theory of autonomy and, in turn, Kant's theory of conscience. I argue that Kant understands conscience to be the knowledge we have of ourselves as we strive to approximate the knowledge God has of us as God holds us accountable to the moral law that we should believe God promulgates to us. I conclude that Kant's theory of conscience is indeed valuable for contemporary Christian ethics because it draws attention to an important yet neglected biblical and theological witness —namely, that God intimately knows each individual and that each individual is singularly accountable before God.

It is not difficult to observe that social anger is pervasive in several contemporary political movements organized for the purpose of resisting systemic injustice and galvanizing institutional reform. However, the field of Catholic theological ethics currently lacks a normative framework adequate for the task of understanding and evaluating these public expressions of social anger. This essay draws upon the common good tradition and the preferential option for the poor in order to argue that social anger is best understood as a ''cognitive interruption" of the ideological rationalizations for oppression and privilege. To the extent that this cognitive interruption is integrated with the civic virtues of restorative justice, conflictual solidarity, and prophetic prudence, it should be judged as rightly expressed through the public actions of social agents aiming to resist human rights violations and to demand equitable institutional participation.

Prophetic speech serves as an important way to engage with a world in need of change, but prophetic speech might not always serve the person or community that uses it. After outlining the potential problems of prophetic speech, this essay presents the tradition of holy folly as an important alternative means of engagement and critique. This essay suggests that this once critical tradition should be attended to again in order to inform what it means to think about and perform Christian ethics. After presenting a background of holy folly and after categorizing critical elements of folly's modes of being and engagement, the essay offers a couple of ways through which elements of folly might be appropriated in the current day by those who cannot fully live the life ofthe holy fool.

In recent years, scholars have increasingly emphasized the reliance of Adam Smith's moral theory on the virtues. This essay argues that Smith's account of the virtues differs from most virtue theories because his must be read through the construct of the impartial spectator. Smith's spectator bears what Emmanuel Levinas might call a "trace" ofthe transcendent and employs what Amartya Sen calls an "open impartiality," which is an impartiality not bound to any social group. As the essay explores how Smith deploys the virtues, it shows that his deeper concern is not with the virtues but with how people respond to the market, their neighbors, and the structure ofthe world. It shows how H. Richard Niebuhr's concept of responsibility can be a helpful lens for understanding Smith's moral and economic approaches.

How can just warriors prohibit torture absolutely while still allowing that killing can be just? The best arguments for torture's wrongness and impermissibility seem to suggest that killing, too, is always wrong. If torture is wrong because it attacks imago Dei, why isn't killing wrong too, for killing seems at least as much an attack as torture? This question, which seems to force a choice between pacifism or countenancing "just torture" alongside just war killing, has scarcely been asked in Christian ethics. Nigel Biggar and Darrel Cole are among the only Christian ethicists even to consider this question. They leverage these issues to argue for torture's permissibility. Against such views, this essay shows why torture but not killing is always wrong, what so distinguishes torture from just war killing that it but not killing should be categorically prohibited. I elucidate three features that distinguish torture from just war killing and establish torture as always wrong: its intention and proximate end, its violating as opposed to destructive character, and its context of domination. I conclude by showing how these features are illustrated and exemplified by practices documented in the 2014 US Senate report on torture.