Taking Responsibility for Evil: Addiction and Usury in the Light of Repentance
ETHICAL DILEMMAS: CRISES IN FAITH AND MODERN MEDICINE, pp. 137-152, John T. Chirban, ed., 1994
12 Pages Posted: 18 Feb 2013
Date Written: November 1, 1991
Abstract
This essay develops reasons for believing that repentance is the key to becoming capable of responsible and compassionate action in the face of evils, particularly the unacknowledged evils of narcissistic immediacy such as addiction and usury. Composed of three major sections, the first discuses how it is that repentance is foundational for a life of ethical responsibility, and how through compassion repentance moves the self to extend itself to evils for which it is not directly responsible. The core of the discussion is an analysis of how repentance posits the self on the grounds of a direct desire for the good, which it encounters as a transcendent reality. Secondly, the essay examines how afflictions such as addiction and usury perpetuate a tradition of evil from which only repentance can free the self. Using recovery from alcoholism as a paradigm, narcissistic immediacy is identified as common ground for the dynamics of addiction and the ethos of usury, thereby pointing beyond ideas of disease or profit to the roots of these largely unacknowledged evils. In its third section, the radical evil that manifests itself in such afflictions of immediacy is approached on a more theoretical level, and the discussion shows that evil is inherently vulnerable to the good – at least insofar as the good acts through a dialectic of compassion and responsibility set up by the unitary movement of repentance.
Keywords: repentance, addiction, usury
JEL Classification: P19, Z10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation