chapter 10 Remember the poor: Duties, dilemmas, and vocation Eric Gregory This volume hopes to renew a conversation that has a long history in the academy, the Church, and the wider world. In addition to various precursors in English and Scottish moral philosophy, theistic engagement with the utilita- rianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill had a profound impact on Anglo-American theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1960s and 1970s, Christian ethics focused explicitly on various theories of act- and rule-utilitarianism. 1 Ongoing debates about proportionalism in Roman Catholic moral theology trade upon the extent to which proponents of this view adopt a form of consequentialism inconsistent with church doctrine. 2 Today, however, sustained engagement with utilitarianism by theolo- gians typically occurs more indirectly through proxy debates in economics, public policy, political theory, and psychology. Deontological and utilitar- ian ethics still frame many discussions in normative and applied ethics. Peter Singer’s own writings have done much to fund this interest, often provoking polemical charges of immorality and irrationality by philoso- phers and theologians alike. At the same time, the growing appeal of virtue language in theological circles tends to focus on character and goodness rather than right action. In contrast to previous generations, contemporary Christian ethics has been shaped more by alliances with Kantian contrac- tualism and Aristotelian virtue ethics than utilitarianism. Indeed, despite the appeal of proportionalism or the soft consequentialism of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism, it is difficult to think of a prominent Christian consequentialist or even explicit treatment of contemporary utilitarian philosophers in recent Christian ethics. It is therefore a welcome 1 See, for example, Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1966), and Richard A. McCormick, SJ and Paul Ramsey (eds), Doing Evil to Achieve Good: Moral Choice in Conflict Situations (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1978). 2 See Bernard Hoose, Proportionalism: The American Debate and Its European Roots (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1987); Aline H. Kalbian, ‘Where Have All The Proportionialists Gone?’ Journal of Religious Ethics 30:1 (2002): 3–22. 192 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107279629.014 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Princeton Univ, on 09 Nov 2019 at 22:29:35, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,