Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics

On Friday, October 21st, Kate Jackson-Meyer, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, returned to Boston College, where she completed her doctoral studies, to speak about her book Tragic Dilemmas in Christian Ethics. There was a great turnout of Jackson-Meyer’s former students, faculty peers, and mentors as Jackson-Meyer returned to what she sees as her “intellectual home.”

She began her presentation with two general points: what makes a dilemma and how her work fits into Christian ethics. A dilemma, in her words, is when one ought to do A and one ought to do B but cannot do both, and a choice has to be made. This decision will result in positive impacts from choosing either A or B but negative impacts from the option not chosen, such as guilt. She elaborated on how, when discussing this, people get frustrated with the existence of evil and God. In response to that, she concentrates on sin and sinful social structures to understand, in a different light, why these choices or dilemmas exist. Taking insights from moral theology and specifically Catholic social ethics emphasis on relationality, Jackson-Meyer presented three cases of dilemmas. She uses them to argue that the current moral guidelines, such as the principle of double effect, are insufficient in situations of moral dilemma. After examining this in cases, Jackson-Meyer presented the idea of moral injury that is still emerging in the current moral paradigms. This is because current strategies focus on the choices rather than the experiences of the people after making those choices. Jackson-Meyer posed a great question: what are ethics if they only strategize with regard to choice and do not consider the moral experience of the people choosing? She continued by explaining her vision for adding a new category to moral theology with a concentration on lament. She explained how lament will help understand dilemmas as tragic and that people’s experiences are not as isolated from the choices' moral implications. In a word, we lament in response to the guilt we feel for not performing the alternative obligation–it is all we can do.

Many questions and a great discussion followed this presentation. Questions about each case, such as the question, how do traditional Catholic ethics such as proportionality lead to thinking about utilitarianism? Jackson-Meyer responded by explaining how proportionalism is only a piece of the principle of double effect. This led Jackson-Meyer to affirm her point that these tools do not solve the tragedy in such dilemmas. Questions also brought forth the ideas of non-negotiable and negotiable decisions. The audience tested different scenarios with Jackson-Meyer and together presented an approach to understanding dilemmas versus tragic dilemmas. The question veered into an excellent closing idea; Jackson-Meyer agreed that her work is not supposed to make these choices easier but, instead, provide reflection for after the decisions and the healing steps needed after tragic dilemmas.