In A Blue Haze:
Smoking and Baha'i Ethics
by Udo Schaefer
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chapter 1 | start page | single page | chapter 3 |  |
Chapter 2
On the Difficulty of Dealing Ethical Questions
1. The question of whether a certain behaviour is permitted or prohibited, good, evil, or neutral, is a question of ethics. A Bahá'í who wants to know how to act in a given situation, will begin by turning to his conscience, and since this has been formed by the revealed Word, to the Scripture, i.e. the sum of the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh and the authoritative interpretations of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi. What might appear to be self-evident for every religious person is not necessarily so, as we shall shortly see.
Today the presentation of concrete ethical standards has become problematic in our society. Certainly, the highest ethical values in the Bahá'í Revelation, the love of one's neighbour and of all humanity, or the cardinal virtue of justice, are sure to meet with approval. One can agree to these highly abstract values without having to commit oneself to changing any patterns of everyday life. However, when it comes to assessing actual everyday behaviour affecting one's own self, especially when it comes to prohibitions, irritation can set in quickly.
The Bahá'ís are living in this society and are influenced by the prevalent ways of thinking whether they want to be or not, and in this society, thinking in moral categories is becoming more and more unfashionable. Many people are unaccustomed to it. To many it seems increasingly questionable that there should be such things as rigid norms and unalterable duties which unequivocally state what should or should not be done. This is concomitant with the decay of religion and the resulting erosion of the Christian value system.[22]
In many parts of the world morality, called an "honourable form of stupidity"[23] by Friedrich Nietzsche, has not only lost its general binding force but also its self-evident importance and is actually seen by many as a kind of stupidity. It has largely disappeared from everyday speech and is almost only used with an ironical undertone. A person who maintains moral points of view is considered a "morality apostle", with whom no one wants any interaction. This is evident in political discussions or in talk shows on television where interlocutors are admonished, for God's sake not to moralise. Especially in regard to so-called "social fringe groups" (criminals, social outcasts, prostitutes, drug addicts, homosexuals) or on the issue of abortion one should kindly refrain from any moral approach whatsoever. Persons who fail to do so disqualify themselves, exposing themselves as Pharisees and die-hard reactionaries. This process of "demoralisation" began with sociology; how far it has already spread can be seen by the semantic cleansing of our language, which bans the use of all terms that might hold any moral reproach.[24]
Of course, Bahá'ís do not think that way. Experience with these issues shows, however, that they often have similar feelings, which is not surprising in this social climate. Therefore, a person presenting ethical demands and thus drawing an ideal of humanity "in light of which one's own everyday existence fails a thousandfold"[25], is easily suspected of affectations or insincerity by being a moralist, a hell-and-brimstone preacher, as well as by violating the cardinal norm that prohibits self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is a distorted form of righteousness. According to Confucius the self-righteous are "the spoilers of morals."[26] They were frequently and uncompromisingly rebuked by Bahá'u'lláh[27] even as He praised the truly righteous, "well is it with the righteous that mock not the sinful, but rather conceal their misdeeds"[28]. When someone uses the pretext of moral responsibility to scrutinize commonly accepted social norms of behaviour, isn't that person preoccupied with the faults and sins of others? In the end, doesn't such a person violate the imperatives of his or her own ethics?
If this were the case, it would actually be totally inadmissible to be concerned with Bahá'í ethics, which as in all religions do make up a substantial part of our theology. However, we are not dealing here with a specific individual's unique and personal behaviour, but rather with abstract human behaviour. And to judge this behaviour in the abstract is not only permissible, but imperative, since God's Book is the "unerring Balance" "in which all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth are weighed"[29], through which "truth shall be distinguished from error"[30]. At a time "when no man knoweth how to discern light and darkness or to distinguish guidance from error"[31], we are challenged to reflect what our duties are, whether certain ways of acting, accepted or disputed in society, are permitted or prohibited. How else could we then accomplish the task which 'Abdu'l-Bahá defined in a prayer: "to refute what is vain and false" and "to establish the truth"[32]?
In other words, this is not a case of a non-smoker passing judgement on smokers, nor of someone self-righteously condemning the sins of others. It is the attempt to question our normative ethics on a controversial issue "without wrath and zeal"[33]. The smokers among the readers may find this to be an occasion to reconsider their habit. Reason[34], as our daily experience shows, is only a weak motivating force. Otherwise the overwhelming evidence against smoking would have caused it to disappear a long time ago. Perhaps Bahá'ís, upon seeing in how many ways they are living in contradiction to divine norms if they smoke, will be motivated to give up smoking more out of that insight than because of medical reasons alone.
2. Before proceeding with the rest of my thesis, I would like to share an instructive experience. If one sets out to write a contribution on such a topic which, as far as I can ascertain, has not been done previously, it is advisable to examine other literature as well. There are many sensible people writing about relevant socio-political issues and it is most valuable to know what others, for example theologians, philosophers, or social scientists, have thought and written on the subject. We will not get any Bahá'í perspectives from them, but we might find some mental impetus, at least of a methodical nature.
In this case however, all attempts to get hold of such literature have failed. There is a vast amount of medical literature on smoking, an abundance of literature from the psychological, even pastoral, viewpoint, but there is no literature that sheds any light on ethical or moral-theological aspects. The German Federal Department of Youth, Family, and Health[35] and also the German Central Office for Addictions[36] were unable to provide any literature relevant to the subject. Even the Evangelical Central Office for Current Issues in the World[37], an agency of the Protestant Churches in Germany, and the Catholic Academy of Bavaria[38] were unable to help me. The research director of the Protestant Academy in Baden[39] let me know that my inquiry made him painfully aware that he could provide me only with some very general reference material on the social costs of smoking and its harmfulness.
Dietmar Mieth, professor of Catholic moral theology at the University of Tübingen, finally confirmed to me that there are no ethical studies on smoking. His letter is informative:
"But I shall gladly tell you why there is no ethical study on smoking: what is ethically correct is decided through the consequences of one's actions. If these consequences are predominantly negative, as is the case today with smoking, there is nothing left to discuss ethically. At most, the question of the urgency in quitting needs to be resolved. But this is more a question of motivational psychology than of ethics."
The letter shows that today's Catholic moral theologians no longer begin their ethical reflection with the revealed Word and ecclesiastical traditions. They start with the facts. Thus, the criterion is no longer the divine will, the set of norms given by divine legislation, but rather reality.[40] Here it becomes apparent what moral theology has come to; a moral theology which for almost two millennia conveyed the guide-lines of Christian ethics and extended them into the most intimate areas of life, has fallen under the pressure of the social sciences to proclaim the "autonomy of morality" at the end of the second millennium, to declare that there is no such thing as substantive Christian morals, and that only reason is capable of telling us the difference between good and evil.[41]
A Bahá'í is guided by the set of norms and values given by Bahá'u'lláh. He is the divine Law-giver who, like Moses giving humanity the law on Mount Sinai, has redefined the norms of morality and furnished them with new power for commitment.[42] Therefore, the starting point for every reflection on ethical questions is His scripture. It is to this scripture that we shall now turn.
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