An intelligent person's guide to Christian ethics

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An Intelligent Person's Guide to Christian Ethics

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An Intelligent Person's Guide to Christian Ethics Alban McCoy OFM Conv

continuum LONDON

•

NEW YORK

Continuum The Tower Building 11 York Road London SEl 7NX

15 East 26th Street New York NY 10010

www.continuumbooks.com © Alban McCoy 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. First published 2004 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN

0-8264-7359-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wilts

For my brothers and sister in memory of our beloved parents Requiescant in Pace


Contents

INTRODUCTION PART I

1

THE MEANING OF 'MORAL

The subject matter of morality Amoralism Morality presupposes freedom, but are we free? Determinism versus Indeterminism Freedom Ethical subjectivism and the claims of conscience Cultural Relativism PART II

45 54 69

ABSOLUTISM, CONSEQUENTIALISM OR VIRTUE?

Kant Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill Aristotle and the life of virtue PART III

11 26 34

81 96 107

ETHICS IN A CHRISTIAN CONTEXT

The structure of moral judgments Christian Morality A Classical Christian moral account: St Thomas Aquinas

117 136 146

CONCLUSION

155

INDEX

159


Introduction

This small book concerns morality. It is written in the conviction that morality is the concern of every human being and not the preserve of experts. Universal as this concern is, however, confusion about the very meaning of morality, even more than disagreement about any particular moral question, has never been more evident. Hopelessly log-jammed conversations and debates take place over moral issues precisely because there seem to be as many views of what morality as such is about, as there are participants in such discussions. One matter over which there does appear to be a consensus is the collapse of what might be called the JudaeoChristian framework that has sustained our moral identity and shaped our ethical deliberations for the last 2000 years in the West. This view is shared by Jew, Christian and atheist alike. So the Chief Rabbi, in his recent book, The Politics of Hope: This tradition has been comprehensively displaced. In its stead has come a variety of substitutes: ethics of work and success, cults of physical fitness, consumerism and salvationby-shopping, therapies, New Age mysticism, alternative lifestyles, sub and counter-cultures, resurgent ethnicities of various kinds, and Internet-surfing as a mode of global identity.1 Morality is everyone's concern precisely because it is concerned both with knowing what it is to be a flourishing human being, and with actually becoming a flourishing

2


human being. Whether morality is regarded primarily from a philosophical or a theological standpoint, it is, of all human enquiries, the most immediate and the most unavoidable for every normal human being. From a historical point of view, moral philosophy in the hands of Socrates and his pupil Plato is the first significant development of Western philosophy after its beginning in the sixth century BC. Of course, not everybody engages in a systematic study of morality; but the question of how to live well, what to be and what to do, is undoubtedly one that figures in everybody's life. We simply cannot avoid making judgements of a moral kind: each of us is faced everyday with choices about the kind of people we should be and the priorities and general direction in which our life should go. And from time to time, everyone is faced with moral dilemmas which have to be resolved in decision and action. In everyday life, we are all more or less consciously involved in a constant weighing and consideration of values. The range of such values depends to a large extent on our state of life, our responsibilities and the position we occupy. But moral values concern us all equally, no matter what our circumstances. They are concerned not with being a good student or a good politician, but with what it is to be a good human being. They are concerned primarily, in other words, not with some particular aspect of our life but with life itself. Now while being a bus driver, baker or parent is optional, being a flourishing human being is not: so that to cease to ask about what is good and right for human beings is to abandon our humanity. And this is why moral concepts find their way into all our thoughts and speech at practically every point: by our very nature, we are enmeshed in moral concerns because human being is moral being. A recent writer has it that 'Human life is moral in its very form and moral knowledge is exercised and acquired in the most basic transactions of human living.'2 Though, undeniably, many of us proceed without any

Introduction

3

clear understanding of what it is to make moral judgements, our conclusions or confusions will be embodied in the practice of our lives. Of course, most of the time our moral judgments and decision-making are almost automatic: they come to the surface, prepackaged and in association with uncritical and entrenched evaluations and inherited opinions. We find it difficult to articulate the foundations of our moral reasoning precisely because our ethical opinions and commitments are often to be found embedded in seemingly non-moral contexts such as liberty, progress, education, human rights, etc. Perhaps the most common context for popular but covert moral discussion is politics. Indeed, the frustrating nature of much political discussion is surely attributable in large part to the fact that few are willing to unearth and expose to view the hidden, moral assumptions below the surface of such discussions. Political disagreements turn out frequently to be moral disagreements. It is to be expected, then, that radical and seemingly insoluble disagreement is the hallmark of contemporary ethical debate. There is an infinitely wide variety of popular arguments and practical principles informing moral decisionmaking: common decency, the national interest, results (the end justifies the means), caution, moderate self-indulgence (as long as it doesn't harm anyone else), and, latterly, safety, as in the ubiquitous phrase 'safe sex', are all canvassed as moral principles. Clear and unconfused thinking is urgently needed in a time like ours of accelerating change. Inevitably, new moral questions emerge to which there seems to be not only no agreed solution but not even a clear way of proceeding in the pursuit of such answers. The only intelligent way of making progress is to examine the principles on which we base our moral judgements, as such. Questions arising from medical technology, genetic science and changing sexual mores have become particularly conspicuous areas of ethical debate and disagreement.

4


This seemingly insoluble disagreement about particular moral questions has lead some to adopt the popular view that the meaning of morality and ethical debate is, by definition, immune from argument or rational criticism. This is partly attributable to 'political correctness' as a guiding principle in modern debate. But it is also a direct result of deeper-rooted views about the nature of human knowledge and the impossibility of achieving both objectivity and certainty in any area other than natural science. This curious combination of positivism, on the one hand, and subjectivism and relativism, on the other, characterizes the contemporary climate. Within this climate, various forms of reductionism suggest that the word morality does not designate any unique experience. So, it is said that morality is nothing more than the expression or registering of subjective feelings and emotions and ought to be treated as such; or morality is the outward expression of conventionalized prescriptions evolved in contingent social and cultural settings. Moral judgements, in other words, are either subjective — a matter of the individual's taste — or relative — a matter of a given society's mores. The corollary is that such judgements are essentially non-rational: we may argue about and discuss moral matters, but such talk does not involve rational principles. Questions of morality belong essentially in the realm of feelings, attitudes, reactions or conventions, not in the realm of argument and reason. What's at stake is nothing less than the intelligibility of ethical discussion as such. This is not just an argument between opposed extremes, one standing for authoritarian imposition, without any argument or reason, the other devoted to libertarian permissiveness. Rather, the point is a logical one: it is claimed that moral judgements are by their very nature independent of argument and reason, despite the outward form of the language employed. The outcome of this threat to the intelligibility of ethics is the conclusion that it is impossible to make rational, moral judgements. Moral opinion

Introduction

5

is to be interpreted in terms of power-relationships and pressure groups, and politics and psychology replace ethics. MORALITY AND RELIGION

But can morality be understood at all, apart from religion? Well, we can say this: if religion does make a difference to our understanding, we will understand that difference only if we seek to understand the experience of morality as we are immediately aware of it and the common, moral conceptions shared by all people, whether religious or not. There is, of course, a prima facie case for saying that religion is not necessary for understanding morality simply because the non-religious view is simpler and more economical. Most do in fact approach morality in this way and some, for example, Peter Singer, mentioned above, now openly advise the jettisoning of religion as the only way forward.3 Again, the experience of morality is chronologically prior to any knowledge, or at least our understanding, of religious revelation. There is also the view among certain kinds of religious people that something being wrong is equivalent to it being against God's will. But this will not do. First, it is manifestly the case that many people make judgements about what is right and wrong who do not give any place to the idea of God in their vision of things. Second, it is, of course, true that God does not will what is wrong: indeed, he can be said to forbid what is wrong. But it must be the case that he forbids X because X is wrong. Murder is wrong in itself; that's why God forbids it. Which is very different from saying that X is wrong because God forbids it. Malcolm Clark catches this: But if God's will is taken as arbitrary or inscrutable then the answer no more explains why I am morally bound to follow

6


divine prescriptions than such an answer would for the laws of respectable human authorities. Yet if... God is held to command for good reasons, then it is precisely these reasons which are a source of moral obligation, regardless of their source or religious authentication.4

What has led many to discount the role of religion and even to regard it as a distraction and inhibition is the view of certain strands of Protestant Christianity (though the origins are in Voluntarism of the late fourteenth century) that ethics is a matter of externally imposed and arbitrary rules involving rewards and/or punishments. This is a very different view from that of Aquinas, for instance, and others who stand in the Natural Law tradition, in which doing what is right is doing that which is in accord with the law' of one's nature. Nevertheless, it will be argued here that the experience of morality is never fully explained or satisfactorily understood apart from a religious context. But one cannot set out from this position: one must arrive at it. After all, the moral dimension of life is a common and universal human experience often in complete independence of any explicit religious conviction. The suggestion that morality cannot be rendered entirely intelligible apart from religion must be argued for, not simply asserted, and it will take the form of showing that what religion affords its adherents is an indispensable insight into the significance and meaning of this experience: but the experience remains the same experience and it is this which is the object of enquiry in moral philosophy. To summarize, the account outlined here is as follows: morality is rooted in what is truly good for human beings, perfective of our nature in its integrity and wholeness. The goods which constitute this fulfilment can be objectively known, reasonably affirmed and rationally defended. Such considerations are discerned in our common and universal experience: that is, by reference to self-evident truths about

Introduction

7

what it is to be human. So Aristotle can say that ethics is a science where the first principles derive from experience.5 NOTES 1. London 1997; Quoted in The Times, 22 February 1997. 2. Peter Byrne, The Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Ethics, London 1992, p. 24. 3. See Peter Singer, How Are We To Live?, Mandarin 1994. 4. See The Need to Question, New Jersey 1973, p. 241. 5. Nicomachean Ethics 1925a: 1142a. Cited by Byrne, op. cit., p. 30.


PART I

The Meaning of 'Moral'


The Subject Matter of Morality

The language and the experience of morality are completely familiar to us. We use the language of right and wrong, good and bad, helpful and harmful, ought and ought not with automatic ease, long before we reflect on specific moral issues or ethics itself because the experience which this language articulates is common to every normal, healthy person. So confident of this are we that someone who exhibits a complete lack of moral sense is judged sick, a psychopath. That the raw material of moral philosophy is universal is, from an anthropological point of view, completely uncontroversial: in every society known to us, we find rules of conduct prescribing what is to be done or not to be done, and some notion of a good which goes beyond what is desired and in the light of which immediate impulse is controlled and channelled.1 The awareness of the moral nature of human life, both individually and socially, is thrust upon us by the experience of real possibilities, realized or frustrated through our free choices. Of all these possibilities open to us as human beings, the question of whether and how we can flourish is the most central to our decision-making. That 'flourishing' is what Aristotle calls eudaimonia and Aquinas beatitudo. Both words can, with due qualification, be translated as 'happiness'. The possibility of happiness, or its opposite, is experienced in the concrete circumstances of ordinary life, conducted in inevitable interdependence within networks of trust, respect

12


and awareness of others' interests as well as our own. Our actions have consequences not simply for others but also for ourselves, in terms of our own character and humanity. If I am to choose freely the direction of my life (on the level of the fundamental dispositions rather than the particular projects), I must also choose the principles which will consistently guide my life in this chosen direction. The question of morality, of course, arises only in the context of freedom: more specifically, the freedom of selfdetermination or the possibility of shaping ourselves — what we are and what we shall be — by our choices. Moral seriousness means accepting the responsibilities of freedom. It is to take hold of my own life, to own my freedom, in the knowledge that my free choices make me into the kind of person I am. And the kind of person I am is, at this level, my responsibility. If deliberation about the conduct of human affairs is focused on our capacity for free choices, the most fundamental choice concerns how to exercise that freedom: whether at random and impulsively or reasonably and consistently. In other words, do I hand over control of my life and myself to uncontrollable forces both within and outside of me or do I freely choose to live in response to worthy goals and reasonable constraints? One could put this another way: is life to be lived for passing pleasure only, or is there something else to live for? The language of morality refers to goals and purposes of human action: some are to be sought after, others to be avoided. All human functioning is in terms of goals or goods (in the sense of ends and purposes). Human action may be right or wrong, good or bad, dutiful or expedient. And this applies to the agent as well as to the act: to motive, intention and disposition as well as to outward action. Such motivations and dispositions can be either virtuous or vicious. The language of moral deliberation is shaped in part by inklings of integrity, dignity and wholeness — ideas that


13

cannot be rendered with great precision, but which are no less influential for that. Through such ideas, we see ourselves in terms of aspirations to possible communion, and fulfilment. But at the same time we feel a sense of isolation and frustration, a sense of falling away, of not being as originally. This ambiguity consists of both a sense of dividedness and a longing for communion. Both are integral to human experience and find expression in the language of moral aspiration. Morality is, then, about human flourishing and we need some rational principle to guide our decision-making about the kind of person we should be. We need to understand better the basis for the distinction between right and wrong, good and evil. We need to understand, in other words, what the word 'moral' actually means. By its very nature, therefore, ethics is practical. This may seem an obvious point: after all, ethics involves reflection about human conduct. Many recent works of ethics are devoted entirely to what their authors call 'practical ethics' (cf. for instance Peter Singer's Practical Ethics). Generally speaking, these books, often now called 'applied ethics', are concerned with substantive ethical questions of a specific kind. But ethics and morality are practical in a quite different sense, in a sense that was recognized from the very beginning of systematic ethical reflection in the hands of Plato and Aristotle in fifth-century Athens. Plato, and his mentor Socrates, engaged in moral reflection precisely because they diagnosed the political turmoil of the Athens of their time as a failure in moral knowledge. And Aristotle says that, of all concerns, it is the most practical and the most unavoidable concern as such for human beings. The sense in which both mean that ethics is practical, then, is this: that the only good reason for doing ethics is in order to participate in human goods: or, put more simply and directly, the only good reason for doing ethics is in order to be a good human being, to live well. And, as we

14


saw earlier, it is concerned not just with outward actions but with the inner sources of our outward actions, namely, intention, motivation, disposition and character. On the other hand, ethics is most definitely theoretical in the sense that what we are aiming at is the truth. Ethics is a rational pursuit. Which is to say that our efforts are not geared to understanding only, in the current jargon, 'how we feel' about morality in general or any moral issue in particular; or simply to register our sense of emotional approval or disapproval of various moral options that confront us. In thinking about morality, we want to know, after due deliberation and with a view to participating therein, what the true good for human beings is. Though this point seems to be laboured here, it is worth remembering that many in the recent past have held that ethics can be done in a completely detached way without any felt need actually to be ethical. This was the view of many English-speaking moral philosophers from the middle years of the last century until relatively recently. It involved the view — part of the Positivist package and by no means completely abandoned still — that facts were entirely separate — logically — from values. Moral philosophers saw it as no business of theirs to be concerned with making or helping others to make moral judgements. Mary Midgley compares this development to the way literary criticism has sometimes developed in complete separation from the role of enhancing the enjoyment of literature and the vision of the world and human relations made accessible through it.2 This view is now increasingly rejected by moral philosophers. Plato and Aristotle saw a self-evident and indissoluble connection between structure and content in ethical reflection. For them both, the only reasonable motivation for pursuing the business of ethics is the desire to participate more fully in the goods discovered. Indeed, it can be said that one does ethics well only if one does it in order to conduct one's life, in the fullest sense, well: that is,


15

to participate personally in genuine human goods. And of course, doing ethics at all is one element among others that constitute human flourishing. It is generally agreed that 'moral' considerations are accorded a priority and significance over other considerations. But how can this be justified? To put the question in a different way: what is it that makes us designate some questions as 'moral'? Why do we exclude from this category such questions as table manners, hairstyles and diet, but readily and uncontroversially include sexual relationships, honesty and justice? After all, Greeks and Romans considered the wearing of trousers to be a mark of moral inferiority while at the same time being completely convinced as to the moral propriety of keeping slaves and treating them as personal chattels. One way of seeing the importance of the question is to ask oneself what difference it would make if someone were to disagree about whether 'X' was a moral question: are there limits to the degree of disagreement possible? Are there, in other words, some issues over which such disagreement would be taken to be unacceptable? Aristotle, for instance, thought that anyone who defended matricide was not to be argued with but beaten. Leaving aside the tabloid equation of 'morals' exclusively with sexual conduct, the most common understanding of what the word 'moral' means, and certainly the official usage in English-speaking moral philosophy until recently, associates it with external behaviour.3 According to this view, the designation 'moral' refers to principles and questions which concern external, public and social behaviour affecting others. Everybody is familiar with the view that as long as your conduct doesn't harm anybody else (and doesn't frighten the horses), it's all right.4 It has been suggested that this use of the word 'moral' to denote the external observance of rules has distinct historical origins. The intellectual context for such a distortion was set in the late Middle Ages and sealed by the Reformation

16


disputes of European Protestantism. The so-called Voluntarism' of the late fourteenth century emphasized the will as opposed to the intellect, and saw morality as constituted by divine decree, without regard to rational considerations accessible to human beings. The outcome of this view was that a morality of law, command, duty and obligation came to replace an older tradition of moral discourse that stretches back to Ancient Greece and which was commonplace in the earliest years of Christianity and among the Fathers of the Church and flourished until the thirteenth century. This development received further endorsement in the late eighteenth century when, at least in the Englishspeaking world, this understanding of 'moral' and 'morality' entered into the common parlance of Protestant Christianity in defence of religion and morality against the atheistic iconoclasm of Enlightenment thinkers. For such defenders of Christianity, no other explanation was necessary and none was possible, other than the view that morality consisted of rules imposed arbitrarily by the Creator on his creatures. It is not coincidental that this defence also laid great stress on fear of punishment and damnation as sufficient motive for acting morally. By the nineteenth century this attenuated understanding of the word 'moral' had taken root. So, for instance, John Stuart Mill (1806—73) could say that morality must not be allowed to interfere in private affairs. Morality had clearly come to be thought of as belonging to the public domain of law and social control.5 And it was this sense which was inherited by the English-speaking moral philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose discussions concerned morality understood solely in terms of external, public and civic behaviour. This 'external' sense is still with us in, for instance, the tabloid equation of 'morals' with sexual conduct. The essential point to make here is that the word denotes something extrinsic to our nature. An older, richer view of the words 'moral' and 'morality', far from designating some external feature of human


17

behaviour, sees morality as constitutive of the very nature of human beings as persons. This more fundamental sense is still present in our everyday language even if now detached from the specifically ethical realm. We speak easily and uncontroversially of 'moral victory', 'moral courage7, 'moral fibre', 'moral feebleness7, 'moral commitment' and 'moral rights'. All of these usages denote what we might colloquially call the 'spiritual' as opposed to the material aspects of life. It is the loss of this sense of the word in a strictly ethical and moral context that has contributed to much confusion.6 How can a more adequate sense of what this word 'moral' means be recovered? All would agree that the word 'moral' concerns 'the good' and 'goods': but which 'goods' and for whom? For me, for you, for us, for whites, blacks, Europeans, Chinese, adults, children, people with high IQs? Now we routinely speak of something's being good from various points of view: good from a medical, practical, aesthetic, academic, political, economic, religious, psychological, etc. point of view. Some senses of the word express expedience: that is, they are means to other ends. Others usages are conditional, specific related, or qualified by circumstances and prior decisions about goals and priorities. What all these uses have in common is that they are limited in application or relevance in that they concern either specific and particular enterprises or optional interests. They concern, in other words, aspects of our life which are, however important, nevertheless, extrinsic to us as human beings. But the sense of good in 'moral' good is entirely different. By 'moral good' we mean something like: 'Good from an overall point of view, or from an ultimate point of view'. That is, good from a human point of view: whoever and wherever you are and whatever you are doing. In other words, the moral good is self-evidently fundamental, total, overriding. The word 'moral' is used to indicate what matters most: it is used to indicate the longest possible of all

18


long-term goods, without qualification; goods that are unconditional, ends in themselves or absolutes. So, when we use the word 'moral', we are not just considering something from yet another point of view. On the contrary, 'good' in this sense sets the perspective within which we order all other goods, values, goals and priorities. It is the standard by which we decide whether any particular 'good' is to be included within our overall sense of value and purpose. And this is because 'moral good' relates to and concerns what we are and can become, at a level more intimate and more significant than any other: the level of the 'real' me, the 'me' which is the source of all my actions. It concerns that core of the human being which rules us specifically as 'human' and 'personal' beings. The word 'moral' marks out '... the central province of the inner life or the federation, the total system of values inside which the provinces fit/ 7 As we saw in those examples of the word used in seemingly non-ethical contexts, (moral victory, etc.) everybody would have the same understanding of the word 'moral'. And this use coincides with the sense outlined above. It refers to and invokes what lies underneath the surface, what concerns the real situation as opposed to the situation viewed superficially or from a limited and qualified point of view. 'Moral' refers to the dispositions, emotions and character of the person acting: the whole complex of factors that makes us human, independent of any specific goal or outcome, in distinction from whatever may or may not be the situation from any particular point of view. And the word 'moral' draws its power from that with which it is contrasted: expediency or pragmatism. The distinction was, of course, crucial to what Socrates, for example, considered the business of morality. Leaving aside later Christians' sense of the word, he would have been happy with the word 'soul' in this context. Morality concerns the 'care of one's soul' and the health of one's soul concerned integrity, wholeness, honesty, faithfulness to truth.


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The moral stands in relation to the other layers and levels of human doing and being, therefore, in the way health stands in relation to physical skills, strength and beauty. As one may be healthy while being at the same time ugly, so one may be moral (humanly flourishing, genuinely happy) while lacking many of the things judged desirable from other particular points of view. Keeping this in mind will remind us that while human flourishing is an activity or complex of activities, it is not exclusively or even primarily to do with behaviour towards other people. Lying around indulging in hateful thoughts or sexual fantasies, even if, for one reason or another, these are not acted on externally, is not neutral, from a moral point of view. The notion of morality is not invalidated on a desert island. Again, morality does not concern exclusively or even primarily external actions: consider greed on this desert island. There may be a good reason not to eat too much — being bloated, becoming lethargic, etc. In all these senses it will do you no good. But the specifically moral notion of 'greed' is first and foremost an attitude to food and thereby an attitude to oneself and to life in general. Greed is precisely an inordinate or disordered disposition and attitude. Of course, greed may (or may not) issue in eating too much; just as lust may (or may not) issue in disordered sexual activity. But essentially both are disordered or unbalanced dispositions or attitudes to life which are present before any action takes place. So morality concerns primarily what we are and only then what we do. Of course, more often than not (though not always) what we do is the best representation of what we are, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins's line, 'What I do is me'. Disposition and the actions they give rise to are usually inseparable. This is why Aquinas was clear that a habitus is not so much a 'habit' in the contemporary sense as a characterizing disposition. One of the most obvious hallmarks of a moral principle

20


and judgement, as opposed to any other kind of evaluation, is what is often called 'universalizability'. Moral principles are precisely those principles we expect everybody and not just a particular class or section of the population to act on. This conviction rests on the assumption that a moral judgement is based on a reason which has universal application in all similar circumstances. Even where the moral judgement is highly specific or detailed, there will be in the background some moral principle which has universal application. We expect moral judgements to be rational: that is, we expect them to be based on specifiable reasons arising from the facts of the case. We distinguish moral judgements, in other words, from matters of taste or preference. Closely related to rationality and universalizablity, we expect moral judgements to be impartial. This does not entail that moral judgements make no reference to particular circumstances or people. Impartiality entails that moral judgements are distinguished from the rules or code of a sect or some esoteric group. Moral requirements cannot be binding on all if only some can be aware of them. What cannot be commended to all is not a moral principle. But it also means that moral principles can never be simply the implementation of self-interest or sectional interest. By definition, a moral judgement is made from the standpoint of what is good for any human being, as such. A moral consideration is precisely one which embodies a conception of what constitutes a fitting, noble, excellent way for a human being to live: in other words, a conception of the human good. So the impartiality of a moral principle or judgment consists not in its abstraction from particulars but in its embodiment of what is good for human beings, as such. Morality, then, concerns human fulfilment or human flourishing; that which is, in other words, most essential to human existence. But what, concretely, does this good consist of? What activities, states of affairs, aspects of life constitute what have been called the 'basic human goods'?


21

This question boils down to another, more familiar question: what does it mean to be human? But before answering this question, we need to consider a common objection to the concept of human nature itself. In this present century some - mainly sociologists and existentialists — have doubted whether there is such a thing as human nature. 'Many people', says Mary Midgley, like to claim officially that there is no such thing as human nature, so that nothing is naturally any more important than anything else. This means that [for instance] total immobility or total solitude would be as good ways of life as any other, provided you either were brought up to them or decided to choose them. Man is supposed to be infinitely plastic.... I find this contention so obscure (even a piece of plasticine is not infinitely plastic; everything has some internal structure) that I propose simply to wait till I find someone living by it; i.e. choosing such things, refraining from ever mentioning or appealing to human nature or instinct, not treating anything as naturally more important than anything else, avoiding Freudian argument, and (in particular) finding a way to reconcile their views with the actual behaviour of babies, before I start taking trouble about it.

It is true that in everyday speech, the word 'human' is ambiguous. Sometimes it is used descriptively as when we ascribe qualities or features which belong to the biological species homo sapiens. On other occasions we use it normatively: that is we convey a sense of evaluation, a sense of what we can or can fail to be. So we speak of someone being Very human' or 'humane'. We speak of 'inhuman treatment' or of becoming 'fully human' or 'authentically human' or just 'more human'. And, we speak of 'humanitarian aid' precisely in the sense of not discriminating between persons on any basis: it is an aid offered to humans qua humans. Both of these uses are critical for making sense of

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morality. One describes what we are, without our choice. The other describes what we can become, or fail to become, chiefly through our choices. Being human is therefore not only a question of actualities, but also a matter of possibilities or, better, potentialities. Simply having potentialities is not itself the point since, clearly, not all potentialities either can or indeed should be realized. Some of us could well have the potentiality of being first-class con-men or seducers. Merely having the potentiality tells us nothing about whether or not we should realize it. Again, we all have certain potentialities which are clearly not relevant to a consideration of morality. I may be capable of having shocking yellow hair, or substituting a 'b' for a 'c' when I speak. It is precisely the business of ethics to distinguish, understand and make clear those potentialities, those human goods which, by our participation in them, constitute human flourishing or true humanity: those goods, in other words, which answer to our demand for wholeness ... [where T]he sanction for resisting... is not just logical confusion, but disintegration.9

To choose to strive after the true good is already to participate in it to a certain degree: this choice more than any other will determine the kind of persons we are at the deepest level. The effort alone to seek out and do what is right secures our integrity, even if we are mistaken in our conclusions. At the most fundamental level, integrity is secured if we strive to be true to what is objectively right: for this is to be true to oneself: ... to thine own self be true, And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Hamlet, l.iii.78-80


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We can gain more purchase on this sense of good by seeing how it is invoked in the reflections of Plato. In the Republic he asks throughout: 'What is the good of living justly, morally, uprightly?' Here one can see that the sense of 'good' is the most fundamental: it is asking about the whole point of life. Again, Plato puts into Socrates' mouth the following question: 'Is it better to suffer wrong than to do it?' Here, the sense of 'good', of which 'better' is the comparative, can be seen to be fundamental in a way that prescinds from any other level of human involvement: e.g. fortune, honour, pleasure, convenience, material gain, etc. Again, the point of life itself is being enquired after. Aristotle remarks that courage, an undeniable good and a moral virtue, has brought ruin to some men. Is it still a good? If it is, the moral good is independent of consequences. It is worth participating in even if through bad luck or circumstances it brings me suffering. We could say the same about justice and truth: are these still to be regarded as goods even when faithfulness to them involves us in sacrifice of our own interests? Yes, of course: if not, the whole meaning of morality is vacuous. In his Fundamentals of Ethics, John Finnis calls the following questions 'Great Questions of Ethics' in that they lead us to the heart and centre of what morality is about: they serve, in other words, as a way of displaying or bringing into relief the point and meaning of moral good. The first is the question addressed by Caiaphas, the High Priest, to his fellow members of the Sanhedrin: 'Is it not better that one innocent person be put to death than that the whole people perish?' The second is the question addressed by Socrates to the other Athenians invited to collude in the judicial execution of their fellow citizen, Leon of Salamis: 'Is it better to do wrong or to suffer it?' The last is the question that canvasses the simplest possible alternatives: 'Is it better to live just for agreeable experiences or is there something else to live for?' Finnis suggests that

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The principles which will become apparent in considering them will determine the method of answering all other practical questions, and in that way will determine the whole content of ethics.10 NOTES 1. Morris Ginsberg, 'On the diversity of morals' in Essays in Sociology and Social Philosophy, London 1968, pp. 235-70. 2. See Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder, London 1989, passim. 3. See Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind, Brighton and New York 1981, pp. 103-32: Is "moral" a dirty word?7 4. Other popular, more disparaging, uses might be: Mr Dolittle, 'Morals? Can't afford them guv'nor/ And appropriate for today: Macauley, 'We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British people in one of its periodic fits of morality/ Both are cited by Midgley, op. cit.f p. 106. 5. See his Essay on Liberty, Ch. IV. 6. Singer rightly identifies 'ethical existence' with genuine selfinterest, as do Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, and he castigates religious ethics for obscuring this. His conclusion is well-targeted as long as one remembers that by 'religious ethics' he means or understands Protestant reward and punishment ethics — ethics, that is, which is external to the individual, imposed from without. But this is, of course, very different from the ethics of Aquinas, for instance, and the whole tradition of natural law. Oddly, he goes on to suggest that sexual questions are somehow second-rate ethical questions. For him, global justice and ecology are the central questions of ethics. But apart from being myopic for obvious reasons, this goes against his broader view in that it appears to convert ethics into public, policy decisions. 7. Midgley, op. cit.f p. 109. 8. Mary Midgley, op. cit., pp. 125—6. For a fuller treatment see her Beast and Man, London 1980. See also Heart and Mind for her criticisms of Marx's suggestion that there is no such thing


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as human nature. It would be impossible then for him to make his great attack on the dehumanisation of the working class', pp. 39-40. 9. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, London 1980, p. 271. 10. John Finnis, fundamentals of Ethics, Oxford 1983, p. 9.

Amoralism

Disagreement about what morality is is different from the position that there is no such thing as morality. Few people, in practice, hold the view that there is no such thing as right and wrong, good or bad, in an unqualified sense. Indeed, how could anyone in practice hold and live by the view that, for instance, rape, human sacrifice, torture and racial discrimination are neither right nor wrong? Some people, however, think they hold such views. Indeed, it is characteristic of a certain type of fashionable nihilism (nothing-ism) to deny that the raw material of ethics, namely, moral experience, is of any real significance. Now this form of radical moral scepticism calls into question the very intelligibility of ethics. It is the view that goes by the name of amoralism and it is frequently expressed in terms of questions like: Why should I do anything?', 'Why should I not act solely on impulse?' The serious amoralist holds the view that there are no such things as moral ideals or moral constraints. In the absence of such things, everybody is entitled to act according to their inclinations. But is this a reasonable position to hold? Is it reasonable to ask: 'Why be moral, anyway?' If ethics is an intelligible and, indeed, intelligent enterprise, there must be some intelligible answer to this question.1 But it's important to recognize from the outset that such questions as 'Why should I do anything?' or 'Why should I not act solely on impulse?' could be not only a serious calling into question of morality and ethics but also an expression of hopelessness; or, indeed, both.

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What we want to know is: Does the question make sense? Does it successfully raise doubts about the meaningfulness of moral experience and thus vitiate the whole enterprise of ethics? Is it a position which a rational person could consistently hold: that is, can it be held without selfcontradiction? In other words, is amoralism a serious or viable alternative to morality? I want to argue, first, that there can be no successful arguments, as such, for amoralism: and this because all attempts are vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency. Amoralism is not a position which can be consistently and therefore reasonably argued for. And, second, that where amoralism is not just espoused but acted on, it is not a form of philosophical scepticism but an illness, attributable either to pathology or wickedness. But it is not a reasonable alternative to moral sensitivity and the practice of ethics. The amoralist might typically claim that he or she gives no weight to moral considerations: completely unmoved by them, such a person might hold that moral considerations offer no reason for acting or refraining from acting. This is not merely indifference to moral considerations, but a denial that such things as moral considerations exist. The amoralist may well be happy willingly to do what others think is moral if, but only if, it suits some purpose of his or her own: and this, because the chief consideration of the amoralist, in the absence of moral considerations, is self-interest. By implication, then, we're talking about someone who cannot make a ... value distinction between say, the loyalty of a mother to her child, the sacrifice of Kolbe, the crime of his executioners, the unscrupulousness of the drug-pusher and the skill of someone speculating on the stock-market.2 Notice, the amoralist is not the same as the morally weak person who is lured from good by temptation to do evil. For the amoralist, the notion of temptation or guilt does not

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figure. Felt guilt can only be the result of psychological conditioning, or other external influences. Now what kind of person would the strict amoralist be: what kind of person are we describing? Well, by definition, the amoralist would not care about the interests of others, would have no inclination to seek or tell the truth or keep promises. Such notions would make sense only if they served purposes of deceit or manipulation. The option of rejecting courses of action which are judged dishonourable or unfair or vicious would not be open to the amoralist. There would be no room for any considerations apart from self-interest to figure in reflecting about what to do and what to be. There would not even be the absolutely minimal moral consideration involved in the view that what's all right for me is all right for others. Admittedly, this is a very basic and 'thin' moral consideration. But it means something like: 'People ought to be able to do what they want without interference, given X, Y and Z'. And, as such, it is a moral consideration. It is, therefore, not a view which can be held by the amoralist without being open to the charge of inconsistency. So, if the amoralist is to remain consistent, he must refrain from any kind of moral judgement and evaluation whatever: he cannot even consistently express disapproval of what others do to him. He may not want or like what other people do to him: that's a different matter. But he cannot adopt a moral attitude and utter such statements as They shouldn't do this' or 'It's not right'. So we can describe the amoralist as someone for whom the word 'ought' has no meaning, save that of mechanical expediency as in 'If I want X, I ought to do Y'. He does not believe in any such thing as an unqualified, moral 'good'. For the amoralist 'good' always means 'good for X in some respect'. 'Good' is a strictly instrumental notion. Now, we can see immediately that, quite apart from the terrifying consequences of such a position, there is something logically odd about it. And it's this: in order to be a successful amoralist, a person must rely on being the only

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one of his kind. If there were more amoralists than himself, if others were to espouse the same views and act on them as he does, his position would be untenable. He is only able to sustain his life-style, satisfy his desires, achieve his ends, because others grant him the freedoms that make this possible. And they do this on moral grounds. On the basis that the law and social disapproval are strong enough to keep most people in line, amoralism is a form of hawkish free-loading on the dove-like behaviour of others. 3 Amoralism entails solipsism. So, on these grounds alone, the amoralist is by definition an isolationist since moral discourse and shared basic feelings are integrally related.4 Therefore, an amoralist society is a contradiction in terms. Again, some (for example, Nietzsche) who have argued for amoralism — a complete rejection of the whole institution of morality — have argued that morality degrades human beings by exalting weakness and denigrating strength. Morality, on this view, ... fosters a social system in which the feeble and cowardly band together to frustrate those who are more adventurous and capable than themselves. It is mainly enforced by despicable psychological weapons, by appeal to the meanest and most cramping of human emotions - guilt and fear.5 Now, notice that, far from being a rejection of morality as such, this kind of argument clearly exalts certain moral values — namely, strength and self-reliance — albeit in a distorted form. It is alleged that people ought to be self-reliant. But amoralism claims to reject the whole institution of morality. Since the argument turns on rejecting some values and choosing others, it is open to the charge of inconsistency. The amoralist chooses some values shared with others, namely, self-reliance, while rejecting others considered to conflict with these, namely, mutual responsibility, or whatever. The key point is that both sets are moral values.

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An example of this kind of argument is Nietzsche's passionate railings against morality as such. It was he who first used words like 'immoralist' and he spent a lot of his time trying to get rid of moral standards altogether. But it is precisely the moral content of his writing, not his scepticism, that gives it such force and conviction.6 This is a far cry from rejecting the whole institution of morality. The notion of absolute amoralism begins to look inherently inconsistent. Again, another kind of argument for amoralism suggests that acting morally — where morality is understood in terms of externally imposed rules — is unnatural. Following our own impulses is more natural, it is alleged. But this also leads to inconsistency: it turns on the exhortation that you ought to follow your own impulses and instincts: it is more natural and therefore more fitting. But this is not an argument for rejecting morality as such but an argument — a naturalistic one — for a particular kind of morality. So this too cannot stand as an argument for amoralism. So the picture of an amoralist is of a very odd person, to say the least: a person unable to use the language of justification or approval except in the most trivial senses. Someone unable to invoke notions of excellence or worth or make judgments in such terms without falling into inconsistency, since such judgements would inevitably and decisively introduce considerations other than taste, whim and desire, namely, moral considerations; unable to praise or approve even his or her own way of life, except negatively, that is, by dismissing everybody else as stupid. And finally one for whom the notion of the common good is a nonsense. What do we make of this picture? The person so described is hardly human. The amoralist will be unable to enter into any kind of relationship or community. If a person doesn't care for anybody but himself, if nobody else's feelings or suffering matter to him, we would normally judge him to be ill: a damaged example of homo sapiens rather than the protagonist for an alternative view of human

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flourishing. Moral discourse and shared feelings and ways of life, as we said, are integrally related. So we can conclude that amoralism is not a viable, rational alternative to morality. Not only is it a position which rules out of court any possibility of argument between the two sides, but it is also a position which it is impossible to hold consistently without exposing oneself to the judgment that one is ill and in need of help. Absolute amoralism requires an explanation rather than a defence and such an explanation would be a pathological account not a philosophical argument. We cannot imagine a person who is both an amoralist and mentally healthy.7 The question, Why be moral?' like the question 'Why seek fulfilment?' or 'Why seek integrity?7 or even, 'Why eat?7 seems to be, to say the least, incoherent. Stephen Clarke catches this when he says: ... to deny morality is in the end to deny any obligation to talk sense, follow an argument, or accept unwelcome conclusions.8

Again, Mary Midgley says something similar: To abandon moral attitudes altogether you would have to stop talking; to put your disregard for other people consistently into practice, you would give up formulating your ideals in their terms ... a mentally active person finds this very hard.9

'Opting out7 of morality is not like setting aside a set of rules or local customs. It is to leave a 'community of standards and ideals7: rather like leaving the Earth's atmosphere or even stopping breathing or speaking at all, not just speaking a different language. It would involve us in a kind of autism or profound isolation.10 Indeed, it is an impossible option. And those who claim to be amoralists are more often than not simply appealing to

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another set of standards — debased morally, but moral standards nonetheless. The person who sought to put amoralism into practice would be unlikely to offer arguments or make claims for his or her position. Indeed, it is not a position as such but a condition, evidenced not in argument but practice. The difference between the amoralist is marked in terms of mental health more than philosophically consistent arguments and conclusions. In practice, of course, this is borne out by experience. So Anthony Quinton: People who have no conscience at all are rare. The few with whom the consideration that some course of action is morally right or wrong does not weigh at all are psychopaths, a small but recognised class of moral defectives, people who have a completely deficient sense of the reality of other human beings as creatures with feelings like their own, for whom the rest of mankind are simply objects to be made use of, like vegetables from the point of view of someone making soup.11

Or as James Rachels has it in a recent essay on moral subjectivism: No-one who was not in the grip of a frightening pathology could endure such an outlook; on the contrary, it might be suggested that anyone tempted by it - really tempted to adopt it in real life and not just tempted to defend it in a philosophy seminar - should seek psychiatric help.12

This is surely why, when we come across wickedness in which the perpetrator has no sense of it being wrong, we feel not just shock or horror but terror. We have the sense of meeting a world of meaninglessness utterly unlike our own: a dark, unknown world. The world of immorality and moral weakness, with which we are all familiar, is undeniably our world. And we can easily imagine someone whose moral sensitivity is limited

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and very rudimentary: a person, for instance, who helps only those whom he likes or his own relatives or those bound by oaths of loyalty, as in the case of the Mafia, but nobody else. Here the task would be to heighten his awareness, broaden his vision or stir his conscience. But the world of amorality is another world altogether. To deny that morality matters at all is to enter into this strange and terrifying world. Here no argument is possible and as Aristotle says more specifically, 'Anyone who says matricide is permissible is not worth arguing against, only beating'.13 NOTES 1. Amoralism is not the same as the view that ethics is nonrational or even irrational. This is the opposite of the view that it should be possible to arrive at the decision that X is right by argument. It should be possible to show 'that in doing X, a person is acting not only morally but rationally'. See Martin Hollis, An Invitation to Philosophy, Oxford 1986, p. 135. 2. Robert Spaemann, Basic Moral Concepts, London 1989, p. 8. 3. Anthony O'Hear, What Philosophy Is, London 1985, p. 257. 4. Ibid. 5. David McNaughton, Moral Vision, Oxford 1989, p. 140. 6. See Mary Midgley, Can't We Make Moral Judgements?, London 1991, pp. 6 and 96. 7. O'Hear, op. cit. p. 280. 8. Stephen Clark, From Athens to Jerusalem, Oxford 1984, p. 11. 9. Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind, Brighton and New York 1981, p. 129. 10. See Midgley, Can't We Make Moral Judgementsl, pp. 7—8. 11. Anthony Quinton, 'What does conscience mean to Tories?' in The Sunday Telegraph, 18 January 1987, p. 23. 12. James Rachels, 'Subjectivism' in Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, Oxford 1993, pp. 432-41, 434. 13. Cited by Spaemann, op. cit., p. 8.

Morality Presupposes Freedom, but Are We Free? Determinism Versus Indeterminism

Presupposed to everything we have said so far about morality and ethics is the possibility that at least some of our choices are free choices. (Notice I say 'some': it would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain that all choices made are free or even equally free.) If this is not the case, all talk of morality and ethics would be pointless and, indeed, meaningless. Without the assumption of freedom to determine ourselves, we would be nothing more than flotsam in an ocean of uncontrollable events. Without the assumption of effective freedom, it would be not only pointless and meaningless but actually impossible to seek to know how best to live, what to do and how to relate to our fellow human beings. Such attitudes as either admiration or contempt, resentment or gratitude would be as inappropriate as praise or blame. The view that we are not free in any meaningful way is called Determinism. Below is a very clear statement of the relevance of Determinism to the question of ethics from Thomas Nagel's, What Does It All Mean? Some people have thought that it is never possible for us to do anything different from what we actually do, in the

Morality Presupposes Freedom, but Are We Free?

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absolute sense. They acknowledge that what we do depends on our choices, decisions, and wants, and that we make different choices in different circumstances: we're not like the earth rotating on its axis with monotonous regularity. But the claim is that, in each case, the circumstances that exist before we act determine our actions and make them inevitable. The sum total of a person's experiences, desires and knowledge, his or her hereditary constitution, the social circumstances and the nature of the choice facing them, together with other factors that we may not know about, all combine to make a particular action in the circumstances inevitable. This view is called determinism.... The hypothesis is that there are laws of nature, like those that govern the movement of the planets, which govern everything that happens in the world - and that in accordance with those laws, the circumstances before an action determine that it will happen, and rule out any other possibility ... If determinism is true for everything that happens, it was already determined before you were born that you would choose X. Your choice was determined by the situation immediately before, and that situation was determined by the situation before it, and so on as far back as you want to go ... However free you might feel when choosing between fruit and cake, or between two candidates in an election, you would really be able to make only one choice in those circumstances - though if the circumstances or your desires had been different, you would have chosen differently ... If you believed that about yourself and other people, it would probably change the way you felt about things. For instance, could you blame yourself for giving in to temptation and having the cake? Would it make sense to say, 1 really should have had a peach instead,' if you couldn't have chosen a peach instead? It certainly wouldn't make sense to say it if there was no fruit. So how can it make sense if there was fruit, but you couldn't have chosen it because it was determined in advance that you would choose cake?1 The view is widely held that to affirm the possibility of free choices is contrary to and inconsistent with a properly

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scientific view of the world. According to this view, human beings and everything about us are ineluctably involved in the infinite and comprehensive complex of cause and effect, in exactly the same way as any other object or item in the world. Propositions about human decisions and the formulation of viewpoints and opinions are, according to this view, more aptly understood when translated into the neutral language of natural science. This is of course only the latest view to threaten the intelligibility of ethics in this particular way. There has been the fatalism of Greek tragedy, in which we are the victim of circumstances, necessity and the Fates. One also sees it in some versions of Christian predestination: the total irrelevance of our actions in this life — we are either 'saved' or not saved. The most extreme modern version of Determinism, pointing to social conditioning, genetic heritage or subconscious influence, is Behaviourism. But in the background is the overall scientific influence of Newton's physics in which the world is governed by invariant laws of nature, such as those of motion and gravitation. The world was conceived to be a mechanism dominated by the law of predictable cause and effect: every event has a cause. Followers of Newton, such as La Place,2 placed such confidence in the all-pervasive presence of causality that they thought the most minute prediction could be made if only we knew all the various causal factors involved. It was only a matter of time before luminaries of the European Enlightenment, following Newton, came to include man in this closed causal network. Underlying their view, of course, was a crude picture of people as just bodies and causes as a simple 'pushing' motion, like billiard balls on a table. The crudity of this view is greatly refined, but the underlying approach is just the same. All events, including the actions of human beings initiated by their decisions and acts of will, are the necessary result of antecedent natural causes outside their control. There is room for neither chance nor choice. An area


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in which one can still detect a popular version of Determinism is in much liberal penal policy. This view of ourselves is, however, counter-intuitive because we intuitively regard ourselves as at least potentially capable of making real and effective free choices. We easily and quite uncontroversially use a whole range of words like praise, blame, responsibility, etc., which would be meaningless if we were not in fact capable of making free choices. Without the assumption that we are free, the language of love and hate, decision and doubt, judgement and intention, not to mention most of the political themes and ideals of liberal Western democracy, would be nonsense. If our actions could never be free because we are constrained and compelled by unvarying laws, as in the natural world, a sense of futility and impotence would be impossible to resist. The fact is that it seems impossible to 'dissolve our unanalysed sense of autonomy and responsibility. It is something we can't get rid of, either in regard to ourselves or in relation to others'.3 The claims of Determinism would undermine the very meaningfulness of autonomy and responsibility and thus render morality and ethical reflection irrational and unintelligible. It is important to recognize that this is not just a verbal problem. That is, it does not concern just what we say about our actions: it touches the attitudes and convictions we claim to hold, affecting directly our view of ourselves and others, our confidence and our personal and social equilibrium. The arguments may be abstract, but the consequences are undoubtedly practical. Some have tried to answer the claim of Determinism, in its 'hard' form at least, by denying the principle of causality. According to this view, it is not the case that all events have a cause: some events, it is said, are uncaused and human decisions and choices are an example of just such uncaused events. Modern physics is often invoked in defence of this view

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and in particular Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This principle, named after its discoverer, Werner Heisenberg (1901—76)4 states that we cannot know both the location and the momentum of subatomic particles. If we come to know one, we make it impossible to know the other, at the same time. Thus he thought it was safer to refer to statistical probabilities than to formulate general laws. On the basis of this principle, it is suggested that Determinism is false. Many scientists now agree that the concept of cause does not apply to certain subatomic particles. This, it is thought by some, is sufficient to contradict the universal principle that every event in the universe has a sufficient natural cause. If it is the case that some events in the universe are uncaused, then it follows that some events are in principle unpredictable. The aim of such arguments is to make room for human freedom. But do they succeed? First, it must be admitted that many of the claims of quantum physics are far from uncontroversial and certainly not unanimously agreed upon. Whatever can be said of subatomic particles, we know that causality applies to large, visible bodies. Certainly, it would be a mistake to think of quantum physics as offering a refutation of Newtonian mechanics: it is more accurate to think of it as refining and qualifying Newton's view, setting his theories in a broader context. But there is a more serious reason why indeterminism of this kind is of little help in rescuing freedom. The principle of causality is actually presupposed to the notion of freedom: it cannot be denied without making a nonsense of freedom, since the opposite of causality is randomness. In order for my free choices to be effective and therefore real, I must be able to cause the events I choose. If all human actions occur in complete independence of any cause whatever, including my will, then there cannot be said to be any exercise of genuine freedom. This particular argument against Determinism effectively defeats its own purpose by undermining the thing it seeks to defend.


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At the root of this fallacious argument is a confusion of causality with one particular form or manifestation of causality, namely, compulsion. Only if compelled am I unfree. In this case the exercise of my will as a cause is frustrated. What matters for freedom is that I, and not someone or something else, am the cause of my actions and acts of will. The Determinisms position might counter this argument with the assertion that either my will or choice is not the cause of my action or if it is, it is itself caused by antecedent factors beyond my control. In other words, whichever way you look at it, freedom is an illusion: my free acts of will are in fact caused by something other than me, by something other than a human agent. How should we respond? The clue is given by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant believed that Determinism applied to everything which was the object of knowledge, but not to acts of the will. His premise is that we human beings work from two quite different and seemingly incompatible standpoints: the theoretical and the practical. (He wrote two works examining each: Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason.) Neither can be rejected without losing claim to objective knowledge. Pure reason concerns knowledge, the mind and the way we see the scientifically explicable world, viz. the object of knowledge; practical reason concerns action, the will and the way we see ourselves, the subject of knowledge. In the case of the latter, we are incapable of thinking of ourselves as anything other than the sufficient cause of action. We cannot rationally look for causes of our actions beyond a genuine act of our will. When we act, we cannot but think of ourselves as free. Freedom, he says, is a postulate of practical reason: that is, it is presupposed to the exercise of practical reason. To have to think yourself free is to be free.5 Freedom is a form of causality.6 I said only that Kant gives us a clue and it's this: talk of Determinism rests on a confusion of categories. We wrongly

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objectify — or 'reify' — freedom and then wrongly apply to it spatio-temporal categories. Kant's argument is that our own self-awareness, without which no description of the world would make sense to us at all, forces upon us the idea that we are free. Kant's answer to the problem of freedom was not so much a solution as a suspension of the question. The mystery, he argued, could never be comprehended.7 Freedom is presupposed to any acting at all: as such it cannot be an object for knowledge in a strict sense. It is, so to speak, the practical Visual field', rather than a point in the visual field. Freedom, being a perspective on the empirical world, cannot also be part of it.8 Determinism and Freedom are opposing metaphysical views and both, as such, are beliefs.9 Neither can, in principle, be proved directly, since any such proof would presuppose the thing being proved. Nevertheless, we can ask ourselves which is 'more intelligible, less paradoxical, involving fewer unsupported assumptions, or simply ... closer to commonsense .10 According to Kant, one cannot forsake the idea that one is free without ceasing to think of oneself as an agent: that is, as the originator of what one does. In general terms, the idea of freedom is indispensable to the idea of action of any kind. On a more particular level, freedom and autonomy are necessary presuppositions without which certain indispensable activities would make no sense. The following argument is set out in Finnis.11 A choice is free if and only if it is between open, practical alternatives such that there is no factor but the choosing itself which settles which alternative is chosen. Belief that there are some free choices is neither


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(1) logically incoherent nor (2) contrary to normal, immediate experience. Therefore, if you want to hold that there are no free choices, you must argue for it. Since such an argument cannot be based on either (1) or (2), it must appeal to our reason: it must be a rational argument. But this entails an appeal to some principle of reason. Now in any argument, you adopt some such principle: you choose to adhere to it or you choose not to adhere to it. Therefore, if you hold on rational grounds that there are no free choices, you have chosen between upholding or refusing to uphold some such principle. Your affirmation of the view, 'there are no such things as free choices' itself presupposes at least one free choice. Thus: to argue for the view that there are no free choices is self-defeating/12 Basically, this argument is saying that all knowledge and enquiry presupposes choice: we choose between alternatives in making any kind of judgement. Even the judgement that there are no free choices, if such we make, entails a choice on rational grounds. If Determinism is true, then there is no such thing as rational judgement, only predetermined courses of action.13 Another way of putting this is: it is impossible to propose determinism ... without assuming the existence of at least one unconditional obligation - namely, the obligation of being reasonable enough to accept the point of view proposed by determinism.14 Herbert McCabe has a similar point: The very possibility of arguing for or against Determinism presupposes that we are not determined. If we were, then our argument has no more significance that two taperecorders jabbering on to each other.15

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A similar kind of conclusion, namely that Determinism is incoherent, can be arrived at in the following way. The AntiDeterminist believes that it makes sense to speak of acting for reasons. In other words, we can ourselves be the personal cause of our actions. In reply, the Determinist is likely to say that our reasons themselves are caused. But this seems to boil down to the view that we are determined by our reasons. However, on this account, the grounds for making a distinction at all between freedom and Determinism disappear. What we are left with is a semantic point. After all, the Anti-Determinist cannot mean anything else by the word 'freedom' except 'reasons causing actions'. The Determinist's position effectively means that it doesn't make sense to speak of 'having reasons for doing X' since our reasons determine that we do X. So, as with Finnis's point, you end up with the rather silly position whereby if the thesis of the Determinist is correct, you can't have any good reason for believing it. If you think you have a good reason for believing it, Determinism cannot be true.16 Determinism seems, then, to be a contradiction in terms. The Determinist is saying that we ought to accept his or her view that the experience of freedom is an illusion. But it makes no sense for the Determinist to tell us what we ought to accept or do, since, according to him or her we have no choice. On another level altogether, Determinism makes a nonsense of the often painful experience of decision-making. This experience is not one of undergoing something, but of doing something. This is why I said earlier that freedom is not an object but an activity. What is more, this is a positive experience as opposed to the experience of an absence of constraint or of compulsion. You can only seriously uphold Determinism about the actions of others: and it is of no help whatever in making your own serious decisions. In short, Determinism cancels itself out. To affirm that some of our choices are free


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... is to affirm that sometimes I choose between alternatives that are open, in the sense that there is no factor, not even a 'system of preferences' of mine or 'set of wants' of mine, which settles which alternative I choose. This is to affirm that some at least of our choices are genuinely creative, precisely because they are not merely the product of anything that was already 'there' (my existing wants, preferences, habits ...). NOTES 1. Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, Oxford 1989, pp. 50-3. 2. Pierre Simon, Marquis de La Place (1749-1827). He put forward a generalized theory of the laws governing the whole solar system. 3. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford 1986, pp. 112-13. 4. Heisenberg was in charge of German atomic research during the Second World War. 5. Critique of Practical Reason, sixth edition, translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London 1893, p. 67. 'Every being who cannot act except under the idea of freedom is by this alone — from the practical point of view — really free/ 6. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by J. Meiklejohn, London 1969, p. 319ff. 7. Roger Scruton, The philosopher on Dover Beach' in The Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 1986, p. 566. 8. Roger Scruton, Kant, Oxford 1982, p. 61. 9. Nagel, op. cit., p. 114: The sense that we are authors of our actions is not just a feeling but a belief ...'. 10. Bernard Mayo, The Philosophy of Right and Wrong, London 1986, p. 23. 11. Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 137ff. 12. Finnis, op. cit., p. 137. 13. For a simpler version of this argument see John Macquarrie, In Search of Humanity, London 1982, pp. 16—17.

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14. Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw, Beyond the New Morality, Notre Dame, Indiana 1974, p. 6ff. 15. Herbert McCabe, 'God II: freedom' in New Blackfriars, 61(1980)725, p. 457. 16. For this argument, see Mayo, op. tit., pp. 28—9. 17. Finnis, op. tit., p. 138.

Freedom

Freedom is presupposed to ethical reflection; without it, we could not make sense of our moral experience. But what do we mean by 'freedom'? What is it we are prizing when we claim we are free? In every sense freedom is a topic of immense, emotive significance in the Western world. 'Freedom fighters' may be a contemporary term, but throughout human history men and women have died and killed for the sake of freedom. The theme of liberation and freedom is present at every level of human expression, in literature, art, religion, politics, psychology, economics, etc., etc. Freedom in its many forms, at least in theory, is a given of the moral and political agenda of the Western world and now a universal aspiration of mankind. We readily and easily speak of political freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of educational opportunity, freedom afforded by education and the free world. All the above are freedoms painfully won by those who possess them — though always in jeopardy — and still not possessed by a great portion of mankind. 'Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains/1 Interestingly, it was only in early Christian philosophy that freedom of choice, as such, became a philosophical theme. Indeed, a new word was coined to express the concept: autexousia.2 Though neither Plato nor Aristotle denied the notion of freedom, their articulation of its centrality was confined to a negative sense of absence of constraint. Only in Christianity did it assume significance in

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terms of the very constitution of the human person. At the Reformation it diminished in significance due to the pessimistic views adopted towards man's nature, corrupted utterly, as it was believed, by sin and therefore utterly dependent on grace for rehabilitation. It was during the seventeenth century that the modern notion of freedom developed: that is, the independent subject, 'determining his own purposes without interference from external authority'.3 By the time of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century the existence of freedom was widely doubted and in modern times even the attenuated sense of 'absence of constraints' has been dropped by many as more and more recognition is given to the role of factors beyond our control in the formation of persons. In what sense, then, must we be free if ethics and moral experience are to be intelligible? Let's remind ourselves what is demanded if the notion of free choice is to make sense: a choice will be free if, and only if, no factor settles which alternative I choose. In other words, a free choice must be such that it is not the product of anything there already in the sense of being predetermined by some set of circumstances, either external or internal to me, prior to the choosing itself. Clearly, we are not speaking of straightforward, unproblematic physical freedom: that is, freedom which consists wholly negatively in the absence of physical impediments to the fulfilment of my choices. Such freedom is found in wild animals as well as in infants or deranged individuals, albeit in a highly qualified way.4 Of course, physical freedom is always a matter of degree. Each of us is bounded by physical limitation, independent of our desires. A certain minimal degree of physical freedom is, of course, necessary if I am to perform any action at all, and so necessary if I am to perform moral actions. But the notion of total freedom is not necessary for free choice: in fact, the idea of unlimited freedom is incoherent.5

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PERSONAL FREEDOM AND SELF-DETERMINATION The kind of freedom relevant to morality is the one which underlies all the various types of freedom articulated in the above list. This is the freedom which we take to be the distinguishing mark of human beings. It is the kind of freedom which cannot be extinguished by any kind of physical circumstances or constraints. We often advert elliptically to the presence of such freedom as this when, for instance, we speak of someone's spirit being uncrushed or when, under the most adverse of conditions, a person does not appear to lose hold of their identity and sense of purpose or give in to dehumanizing pressures for the sake of physical survival. Often we might speak of someone not losing themselves' or their identity, despite everything: this, we say, is 'true' freedom. And what is it? It is the freedom to determine oneself, the kind of person one is and remains: it is the presence of a fundamental responsibility for oneself in decisions and choices which are genuinely creative. Freedom is not a state of mind or an emotion but a capacity. In a strict sense it is a potentiality for realising our natures. Freedom enables us to have a role in our own selfcreativity. It is in this sense that freedom is crucial to the notion of morality; it is this sense which entails responsibility for the kind of person I am. The key idea here is creativity. We are unfinished animals. This is what it means to say we are historical. The fulfilment of our natures - what we are - is something in which we participate. The Renaissance philosopher, Pico della Mirandola (1463—94), who influenced the sixteenth-century Humanists, especially St Thomas More and John Colet, sums this up in his Oration on the Dignity of Man: A limited nature in other creatures is confined within laws laid down by me. In accordance with your free judgement, to which I have entrusted you, you are confined by no

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bounds and you will fix the limits of your nature for yourself. ... You, appointed like a judge for being honourable, are the moulder and maker of yourself; you may sculpt yourself into whatsoever shape you prefer.6 Such fashioning of ourselves is effected collectively in the way we create a distinctively human world, as opposed to the natural world around us: the human world is primarily a world of meaning and interpretation. We do not merely adapt to our environment but adapt the environment to ourselves and our needs. We go beyond the needs of survival in developing culturally. Man is a symbolical and historical animal. He is not just part of history: he makes it, he is history. This is one reason why his knowledge of himself is always incomplete.7 In the same way we are not just a nature: we take possession of our common nature and, through our choices, make something more — this is what the notion of 'person' seeks to secure. And to say that we are symbolical animals is to make a similar point: among the animals, we transform life, creating a distinctive world in which we reflect meaning and significance disclosed within our experience and expressed in symbols. Indeed, our symbols are constitutive of ourselves.8 This is to speak of humankind collectively. But the same is true on the individual level. My free choices have both transitive and intransitive effects: that is to say, they not only bring about states of affairs around me, but states of affairs that include me, that constitute me a certain kind of person. Choices that are free are, therefore, either creative or destructive of me: they determine me, whether I like it or not, as a person. They contribute to the strength or weakness of the complex of motivating dispositions from which all my actions flow and which constitute the kind of person I am. All free choices change us to some degree: none is wholly without effect. They contribute to our character and identity: they augment or diminish us in some way, perhaps

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imperceptibly, but certainly. Each genuinely free choice is a commitment of myself and logically such a commitment continues until I make a contrary commitment: hence the notion of repentance of one's choices. In other words, our choices last. In this important sense, then, what we become depends in some measure on ourselves. Deciding what we should become, and then discerning the choices through which we will participate in the goods which constitute us as the particular kinds of people we deem it good to become is the business and task of ethics. Or, as Germain Grisez has it, 'the responsibilities of freedom'. One way of seeing this in our experience is the familiar notion of habit. It is a cliche — but nonetheless true — that we are creatures of habit. But the Latin word habitus is stronger than most ordinary usages of the English word. In normal usage, the word 'habit' means something that accounts for an unthinking routine of behaviour. But writers such as Thomas Aquinas used the word habitus in a much stronger sense. It means 'tendency' or 'disposition': an aspect of one's character which makes for consistency in deliberate behaviour resulting from free choice (Cf. Summa Theologiae Ia2ae 49.1—3; 55.1—2). Think of how on learning something, that something becomes part of you, a base from which you can make judgements, establish perspectives and come to understand other things. So it is with our choices, usually issuing in actions; they constitute us as particular kinds of people by forming our character, becoming part of the basis from which we make new decisions and choices colouring our vision. So choices settle us in a particular orientation such that further choices and goals will be seen in the light of past choices, thus affecting our understanding of goods. These dispositions are what are referred to as vices and virtues and they can be said to constitute what we refer to when we speak of someone's 'character'. Character results from the integration of all one's choices and the complex of dispositions which orientate one towards other future choices.

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As we said earlier our physical freedom is limited. But the same is also true of our capacity for exercising the kind of freedom by which we determine ourselves: it too can also be limited. One of the principal benefits of the still infant science of psychology has been to uncover the presence of forces, drives and neuroses which can severely inhibit and, in extreme cases, nullify our capacity for free choice. Such discoveries and conjectures do not invalidate the notion of free choice: rather they serve by contrast to bring more clearly into relief what it means. Psychology and biology teach us that none of us exists in a vacuum: we are at least partially the product of past influences and processes beyond our control; we are qualified by temperament, aptitudes, intelligence, social precedents and genetic inheritance. But none of these is the final arbiter of what we can become by the exercise of free choice. Indeed, the notion of free choice entails that we are never bound by the cumulative influence of such factors. By the exercise of free choice and our commitment to the basic human goods we become something entirely new: a new 'something' which is never the sum total of what has gone before. What we can become in superficial terms is, of course, strictly limited in various ways: I cannot become a virtuoso violinist if I am born with no arms. I cannot become an RAF jet pilot if the idea enters my head at my present age, etc., etc. But the sense of becoming the person I can become exceeds any of these limited goals. The fulfilment through participation in basic human goods which is effected by free choices is qualitatively different from all these partial aspects of particular human functions. The goods in which I can participate are aspects of human fulfilment itself, not means to it; and they are accessible to everybody in an immediate, intrinsic sense rather than in an instrumental sense. But our understanding of freedom has undergone profound and radical changes. Perhaps the most crucial was that which took place in the late Middle Ages. Up to

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and until then, a view of freedom had been dominant that was rooted in our nature as it is characterized by reason and will. Freedom was the capacity to choose in accordance with our in-built and characteristic inclinations towards truth, goodness and happiness. This has been called 'freedom for excellence'. But in the work of William of Ockham (d. 1349), freedom was understood to be a faculty that was not only detached from our nature as such, but which had priority over it. This has been called 'freedom of indifference'.9 Nature, on this view, is no longer the source of freedom, but subordinated to it. This shift in understanding would have far-reaching consequences for the understanding of morality. Freedom of indifference would give rise to a morality of law and obligation, emphasizing duty and obedience; thus replacing the more ancient understanding of morality associated with freedom for excellence which was a morality of happiness and human flourishing. So far we've spoken of freedom as a presupposition of morality. But there is a sense in which freedom is also a goal of moral action. Our freedom is always in some way limited, but we manifest our freedom precisely in aspiring to be free and act freely. Freedom has been one of the great themes of Existentialism. For Sartre, freedom is the goal and measure of our life as persons. In his view, man makes himself what he chooses from nothing. But this is taken to an extreme: freedom becomes an end in itself. What matters on this view is not what I choose but that I choose freely. According to Sartre and others, the nothingness which is the human individual must be filled by freedom in which we become whatever we choose to become. We may try to avoid this freedom: in which case we are guilty of mauvaise foi. We do this whenever we act only in conformity with what is laid down by others, thus acting as a thing. But Sartre's assertion that everything depends on me — the world and my life has the meaning I give it — is linked to a recognition of the ultimate absurdity of life. There is no reason why I should be here or why I should do this rather

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than that. The recognition of this absurdity and the void to be filled by my freedom produces 'angoisse'. In this sense, To be free is to be condemned to be free'.10 Before Sartre this theme of anxiety linked to freedom is found in the forerunner of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard. This anxiety may be likened to dizziness. He whose eye chances to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy.... Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, when freedom gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself.11 Contemporary psychologists much influenced by Existentialism such as Erich Fromm have spoken of the 'fear of freedom'.12 Such evident ambiguity about the possiblities opened up by freedom have moved authors such as Nicholas Berdyaev to suggest that 'People love slavery and authority. The mass of mankind has no love of freedom, and is afraid of it.'13 Freedom involves us in a paradox: on the one hand, it is a presupposition of any morality in the sense that rational choices that are free are willy-nilly self-constituting of the person making them through the commitments to the goods or otherwise in which he or she participates. On the other hand, freedom is a goal and an aspiration: it is a state constituted by taking responsibility for this self-determination and choosing to participate in genuine human goods, constituting a humanly fulfilling life. NOTES 1. Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk 1, ch. 1. 2. Autexousos was current as an adjective but Christians coined autexousia. 3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge 1989, p. 82.

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4. So says J. Z. Young, Introduction to the Study of Man, Oxford 1971, p. 24. Cited by John Macquarrie, In Search of Humanity, London 1982, p. 7. 5. Cf. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, London 1980, p. xvii. 6. Oration on the Dignity of Man, English translation, Chicago 1956, pp. 5—6; cited by Macquarrie, op. cit., pp. 14—15. 7. The fact that we exist in history means that knowledge of ourselves can never be complete/ Andrew Louth, Discovering the Mystery, Oxford 1983, p. 36. And Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God, Edinburgh 1978, p. 318: 'As for man ... what makes man so particularly human is that Homo Sapiens is the sole species capable of making history/ And Johannes Griindel, 'Natural Law' in Sacramentum Mundi, p. 160: 'Man does not merely have a history, he is history. He realises his being by mastering nature and making it serve him: he shapes things and gives himself values and goals'. 8. Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man, New Haven 1963, p. 24: 'Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are found to be in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition transforms the whole of human life. As compared with other animals, man lives not merely in a broader reality: he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality/ 9. Servais Pinkaers OP, The Sources of Christian Ethics, Edinburgh 1995, p. 375. 10. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, London 1957, p. 129. 11. The Concept of Anxiety, Princeton 1957, p. 55. 12. Cf. Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, London 1942. 13. The Beginning and the End, London 1952, p. 216.

Ethical Subjectivism and the Claims of Conscience

The question of whether or not we can make objective moral judgements is, in the view of many, the central problem of ethics, 'Not just in theory but in life7.1 If nothing is objectively right or wrong then it's a small step to the view that nothing matters at all: and this is very close to a moral nihilism that is nothing less than disastrous for the conduct of all human affairs.2 Subjectivism is the view that moral judgements are subjective: they are rooted in factors such as taste, preference and genetic make-up that are themselves wholly subjective. Unlike the amoralist, the subjectivist is not committed to holding that nothing is either right or wrong. Rather, he or she holds that distinctions between what is right and wrong, good and bad, rest on subjective foundations. Any appearance of objectivity is just that: an illusion created by the peculiar character of moral language. Moral principles and judgements are neither true nor false since they are not claims to objective knowledge. The ethical subjectivist is convinced that moral judgements are not 'anchored in the real'.3 Subjectivism's pedigree can be traced back in its modern form to the Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711-76), who held that Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. ... Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular.4


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Its most widespread form was articulated as a corollary to Logical Positivism in the work of C. L. Stevenson. This goes by the name of Emotivism.5 Emotivism was an attempt to improve simple subjectivism by incorporating a more sophisticated view of language, indeed, a positivist account of factual language. Stevenson distinguished reporting an attitude from expressing an attitude. The former implies facts, namely my actual feelings. It can thus be either true or false. The latter entails no facts. Simple subjectivism treats moral language as a case of the former, but moral language, for Stevenson, is a case of the latter. It is not fact-stating and it does not convey information. So 'X is good' means not 'I approve of X' but 'Hurrah for X!7.6 But the decisive weakness of Emotivism is its association with Logical Positivism, its bankrupt view of language and its truncated view of human action. One reason why subjectivism seems plausible if not de rigueur is that it seems to follow from and be required by contemporary liberalism. In this sense, it seems to be an expression of and, indeed, a rationale for tolerance. Again, subjectivism seems to complement and be required by certain politically correct maxims of liberal society. For instance, 'no segment of the community has the right to impose its moral view on another7.7 However, far from espousing the quite uncontroversial view that everybody is entitled to his or her own opinion, subjectivism holds that there is no single test or set of criteria for truth in moral matters; instead, it holds that 'allopinions-are-true-for-those-who-hold-them'.8 Again, it seems to many that subjectivism follows from or is entailed by a proper respect and care for one another. 'Who am I to judge whether this person is right or wrong?' it is asked. But notice, this reluctance to judge is itself grounded in a moral judgement. And it certainly does not follow from the principle of charity that there is no such thing as moral truth. Frequently, people confuse the quite legitimate assertion

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that ethical judgements are personal with subjectivism. To say that morality is personal is to say no more than that we must take personal responsibility for our moral judgements: nobody can assume this responsibility for us. ... a morally sound life is essentially a matter of personal effort and aspirations - not 'personal; of course, in the sense of 'subjective' or Idiosyncratic' - but personal meaning that no one can do it for us.9

Again, it may be conceded that moral judgements and values are not properties of the universe without any relation to human being and their lives. And ... we can say that good and right are not part of the world as studied by natural science.10

But this does not entail that they are subjective either. It does not entail, in other words, that they are not as real, objective, non-relative as any other part of the natural world. It means nothing more than that in estimating the moral quality of an act, the circumstances or situation in which it occurs must be taken into consideration.11

Such considerations enter into discussion of one's own or another's subjective culpability, but these two senses of subjective need to be distinguished. Again, moral insights are influenced by many factors and moral opinions evolve over time and therefore are, in some sense, relative to historical epochs and conditions. Aristotle, for example, thought that some men were born to be slaves: they had natures that were different from Athenian citizens. It is also undoubtedly true that many subjective factors, both conscious and unconscious, enter into the way we make moral judgements. But this is to say


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no more than that circumstances constitute one of the factors, among many others, which must be considered in any moral judgement. Moral judgements, like all others, cannot be abstracted from contexts: they are not made in a vacuum. But moral subjectivism says much more than this. It holds that moral judgements are by definition subjective because there is no such thing as objective moral truth or falsity. There is only what you or / decide; and we might decide entirely different things.12 So, ethical subjectivism is most commonly expressed in the assertion that one's ethical viewpoint and opinion depend on the kind of person you are, the kind of tastes you have and your temperament and background. If cultural relativism accounts for morality wholly in terms of external circumstances, subjectivism accounts for it wholly in terms of internal, subjective factors. Moral subjectivism is a major threat to the intelligibility of ethical reflection as well as an obstacle to actual reflection in practice. As such, it accounts in large measure for the moral impasses at which such arguments frequently arrive. Subjectivism makes ethical discussion a virtual impossibility since it removes ethics and morality from the arena of public and rational debate and relegates them to the private world of the individual or the closed world of the group and its psychology or, more cynically, vested interest. Effectively, this collapses the distinction in our experience between obligation and inclination and, as Robert Spaemann points out, it also neglects the evident need we feel to distinguish between competing inclinations and desires.13 For the subjectivist, sustained rational reflection aimed at discerning and discovering the requirements of practical reasonableness among the many opportunities and choices intelligence reveals to us for ways of living is a futile and time-wasting delusion.14 The subjectivist says, effectively, that whatever we choose to do is right: we are all infallible. But this makes a nonsense of the chief requirement of

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practical reasonableness which is that we should follow our best judgement. It also makes a nonsense of the fact that our judgements can be mistaken.15 Again, the subjectivisms only consistent imperative is that we should 'do as we please'. But this assumes that we know what we want and need instinctively. It assumes that we, as all other animals, are programmed. The truth is that we also have choice and reason and we cannot avoid exercising choice in one form or another. Ethics seeks to render our choices reasonable.16 On the subjectivisms terms, moral disagreement would be either rationally unassailable or simply an illusion: that is, it is either irremediable or unreal. There can be no standards or requirements or criteria about what is right or wrong independent of your own decisions, whims, wants or inclinations. So, for example, I can legitimately and reasonably say 'I don't agree with Hitler's actions' but I cannot say 'Hitler was wrong'. Ultimately, my judgement can concern only Hitler's sincerity and/or consistency. But do we ever in practice regard moral judgements, our own or those of others, in this way? The truth is, of course, that we do act on the understanding that moral judgements, by definition, transcend our preferences or the demands of mere consistency. In practice, we assume that in the absence of reasons, moral judgements would be arbitrary. We distinguish moral considerations from efficiency, expediency or taste and we implicitly regard them as, by definition, applicable to all. Indeed, objectivity and morality are related in their very meanings. To act morally is precisely to act impartially and in accord with reality and the truth. Moral views are precisely those that seek an objective point of view. This is to remark nothing more than a simple fact about the meaning of our language.17 If subjectivism were the case, it would entail that nobody can be said to do wrong: such talk would refer only to inefficiency. Attention to our language reveals a common source of


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confusion which may lend plausibility to the subjectivisms case. There seems to be a confusion between judgement and choice, both of which come under the heading of and are often expressed as decision. So we often say that we decide in the sense of judge what is right or wrong; at the same time we often say that we decide in the sense of choose what to do. But clearly, the two are not the same thing. Indeed, many of what we call 'moral dilemmas' arise from a clear conflict between the two. Yet because our language uses the same word for both actions, the subjectivisms case seems plausible. But in reality, the subjectivist collapses the distinction. If subjectivism were the case, we would surely never experience moral dilemmas. Yet it is a simple and irresistible fact of our experience that we do not always know what to do or what is genuinely good for us (even if what we call 'moral dilemmas' are frequently a case of not wanting to do what we know we should do!). Subjectivism implies that whatever we choose to do is, by that simple fact, right. And it usually adds, 'for me'. The problem is that the subjectivist cannot actually believe anything because he or she does not believe anything to be true objectively, as opposed to merely 'true-for-him'. Stephen Clark catches this neatly: That what he believes he believes to be true-for-him only means that whatever he believes he believes that he believes. His belief is Pickwickian: but for the grace of everyday life, he would end up a Pyrrhonian.18 The curious upshot of subjectivism is that it isolates the moral dimension from the rest of life by removing it from the arena of rational management. But why should moral values be singled out among all others for such treatment? Take aesthetic judgements and values: even though we admit the relevance and importance of taste, we nevertheless accept that there is an objective basis for such judgements. If we did not accept this, we would not consider education in

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this area relevant and we would not be inclined to fund the arts. Of course we accept that each is entitled to their own opinion: but we also accept our right and the right of others to judge which opinion is more worthwhile. Finally, let us return to the virtue of tolerance which seems, at least on the surface, to be so well served by ethical subjectivism. Even tolerance has limits. If it did not the rule of law would be otiose. Subjectivism cannot hold consistently, on the one hand, that each person is free to choose his or her own moral principles or that no group has the right to impose its moral view on any other group and yet hold, on the other hand, that tolerance is obligatory or even just preferable. That we ought to be tolerant is itself a moral judgement and, as such, the subjectivist must say that this too is only a personal feeling or preference which does not necessarily oblige anybody else. Nor, as Spaemann rightly points out, does relativism produce tolerance as one of its fruits: It should be clear by now that tolerance is not the obvious outcome of moral relativism, as is often maintained. It would be truer to say that the idea of tolerance has its roots in specifically moral convictions which, moreover, require some notion of universal validity. The moral relativist can always answer, 'Why should I be tolerant? My moral code permits me to be violent and intolerant/19

The notion of absolute tolerance is, therefore, incoherent. Some authors doubt the existence of such a thing as real, practical, ethical subjectivism. So Mary Midgley says that Nobody actually thinks that morality is just a matter of everybody's subjective opinion, because human life cannot be carried on at all without a wide measure of moral agreement. (Even in the Mafia, people have to have standards that they take for granted.)20

She adds that, usually, those who claim to be subjectivists


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simply combine this view with quite definite moral views on other occasions and issues. Finally, subjectivism is all too frequently the rationalization into which we lapse when faced with unwelcome conclusions or moral difficulty. We are all capable of finding within ourselves 'an inarticulate private self which is held accountable to nobody' when it suits us.21 And we grace this 'self with the name 'conscience', thus affording ourselves an inaccessible source of moral decision-making beyond the reach of reason which needs no defence and claims absolute rights. This is a rationalization whose incoherence outweighs its convenience.22 In conclusion, while always wary of the danger of false objectification — that is, elevating 'personal taste and prejudice into cosmic values'23 — moral principles are things that we are constrained to follow, not something we freely create; they are to be acknowledged, not discovered or invented. And this is what we mean when we say that we can and do make objective moral judgements. CONSCIENCE

Conscience is a crucial concept in both moral theology and philosophy. It is also a recurring theme in much political debate in Western, liberal democracies. Indeed, it is taken for granted that a society which fails to enshrine liberty of the individual conscience in its constitution and practice is hardly civilized. In a specifically religious context, it is also taken for granted that rights of conscience are inviolable. But, as ever, there is confusion abroad. And important distinctions and elucidations need to be made if we are not to fall prey to serious distortion. One of the chief confusions is the misidentification of talk of conscience and its rights with ethical subjectivism. For many, conscience denotes a secret, private and inaccessible

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part of ourselves: an instinct, a special organ, a faculty caught poetically in the phrase 'the still small voice'. This is conscience understood as an inner oracle. A great deal of popular contemporary discussion of conscience seems to assume some such picture, especially where the emphasis is focused on rights or freedom of conscience and in discussion of particular questions of conscience such as issues of sexual morality, notably contraception in the recent past. There is no doubt that this is an obvious and understandable reaction against the legalism and perceived authoritarianism of the recent past. But this relatively recent understanding of conscience as this 'still small voice' is a distortion that leads to confusion and incoherence. Conscience, in a prescriptive, antecedent sense, is concerned not with feelings but with reason and judgement. 'Conscience' can be used in two quite different senses: as an antecedent or legislative judgement prohibiting or commanding us, or, in a consequential or judicial sense, as retrospectively approving or disapproving past actions. The first sense emphasizes the judgement, the second points to the feelings associated with such a judgement: guilt, remorse, pain, etc. Current misunderstandings are caused in large part by the confusion of these different meanings and senses and this gives rise to a confusion of the respective roles of reason and judgement in moral questions. There is no doubt that much of what we speak of as conscience concerns powerful feelings. Often, we experience this even when our judgement is clear about the status of what we have done or intend to do. Modern psychology has helped us to see that it is possible to feel a residual sense of guilt even when this is unjustified rationally; that is, where such feelings might be attributed to neurosis or some other recognizable disorder originating in preconscious conditions. Nevertheless, an adequate account of what is meant by conscience must steer a middle course between cold intellectualism (often masquerading as rationality) and emotionalism (often masquerading as compassion).


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It is, however, a misunderstanding of how the term can be used to think of conscience as 'a still small voice7 or, even worse, the Voice of God7. Such views are dangerous not least for lending sanction and legitimacy to practically anything. Conscience, the name given to our sense of absolute obligation, has often commanded that which in itself is plainly contra bonos mores or morally indefensible. Conscience has told many men to fight duels, to carry on blood-feuds, to offer their child in human sacrifice or to persecute 'heretics' and to slaughter enemies. Conscience is most infelicitously called 'the voice of God'.24 Again, it can be seen that conscience understood as the Voice of God7 easily becomes what we mean by 'right7 and 'wrong7 so that, in effect, we become the arbiters in some oracular way of good and bad. But this is inevitably not only illegitimately oracular: it is also illogically circular. We do what is right because our conscience tells us to, and we usually obey our conscience, because if we don't we suffer remorse. We should do what is right, because it is of the nature of conscience to be a proper authority. We know what is right by consulting our conscience, which is either infallible or at least usually correct; indeed, perhaps the voice of God. And 'ought7 simply means what our conscience prescribes: 'wrong7 what it forbids.25 Contrary to the frequently expressed view that it is the source of values and answerable only to itself, conscience does not make the law, nor is it itself a law: rather it recognizes law and it assesses conduct by means of it. Conscience, in other words, is not an unaccountable oracle or intuition but 'a reflective faculty at the center [sic] of ourselves, by which we can think about our various actions, stamping some with approval and rejecting others7.26 In religious terms, conscience is not so much the voice of God as our response to that voice. Conscience therefore refers to practical reasoning when it is focused on concrete acts of

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individuals in which we judge this particular, actual, practical option to be good or bad, worthy or unworthy, fitting or unfitting. Must you always follow your conscience? It is admitted by all that conscience can err. Nevertheless, one is bound always to do what one considers to be objectively right. So, for instance, Aquinas holds that though conscience can indeed err, it always binds.27 However, two vital points need to be made. Aquinas is clear that an action evil in itself does not become a good action when done in mistaken apprehension. Only the subjective culpability of the agent is changed by the mistaken conscience. Secondly, and equally importantly in view of a somewhat loose use of the notion which is prevalent today, it is logically necessary that the so-called 'erroneous conscience' is not a conscious feature of the one who is deciding. One must be genuinely ignorant of one's mistake.28 Doing what you consider to be objectively right involves, of necessity, that you genuinely believe this to be objectively right. This is very different from the perception that this is right for you. To say that you must do what you believe to be right is not the same as saying that you must do what you think is right for you.29 Again, we must respect the conscience of others. But this is very different from saying that everybody is entitled to do whatever they think is right. Again Finnis notes this distinction: Of course, it by no means follows ... that if ... I have an obligation to do X, others have no liberty to prevent me from doing X, or to punish me from [sic] doing X; indeed, often enough they have not only the liberty but also the obligation to do so .. .30

A good test of whether we are acting conscientiously is whether or not we are prepared to accept the consequences of our conscience, even when the cost is great. All too often,


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we invoke conscience in support of what we fervently want to do. But it is also invoked, as in the case of St. Thomas More, in support of what we do not, from a worldly point of view, want to do. CONCLUSION The point I have been trying to make throughout is expressed well by Jack Mahoney: And perhaps a little demythologising may be in order, for conscience is not a still small voice, nor bells, nor a blind stab in the dark; it is simply me coming to a decision. When I say 'my conscience tells me" all I am really saying is 1 think'.31 Having tried to demythologize the rhetoric associated with the notion of conscience as this 'still small voice', we are in a better position to appreciate the significance of the word when it is used in certain contexts, usually religious, to point to and express both the dignity of the human being and personal responsibility.32 Such talk is found in one of the most important documents of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes: 'Deep within their conscience individuals discover a law which they do not make for themselves but which they are bound to obey, whose voice, ever summoning them to love and do what is good and to avoid what is evil, rings in their heart when necessary with the command: Do this, keep away from that. For inscribed in their hearts by God, human beings have a law whose observance is their dignity and in accordance with which they are to be judged. Conscience is the most intimate centre and sanctuary of a person, in which he or she is alone with God whose voice echoes within them'.33

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Though this view of conscience is more at home in the context of moral theology than philosophy, it rests on the axiom that man has an inner need to conform his doing with his knowing. When these two elements are at odds with one another, we experience pain, 'pangs of conscience'. This consequential sense of conscience catches the presence within us of inklings of an integrity and wholeness towards which we may aspire and in the pursuit of which ethics plays an indispensable role. NOTES 1. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford 1986, p. 136. 2. See Bernard Williams, Morality, London 1972, p. 40. 3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge 1986, p. 56. 4. A Treatise of Human Nature, 11,111,3 and 111,1,1. 5. So Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, London 1985, second edition, p. 14: In the eighteenth century Hume embodied emotivist elements in his large and complex moral theory; but it is only in this century that emotivism has flourished as a theory on its own/ 6. Emotivism can accept moral disagreement: but it is a disagreement in attitude, not a disagreement about attitudes. Emotivism still cannot account for the place of reason in ethics. C. L. Stevenson, the originator of emotivism as an ethical theory, suggested that any statement about any fact which is likely to achieve the point of a moral statement, namely, to influence someone else, is a reason for or against a moral statement. But this is to make psychological influence and impact equivalent to relevance. See James Rachels, 'Subjectivism' in Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, Oxford 1993, pp. 432-41. 7. Ibid. 8. Stephen Clark, From Athens to Jerusalem, Oxford 1984, p. 7. 9. David Carr, Educating the Virtues, London 1991, pp. 8-9. 10. Taylor, op. cit., p. 56.


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11. Morris Ginsberg, 'On the diversity of morals' in Essays in Sociology and Social Philosophy, London 1968, p. 238. 12. See Grisez and Shaw, Beyond the New Morality, rev. edn, Notre Dame, Indiana 1980, p. 56. 13. Robert Spaemann, Basic Moral Concepts, London 1989, p. 8ff. 14. See John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics, Oxford 1983, p. 56. 15. Grisez and Shaw, op. cit., p. 57ff. 16. Ibid. 17. On this see Spaemann, op. cit., p. 71 and Rachels, art. cit. p. 439. 18. Clark, op. cit., p. 7. 19. Spaemann, op. cit., p. 11. 20. Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder, London 1989, p. 35. 21. Midgley, op. cit., pp. 34—5. 22. Charles Taylor, op. cit., attributes the prevalence of relativism and subjectivism to the exclusive arrogation of objectivity to themselves by the natural sciences and to the demise of Platonic Forms: of course, we do not believe they exist, but this does not mean that absolute moral standards, which they were devised to secure, also no longer exist. This is a case of the baby and the bath water. 23. For this, see Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford 1986, p. 143. 24. Nathaniel Micklem, Christian Thinking Today, London 1967, p. 129. 25. Bernard Mayo, The Philosophy of Right and Wrong, London 1986, pp. 9-10. 26. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, Brighton 1979, p. 267. She is speaking about Butler's views in his Sermon II, 'Upon human nature'. 27. See Quaestio Disputatio de Veritate, 16.2 and 17.2, 3 and 4. 28. So Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford 1980, p. 126:'... (A logically necessary feature of such a situation is, of course, that one is ignorant of one's mistake.)' 29. On this, see Spaemann, op. cit., p. 65. 30. Finnis, op. cit., p. 133, n. V.9. 31. Seeking the Spirit: Essays in Moral and Pastoral Theology, London 1981, p. 18.

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32. See Spaemann, op. cik., p. 59. 33. Gaudium ei Spes, 16, in Norman Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, Washington 1990.

Cultural Relativism

Put crudely, it may be said with some justification that cultural relativism is the morality of Joe Public. This is the view that all ethical judgements are culturally conditioned and, far from being a modern view, it was pioneered by the Sophists in fifth-century Athens. Though combatting it was one of Plato's main preoccupations, it was still widely popular in Late Antiquity in the form of the moral scepticism of Sextus Empiricus (c. AD 160—210) And, though it has now been largely abandoned by serious anthropologists, it continues to exert a powerful influence on popular attitudes, as well as being still the surprisingly widespread and seriously held view of many professional philosophers.1 Other philosophers of international standing think otherwise. The late Bernard Williams, for example, in his book Morality, says of this thesis that it is 'possibly the most absurd view to have been advanced even in moral philosophy'.2 Cultural relativism holds that all standards of right and wrong and the judgements we base on them originate within and are derived from the society or culture within which we live. As such, this view is of a piece with the more general theory of social conditioning.3 This kind of relativism is applied not only to contemporaneous cultures but also to different periods of history and, more recently, it is thought to apply within cultures: that is, it is extended to 'subcultures' and even to different classes within a given society. This extension of cultural relativism is more relevant than ever given the

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growth of a multiracial pluralism in Western countries and the emergence of the forceful, minority group lobby. To a great extent cultural relativism gained momentum from a quite understandable reaction against an older, and now unacceptable, style of social anthropology, exemplified by Frazer's Golden Bough.4 From the cultural relativist's point of view, comparisons of standards between cultures are not only unfair but impossible and meaningless.5 CRITICISM

It has been suggested, however, that it would be impossible, in practice, for anyone to take cultural relativism on board wholly. There are some things, e.g. human sacrifice, child abuse and matricide, which it would be hard for anyone to accept as 'all right for them'. Our commonly felt repugnance for the undiluted version is itself instructive: the 'Yuk' factor is ignored in this as in many other matters at our peril. The view which cultural relativism opposes holds that Homo sapiens has a common human nature such that there are bound to be some transcultural moral standards, even if at any given time we do not know or presently discern them. This view is well expressed by Mary Midgley: 'Values register needs ... We are creatures of a definite species on this planet and this shapes our values/6 Clearly, there are differences in ethical values between different societies and cultures as well as between different ages, but are the differences between societies and cultures as significant as the cultural relativist maintains? Modern anthropology has shown more interest in the striking points of convergence underlying the superficial differences.7 A lengthy quote from Finnis is useful here. All human societies show a concern for the value of human life; in all, self-preservation is generally accepted as a

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proper motive for action, and in none is the killing of other human beings permitted without some fairly definite justification. All human societies regard the procreation of a new human life as in itself a good unless there are special circumstances. No human society fails to restrict sexual activity; in all societies there is some prohibition of incest, some opposition to boundless promiscuity and to rape, some favour for stability and permanence in sexual relations. All human societies display a concern for truth, through education of the young in matters not only practical (e.g. avoidance of dangers) but also speculative or theoretical (e.g. religion). Human beings who can survive infancy only by nurture, live in or on the margins of some society which invariably extends beyond the nuclear family, and all societies display a favour for the values of cooperation, of common over individual good, of obligation between individuals, and of justice within groups. All know friendship. All have some conception of meum and tuum, title or property, and of reciprocity. All value play, serious and formalised, or relaxed and recreational. All treat the bodies of dead members of the group in some traditional and ritual fashion different from their procedures for rubbish disposal. All display a concern for powers or principles which are to be respected as supra-human; in one form or another, religion is universal.8 Further examples of absolute values recognized by all would be: responsibility of parents for children and vice versa; heroism; gratitude and generosity; impartiality in a judge or courage in a warrior; etc. All these are recognized as selfevident goods, across different cultures and periods of history. Of course, on the level of specific moral rules and precepts there is variation. Nevertheless, this basic common grasp of certain fundamental human values, however differently they are explicated in a given time or place, is surely significant. What is more, it does not follow from such variations between cultures (no more than it does from differences and variations between persons) that there is no objective 'good'.

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We might even expect such variations in the recognition and formulation of those practical principles which articulate self-evident and basic human goods. The gradual coming to understand how these goods are to be achieved and participated in is necessarily tied to the way human beings, individually and collectively, grow in understanding and knowledge in general. It is also tied to the prevailing conditions of life. Mistakes can be made and reproduced from generation to generation in ethical reflection just as in all human knowledge. In science, for instance, wrong turnings and culs-de-sac have been arrived at and perpetuated for generations and across whole cultures. Because it is both rational and practical, moral deliberation is open in the same way to error. Moral reflection is, it might justifiably be said, even more open to misinterpretation, distortion and rationalization than most other discourses.9 We might expect courage, friendship, right thought and self-control (the Aristotelian virtues) to take different forms: but they are the same virtues. It has been remarked that the splendid, aristocratic warrior and the Christian monk are both exemplifying, albeit in different ways, virtues of courage, fairness, loyalty, love, friendship, intelligence, skill, self-control.10 Clearly, then, it does not follow from the presence of variation among cultures that moral judgements are culturally relative and that the quest for objectivity in moral judgements is hopeless; just as it does not follow from the obvious fact of disagreement between individuals that there is no such thing as moral truth. So Ginsberg again: ... the diversity of moral judgements affords no more proof of their subjectivity than the diversity of judgements regarding matters of fact throws doubt on the possibility of valid scientific judgements about them.11

Indeed, it could indicate quite the opposite, as Bernard Mayo says:

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Historically, the discovery that one's social rules are not the same as those of another society has often led reflective people to search for more universal rules; and the idea that one's own set of rules might not be the right ones, might be open to correction and criticism in the light of something beyond them, is the burgeoning of rational morality.12 The point is well made, since it was precisely knowledge of differences which gave rise to moral philosophy in fifthcentury Greece. Travellers told all manner of weird tales brought from their journeying and it was this that provided the incentive to find ways of comparing different moral codes according to some fixed standard. So it was that the idea of phusis (nature) as opposed to nomos (convention) was introduced. Cultural differences do not provide a prima facie case for relativism in ethics. It is precisely our experience of both cultural differences and absolute moral judgements that engenders moral philosophy. Nicholas Rescher remarks that cultural relativism mistakenly confuses 'mores' with morality. He calls this the 'Anthropologist's Fallacy'.13 There is also a problem of inconsistency in all arguments for cultural relativism, similar to that in all theories of complete social conditioning. If it is true, it should be applied equally to one's own culture. But this would entail the impossibility of criticizing one's own culture and its values. In that case, morality becomes conformism. And this is manifestly not the case. What sense would we then make of individuals who have spurned or rejected the morality of their group? Are we to regard them as ill? Such views of dissidents has too often served as justification for all manner of oppression in totalitarian regimes. Moreover, such a view would pull the rug from under the notion of reasoned social change of any kind. On this reading, social change becomes a matter of pressure groups and power, more akin to the terrors and falsities of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Third Reich or Pol Pot's Cambodia.

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Again, cultural relativism raises many serious but neglected questions about the logic of the words 'society' and 'culture'. When is a group a 'society'? How and when do we apply this to an immigrant community or, for that matter, to any minority group within a nation? What makes us distinguish between a recognizable cultural group within a society and a group of eccentrics? Do so-called 'minority groups' rank as societies in the relativist's sense? 'Culture' in the sociological sense is a very vague word, but we can say that the broadest sense of the word describes the way human beings seek to satisfy common human needs. And these needs correspond to basic, universal values. So, for instance, life is a self-evident, universal value in itself. But how this notion evolves differs. It may be thought at some stage to be a value shared only by the members of one's tribe, clan or family and only gradually extended to all. Despite differences, what runs throughout all cultures and human societies is the recognition, albeit in a sometimes fragmentary and halting way, of such fundamental values crucial to human life. Such common apprehensions are presupposed even to the recognition of what differences there are. It is uncontroversially true that we are becoming more and more a universal and global culture. Not only are there probably no completely isolated groups in the world any longer, but the broad outlines of the shared agenda on the moral front (as well as the political, social and economic fronts) comes to be more and more shared as a given. Again the idea of tolerance raises questions of consistency as in ethical subjectivism. The cultural relativist finds he has to use a non-relative sense of 'tolerance' when he holds, as he must, that it is not right for people in other societies to condemn people in other cultures for their moral practices. For this stricture to have any meaning at all it must be intended in a strictly non-relative sense.14 Certain ideas integral to our Western self-understanding would be untenable if cultural relativism were true. What

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sense, for instance, can be made of the idea of progress? How can any culture be said to advance? How can a culture be said to become better than it was before, where 'better' implies standards external to the culture? That is just what a cultural relativist cannot grant. But, in practice, we do most definitely conceive of ourselves as making progress. Think for instance of slavery and the unquestioned change of attitude which we now take for granted. It is instructive to remind ourselves of the recently almost universal attitude - still far from eradicated worldwide — as described in this passage by Mark Twain. He is describing his mother's attitudes: Yet, kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit but had heard it defended in a thousand; her ears were familiar with Bible texts that approved it but if there were any that disapproved it they had not been quoted by her pastors; as far as her experience went, the wise and the good and the holy were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for. Manifestly, training and association can accomplish strange miracles/5 And after Huckleberry Finn has lied to Aunt Sally about being on a riverboat that blew a cylinder-head, she asks him if anyone has been hurt. 'No'm', replies Huck. 'Killed a nigger/ To which Aunt Sally responds: "Well, that's lucky; because sometimes people does get hurt/ The realization that slavery was unacceptable, and that it is

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not the case that, as Aristotle thought, some people are born with slave natures, was a slow and painful one. But would anyone question whether or not we had made progress? As with all relativism, so ethical relativism falls under its own judgement. Relativism necessarily relativizes the relativizer. NOTES 1. '... those philosophers who have recently sought to test this assumption (that there are no stable and fixed universal values among all peoples), by surveying the anthropological literature (including the similar general surveys made by professional anthropologists), have found with striking unanimity that this assumption is unwarranted'. So John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford 1980, p. 83. See his bibliography on p. 97. For a comprehensive survey of the anthropological literature and its relevance to ethics, see Richard H. Beis, 'Some contributions of anthropology to ethics' in The Thomist, 28(1964)174. 2. Bernard Williams, Morality, London 1972, p. 34. 3. See Grisez and Shaw, Beyond the New Morality, Notre Dame, Indiana 1974, p. 57. 4. Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) wrote his Golden Bough in 1890. It consisted of two volumes to begin with, but constant revision and addition ensured that by 1941 it ran to fifteen volumes. See A. Downie, Frazer and the 'Golden Bough', London 1970. 5. See for instance, Peter Winch, 'Understanding a primitive society' in Religion and Understanding, (ed.) D. Z. Phillips, Oxford 1967, pp. 9-42. For a contrary view which criticizes Winch, see Charles Taylor, 'Rationality' in Hollis and Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism, Oxford 1982. 6. See her Beast and Man, London 1980, p. xxii. 7. Robert Spaemann, Basic Moral Concepts, London 1989, p. 5: The moral outlooks of different cultures and epochs have much more in common than we think'. See also Morris Ginsberg, Essays in Sociology and Social Philosophy, London

Cultural Relativism

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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1968, p. 264: 'Relativists in general stress the great diversity in morals. Yet the similarity is far greater/ Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford 1980, pp. 834. On this see Finnis, op. cit., pp. 81—5 and also his Fundamentals of Ethics, Oxford 1983, pp. 76-7. Peter Byrne, The Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Ethics, London 1992, p. 122. He cites Stuart Hampshire, Two Theories of Morality, London 1977, p. 44. Ginsberg, op. cit., p. 237. Bernard Mayo, The Philosophy of Right and Wrong, London 1986, p. 73. Ginsberg, op. cit., pp. 236—7 cites the example of Locke who, he says, is the first person to use anthropological data to illustrate the diversity of morals and yet still believe in the possibility of a science of morals as certain as that of mathematics. Nicholas Rescher, Moral Absolutes, London 1989, p. 29ff. See Williams, op. cit., p. 34, for this point. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, London 1959, p. 176.


Part II

Absolutism, Consequentialism or Virtue?


Kant

The view that all moral judgements are culturally relative or subjective entails that there are no such things as moral absolutes: that is, nothing can be said in an unqualified way to be good or bad, right or wrong. By implication, there can be no such thing as an absolute obligation, just as nothing is absolutely forbidden. The most extreme view that there are indeed moral absolutes was that of Immanuel Kant (1724— 1804), undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in Western philosophy. Until recently, debates in moral philosophy oscillated between Absolutism and Utilitarianism or Consequentialism: the latter being the view that moral goods are to be calculated on the basis of desirable outcomes alone. The following scenario serves to illustrate the difference between these two positions. You are an explorer in South America who stumbles across an execution which is just about to start. Twenty Indians are to be shot, having been randomly chosen from members of the population to punish acts of dissidence. The executioner offers you the visitor's privilege of killing one of the Indians yourself. If you accept, the other Indians will be set free. If you refuse, all twenty will be killed. Typically, the Consequentialist will conclude that you ought to kill the one Indian in order to save the other nineteen. The Absolutist will say that you ought not to kill a person, no matter how 'good' the consequences to the others might be. Therefore you must not kill the one Indian.1 A more difficult and certainly more topical example might

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involve healthcare allocation. Six people have a kidney disease and need dialysis. Five of the patients need it for short periods of time on a regular basis; without this they will die. One of the patients needs a prolonged session on the machine in order to live. If, however, the patient has this session, the other five will have to miss one of their regular but brief sessions. What should the hospital administrator decide? Notice that the disagreement between the Absolutist and the Consequentialist concerns which features of the situation are morally relevant. This debate is described in different ways: I have referred to an Absolutist versus Consequentialist debate. Another way of characterizing these opposing positions is Deontological versus Teleological. The word Deontology is from deon, science of duty; it was coined, ironically, by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, the most widespread form of Consequentialism. In Deontology, the right takes precedence over the good. There are basic rules and principles which guide us to know which goods to pursue. They can be judged independently of any particular conception of the good. That is to say, they are formal, in the sense that they arise from the nature of reason and the self. Modern Deontology eschews too close an association with Kant. It rejects his absolutism and his complete disregard for consequences. Modern Deontology simply says: consequences are not primary, but empirical considerations necessarily enter in to moral judgement and principles sometimes conflict with each other. Nevertheless, the classical statement of Deontology is the moral philosophy of Kant. Immanuel Kant bestrides Western moral philosophy like a Colossus.2 His moral theory has been at the heart of philosophical reflection on the nature of morality and one of the most influential views since his own lifetime. No account can afford to omit reference to him. There is in Kant's case a striking congruence between his

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moral theory and his character. He was master of his own passions and a man of unbending if congenial routine and ritual. He was utterly indifferent to power and reputation, being moved and regulated only by duty. In consequence, his life was unremarkable. Kant was born in Konigsberg (now, at least for the time being, Kaliningrad, being renamed after one of the few of Stalin's henchmen to die a natural death) in East Prussia (now Russia) in 1724. He was the fourth child of a poor harness-maker who, with his wife, was a devout Pietist, a reform movement of Lutheranism among the lower and middle classes of Germany. Pietism laid great emphasis on the eventual reward of labours, the sacredness of work, duty and prayer and the sovereignty of the individual conscience. It was all rather gloomy and Kant disliked it profoundly, regarding his Pietist teachers as bordering on the fanatical. He inherited a certain gloom but set to work dispelling this. Kant was of small stature and slightly deformed but he was very popular in his native town, which he loved with great devotion. He was one of its most popular and wellknown citizens, with a reputation for wit and lively conversation and known as der schon magister. He turned down offers from many other German universities, preferring to wait patiently for the Chair of Philosophy in his beloved Konigsberg. At the age of 46 in 1770, he finally became Professor of Metaphysics and Logic. His lectures were so popular that students wishing to attend had to arrive at least one hour early, at six in the morning, to get a seat. He died peacefully on 12 February 1804, having become senile, but no less popular. His funeral was attended by the whole of Konigsberg, 'being acknowledged even in his senility as the greatest glory of that town'.3

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KANT'S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION Kant's overall project was to investigate the presuppositions of self-consciousness and examine the conditions of possibility of all knowledge.4 In other words, in three monumental studies, he set out to examine the formal structures of pure reasoning, causality, a priori knowledge (knowledge not based on experience) and the question of objectivity (Critique of Pure Reason 1781 and a second edition 1787); to demonstrate the formal structure of practicalmoral reasoning (Critique of Practical Reason 1788); and to examine the conditions of possibility of aesthetics and religion (Critique of Judgment 1790). Kant's work was a reaction against the foundationalism of both the rationalists and empiricists. His concern was the problem of objective knowledge: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just 'knowledge of the world as it seems to me'? Notice that, unlike both the rationalists and the empiricists, he does not ask, 'Can we know anything?' but 'How do we know what we know and what is it to know?' Descartes held that the foundation of knowledge is the knowledge of the knowing subject. Kant was critical of this: he thought that this yields no knowledge of what the subject T is or even that it is. Leibniz (1646-1716) thought we can have knowledge untouched by the point of view of any observer; while David Hume (1711—76) argued that we can have no objective knowledge of anything at all. It was this sceptical empiricism of Hume which, on Kant's own admission, roused Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. Kant was spurred to formulate by contrast his own critical philosophy. Kant takes knowledge for granted. He claims, however, that our knowledge is not of the world as it is in itself, but of the world as it appears to us. What exists, exists: its nature simply is what it is; but with that, we ourselves can have

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nothing to do. It is, however, equally certain that what exists appears to human beings in a particular way, and is classified, interpreted, categorized and described in a particular manner by us. If our sense organs had been radically different from what they are, the world would appear to us in a radically different way; if our languages and modes of thought were radically different, the descriptions of the world that we would give would also be different from those that we now give.5 Thus our nature and its capacities at least partly determine the world as it appears to us, the form that it appears to have. Kant is thus the first person to question the straightforward correspondence theory of truth, the view that knowledge is a mirror or copy of reality. Hilary Putnam has expressed it like this: But Kant said: It isn't so simple. There is the contribution of the thinking mind/ Of course, knowledge isn't made up by the mind - Kant wasn't an idealist. It isn't all fiction. But it isn't just a copy either. What we call 'truth' depends both on what there is (the way things are) and on the contribution of the thinker (the mind - I use the term 'the mind' but today we would think of this in a social, not individualistic sense as Kant did).6

Again Del Ratzsch catches this well: Kant argued that various categories and principles of thought were built into the very structure of our minds and into the very operation of our perception. Any experiences we had were organised according to these categories and principles before we even had conscious access to them. Thus, if we knew what these categories and structures were, we would know something about any future experience we could ever have, since it would always be organised in a way dictated by the structure of our minds and the operation of our perception ... If we know the structures of the mind

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and perception, know the constraints they dictate and what characteristics they impose, we can know some things about any experience we can ever have ... Since our experiences were formed, shaped and even partially constituted by these structures within us, and since our daily access to the world outside ourselves was via experience, all we could study directly and all we could really know about scientifically were our own experiences, our own perceptions ... we had no reason at all to think that [our experiences] corresponded to ultimate reality... it couldn't be like our experience of it.7

This constituted a Copernican revolution, outlawing metaphysics as a pseudo-science and voiding all attempts to prove the existence of God by appeal to the world's contingency or by means of logic. Nevertheless, according to Kant, though this turn to the psychological subject outlawed theology, it made room for faith and religious experience. KANT'S MORAL THEORY

In Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) (variously translated as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals or Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals or The Moral Law) Kant tried to give a systematic account of the formal elements involved in morality. His moral theory seeks to secure the objectivity of moral judgement, the universal character of moral precepts and the rooting of morality in reason, as opposed to feelings or inclination alone or, indeed, religion. It is in this sense a secularized Christian ethics in terms of content.8 Now just as Kant asked, in the case of knowledge in general, about the a priori categories through which we grasp and order the world as it appears to us, so in the case

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of morality: he takes morality for granted and asks what these categories — which constitute the conditions for the possibility of morality — must be like, such that morality is what it is. In other words, what makes a moral precept moral? What form must a precept have to be a moral precept? Kant is fiercely critical of any heteronomous ethic: that is, the claim that something is right because it satisfies some emotion, desire, goal or obligation. This would entail for him that reason was subservient to something else, whether this be pleasure, happiness or the majority opinion. Such a morality must always remain conditional and dependent. In the first section of Groundwork of a Mekaphysic of Morals Kant takes for granted certain features which he claims are part of the common moral consciousness: the 'common understanding' and the 'moral knowledge of common human reason'. Indeed, he sees himself as simply making these explicit. Recent authors, however, descry in this account not the common consciousness but the outlines of a consciousness common only among Protestant Christians of a Pietist tendency. This is an initial weak point, as Richard Norman points out: That is to say, it does not possess the universal quality which Kant might want to claim for it. It is the ethical common sense of a particular society and particular historical epoch.9 One of the most striking characteristics of Kant's view of morality is that it is rooted in rationality to the exclusion of any other consideration. He sees this as entailed in the common assumptions concerning morality: namely, that the demands of morality are unconditional or categorical; that the demands of morality are invariant and unchanging; that the sheer fact of morality requires and presupposes freedom. On these grounds, he excludes any such observation as

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that of Hume that morality is rooted in a 'moral sense', or in any kind of feeling or inclination. Morality has nothing to do with our desires, ambitions, impulses or emotions. The only impulse of the heart permitted is reverence for the law.10 Notice that he is not dismissing or outlawing desires and inclinations. He is simply saying that morality is not rooted in them: they have nothing essential to do with morality. Only reason is universal. But because he thinks of reason independently of society or anything outside the individual, morality is a function of individual reason, an autonomous reflection on rational principles of action and conduct. Thus he asks: 'What makes a moral act the kind of thing it is?' His reply is that only one thing is good unconditionally: namely, the good will. In this talk of the will he sees the act and the motivation as continuous: the intention, the volition, the motivation and the act are a whole.11 And this whole is to be firmly distinguished from what it may (or may not) achieve. It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and any other talents of the mind we care to name, or courage, resolution, and constancy of purpose, as qualities of temperament, are without doubt good and desirable in many respects; but they can also be extremely bad and hurtful when the will is not good which has to make use of these gifts...12

This alone counts and this alone is the seat of value. Abilities and talents count for nothing or at least they are morally neutral, since they can be used for evil purposes. Consequences cannot count as morally significant, since they are to a great extent beyond the agent's control. Only the will is ours and within our control: everything else is a matter of fortune. Only the will can be unconditionally good, since only the will can exercise pure, practical reason.

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Again, he does not mean just wishing but willing: that is, not just idle good intention but the straining of every means in our power. One can see here the strength of his reaction against Hume's exaltation of feeling and the passions. But what makes the good will good? To exercise a good will is to set oneself to act simply and solely for the sake of duty.13 And duty is done by the good will that subjects itself to rational principles of action. The noble end for which our reason fits us is not happiness — anything might give us that — but duty. Indeed, he says that the good will is the indispensable condition for even being worthy of happiness. And it must be stressed that it is a matter of doing duty for the sake of duty itself: this alone is decisive goodness. Doing duty for any other reason, be it inclination, self-interest, affection, etc., does not count and is neither morally laudable nor morally neutral.14 The question of morality enters only when confronted with a conflict between duty and inclination. The good will chooses to do duty for duty's sake. Kant does not rule out pleasure in doing duty, but pleasure is no guide to what duty is or to the morality of one's actions. And action, for Kant, has no moral worth if any satisfaction arises from the consciousness of doing one's duty. To be certain that an action is morally good, one would have to discount or eliminate all pleasure from the reckoning. So Kant's analysis of morality is entirely formal. How does duty appear to us, what is its form? How are we to know our duties? Duty, he says, is the necessity of acting from respect for the law.15 It is obedience to a maxim which is universally binding as a law for all rational beings. That is, I must be able to will, without inconsistency, that this precept should be done by all. In other words, a moral precept, as duty, is a maxim which is, without inconsistency, universalizable for all people. This law of universalizability turns out to be a kind of generalized version of the Golden Rule: 'I am never to act otherwise than so that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.' This he calls the Formula of the Law of Nature.

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An example he uses himself is promise-keeping. I cannot consistently will that promise-breaking for reasons of selfinterest should be a universal law. If I try to universalize the following maxim: 'I may always break my promises when it is in my interest to do so' I will arrive at the conclusion that promise-keeping both should and should not continue as a practice. This is inconsistent and therefore cannot be a moral imperative.16 So the challenge in moral judgements is to distinguish right from wrong maxims. And this is a work of reason alone in seeking those maxims that can be consistently universalized. Another way of expressing this demand of universalizability is to say, as Kant does, that no person, including oneself — indeed no rational creature — must ever be treated as a means to an end, only as an end in himself. This he calls the Formula of End in Itself. To treat someone as a means is to deny that he or she is, like oneself, a rational and independent judge of his or her actions. It is to treat oneself as in some way superior and different. Both of these involve us in irrationality. Consistency demands that we treat everybody as an end. Indeed, a third formulation is that we should regard ourselves as law-making members of a kingdom of ends. This he calls the Formula of a Kingdom of Ends. Another essential feature of morality is that it is unconditional. A moral precept must be absolutely unconditional: it must be categorical. Any conditional imperative is derivative from a categorical one. The moral imperative is distinguished precisely in being categorical. Here Kant distinguishes categorical imperatives from hypothetical ones. The latter would consist of rules of skill aiming at technical ends, or counsels of prudence as a means to personal well-being. The categorical imperative, however, is not contingent on anything, especially not desires or goals. A categorical imperative is absolute and universal. Like a necessary truth, a categorical imperative cannot be denied without self-contradiction or irrationality.

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One of the most characteristic features of Kant's account is that the universal maxims are self-imposed laws. The law of the good will is each individual's law and only an appeal to our own rationality can bring us to the conviction that something is good. So there can be no appeal to religion, for instance, to justify decisions that something is a duty. Religion is certainly presupposed as a postulate to morality — Kant asserts that it would be intolerable if the doing of duty were not, in the end, crowned with happiness, albeit unsought — but it is not a court of appeal or a moral resource. Reason alone is a moral authority: nothing outside ourselves can be the arbiter of what is right. Even if we accord somebody with authority it is our reason that is the more ultimate authority in judging thus. So, in Religion Within the Limits of Reason (1793), Kant says ... in whatever way the Deity should be made known to you, and even ... if he should reveal Himself to you: it is you ... who must judge whether you are permitted to believe in Him, and to worship Him.17

Interestingly, for Kant the experience of morality is the ground of religion rather than its consequent. He thus provides a moral basis for religious doctrine. Through the moral law and the act of obedience which it compels from us we are presented with so vivid a representation of transcendence as to want nothing that is needed for the worship of God.18

This Kantian insistence on autonomy is crucial. It is central to Kant's claim that moral judgements are not based on any empirical consideration concerning, for instance, human nature, human flourishing or human destiny. It is undoubtedly true that Kant's view of the individual as morally sovereign - there is no moral authority or criterion of

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goodness outside the person — fits well with our contemporary emphasis on the rights and freedom of the individual. It is also true that his outlawing of consequences as entirely irrelevant to the morality of a precept and its performance is a welcome and sane alternative to the preponderance of consequences in much modern moral philosophy and theology. The view held stoutly by Kant that I alone must judge what is good or bad nevertheless affirms that it is irrational to base my views on the mere hearsay and say-so of an authority. It does not entail, however, that it is irrational per se, to judge an authority worthy of respect and thus to heed it. What's more, this stricture is plainly not something specific or peculiar to morality: it applies across the board.19 Aside from making the individual the sole authority for moral judgement, this is in every other way a law-bound account of morality and this is why it seems painfully lacking in content, leaving morality hanging in the air, as it were. Kant's formal principle grants freedom to do anything that can be consistently universalized. Morality sets limits but does not offer direction: it is form not content. For this account to make sense, Kant has to postulate the existence of God, freedom and immortality. Indeed, it could be said to be a religious morality without God, in that what he takes for granted as common assumptions about morality are features of Protestant Pietist morality in which God is the Law-Giver to be obeyed. Kant argues that there must a God and an after-life since it would be intolerable if there were to be no reward. But he is surely inconsistent in holding that, though happiness is not the criterion or foundation of virtue, it must be its reward. With regard to happiness he gets himself into some painful twists. He strongly dismisses happiness as the goal of ethical behaviour. In Metaphysic of Morals he says that

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The principle of personal happiness is the most objectionable [empirical principle of ethics] not merely because it is false and because its pretence that well-being always adjusts itself to well-doing is contradicted by experience; not merely because it contributes nothing whatever towards establishing morality (since making a man happy is quite different from making him good ...) but because it bases morality on sensuous motives which rather undermine it and totally destroy its sublimity inasmuch as the motives of virtue are put in the same class as those of vice and we are instructed only to become better at calculation, the specific difference between virtue and vice being completely wiped out.20

And yet he says that we have a duty to make ourselves happy, not because we want to be happy (wants are never duties) but because it is necessary for us to do our other duties. It is clear that, in his view, duty is detached entirely from the context of needs, purposes, goals, wants or ends in a way that hardly corresponds with either common sense or our fundamental assumptions. Duty, for Kant, seems to exist in a vacuum. One striking case of this is Kant's distinction between practical love, that commanded as a duty, and pathological love, that which involves our emotions. But are moral rules ever so detached from particular considerations such as people, places and circumstances? Kant severs any link between duty and empirical considerations: and thus he severs morality from everyday life. Kant's admirable goal of rooting ethics in reason, which he shares, of course, with Aquinas, among others, nevertheless seems to presuppose an unrealistic and sometimes bizarre concept of reason, in isolation from everything else about human beings and doings. Thus, though superficially similar to Aquinas's project, in this regard at least, it is the very antithesis of Aquinas's more 'holistic' view. The difference between Kant and Aquinas is that Kant has an a priori concept of reason. One can see why Scruton says of Kant's ethics that he ends up with 'the most metaphysical

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and abstract basis that has ever been given for the common intuitions of morality'.21 In consequence of the overly formal character of Kant's ethics, it has been argued that the universalizability principle simply does not work. With ingenuity it can justify anything, since it can be used to consistently universalize practically anything. So Alasdair Maclntyre: ... all I need to do is to characterise the proposed action in such a way that the maxim will permit me to do what I want while prohibiting others from doing what would nullify the maxim if universalised.22

This possibility follows directly from the empty formalism of Kantian ethics: it is the form of lying that is wrong. Finally, while Kant is strong on understanding the conflict between duty and inclination he offers no way of understanding the equally occurring conflict between different duties in themselves. NOTES 1. The example is from Bernard Williams, Morality. 2. Colossus: the giant statue at Rhodes in the entrance to the port, built in c. 280 BC and regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world; it was destroyed in 244 BC. 'He doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus/ Julius Caesar I.ii. 136-7. 3. Roger Scruton, Kant, Oxford 1982, p. 10. This section is based on Scruton's account, pp. 1—10. 4. See Scruton, op. cit., p. 24. 5. G. J. Warnock, 'Kant' in D. J. O'Connor (ed.), A Critical History of Western Philosophy, London 1964, p. 300. 6. Hilary Putnam in conversation with Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas, Oxford 1978 (1982), pp. 196-7. 7. Del Ratzsch, The Philosophy of Science, Leicester 1986, pp. 41—3.

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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See Jacques Maritain, Moral Philosophy, Paris 1951, p. 96. Richard Norman, The Moral Philosophers, Oxford 1983, p. 96. The phrase is Maritain's in Moral Philosophy, p. 100. For this see Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind, Brighton and New York 1981, p. 90. Kant, Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals, 1,1, p. 59 in H. J. Paton's translation, The Moral Law, London 1948. Ibid., p. 63. Peter Byrne, The Philosophical and Theological foundations of Ethics, London 1992, pp. 88—9, says that in Critique of Practical Reason, p. 63, Kant makes it clear that happiness is a human goal and, as such, part of the good all pursue. But, he says, it does not function as a basis for deriving moral rules because [a] views about happiness inevitably differ and [b] if someone has a goal which leads to pleasure or happiness or whatever, it will act as a motivation only if the agent has a prior desire for it. He concludes that rules for conduct, which as such must be universalizable, cannot follow from any determinate conception of the good. Op. til., p. 66. By way of explanation: if everybody followed my universal maxim of promise-breaking, the making and breaking of promises would obviously collapse. But to will that I should act on this precept, that is, adopt the breaking of promises when it suited me as a principle, is to will that promisekeeping continues so that I can take advantage of the practice of opportunistically breaking my promises. Religion within the Limits of Reason, second edition, London 1974, p. 56. Ibid. This point is made by Anthony O'Hear, What Philosophy Is: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, London 1985, p. 256. Page 103. Scruton, op. ciL, p. 58. Alasdair Maclntyre, A Short History of Ethics, London 1968, p. 58.

Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Kant's austere, formal absolutism is the most explicit version of Consequentialism: Utilitarianism. It is often said that Utilitarianism is the ethical theory most congenial to the pragmaticminded English. While it certainly was the invention of the English, Utilitarianism is undoubtedly now the most widespread and, to many, the most self-evidently rational account of moral reasoning in the Western world.1 Utilitarianism arose alongside the developing empirical and social sciences of the nineteenth century and was preached by the liberal-minded social and legislative reformers of that era. Utilitarianism is a form of Consequentialism: the view that what is of most critical importance in moral reasoning and what alone defines and regulates the use of the words 'right' and 'wrong' are the consequences of an act. Specifically, Utilitarianism holds that Tightness and wrongness in human acts are to be judged according to whether or not actions produce directly or conduce towards 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number': the exact definition of 'happiness' is, significantly, left open to interpretation. This central principle of Utilitarianism is often taken now to mean 'the greatest good of the greatest number'. A right act will, therefore, be the one which will (or probably will) maximize whatever one fixes as the good to be desired above all else. This act will serve the maximum


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utility. As we shall see, since the time of the first Utilitarians and into the present day, the notion of what constitutes this 'good' has varied. But the essence of all Consequentialist theories, and especially Utilitarianism, is the role of calculation in moral reasoning. From the beginning, Utilitarianism was and continues to be attractive. It is not just an ethical theory, however, but a political creed. Further, it is inextricably bound up with the rise of liberal democracy as a political ideal in the West. The first Utilitarians were social reformers in England. The first explicit statement of Utilitarianism as an ethical and political theory was formulated by Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832). Bentham's father was a prosperous Tory who sent his son, aged seven, to Westminster School, which he hated. Five years later, at the age of twelve, he went up to The Queen's College, Oxford, which he hated even more. Three years later, he started the study of law at Lincoln's Inn and, in 1768, he was called to the Bar. Bentham was an advocate of political reform. But this was secondary and subordinate to his interest in penal and legal reform. For instance, he believed in neither democracy nor the natural rights of every man. He did believe, however, that the ruling classes had self-interest as their principal motivation: this was abundantly evidenced, he thought, in the total lack of interest shown by them in his plans for legal and penal reform. Eventually he suggested the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England. He also came to favour the introduction of universal suffrage and the annual sitting of Parliament. For Bentham this was not so much a matter of humanitarian sympathy as the rational way forward if his goal of legal and penal reform was to be achieved. In 1808 Bentham met James Mill (1773-1836) who immediately fell under his spell and became a devoted disciple. Bentham took a close interest in the education of Mill's young son, John Stuart Mill (1806—73), and set out to train him as a disciple. James Mill even moved house to be

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closer to Bentham, taking 1 Queen Street, Westminster, which is still there today. When Bentham died on the 6 June 1832 he had his body donated to the library of University College, London (founded, by the way, in 1828 as a result of pressure from Bentham and others to cater for those who could not be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge, due mainly to the religious tests required). His body, dressed in his own clothes and sitting in a glass case, is still displayed today. JOHN STUART MILL Utilitarianism is also associated with J. S. Mill, Bentham's unwilling protege, who developed his thought in his work, Utilitarianism (1861). He was two years old when Bentham met his father and his is perhaps the most famous and welldocumented education of all Englishmen, detailed in all its rigour in his Autobiography. He was taught Greek at the age of three or four by his father; at eight he studied arithmetic and Latin; by twelve he was studying logic and by thirteen political economy. Until the age of fourteen he saw nobody of his own age but mixed only with his father's Utilitarian friends. He even had to teach his younger brothers and sisters. He says, 'I never was a boy; never played cricket; it is better to let Nature have her way'.2 In 1826 and for the next two years he (unsurprisingly) fell into a deep depression from which he eventually recovered only on discovering the poetry of Wordsworth. Soon, in 1830, he found longed-for happiness when he met Harriet Taylor. After the death of her husband, he married her in 1851 and spent the next seven years blissfully happy until she died of tuberculosis in 1858. In 1865 he became the Member of Parliament for Westminster and concerned himself especially with the


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extension of the franchise to the working and unpropertied classes. In 1868 he retired to Avignon with his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, to be near the grave of his dear Harriet. On 8 May 1873, he died of a local fever and was buried with his wife. Utilitarianism is deeply rooted in the traditions of Empiricism.3 Inspiration for Bentham's ideas came from David Hume's suggestion that there can be no other criterion of legitimacy in the public realm than utility.4 This prompted Bentham's Fragment of Government (1776) in which he thought he had brought common sense and scientific method to bear on the affairs of state. (This same view of Hume's was the inspiration for Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations which became the flagship of laissez-faire capitalism.) The principle of utility was not original to Bentham.5 While he was at Oxford, the young Jeremy discovered in a circulating library near Queen's Joseph Priestley's (17331804) Essay on Government (1768) in which he found the phrase 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Priestley had used it to say that 'the happiness of the majority of the members of any state was the standard by which all the affairs of the state should be judged'.6 The moralist Francis Hutcheson (1694—1746) had also used the same phrase in a specifically ethical context.7 Bentham adopted this maxim as the principle both of ethics and politics. He first enunciated the principle of utility in an ethical context in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). The good involved is psychological hedonism and the single, relevant fact is that human beings seek pleasure and avoid pain.8 According to Bentham, the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain alone point us in the direction of what we ought to do and determine that we shall do it. The principle of utility simply converts this underlying self-interest into an allegedly workable principle for application in public and private. The 'greatest happiness of the greatest number' is the 'only right and proper and universally desirable end of human

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action'.9 In the process, Bentham dismisses any distinction between pleasure and happiness, just as he dismisses the notion of conscience and moral law. He claims that the principle requires no justification but is self-evident, if only we are honest with ourselves. The ethical principle extends into the public domain of politics. It becomes the sovereign principle of political and social justice and enables the discussion of political and other social freedoms in terms of calculating the best balance of pleasure and benefit for all individuals.10 On the basis of such computation there is no reason why, according to the principle of utility, it should not be acceptable that the entire pleasure of one individual should not be sacrificed entirely for the greater benefit of the whole. Thus, Utilitarianism enables ethics to be conceived in strictly quantitative terms: that is, in units of pleasure and pain, judged in obvious terms of intensity, duration, certainty and immediacy. Bentham seems to imagine that, as it had proven possible to lay bare the workings of nature in the new sciences, so the same was possible with human behaviour.11 It is in this sense that it is a theory wholly at one with both the Empiricist and Rationalist climate of the day. The late Bernard Williams offered four clear reasons why Utilitarianism holds attractions for those who adhere to it as a moral theory: it is non-transcendental, non-religious and makes no appeal to anything outside human life; its basic good, happiness, seems minimally problematic; moral issues can, at least in principle, be determined by empirical calculation in terms of consequences. The question of moral thought thus becomes an empirical matter of social science and public policy. The task of calculation reduces any obscurity there may be in ethics to a question of technical limitations. And finally Utilitarianism obviates the occasion of conflict of the kind where all options are wrong. Happiness is always right. And such conflicts disappear because the Utilitarian seeks to know only the best thing to do on the whole.12 Williams adds, 'Utilitarianism is


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unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; .. .'.13 Utilitarianism and its modern variants all centre on the notion of consequences and calculation, where the overall, numerical benefit is the final goal of moral reasoning. All moral reasoning is aimed, in other words, at the 'best consequences'. This may be specified in terms of some 'good' which can range from brutish hedonism to something more vague such as that notoriously ambiguous and loaded phrase 'quality of life'. The late Martin Hollis summed it up thus: 'Best consequences', in utilitarian hands, offer a sort of calculus (charmingly named the 'felicific calculus') for finding the strongest moral reason. I must work out what will produce the largest amount of happiness, after subtracting any misery caused too. In one version I am to do it on each occasion; in another I am to work out what set of general rules would have this effect and then apply them. ... Happiness is a matter of what people truly want. The calculation may be difficult but it can be done at least roughly and so as to eliminate some course of action.14 It will be seen immediately that there is a strictly nonconsequentialist premise presupposed to Consequentialism: namely, the arbitrary decision about which kinds of consequences are acceptable or 'good'. Bentham chooses pleasure and suggests that this choice follows from the empirical fact that all men desire pleasure. But this is a non sequitur. Does anything, strictly speaking, follow from this for ethics? Perhaps one of the most alarming aspects of the theory is the possible kinds of resolution of moral perplexity open to it. For instance, one can see that it would be quite consistent with Utilitarianism that one person's life could legitimately be traded off against the good of others. The greatest happiness principle could countenance the slaughter of

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hostages or torture if it furthered the greater happiness of the greater number. Utilitarianism turns out to be the canonization of expediency. The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the last war are a classic illustration of what can be justified under the banner of Utilitarianism. The argument that it was justified to kill so many people because it shortened the war and therefore saved the lives of a putatively larger number is a perfect example of Utilitarian computation. Nowhere is the principle of utility captured more hauntingly, however, than in the claim of Caiaphas that 'It is better that one man die than that the whole people perish'. The above examples are good illustrations of the breadth and, in some cases, repugnant implications of the principle of utility. But Utilitarianism has proven itself versatile. Joseph Fletcher's so-called 'Situation Ethics', much-beloved of the 'swinging sixties', was an attempt at a Christian version. A Catholic version of Utilitarianism has found acceptance among certain moral thinkers under the name of Proportionalism. But in the case of both Proportionalism and Situationism, clearly, pleasure cannot be the 'good' invoked. In Proportionalism specifically, in its place is put 'a better proportion of benefits to harms'.15 Finnis and others point out the structural problems involved in the Utilitarian calculus. The computation that is proposed is not just difficult - Williams agrees with this but senseless. That is, it makes no sense at all to try a comparative computation of basic human goods precisely because they are all basic: none is a means to another. The basic human goods are, by definition, all aspects of the being of persons: they are not abstract entities or quantifiable units. Nor are they arranged in any inherent hierarchy, except where this is a result of a prior, moral commitment which necessarily shapes our response to and participation in the goods of human existence. Further, there is never just one basic human good at stake. Some states of affairs are, of


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course, plainly better than others. But the Consequentialist is not offering a means of evaluating various states of affairs, but of deciding what to do and what to choose. The Consequentialist offers a model of moral reasoning based on cost—benefit analysis. But can 'good' ever be quantified, as if it were an economic unit? Again, there is a problem about the concept of consequences, as such. Consequences for social and human situations are notoriously difficult to predict. And which consequences are to count: only the intended ones or all the actual ones? How large a frame of reference, in other words, are we to take in? And is such technical calculation the responsibility of individuals or is it obviously better left to experts — statisticians, economists, social planners, etc.? Does the notion of 'overall good' justify leaving out some 'goods'? For instance, in a Utilitarian-based, socio-legal situation, how does one protect the rights of minorities? But calculation of consequences as a model of ethical reflection is inappropriate not just because it happens to be difficult in the case of human actions but because it does not make sense. The prior commitments which guide our decision-making about what to do can never themselves be the result of computation of this kind. It is prior commitment to some more basic, human good that constitutes the starting-point of reflection about what to do. The Utilitarian proposes that even such a commitment as this is the result of computation aimed at maximizing whatever we take to be the good. Fundamentally, Utilitarianism and Consequentialism espouse the principle that 'the end always justifies the means'. The Tightness or wrongness of an action resides exclusively in its expected outcome. What is more, various notions in ethics lose their distinctive meaning. 'Right' and 'wrong' are translated into 'yielding more or less good'. But who would consciously choose to bring about less overall good? The idea of wrong choice loses meaning. Morality

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becomes a matter of technique and computational skill and is handed over to experts and technocrats who alone are in a position to make such complex computations. There is no such thing as choosing what is wrong; only choosing inefficiently. Thus the notions of blame and responsibility lose meaning and Utilitarianism evacuates from all actions any specifically moral qualities.16 Utilitariansim thus seems to founder on both its principal premises: the ambiguity of its goal, however enunciated, and the inoperability of its method, viz. maximization. There is no doubt that at first Utilitarianism must have seemed something like a liberation from all kinds of dogmatic nonsense and superfluous, not to say superstitious, traditions in moral thinking. It was, as Donald Mackinnon says, the perfect Enlightenment morality. [The] down-to-earth, matter of fact quality of Utilitarianism came to men as a way through the maze of inherited complexity in social and in legal institutions;.. ,.17

But the thoroughgoing Utilitarianism of Bentham basically wanted to take the 'ought' out of human language, thus converting morality into advantage of the most basic kind. Utilitarianism and its modern variants, even its religious and theological versions, constitute the abolition of morality. One conclusive way of seeing this is to note the radical inconsistency of Utilitarianism with the Socratic principle constitutive of the very notion of morality: 'It is better to suffer evil than to do it'. Consequentialism in general is a morality of goals: it belongs to a naturalistic view of man in which human beings, despite our technological prowess, are an accident of nature 'to whom nothing is forbidden or permitted by any power beyond himself'.18 Agnes Heller points to the inevitable outcome of basing moral judgement on the assessment of consequences:


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... in a world where consensus no longer exists, will not everything be permitted? Will not every result be considered 'good' in so far as it 'suits us'.. .?19 Between the Scylla of Kantian Absolutism and the Charybdis of Consequentialism, an understanding of morality based not on law or calculation has returned to view. So-called Virtue Ethics' has a much older pedigree; it is also the understanding of morality adopted by early Christianity to express its distinctive moral insights. The classical exploration of this version of morality was undertaken by Aristotle in the fifth century BC. NOTES 1. The otherwise perceptive and intelligent Barbara Amiel said in an article in The Times 26 August 1988, p. 9: 'Consequences is what morality is about, of course'. See Richard Swinburne making the same mistake in his essay in Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion, pp. 100—1: Tike all moral arguments, this one can be settled only by pointing to the consequences ...'. D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer, London 1976, p. 35, comments that the position is Vulgar'. 2. Anthony Cockshut remarks that 'His own autobiography itself is enough to prove that you cannot make people happy by the application of utilitarian principles'. See The Unbelievers, London 1964, p. 25. 3. Donald MacKinnon remarks that underlying Utilitarianism is a 'thorough-going empiricism at work in the scrutiny of manners and morals'. See A Study in Ethical Theory, London 1957, p. 35. 4. See his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 111,1,145: '... public utility is the sole origin of justice'. 5. Frederick Copleston points out that Bentham did not 'invent the principle of utility: what he did was to expand and apply it explicitly and universally as the basic principle of both morals and legislation', The History of Philosophy, Vol. 8, p. 4.

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6. Ibid. 7. An Inquiry Mo the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), pt 3. 8. 'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think; every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while', he. cit. 9. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I, sec. 1, note 1. Cited by Copleston, op. cit.f p. 10. 10. For this see MacKinnon, loc. cit. 11. Ibid. 12. See his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, London 1972, p. 97ff. 13. Ibid., p. 103. 14. Martin Hollis, An Invitation to Philosophy, Oxford 1986, p. 135. 15. Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 86. 16. See Spaemann's arguments against Utilitarianism in his Basic Moral Concepts, pp. 46-56. 17. Mackinnon, op. cit., p. 45. 18. Roger Scruton writing in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 May 1988, p. 565. 19. General Ethics, Oxford 1988, p. 87.

Aristotle and the Life of Virtue

Aristotle interested himself in every detail of life. Although educated in Plato's Academy, he rejected the doctrine of the Forms, in which Plato located reality beyond the world of our senses, and, far from downgrading the senses as Plato had done, placed first importance on knowledge through sense experience: that is, on what could be seen and noticed and what could be said about it. Aristotle can also be credited with giving the West its philosophical vocabulary. Nowhere is this more true than in ethics. He both sorted out with considerable precision the meaning of moral words and sought to give an account of the structure of morality. The point and purpose of engaging in ethics is, according to Aristotle, to become good: For we are enquiring not in order to know what virtue is but in order to become good since otherwise our enquiry would be of no use.1

Aristotle begins his examination of ethics by looking at the way the most common ethical word, 'good', is used. He notices right away that every act aims at some good. Every art and every enquiry and similarly every action and pursuit is thought to aim at some good and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.2

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He makes an early and important distinction between things which are good as means, that is, for the sake of something else; and things that are good as ends, that is, for their own sake only. About human activity, he asks: Is there one final end for man? He argues towards his first conclusion in moral philosophy: namely, that there is indeed one, overriding, final end of all human activity. If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?3

This line has been criticized by modern philosophers on the grounds that, since all chains must stop somewhere, it does not follow that there is somewhere where all chains must stop. Or, because everyone has a father, it does not follow that there is someone who is everybody's father. Cogent as this argument may seem, however, it can also be said that if human beings are unified wholes, it is reasonable to expect to find that, just as each action has an end, so our life as a whole has an end and purpose. Certainly, for determining subordinate ends, knowledge of the final, supreme, overriding end is very helpful. As Aristotle says: Not to have one's life organised in view of some end is a mark of much folly.4

Aristotle calls that final good, for the sake of which everything is (ultimately) done, happiness. He arrives at this argument in two seemingly different ways, one way being better, in the opinion of some.


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But, first, a word about the word for 'happiness'. Eudaimonia is the Greek word used by Aristotle: it does not mean happiness in the sense of a state of euphoria, as it does in English. Rather, it means to be flourishing, to make a success of life. So that the connection between eudaimonia and happiness is indirect.5 The first argument for happiness as the final end of human beings is known as the ergon argument: that is, the argument from function. Human flourishing requires the activity of that part of man which is peculiar to him. Aristotle says that eudaimonia concerns the activity of the soul or mind. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or any artist and in general for all things that have a function of activity (praxis), the good and the 'weir is thought to reside in the function, so it would seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter then and the tanner certain functions of activities and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as the eye, hand, foot and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be? Life seems to be common even to the plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude therefore the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would a life of perception but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox and every animal. There remains then an active life of the element that has a rational principle ... human good turns out to be the activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. But we must add In a complete life'. For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day or a short time does not make a man blessed and happy.6 And later he says: If happiness is an activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the

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highest virtue; and this will be that of the best things in us. Whether it be reason or something else that is this element which is thought to be our natural ruler and guide and to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it be itself also divine or only the most divine element in us, the activity of this in accordance with its proper virtue will be perfect happiness. This activity is contemplation (theoria). Others have argued that Aristotle has another, more effective argument for demonstrating what the good for human beings is. John Finnis, for example, would argue that the ergon argument is 'not the deep structure of Aristotle's ethical method; it is an erratic boulder'.8 In Nicomachean Ethics, there is a series of appeals to what 'everyone would say' or to what 'no one would say' and to what 'everyone would choose'. These are not arguments about what the majority think: elsewhere, Aristotle explicitly rejects as lacking authority opinions based on numbers.9 Finnis notes that The primary ... function of these appeals to what we or others (or 'everyone') would say or choose is to prompt or remind us ... firstly, of our own and others' prephilosophical experience, and secondly, of our own and others' practical and pre-philosophical grasp of good(s).1 So Aristotle says that No one would choose to live with the intellect of a child throughout his life, however much he were to be pleased at the things that children are pleased at...."

Or No one chooses to possess the whole world if he has first to become someone else ...; he wishes for this only on condition of being whatever he is.12


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In this way, Aristotle brings to our consciousness what we all know, after reflecting on our common experience, about what is good for and, therefore, what is wanted by human beings. Most would now cavil at his conclusion to the first arguments that the good consists in contemplation. For one thing, this is not peculiar to human beings since it is something we share, according to Aristotle, with the gods. For another, it is difficult to escape the sense of this being a mega bore as far as fulfilling activities go. Reason certainly is part of the good for human beings, but on the level of means rather than final end. Happiness and fulfilment will always involve the life of reason: that is, thinking about what to do, trying to understand one's activities, foreseeing the consequences of one's actions, differentiating between various subordinate ends, while keeping one's eye on the ultimate end. But it can never be the final and exclusive end in itself which he suggests. The second argument pointed to by Finnis leads, therefore, to the conclusion that eudaimonia is a complex of goods. Aristotle's ethical theory is known as Virtue Ethics or Aretaic Ethics because at the heart of his description of the good are the virtues as shapers of human character, and thus, of human behaviour. He suggests that human well-being is a life characterized by the virtues. In Greek thought, arete refers to excellence in general, primarily with reference to the point and purpose of things. The arete of something is that characteristic of it which makes it a good example of its kind or nature. It is a quality of a thing that fulfils its nature and serves the end for which it was made. Aristotle's ethics is, thus, teleological: that is, he sees the good as consisting in some natural purpose for human beings. The virtues are precisely those things apt to promote the well-being and flourishing of human beings as such. And Aristotle is very definite about human nature, that the good human life is one lived in harmonious and co-operative relations with our fellow human beings. For Aristotle, as

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opposed, for instance, to Thomas Hobbes, we are by nature social animals. But we are also rational animals. So our wellbeing will partly consist in the exercise of our rational faculties, both for practical or instrumental purposes, and for its own sake. Thus for Aristotle, there are the moral virtues, which fit us for successful social relations within a civilized society; and the intellectual virtues, which enable a successful engagement in rational enterprises. Aristotle compares the virtues to skills acquired through practice and habituation. They are dispositions, arising from settled states of character acquired largely by a process of practical training, to act in particular ways. In this context, Aristotle introduces the doctrine of the mean, suggesting that the virtuous man is the moderate man, inclining to nothing in excess. This notion is often misunderstood: it can appear to suggest that the virtuous life is mediocre and uninteresting. But what it secures is the avoidance of both the extreme of hedonism and the other extreme of Puritanism. For Plato virtue is largely self-control and subjugation to the point of near extinction of the emotions as disturbances of the soul. Aristotle agrees that virtue is shown in rational control of the passions and appetites but, unlike, Plato, he does not regard the passions, emotions and appetites as intrinsically bad, or inconsistent with the moral life. Were a person to lack certain passions and emotional responses, we would count them a deficient human being. It is natural to feel fear in some circumstances, but we would count it a virtue where such fear is contained so as to avoid the kind of panic which might endanger the lives of others. On the other hand, were someone to feel no fear and, as a consequence, to act rashly in dangerous situations, this would count for Aristotle not as courage but as foolhardiness. The passions, emotions and appetites are intrinsic to the life of virtue, not its enemy. The virtues are as much undermined by the lack of positive feelings as by the excess


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of negative ones. The virtues, therefore, are concerned with the promotion of human well-being, determined by rational judgement and choice about appropriate courses of action and conduct. Aristotle has some very pertinent reflections on akrasia or weakness of will. He recognizes that there is huge difference between the victim of akrasia, who knows and acknowledges what he should do but fails to do it, and the licentious individual who prefers a life of vice, wickedness and selfindulgence to that of virtue, either because he knows no better — he is badly brought up or badly educated — or because he has convinced himself that what he wants to do is acceptable. Though he does not use the phrase, Aristotle seems convinced that moral absolutes — objective moral principles — are presupposed to his account of ethics. He is clear that what constitutes human good is not negotiable or individually decidable. To have been properly educated in virtue means precisely that certain choices are not available to us if we wish to pursue the life of virtue. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE) 1103b27. NE 1094al. NE 1994al8-24. Eudemian Ethics 1214b9. For these remarks, see Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle, Oxford 1982, p. 78.

6. NE 1097-8. 7. NE 1177.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 17. See NE 1, 4:1095a22. Finnis, op. cit., p. 18. NE 117al-3 (X, 3). NE 116al9-22 (IX, 4).


PART III

Ethics in a Christian Context


The Structure of Moral Judgements

The purpose of this small book has been to understand what it is we are doing when we make what we call 'moral' judgments or choices. What factors are relevant to such a procedure and what resources are at our disposal? Now I want to bring together many of the topics already touched on in the various accounts of morality so far discussed, all having something positive to offer but, equally, all lacking in some important way. As we saw, as recently as thirty years ago, the two varieties of ethical theory taken most seriously, albeit in many different forms, were Utilitarianism and Kantianism: moral goodness determined by calculation on the basis of what benefits the greatest number and the view that certain types of behaviour are inherently praiseworthy or wrong. In more recent work, however, two important and widely influential developments have taken place. First, attention has turned to a revival of Ancient Greek thought and particularly that of Aristotle. Other names for this approach are 'Aretaic' (after the Greek arete for virtue) or 'Eudaimonist' (after the Greek eudaimonia for happiness) but the most common is Virtue Ethics'.1 This is also the approach Aquinas adopted when, in the Second Part of his Summa Theologiae, he constructed on the basis of his reading of Aristotle a comprehensive ethical account. Second, there has been a revival of natural law theory, pioneered by what has come to be called the 'Grisez School7 comprising thinkers

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such as Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle and, most recently, Robert George.2 The following account owes much to the fruits of these revivals.3 The goal of choice on these accounts of morality is human flourishing and one of its strengths is that it combines the strengths of both Deontological and Consequentialist accounts: virtues are chosen for their own sake, yet the moral agent must focus on the ends and purposes of one's life as a whole. The good for human beings is a complex of goods, each essential and incommensurable among themselves. This will, of course, sometimes make for difficult, even tragic, choices; but the goal of human flourishing is, self-evidently, worth whatever suffering it may involve. Such an approach as this is a teleological ethic in which the end is human flourishing, characterized by qualities known as virtues, in which the good rather than the right is paramount. Ethics aims at knowing in what the good consists, what it is to be a good human being, rather than merely knowing which action is right in this particular case. On this account, unlike most forms of Consequentialism, moral judgement cannot be reduced exclusively either to a calculation or to the application of a rule. Rules are important, of course; but they are important precisely because they result from a distillation of the wisdom and good habits of choice, as well as inherited knowledge of which habits are praiseworthy and which not, within the tradition through which one knows oneself. The good life, in other words, is the one that manifests the virtues. So, an aretaic ethic can hold both that certain types of behaviour can be either inherently praiseworthy or wrong; and that consequences and rules play a part. But it regards both these positions in isolation from the other as insufficient.4 In this view, knowledge of what to become is the goal of ethics: only then are we in a position to know what to do. This, of course, involves knowledge of how to choose and for this practical wisdom or prudence is required. Crucially, such knowledge and prudence arise from the experience of


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choices: moral education is from below upwards, we might say. But this is learned in interaction with top-down knowledge derived from tradition. In this sense, moral knowledge is not isolated from all our other knowledge: moral knowledge and experience are both social and objective. THE MEANING OF 'GOOD7

But first an important preliminary: what about this word 'good'? What is the fundamental meaning of this allimportant word, the meaning, that is, which enters into every instance of its use? Aristotle states quite tersely and, to our ear, rather sparsely: The good is that which all things desire'.5 He means that, in its widest possible sense, 'good' means 'desirable'; and we may add 'for whatever reason'. Good refers to anything a person can desire. Aquinas takes this view over completely.6 To us, this may sound strange, as if the word has been emptied of any significant content, rendering it vacuously formal. But to understand Aristotle's point we should remember that whenever we act, we act for an end, a goal, an aim or a purpose. We act for the sake of something which is considered desirable, however minimally, however unreasonably even. (A scratch will do.) If the end did not in some way appear to us as desirable, we would not act. A good, as perceived by us, is the end of every act and, therefore, the end of every act is something desirable. Now this sense of the word 'good' could be said to be its pre-ethical sense in that it is present throughout the infinite variety of contexts in which the word is used. Indeed, it is precisely this widest possible meaning which enables us to use it with such widely differing applications. The word 'good', in other words, is used analogically and what exactly it means in each context will depend on what thing is being

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described as good and what our expectations of that thing are. In turn, having expectations will depend on our knowledge of what a thing is. We know what we expect of something because we know what kind of thing something is and what it is for. Expectations will be different in each case and yet the word 'good' will share a similar meaning among its uses. Unless I know what something is, I will not know what to expect of it; and, therefore, I will not know whether it is good or bad, because I will not know whether it has got what it should have or is what it should be. Notice, the force of the 'should' here is non-moral: it is drawn simply from a knowledge of what something is and is for. In exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons, an evil is a deficiency or lack in some respect vital to the thing in question. It is not necessarily an absolute deficiency or just any deficiency. It is no deficiency in me that I can't run like a mountain goat. (This is Aquinas's example.) But it would be a deficiency in me if I could not feed myself or if some other essential quality or capacity were missing. Similarly, it may be that some other quality which shouldn't be there is present in the place of what should be there. Now, in principle, this same sense of the words 'good' and 'bad' applies when we speak of human beings. Infinitely more complex as it is, the same application of the words is nevertheless in force here. Formally, we can say that a 'good human being' is one who possesses all the properties of a fully functioning, fully flourishing human nature. But ethics seeks to articulate what, concretely, constitutes this human flourishing. What is interesting here, though this is to anticipate slightly, is that we would not call a person 'good' in an unqualified sense unless he or she were intent on knowing and participating in the morally good judgements and choices. Consider how you would even begin to argue with someone who denied this: we saw how difficult, if not impossible, this would be with one who claimed to be an amoralist.


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It will be clear that the meaning of 'good7 is closely related to the notion of fulfilment in two ways. Something is called 'good' when it fulfils its purpose, when it is itself fulfilled, complete, running well, being all it can be, realizing its potential, 'coming up to scratch'. The word 'good' is close to the notion of fulfilment in a second way: we act for the sake of something desirable. In other words, we act for an end or good which will satisfy our desire for, or need of, fulfilment in some way. I stretch my leg in order to satisfy a desire for comfort: this is a partial fulfilment of some aspect of my physical well-being. I work hard for an exam and pass: this is to satisfy a desire for material betterment and security. This is a fulfilment of another aspect of my life. Now, we desire many things and we are capable of fulfilling many different desires. Similarly, there are many potentialities which we are capable of realizing. But which ones should be realized? Surely, not every potentiality is to be realized, even if we were capable? How, then, are we to distinguish between all these? What principles are involved? Stealing valuable antiques is fulfilling a potential as much as caring for the sick. Mugging pensioners is as much the fulfilling of a potential as is mending their cars. Becoming a good con-man is as much the realizing of a potential as becoming a good teacher. What's the difference? Is the fulfilment of just any potentiality to be deemed a good and thus the fulfilment of my nature? Is it that the realizing of just any potential is equally good in an unqualified sense? Clearly not. But how do we show this? On a very basic level there is an immediate basis for a distinction among various possibilities: a distinction which makes appeal to our good sense, reasonableness or prudence. On each of the many levels of our lives, some actions promote a furthering of overall objectives, opening new possibilities and bringing to light and fruition other capacities. Other actions tend to fragment, dissipate, close off possibilities, frustrate certain needs, limit us in terms of

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self-expression and achievement. Certain potentialities, when realized, produce conflict, wasted energy, division, turmoil and general deadening of human activity.7 Clearly, some of our inclinations and urges do not correspond to basic values apparent to anybody: for instance, the tendency to always try to get one's own way. On the most basic level of all, that of physical survival, the potentialities which make for life and those which make for death are all too obvious and beyond debate. But we need some things more than the mere means of survival. And so, the further you get from this obvious level the more likelihood there is of disagreement and debate. Nevertheless, we do recognize that our actions either contribute to or diminish the possibilities of human well-being, conceived and understood as a balanced and harmonious flourishing of all the facets of our nature as human beings. We recognize such a state — integral human fulfilment — to be a self-evident value in a way that is fundamental — literally, foundational — for us as human beings. Such is the self-evidence of the notion of integral human fulfilment that we would not know how to answer someone who questioned the point of integral human fulfilment.8 This is apparent to us if we think of human fulfilment in terms of integration as opposed to fragmentation. So Mary Midgley makes a similar point when she says that integration is not an optional extra. Disintegration is manifestly to our disadvantage: the moral imperative is the direct correlate of 'our demand for wholeness. The sanction for resisting it is not just logical confusion but disintegration/9 BASIC HUMAN GOODS Many random factors contribute to the good life: fortune, economic advantage, physical well-being, time and place of birth, etc. We grasp which actions, states and potentialities


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within our control contribute to integration and fulfilment by reflection on our and others' experience or inclinations or desires: we see these as good things to have, to do, to be. Unlike sheer inclinations or urges, which do not necessarily correspond to basic values, these goods do not stand in need of explanation. Society would be impossible were it not the case that there was some minimum degree of agreement about the necessary conditions for human flourishing. As Michael Ignatieff says: 'Human needs are not infinitely contestable'.10 These basic human goods correspond to and are rooted in inclinations or innate tendencies which are shared by all human beings and which earth all other human values, such as: the inclination to seek what is good and avoid what is not good; the inclination to preserve and transmit life; the inclination to seek and know the true and the beautiful; the inclination towards friendship in all its forms, including marriage and social and political co-existence. These inclinations correspond to the following basic human goods: life, family, friendship, work, play, beauty, knowledge, integrity and religion.11 There are human goods that are basic and irreducible in such a way that it is they that enable us to understand and recognize as good any particular aspect of human activity, because it is understood to be a promotion of one of these basic human goods. Far from being in need of justification themselves, they provide us with sufficient explanation and justification for our partial commitments and activities. A grasp of these basic human goods provides us with the principles and starting-points with which we discern which actions and activities are reasonable. So we distinguish a reasonable course of action from a blind urge, or a fulfilling and enriching commitment from a destructive and divisive one, by reference to these basic human goods. But notice, it is not the sheer presence of the inclination or desire but the recognition that it is a self-evident value if human beings are to flourish that counts. And recognition is not the same as a

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gut feeling or indeed any feeling. It is first and foremost the work of understanding. These basic human goods, then, are the principles of practical reasonableness. They provide us with an orientation for practical reasoning. They guide us in the sense of providing reasons for considering some possibilities as worthy opportunities for human flourishing. They are the logical and experiential starting-points for deliberation about what to be, what to do, what to have. They are the last resort in justifying what we take to be obvious to any openminded, sane human being about what is a worthy course of action, in that a course of action is justified as worthy by being a way of participating in the particular basic human good. A good course of action, however, is not deduced from the basic human good, as though the latter were a rule or maxim, but is recognized to be an instantiation of the good. But what makes these basic human goods basic? What distinguishes them from other recognizable goods? We have all kinds of goals in life and every act is for an end or goal or good, as we saw. Some of these goods are completely extrinsic to us as persons, even remote: all our possessions, however important to us, are such. Some things are thought to be good because of their relevance to something else and some goods are simply useful for certain purposes. All such goods are means to ends. But what distinguishes the most basic human goods is that they are neither instrumental nor means to ends nor extrinsic to us as persons, but constitutive of what it is to be a flourishing human being. As such, they are aspects of personal being, not things which a person may have or use. Further, such goods as these are not accomplishments or the limited outcome of specific actions: they are not even goals, as such. On the contrary, they are the reasons for all our accomplishments. They are the justifications for and the explanations of our goals, the self-justifying reasons for intelligently, that is, reasonably wanting something. As


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opposed to limited and contingent goods, things which are distinct from us as persons, without these we would not be fully human: our existence would be truncated. And so we participate in them for their own sake — which is our sake. It is in this sense that we can speak of the ethical good as that which we truly desire: it is, in other words, related to wants and needs at the most fundamental level.12 Of course, we are infinitely capable of self-deception with regard to what our needs are.13 These basic human goods need not be the explicit purpose or object of specific actions. Our actions have their own, proper and limited goals and by the performance of these actions we achieve or fail to achieve those goals. Specific goals can be completed and fulfilled and will or will not yield satisfaction, etc. But the basic human goods are realized as the concomitant of such actions: or, better, by such actions we participate in the basic human goods. Our participation is ongoing. And participation in the basic human goods is fullness of life, meaningfulness of existence, personhood, happiness, fulfilment.14 Further, the basic human goods are open-ended, never fully or finally realized in this life. The basic human goods are not definite and specific objectives or goals or desired states of affairs or things we hope to achieve in the future: our self-determination is never ended and no aspect of our well-being is ever complete. They go beyond any particular instantiation of them and are inexhaustible. We do not, in other words, arrive at integral human fulfilment this side of the grave. Because they constitute human fulfilment, as such, the basic human goods are several rather than singular. That is to say, they correspond to the complexity and multi-faceted constitution of human nature. This is important to stress in the light of various strategies for reducing them to one good, as in Aristotle, Kant, Utilitarianism, etc. It is also important to note that they are all irreducible among themselves.

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Some of these goods are, of course, participated in unconsciously and prior to any understanding of them: e.g. life itself, play, knowledge, etc. But part of the dawning of consciousness and reason is our grasp that these are values which are to be promoted and cared for, not to say enhanced and improved. We said earlier that we know the basic human goods precisely as aspects of authentic human flourishing: rather than needing demonstration, they themselves function as the reason why certain courses of action are to be chosen: viz., they promote the human goods. But this work of recognition is not just a gut feeling, hunch or intuition, neither in the colloquial sense, nor in the technical sense of G. E. Moore's Intuitionism. Nor is it an instinct in the biological sense. Knowing the basic human goods is the work of intelligence, thought and judgement: it is an intellectual grasp. But such recognition is neither innate nor automatic. Nor is it achieved by everybody, willy-nilly, as a matter of course. Such a capacity for recognition could be hindered, if not obliterated altogether, in the absence of certain necessary conditions. For instance friendship or sociability is obviously a basic human good and, as such, fulfilling of human nature. But is it obvious to everybody? One could conceive of circumstances in which this recognition was inhibited or blocked so that the desirability of friendship and sociability in its many forms was not self-evident to someone. For instance, this may well be the case in the mind of someone who had been subjected to certain forms of psychological deprivation in childhood. Fundamental aspects of human flourishing might be absent from such a person's experience. Nevertheless, friendship remains an obvious good. In answer to the question, 'Is friendship worth having?' the reply is 'Yes, obviously'. If someone disagreed, how would you go about explaining why? You wouldn't. Instead, you would wonder what had gone wrong in that person's life. But again, importantly, it is not simply the universal


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presence of an urge or inclination that gives rise to the notion of a basic human good, nor is it a matter of counting heads. They are not, in other words, drawn by inference from empirical data. It would not matter, for instance, how many people had a deeply rooted inclination towards divisive behaviour: this would be no guide to whether or not this was a basic human good. Again, though it may be the case that all desire knowledge, as Aristotle says, it is not simply the universality of the desire that demonstrates that knowledge is a basic human good. Rather, one grasps with the understanding that in the case of certain tendencies the object of such an inclination is a human good, a desirable value of human life. It is, in other words, the recognition that this urge is towards a good authentically perfective of our nature that enables us to recognize it as a basic human good. As we saw, we may feel many different urges, but it is the work of judgement and intelligence to sort out these one from another. Another familiar misconception, especially when the approach outlined here goes explicitly under the rubric of 'natural law', is the view that we infer basic human goods directly from the way our human nature is: from the fact that something is an ineradicable feature of the way we are, or from something that is common to all animals. All such facts are, of course, relevant to the kind of consideration which issues in a grasp of basic human goods: all contribute to our understanding of ourselves. But our grasp of the genuine goods of human living is not a logically compelled inference or a deduction. It is the work of intelligence and practical reasoning attending to one's inclinations and the whole range of possibilities open to us by which we gain insight and understanding about those goals which are desirable and opportunities for fulfilment as opposed to dead-ends. Indeed, ethical reflection itself, far from starting from a grasp of our nature or what we are, is an essential part of the process which leads us to an understanding of what we are by nature:

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... [knowledge of] human nature is not the "basis of ethics'; rather, ethics is an indispensable preliminary to a full and soundly based knowledge of human nature. What one can and should say about human nature, as a result of one's ethical inquiries, is not a mere rhetorical addition; it finds a place in the sober and factual account of what it is to be a human being.15

I should stress that my references to the intellect grasping and recognizing the basic human goods are not intended to imply that we exercise our understanding in insulation or isolation from our feelings. It is doubtful whether there is such a pristine thing as a purely intellectual process: feelings, emotions and desires are involved at all points and it would be a delusion to deny it. But feelings alone are no guide: alone they only display a subjective point of view which is tantamount to 'saying that it is not a judgement'.16 Intelligence and judgement are the organizing and discriminating factors in such understanding. Such is the work of practical reasoning. One way of seeing how this is so is to consider the assumptions underlying the way we actually reason about what to do. In any analysis of why we think we should do something, we eventually arrive at a point where the reason we adduce is no longer a means to an end but an end in itself: that is, a good which is taken as the very presupposition of the discourse or argument, as an aspect of human fulfilment with which no sane person could disagree. We arrive at the fundamental issue which is the reason for intelligently wanting something and choosing to act towards it. So for instance if you ask 'Why are you doing this?' and proceed to push the enquiry back as far as it will go you will eventually come to a point beyond which further explanation will be impossible. Eventually you come to a point where the reasoning has to stop or seriously risk collapsing into madness.


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'Why are you shopping?' 'To buy food for dinner/ 'Why do you want dinner?' 'Because we need to eat/ 'Why do you need to eat?' 'If we don't, we'll die/ 'Why do you need to live?' 'Don't be stupid/ The final retort manifests the self-evidence of the point which is being (insanely) disputed. It is the same kind of selfevidence as that which attends the principle of noncontradiction in logic. To deny it is to deny the possibility of any kind of (moral) discourse at all. However, the self-evidence of these goods does not entail that they are arrived at without experience, learning and education. As we said earlier, they are not innate and our capacity for recognition can be suppressed through circumstances. Conversely, however, nor does it mean that those who are guided by them necessarily formulate them explicitly or reflectively. Nor does it mean that, even given education and experience, every articulation of them will be necessarily and automatically accurate, requiring no further thought or reflection. It is important to notice that the 'What for?7 question is a question posed by intelligence which enters into all human, voluntary acts. Sometimes we act in a way that is not voluntary. Such acts are not the object of moral deliberation. But sometimes we act on the basis of feelings alone rather than what we judge to be good. It is important to be clear that judgement must be the deciding factor in free moral choices. It is intelligence, after all, that enables us to discriminate between feelings of various kinds: feelings which we can intellectually recognize are unwarranted, irrational or delusive, etc. Human beings are a balance of aspects, body and mind, heart and head. This can hardly be denied. The question of

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how sensible and intelligible goods should be balanced is real, however, precisely because these different elements are not infrequently in conflict, one or other overriding the others. (Not always, it should be said, in the obvious order: the head can just as disastrously overrule the legitimate claims of the emotions.) In the light of such contingencies, it is necessary to discriminate between the various and conflicting claims. Aristotle argues that man is distinctive in that he embodies reason in his conduct: he is answerable to reason in all he does. But this does not exclude emotion or imagination. These too constitute excellence when appropriately directed to fitting ends: that is, when they issue in praiseworthy human acts, (i.e. reasonable acts.) 'Rationality in action is thus not an alternative to other ways of being human, but is manifested in them/17 That is to say, rational and reasonable action ('displaying reason in action'18) is a formal and generic account of human flourishing not a particular way of living picked out from among others. It is not to invoke intellectualism as an ideal, though it must be said that Aristotle's account seems to imply this. Our feelings play a critical and vital part in moral evaluation. Emotions, it may be said, embody primitive evaluations.19 Reason reflects on the objects of desire and aversion with a view to integration not exclusion. The only alternative would be the forcible exclusion of all emotion and feeling. But this is incompatible with human flourishing because it would inevitably induce a state of tension unsuitable for human beings and indeed would obviate many kinds of emotion which are appropriate reactions to certain situations, e.g. just anger, pleasure in good. As Aquinas says, the emotions are part of the good life and pleasure taken in doing good is a mark of virtue. Aristotle says that the man who does not rejoice in noble action is not good.20 'We must take as signs of states of character the pleasure or pain that ensues on acts.'21 In practice, normally, we act with an eye to both sensible


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and intelligible goods, held in balance. For instance, we take and enjoy a delicious meal, enjoying all its pleasures, both gastronomic and social, as well as serving our health and need for nourishment. But sometimes there will be a clear conflict between these two goods or ends. We readily acknowledge the need for sensible satisfaction to be accorded second place on occasion when there is a conflict. We do this all the time: when we go on a diet, when we take exercise, when we forego our own comfort for the sake of others, when we undergo medical treatment for the sake of the benefit to the whole body. What's important here is to recognize that sensible goods can only be partial aspects of the fulfilment of human beings. Sheer animal behaviour, where the satisfaction of mindless pleasure is the sole and all-encompassing objective, cannot be a fitting goal of human functioning. If this were so, we would never submit ourselves to situations which involved pain or simple discomfort even for the sake of health. A further indication that pleasure cannot be the sole point of life is that pain is a biologically necessary and beneficial aspect of all animal existence: it belongs to a healthy organism as a means of survival. In human action and free choices, judgement is prior. That intelligence and judgement, not pleasure, have a prior role in ordering and recognizing pleasures and sensible satisfactions is clear from the role they play even in one who decides to be a complete hedonist: ... other animals may be dominated by an appetite for pleasure; but it takes intelligence of the human sort to be an akolastos in Aristotle's sense and make pleasure in general one's goal.22 If one confuses sensible and intelligible goods and assumes that the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the sole motives and reason for acting, one's conception of human action and life will be correspondingly distorted. This recognition was an abiding preoccupation of many ancient

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philosophers, especially Plato. While it may well have been overstressed by some, experience still teaches us the danger of getting this aspect out of perspective. It is hard to see how we could hope to derive any meaningful overall life-plan simply from devoting ourselves wholly to bodily pleasures, and from satisfying our instinctual desires for food, drink and sex. A creature who leads such a bodily life would be very much at the mercy of his environment; even at best, his life would be uninteresting.23

This is not to say, of course, that we do not intelligently seek pleasure and avoid pain on occasion in a perfectly intelligible way. We may take a bath in order to relieve tension. Part of this is the full enjoyment of its soothing and sensuous benefits. We organize a good meal in order to promote friendship. We remove stones from our shoes and keep warm in the winter. None of these is done by way of conscious deliberation: they are a matter of necessity. But they are the result of intelligent choices aimed at activities which involve us in basic human goods, integrated and harmoniously balanced and constituting the fulfilment of human nature. We can usefully conclude by citing John Finnis' and Robert Spaemann's 'experience-machine' (original to neither of them) in order to remind us of what we will not admit as human fulfilment. Suppose you could be plugged into an 'experience machine' which, by stimulating your brain while you lay floating in a tank, would afford you all the experiences you chose, with all the variety (if any) you could want: but you must plug in for a lifetime or not at all. Would one choose to plug in for the sake of a lifetime of (nothing but) 'pleasures' ... i.e. of thrills or pleasurable tingles or other internal feelings? When we realize that we would not plug in for the sake of that sort of experience, we realize that 'pleasure' is


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not the point of human existence; the life of pleasure cannot really count as a life of fulfilment. But now suppose that we consider the option of plugging in for the sake of a lifetime of experiences of any or all of the sorts of things (activities, achievements...) in which a human being can 'take pleasure' in the broadest sense of pleasure. What is on offer is a life of satisfactions, in a broad sense of 'satisfaction'. But remember, it is not a life of activities, achievements, fulfilments; it is a lifetime of doing nothing at all, but of just floating in a tank plugged into a machine which creates for you the experience of satisfactions. Finnis concludes, 'Such a lifetime is not to be chosen, is it?/24 This obvious preference tells us a great deal about what we actually do take to be genuinely fulfilling. Clearly, maximization of pleasure is not the point of it all. Finnis enumerates three things (which he thinks are adumbrated also by Aristotle) which are essential to human fulfilment: 1 activity has its own point: that is, fulfilment entails active participation in life as opposed to passivity. 2 maintenance of one's identity is a good: I am not just a human being, but this particular, non-repeatable human being. 3 appearance is not a good substitute for reality: no 'as if is a good substitute for real life. The Thought-Machine trades on the feelings without the reality.

And the notion holding these three together is 'opportunity. 25 NOTES 1. See Bernhard Haring, The Law of Christ (2 vols), London 1965; Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, London 1981; Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue, London 1994. For a discussion of the

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2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.


development, see Jean Porter, Virtue Ethics7 in Robin Gill (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics, Cambridge 2001, pp. 96-111. Each of these authors has produced independent work, but the locus classicus for their thought is Grisez, Boyle and Finnis, 'Practical principles, moral truth and ultimate ends' in American Journal of Jurisprudence, 32(1987), pp. 99—151. Robert George's contribution can be found in George, Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays, Oxford 1993. For a full discussion of this development, see Nigel Biggar and Rufus Black, The Revival of Natural Law, Aldershot 2000. See Peter Byrne, The Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Ethics, London 1992, pp. 108-14. NE 1.1 1094a3. Summa Theologiae la 1.5.3. (hereafter ST). So Hollis in An Invitation to Philosophy, Oxford 1986, p. 3: '... human beings have all sorts of desires, some making for a peaceful life together and others for strife and enmity. We are prone to love and sympathy and also to envy, hatred and malice/ So Finnis, Grisez and Boyle, in Nuclear Deterrence, Oxford 1986, p. 287: 'Why worry about integral human fulfilment? That is like asking why man is man?' Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, London 1980, p. 271. She says earlier on p. 262: 'By integration I mean having a character, acting as a whole, having a firm and effective priority system'. See Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers, London 1984, p. 12. See Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, Morality and the Human Goods: an Introduction to Natural Law Ethics, Washington 2002, pp. 6— 25. Robert Spaemann, Basic Moral Concepts, London 1989, pp. 14—15; see also Midgley, op. cit., and Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language, London 1968. See Ignatieff, op. cit., p. 11. See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford 1980, p. 96. John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics, Oxford 1983, pp. 21—2. Mary Midgley, Can't We Make Moral Judgementsl, London 1991, p. 142.


17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Byrne, op. tit., p. 116. Ibid. Ibid. NE 1099a. NE 1104b. Elizabeth Anscombe, Collected Works, vol. I, Oxford 1981, p. 107. 23. William Jordan, Ancient Concepts of Philosophy, London 1990, p. 91. 24. John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 37. Spaemann uses a similar conceptual experiment with the same conclusion. See Spaemann, op. tit., pp. 15—23. 25. Finnis, op. cit.f p. 41.

Christian Morality

I referred at the beginning of this short book to the widely held view that the Judaeo-Christian framework that has sustained our moral identity and shaped our ethical deliberations for the last 2000 years in the West has collapsed. This alleged fragmentation of Christian moral discourse was first articulated in the early 1980s by Alasdair Maclntyre. In the first of a trilogy of volumes that have become the starting-point for modern discussion of these issues, Maclntyre locates the beginning of this crisis of community and identity in the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment. And he likens the ensuing moral crisis in our own day to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century, ushering in the so-called Dark Ages. There is, however, a difference. This time', he says '... the Barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament/1 Many secular commentators would agree. While Jewish and Christian writers see the present state of affairs as a cultural loss, giving rise to 'acute structural weaknesses in contemporary society' (Sacks),2 secular commentators like Peter Singer, the pioneer of animal rights and trenchant critic of what he takes to be the Christian ethical viewpoint, are convinced that the demise of Christianity and its influence on our moral identity is long overdue: its disappearance finally opens up a 'better way of life for us/ For him, the Judaeo-Christian moral order is 'an empty shell, founded on a set of beliefs that most people have laid aside'.3

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In my opinion, the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition has not collapsed: but nor has it been very much in evidence in modern times. What has exceeded its sell-by date, however, is an attenuated and inadequate version of Christian morality which has, during its tenure, served only to obscure the rich heritage of Christian moral insight. Much of what has been rejected by modernity and now post-modernity is a peculiarly impoverished and truncated account of Christian morality. In this sense, the rejection of much that has carried the label 'Christian' in the sphere of ethics and morality is to be welcomed as an opportunity to make room for what is genuinely Christian. Legalism, for instance, has justifiably been associated with a Christian view of morality, in theory and in practice. But what we see throughout the Christian gospels is a searing attack on heartless legalism. Intrusive moralizing has often passed for Christian moral insight, giving rise to the conviction that Christianity is concerned with a morality understood exclusively in terms of external acts and, usually, bad acts at that. In this travesty, the black-clad clergyman's sole role is to warn, condemn and pronounce sanctions on wrongdoing. According to this all-too-common view, morality deals primarily with what to shun rather than with what to be and to do. But throughout the Christian gospels we hear of forgiveness, life in abundance and the new commandment of love. Authoritarian elitism has often been allowed to hijack moral discussion. Morality and ethics fall prey to the experts, whether clerical or lay, involving the tyranny not just of the legislator, but of the law-centred ethic, so often taken to be at the heart of the Christian moral outlook. But authority need not be authoritarian. Indeed, throughout the Christian gospels we are told that the exercise of authority is one of service and sacrifice. In moral matters, the decision of the expert can never supplant the decision of the subject. Again, Christian morality has too often been trivialized by the carrot of reward and punishment and the frankly presumptuous threat of divine sanction

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applied to merely human regulation. How far this is from the heart of Christianity is echoed in the remark of one medieval theologian that 'we do not offend God except by doing something contrary to our own good'. In this view, it would be more accurate to say that we are punished by our sins, not for them. Most important of all, however, is the criticism levelled by Peter Singer, who charges Christianity with obscuring the true nature of morality. Unlike the great figures of preChristian moral discourse, Christians, he alleges, have lost sight of the goal of ethical deliberation: namely, genuine, human self-interest and fulfilment. In a word, happiness. Singer is right: a morality of law, command, duty and obligation has replaced an older tradition of moral discourse that stretches back to ancient Greece and which was commonplace in the earliest years of Christianity and among the Fathers of the Church and flourished until the thirteenth century. Ironically, the impetus in recent years for a return to an ethic that emphasizes goodness of character more than Tightness of act, virtue rather than obedience to the law, fulfilment or happiness more than obligation and duty has come, in the main, from secular moralists. The result of this hiatus has been a Christian morality wrenched from the only context in which it can make sense: namely, the ethic of the Gospel, exemplified in the Beatitudes. Charles Taylor has suggested that there is a contemporary ideal, indeed, a moral ideal, that has been recovered only in modern culture and which has taken firm root only in the present generation. Though it is frequently criticized as a sham or a cover for self-indulgence and always in danger of being swamped by subjectivism, what Taylor detects at the heart of modern culture is the ideal of authenticity and he points to this as the ideal underlying much that is good in modern society. Is it not significant that, throughout the Christian gospels, the most consistent moral censure focuses on the opposite of authenticity: hypocrisy? If the influence of Christianity has waned, if many have

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looked elsewhere for inspiration and guidance, it is because Christians have come to see the primary focus of morality as duty rather than opportunity: they have allowed the threat of punishment and the promise of reward to trivialize and inhibit the quest for wholeness and integrity; and they have allowed law to replace grace, and obedience to replace love. To grasp what is distinctive about Christian morality, it is necessary to consider three elements: Christianity's relation to its origins in Judaism; its relations with contemporary philosophical thought; and its own, original resources, namely, the New Testament. The early Church carried into the history of Christianity much that belonged to the Jewish religion. One thing it left behind, however, was the Jewish ethic of law: divine command made known in a comprehensive legal code, interpreted endlessly by generations of lawyers and religious courts. Moral concern, in this legal tradition, was easily and frequently supplanted by preoccupation with precise and minutely fashioned ritual requirements and practices. Christians dropped the legalism and kept the law, that is the foundation of the Law, the Ten Commandments. Early Christians saw their adherence to the Ten Commandments as testimony to their faithfulness to God's original revelation. But they also understood them to be the principles and guidelines for civilized existence and human flourishing, according to the human nature we have been given by God: pointers to the minimum conditions that make for a peaceful and flourishing existence in harmony with all around you. Though they were given by God, they are rational conclusions at which one could arrive simply by the exercise of reason, wisdom and reflection on experience. In this sense, they sum up the most basic demands of our nature as social animals and they establish the most fundamental perspective within which to understand ourselves. What is particularly interesting is that they point to relationships as the natural goal of human existence: our

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relationship with God and the network of relationships of all kinds among ourselves. So the first three commandments establish the contours of our relationship with the Creator and the other seven establish the outlines for all our other relationships. That each of the Ten Commandments is expressed as a negative might be thought a misleading starting-point for a morality of human flourishing. But, as G. K. Chesterton once said: '... it is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden .... It is better to tell a man not to steal than to try to tell him the thousand things that he can enjoy without stealing; especially as he can generally be pretty well trusted to enjoy them/4 But unlike both Judaism and Islam, Christianity is not a religion of law. Though it carries with it the Ten Commandments, and though these were quickly understood to be an expression of the natural law, Christian morality was of a different order from a law-based ethic and governed by an entirely different mindset. Christianity offered from the beginning a moral teaching that responded to the most widespread question posed by contemporary philosophy: the question of happiness and salvation. Hence, the most concentrated body of moral teaching in the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, begins with the Beatitudes: 'Happy are the poor ...', etc. But the Sermon on the Mount has often been misunderstood as a set of impossible commands, a code of obligations. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Sermon does, indeed, contain demanding and challenging teaching, ranging over a variety of particular topics, but the injunction that is undoubtedly without precedent in the Old Testament or anywhere else and which underlies all else both in the Sermon on the Mount and the gospels generally, is the injunction to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' (Matt. 5: 44).

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The new commandment of love, in other words, is at the heart of this moral teaching, and the gospels, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, draw out the radical implications of this new commandment. Though the teaching is expressed in the recognizable form of wisdom literature, with deliberate hyperbole, these 'strenuous commands' deliberately offer an ideal beyond anyone's individual grasp. And this is deliberate because love is essentially limitless, always calling us forward. There could be no more explicit and unequivocal statement of the foundation of Christian morality in the gospels than when the religious leaders try to trap Jesus into answering a trick question in order to have grounds on which to condemn him. Teacher', they ask him, 'which commandment in the law is the greatest?' He answers, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets' (Matt. 22: 35—40). Luke adds, 'Do this, and you shall live'. And St John sums up explicitly, 'I ask you, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but one we have had from the beginning: let us love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments: this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning.' The ultimate criterion of any teaching that claims to be Christian moral teaching is whether or not it is consistent with this statement. That this was from the earliest times understood to be the litmus test is obvious in something St Paul says, 'Owe no one anything except to love one another: for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet" and any other commandment are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbour as yourself". Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law' (Rom. 13: 8-10).

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There are no limits to love and it is in its fullness definable only in terms of God: in the gospels Jesus tells his followers not only to love 'as yourself but 'as I have loved you7. This is why the gospels also invite imitation of Jesus. 'Follow me' recurs throughout the gospels and Jesus constantly offers himself as an example of the life his followers should lead. 'Shoulder my yoke and learn from me' (Matt. 11: 29). 'If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross' (Mark 8: 34). And when he washes his disciples' feet, he explicitly invites them to do the same: 'as I have loved you, so are you to love one another' (John 15: 2). That this was understood from the beginning in the early Church is borne out by countless examples from the writings of St Paul, especially his hymn to love in the letter to the Corinthians, and from the early Church Fathers. None is more explicit, however, than the greatest of the Latin Fathers, St Augustine of Hippo: Love, and do what you will. If you keep silence, keep silence in love; if you speak, speak in love; if you correct, correct in love; if you forbear, forbear in love. Let love's root be within you, for from that root nothing but good can spring.

(Epistola Joannis 7.8)

This distinctively Christian moral teaching continued in the work of such important thinkers as St Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that we are made out of and for love, made to share the life of God in friendship with him and all whom he has created. Only love, according to Aquinas, unites us to God, and to love is to share his life. Love is both the highest and the form or inner rationale of all the virtues: without love, no virtue is possible. All the virtues, in other words, specify the form love takes in different circumstances. Though soon after Aquinas a morality of law supplanted this original morality of love and grace, the revival of socalled 'Virtue Ethics' in both secular and Christian contexts

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has helped to demonstrate the original character of Christian morality. Virtue ethics is significantly different both from the way people have professionally thought about the subject until recently and the way most people on the popular level approach the subject. But this is a return to a much older way of understanding morality, going all the way back to Aristotle in fifth-century Greece, and it was the accepted way of thinking about morality until roughly the eve of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is referred to as Virtue ethics' because of the original meaning of the word in Greek which our word Virtue' (from the Latin virtus) translates. The Greeks used the word arete for anything and everything: an arrow, a vase, an olive grove, a wife, a father, a slave or a citizen. The word means 'excellence' and it was used to register that something was a good example of its kind. When used of a person, arete refers to the characteristics of the good person: good in the sense of being all that a person is meant to be: hence the necessity of asking what precisely a person is meant to be. Now as we saw, when Aristotle asks himself what a good person is, he is necessarily confined within a highly specific and historically conditioned set of categories and expectations. For one thing, he is asking about what it is to be a good man. And this is because his conception of human flourishing concerned only the citizens of the Greek city-state, the polls. And only men, not women, and free men, not slaves, were citizens. So when Aristotle answers this question, he offers eleven different virtues vital to the life of the good citizen. For him, a human being is first and foremost a social being, taking his part in the life of the polis. And he is a rational being, able to exercise his faculty for right thinking and clear argument. Of course, he has much more to say besides. But for our purpose, we can see the methodology involved. First ask what kind of thing a person is and what they are for — what is their telos, or their purpose. And then you are in a position to say what characteristics a good specimen of this kind of thing will

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display — what, in other words, constitutes the virtuous person, the person who is all that he or she is meant to be. When we talk about the virtues, we are answering the question 'What kind of person should I become?' They are the goal towards which we strive, even if we never become fully that kind of person in this life. A distinct advantage of this approach to ethics, therefore, is that one of its fundamental categories is growth. Ethics is concerned, on this reading, with knowing what we should aim to become and setting ourselves in the direction of that goal. But arriving there is a long process. Indeed, Aristotle makes the point succinctly and memorably that this is a lifetime's work when he says, 'One swallow does not make a summer, nor one fine day'. Another advantage of this approach over the actionoriented or the obligation and law-based understanding of morality ethics is that it attends to the whole person and to the whole of a person's life. Remembering that growth is the key concept, this approach acknowledges that every moment and every circumstance can contribute to growth of virtue or its opposite. And this is based on the view that every free act has its effect and contributes to the kind of person we become. I become, in other words, what I do. Or as Gerard Manley Hopkins has it, 'What I do is me/ One way of describing the difference between these two ways of doing ethics is to say that one is problem-based and the other person-based. The problem-based approach responds and reacts to situations as and when they arise, while the other approach is pro-active and cultivates the inner person from within whom outer actions emanate. From the beginning, then, Christian morality was a virtuebased morality. And it is commonly acknowledged that the foremost exponent of this approach to ethics and morality since the thirteenth century has been St Thomas Aquinas. Christian ways of understanding morality and doing ethics have fallen on hard times usually when they have failed to make capital of these insights.

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NOTES 1. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, London 1981, p. 263. 2. Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope, London 1997, p. 87. 3. See 'Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong' in The Spectator 16 September 1995, pp. 20—2 and Rethinking Life and Death, London 1992. 4. G. Marlin, More Quotable Chesterton, San Francisco 1988, p. 494.

A Classical Christian Moral Account: St Thomas Aquinas

It cannot be sufficiently stressed that the starting-point of Aquinas's view of morality sets him apart from practically every modern attempt to articulate a Christian ethical outlook. For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, morality is rooted in the most basic and universal desire of human beings: the desire for happiness and fulfilment. Thus the keystone of his moral treatise in the Summa Theologiae is the question that opens the discussion: in what does human happiness consist? What is genuinely fulfilling of our human nature and how is this to be achieved? Only much later does he arrive at what we would conventionally call 'moral questions'. His pursuit of these questions gives rise to an ethics, not of duty, but of opportunity: opportunity, that is, for human flourishing, an ethic rooted in our human nature rather than in an externally imposed law. For him, law does not have anything like the central role in determining the morality of an action that it does for modern moralists and nowhere does he devote a question to the nature of obligation, as such. This establishes a distinctive perspective within which human needs and experience at all levels are taken seriously. The very stuff of morality, its raw material, is the human nature with which we have been endowed by God: and the point and purpose of moral reflection is to discern ways in which this nature can flourish. In adopting this starting point, however, Aquinas was not innovating: he stands, as we have seen, in a consistent


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tradition beginning with the ancients and echoed in both the Latin and Greek Fathers of the Church. For all of them, happiness is self-evidently the principal question of morality and, for the Christian Fathers, the Gospel of Christ offers the true answer to what is our highest and most complete and lasting happiness and fulfilment. The significance and implications of this distinction between happiness and obligation as the starting points of ethics are vast: each gives rise not merely to different emphases, but an entirely different moral theology. We are offered in these different approaches two opposed models of moral thought: happiness leads us to talk of the virtues, obligation to talk of duties. To understand morality as the quest for fulfilment focuses our attention on what is genuinely good for us, what answers to our most basic needs: the door is then open for talk of communion and wholeness, love and friendship: and, in so far as it figures at all, obedience follows from and serves love. To focus on obligation, on the other hand, implies an arbitrary and external principle of action in which conformity to law is all important. In this account, love is subordinated to obedience, and thus the 'moralist ... becomes the guardian of laws, the interpreter of commands, the judge of obligations'.1 And the door is then open for an unhealthy and unhelpful concentration on sin and what is to be avoided rather than what to be and what to do. The word Aquinas uses for 'happiness' is beatitudo. Of course, ever since Kant, such a notion has aroused suspicion, seeming to point to hedonism and Utilitarianism. But Aquinas is not speaking of some passing feeling or mood: he means, 'a complete well-being .. / (Ia2ae 2.4). Our happiness is the perfection of our nature and it will correspond to the essential propensities of human nature and the flourishing of each. Thus, Aquinas holds, we know happiness only in communion, love and friendship. Friendship, as we shall see, is integral to Aquinas's view of morality and human fulfilment: he sees it as the highest

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form of love and the culmination of our relationship with God. Aquinas is clear that happiness comes from being united with the object of love, but since only God quietens all desires, our ultimate happiness consists in being united in friendship with God. For man to rest content with any created good is not possible, for he can be happy only with complete good which satisfies his desire altogether; he would not have reached his ultimate end were there something still remaining to be desired.2

So, though our desire for this perfection is itself natural, its fulfilment is a gift of grace. Consequently, and unlike Aristotle, Aquinas thinks that perfect happiness is not possible in this life. Nevertheless, just as every desire points ultimately to the completion of all desire, namely God, so even now we can know imperfect and incomplete happiness. So Aquinas sees continuity between this life and the next: our happiness begins here and now. Aquinas's rooting of morality in the desire for happiness leads him to take every aspect of human nature and experience seriously. Everything potentially contributes to or detracts from human felicity. Aquinas judges as morally good all those things required for happiness: so he says that we need health (Ia2ae 4.6), sufficient temporal goods to enable us to live virtuously (Ia2ae 4.7), and the company of our friends (Ia2ae 4.8), even in heaven. Nothing is too insignificant to be considered in the scheme of things. He devotes as much energy to discussing the needs of the body and the role of the emotions as he does to any apparently more 'spiritual' question. In large measure, this is attributable to his conviction that human beings are a unity of body and soul: we are not our souls, and no greater priority should be given to either element.


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It is a common criticism of Christian morality that it downgrades the body and its functions, regarding it as of less importance than the soul. St Thomas is completely untouched by this Platonist and Neoplatonist perspective. Aquinas restores the Christian view that the human body is essential to our nature: without it we are not complete. According to Aquinas, a soul without a body is not a fully functioning human being. We are completely human again only when reunited with our bodies and as the body is necessary for knowledge, so it is necessary for happiness.3 In this Thomas has turned his back on the 'spiritualist' view of human beings — the prevalent view in Aquinas's time, and for many Christians, still the dominant view4 — which sees the care of the soul as the pressing priority. For most Christians, it still is. But Aquinas is clear: 'Our bodily nature, far from issuing from an evil principle, as the Manichees imagine, is from God' (2a2ae 25.5). This emphasis on human persons as a unity — the unity of the substantial form — got Aquinas into serious trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities. But he was determined to spell out the implications of this essential Christian viewpoint. For instance, far from devaluing the emotions or passions as in themselves disturbances and hindrances, rather in the way a Stoic might regard them, Aquinas regards them 'as part of the virtuous life' (Ia2ae 24.3). Again, moral decision-making is not done by the intellect alone, as if in some sense the body and our passions and emotions were alien to it and able to be commanded at will. For Aquinas there is no exercise either of the will or the intellect without imagination — which involves the body, our passions and the emotions. They are part of what it is to be human and all human acts involve such factors. It is impossible for the intellect or the soul simply to command the emotions. Man's control over his emotions is political rather than despotic. Sexuality, for Aquinas, is, in itself, good (2a2ae 23.1 ad 1) and the lack of due delight in our senses is a serious failing

150


(2a2ae 142.1). Indeed, he avers that in man's state of innocence before the Fall, the pleasure of sex would have been even greater (la 98.2 ad 3). He is clear that 'People need pleasure as remedies for all sorts of grief and sorrow' (Ia2ae 31.5 ad 1), To the extent that reasonable activity needs bodily activity he should enjoy bodily pleasures' (2a2ae 142.1 ad 2). According to St Thomas, God has given us our senses so that we might delight in his creation. Thomas devotes a whole question to an issue of pressing importance to any human being: what is the remedy for feeling fed up — he uses the word melancholia and often this is translated, quite reasonably, as 'depression'? The remedy, he announces, is the sympathy of friends, a good sob and, last of all, a hot bath and an early night (Ia2ae 38). Aquinas's account of ethics and morality begins from a consideration of the needs, desires and acts that characterize our nature. It is important to situate this consideration. For Aquinas and his contemporaries, moral theology does not exist, as such. These reflections on morality take place in the context of his attempt to set forth the whole of the Christian faith in systematic form. God is the origin and end of all things that exist. Man is made in God's image and made for communion with God in friendship, and Christ is the means by which man enters into this relationship. The purpose of morality is to enable us to arrive at the fulfilment of our natures and the completion of our desires. Aquinas frequently uses St Augustine's phrase that we are made to enjoy God: frui Deo. There is one aspect of Aquinas's thinking that is, more than any other, frequently misunderstood: namely, the notion of Natural Law. Aquinas's moral theory is not law centred, and yet he famously speaks of the natural law. This may seem an inconsistency. And yet paradoxically, it is precisely with the fourteenth-century attack on the notion of natural law by nominalistic thinkers such as the Franciscan, William of Ockham (1285—1349), that the Christian approach to morality becomes law centred and focused on obligations.


151

The fundamental premise of Aquinas's talk of natural law is that the basis of morality is the constitution of our human nature and its needs. Christian natural law thinking derives from the oldest concept of moral theory. The Greeks had a clear sense that there was a law greater than human law. Philosophical elaboration of this conviction took place in Plato's insistence on the rule of reason and Aristotle's rejection of a purely conventional distinction between good and bad. With the Stoics the notion of natural law reaches its zenith and as Latinized and popularized by Cicero it became the basis for Christian thinking on the subject. With the Voluntarists and Nominalists of the fourteenth century, however, the notion is heavily criticized. Moral principles are seen by these thinkers to depend solely on the arbitrary will of God: if God says adultery is acceptable, so it is. Something is good or bad because of God's fiat. With notable exceptions, many of the Reformers took a voluntarist line. Though not rejecting the notion of natural law, they looked to the Bible for the legislative will of God and they came to view human nature as entirely corrupted, both will and intellect, and therefore offering no guidance as to what was morally acceptable. The seventeenth century saw in the work of Hugo Grotius (1583—1645) and others the emergence of a secular theory of natural law, detaching morality from its religious context and enshrining human and political rights for the first time. This approach was adopted by many political and legal thinkers and converted into a quasi-mathematical calculus for demonstrating moral reasoning after the fashion of a political science. So, for instance, Samuel von Pufendorf (1632—94), who dominated natural law thinking: Now the knowledge which considers what is upright and what is base in human actions ... rests entirely upon grounds so secure that from it can be deduced genuine demonstrations which are capable of producing a solid science. So certainly can its conclusions be derived from

152


distinct principles that no further ground is left for doubt.5

This extreme rationalism led to absurdity and a discrediting of natural law. Unfortunately, much of the criticism levelled at Aquinas's notion of natural law is really aimed at these later developments. Aquinas takes his cue from the fact that human beings have natural inclinations to certain acts and certain ends which are indicative of a specific nature. Part of that nature is his reason. Natural law is not so much a theory, and certainly not a device for making moral decisions: rather it is a way of asserting that our nature is objectively knowable and that our reason is central to the task of understanding what is perfective of that human nature. Further, it is premised on the conviction that we have a telos or purpose, and that our practical reason is capable of directing us in accord with that end, or, conversely, being aware that our actions are inconsistent with that end. 'Natural law is not an abstraction, to be read as a text, or indeed to be picked apart by casuists. It is simply, therefore, reason at work/6 By speaking of natural law, Aquinas stresses that 'ethics is a matter of our common humanity and not of some esoteric teaching alien to our nature'.7 These more recent natural law theories were modelled on science and thereby claimed a degree of certitude that neither Aristotle nor Aquinas would have believed possible. Indeed, Aquinas is clear that though there will always be agreement on the most fundamental, primary principles of the natural law — the preservation of life, reproduction, nurture and education of offspring and knowing the truth and God,8 the secondary precepts in which we seek to discern what actually is applicable in any given case will always be subject to error and disagreement, requiring as they do experience and much effort of reason, as well as the exercise of wisdom. In other words, Aquinas's understanding of natural law is more realistic and more flexible. It does not imply a body of


153

principles from which we make simple deductions in order to arrive at moral decisions and it takes into account our human limitations and weakness. So, in his commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: Since discourse on moral matters even in their universal aspects is subject to uncertainty and variation it is all the more uncertain if one wishes to descend to bringing doctrine to bear on individual cases in specific detail, for this cannot be dealt with by either art or precedent. Therefore judgement concerning individual cases must be left to the prudence of each person.9 It is worth noting here that the word 'prudence' is far stronger for Aquinas than is its use in English. It denotes the central virtue through which we exercise good judgement about what is appropriate. For Thomas, it does not connote caution. Perhaps most important of all for Aquinas, natural law is not enough if we are to attain that final happiness which alone will satisfy and complete. For this, God's grace is needed. Aquinas speaks of the Old Law, meaning the Torah, the law of God from Moses to the coming of Christ. But the purpose of the Incarnation of Christ was to make possible loving union with God in friendship. With the coming of Christ there is a transition to what he calls the New Law or the Law of the gospel. The New Law consists chiefly', he says, 'in the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is shown forth by faith working through love.'10 The Old Law was a written law to be obeyed, whether out of fear or for reward. The New Law, by contrast, 'is instilled in our hearts' and it has its effect 'not only by indicating to us what we should do, but also by helping us to accomplish it'.11 And again he makes it clear what this effect is: Those who are possessed of virtue are inclined to do virtuous deeds through love of virtue, not on account of some extrinsic punishment or reward. Hence the New Law

154


which derives its pre-eminence from the spiritual grace instilled in our hearts is called the Law of Love.12 St Thomas Aquinas offers us an understanding of the moral life that is both objective and personal. He combines realism with idealism and intellectual rigour with humanity. He offers an account of morality that concentrates more on human character and its potential for goodness and flourishing than on the evaluation of particular acts. NOTES 1. Servais Pinkaers OP, The Sources of Christian Ethics, Edinburgh 1995, p. 17. 2. ST Ia2ae 2.8. 3. See ST Ia2ae 101.5. 4. See Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, Oxford 1982. 5. From Ekmentorum jurisprudentiae universalis 11.29 and De lure naturae et gentium 11.25. Cited in M. B. Crowe, 'St Thomas's Natural Law and some contemporary approaches7 in Atti del Congresso VII Centenario, Vol. 8, p. 275. 6. Jordan Bishop, 'Natural law and ethics: some second thoughts' in New Blackfriars 77(1996)907, p. 384. 7. Herbert McCabe, 'God II: Freedom' in New Blackfriars 61(1980)725, pp. 456-70. 8. Whatever is a means to preserving life and of warding off its obstacles belongs to the natural law. Those things are said to belong to the natural law which nature has taught to all animals, such as sexual intercourse, education of offspring and so forth. Whatever pertains to the natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society belongs to the natural law. See Ia2ae 98.4 ad 2. 9. In Eth. 2.2 cited in Da vies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Oxford 1982, p. 237. 10. ST Ia2ae 108.1. 11. ST Ia2ae 106.1 and Ia2ae 106.1 ad 2. 12. ST Ia2ae 107.1 ad 2.

Conclusion

The late Herbert McCabe once wrote that 'Ethics is entirely concerned with doing what you want'.1 If morality and ethics are conceived exclusively in terms of obligation, obedience and law, this is indeed a strange thing to say. But if morality and ethics are understood to concern our desire for happiness, then, far from endorsing libertarianism, McCabe was articulating an important truth. One of the difficulties with which ethics engages is that of distinguishing our deep needs and wants from those that are ephemeral and contingent on circumstances. The account of morality in this small book is premised on the conviction that our deepest needs and wants are shared by all human beings. Ethics is crucially concerned with intelligently choosing to do and to be that which fulfils our deepest needs and wants. For this reason, a central aspect of ethical enquiry will be an understanding of what we human beings are and what we are for: our nature and purpose. These two questions are, of course, one question in reality. This is why ethics in a Christian context inevitably and necessarily affects and transforms the significance of morality and ethical reflection. The account given here has closer affinities with natural law theory than with any other current or past attempt to render moral experience and ethical reflection intelligible. It is premised on the view that religious faith is not the sine qua non of exercising moral judgement or making moral choices. The demand and the possibility of such judgements and

156


choices are earthed in our common humanity and the possession of our rational faculty. If morality is our human response to the desire for happiness and fulfilment, as this account has maintained, then the conviction that we human beings have been created by and for love and communion with one another, and with the Creator, cannot but transform our understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. In just the same way, the conviction that human effort alone is insufficient to achieve or, indeed, participate in the goal of human happiness and that perfect happiness cannot be attained in this life cannot fail to make a difference to the way we understand and exercise moral judgement and choice. In so far as specifically Christian ethics has been treated, only the most fundamental and thus most widely shared moral insights have been discussed here. No consideration of particular ethical issues in the light of Christian moral principles has been given. That is partly because a Christian moral outlook does not propose a set of principles but a way of life. Decisions about what we should do in particular situations present themselves from within this way of life as compatible or incompatible with its goals: communion in love with one another and with God. The unavoidable business of making moral judgements therefore involves both reasoned argument and the accumulated wisdom of tradition: within a Christian perspective, the Church plays an indispensable, vital role in preserving and communicating that wisdom. Ultimately, Christianity understands the universally shared desire for happiness to be the desire for God, believing that God is the beginning and end of all existence and that we are created for friendship with Him. In that friendship, all friendship and love is consummated and fulfilled. The moral life is thus one of the ways in which we participate as human beings in the fulfilling of God's purposes and respond to His gift of life. The purpose and goal of morality is, in other words, life in Christ, in whom

Conclusion

157

alone, it is believed, we are granted fullness of life: 'I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly7 (John 10: 10). NOTES 1. Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language, London 1968, reissued by Continuum 2003.


Index absolutism (Kantianism) 81-95, 117 action and being 19, 125, 144 aesthetic judgements 59—60 aims see ends; goals akrasia (weakness of will) 113 Amiel, Barbara 105 amoralism 26—33, 120 Anscombe, Elizabeth 135 anthropology 70, 73 applied ethics 13 Aquinas, St Thomas body and soul 148-50 and Christian morality 146-54 and conscience 64 and dispositions 19, 49 and 'good' 119, 130 and happiness (beatitudo) 11, 146, 148 and Kant 93 and love 142, 148 and Natural Law 6, 150-3 Summa Theologiae 49, 117, 119, 134, 146-54 Aretaic Ethics see Virtue Ethics Aristotle 11, 13, 14, 15, 24, 127 and amoralism 33 Eudemian Ethics 108, 113 and freedom 45

and good 23, 107, 119, 125 happiness (eudaimonia) 108—11 and human nature 109, 130, 143 and knowledge 107 means and ends 108, 119 Nicomachean Ethics 7, 107, 108, 109-10, 113, 119, 134, 135, 153 and slavery 56, 76, 143 and Virtue Ethics 105, 107-13, 117 Athens 13, 23, 56 Augustine of Hippo, St 142 autexousia (freedom) 45, 52 authority 91, 92, 137 autonomy 37, 40, 91 Barnes, Jonathan 113 Beatitudes 138, 140 beatitudo (happiness) 11 behaviourism 36 being and doing 19, 144 Beis, Richard H. 76 Bentham, Jeremy 82, 99-100, 104 Fragment of Government 99 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 99, 106

160


Bentham, Jeremy, cont. life of 97-8 Berdyaev, Nicholas 52, 53 Biggar, Nigel 134 biology 50 Bishop, Jordan 154 Black, Rufus 134 blame 104 body and soul/mind 129, 148, 150 Boyle, Joseph 118, 134 Byrne, Peter 2, 7, 77, 95, 134, 135 Caiaphas 23, 102 Carr, David 56, 66 Cassirer, Ernst 53 categorical/hypothetical imperatives 90 categories 86, 87 causality 36, 39, 84 character 12, 14, 18, 48, 49 Chesterton, G.K. 140 Chief Rabbi see Sacks, Jonathan 1, 136, 145 choice/s 22, 104, 110, 118-19 and determinism 34-44 freedom of 12, 45—6, 48-50, 129 and moral judgements 58, 59 Christian morality 136-45, 156 and St Thomas Aquinas 146-54 Christianity 45-6, 136, 138-9, 156 Cicero 151 citizenship 143—4 Clark, Malcolm 5-6, 7

Clark, Stephen 33, 59, 67 Cockshut, Anthony 105 Colet, John 47 commands 16, 139, 141 communion 13 compulsion 39 conscience 32, 61-6, 67, 100 and reason 62 consequences 88, 92, 100, 101, 103 consequentialism 81—2, 96, 101, 103-4, 118 contemplation 110, 111 Copleston, Frederick 105 Corinthians 142 courage 23 creativity 47 cultural differences 71—3 cultural relativism 69-77 'culture', meaning of 74 Da vies, Brian 154 decision-making 42, 59, 149 deontology 82-3, 118 depression 150 Descartes, Rene 84 desires 121-2, 123, 130, 148 determinism 34-44 see also freedom dispositions 14, 18, 19, 49, 112 dividedness 13 Downie, A. 76 duty 16, 82, 83, 89, 93, 139 emotions 4, 18, 112, 130, 148 emotivism 55, 66 empiricism 84, 99, 100 End in Itself (Kant) 90

Index

ends 118, 119, 144 and means 90, 103, 108, 124, 128 Enlightenment 16, 36, 46, 136 eudaimonia (happiness) 11, 109, 111, 117 existence 84-5 existentialism 52 expectations 120 experience 86, 107, 119, 132-3

161

'freedom for excellence' 51 'freedom of indifference' 51 friendship 126, 147-8 Fromm, Erich 52, 53 fulfilment 13, 20, 121-2, 125, 128, 133, 156 and St Thomas Aquinas 146 see also happiness

George, Robert 118, 134 Ginsberg, Morris 24, 56, 66, fatalism 36 72-3, 76, 77 goals 12, 104, 119, 124, 144 Fathers of the Church 16, God 91 138, 147 existence of 86, 92 feelings 4, 86, 112, 128, 129, friendship with 156 130 and human nature 139, Finnis, John 25, 118, 134, 135 and Aristotle 110, 111, 146, 150 and punishment 137, 138 113, 133 relationship with 139, 140, and conscience 64, 67, 68 and determinism 42, 43, 44 148 'experience machine' 132 will of 5-6, 16, 151 and human nature 128, Golden Rule 89 134 Gomez-Lobo, Alfonso 134 and moral questions 23-4 good 17-18, 23, 107, 118 and amoralism 28 and relativism 70, 76, 77 and utilitarianism 102 in Aristotle 107, 110, 111, Fletcher, Joseph 102 119, 125 and bad/evil 11, 12, 13, Frazer, Sir James, The Golden 54, 120 Bough 70, 76 freedom 12, 45-53, 87, 92, basic human goods 20—1, 144 22, 122-35 anxiety of 52 'greatest good of the and determinism 34-44 greatest number' 96, development of the 117 meaning of 119-22 concept 45-6, 50-1 and relativism 71—2 as a goal of action 51—2 and self-determination and utilitarianism 97, 47-52 102-3

162


good will 88, 89, 91 Gospel 138, 147, 153 grace 153 Greece 16, 73, 143, 151 greed 19 Grisez, Germaine 41, 44, 49, 67, 76, 117-18, 134 Grotius, Hugo 151 Grundel, Johannes 53 guilt 27-8 habit 19, 49 Hampshire, Stuart 77 happiness 11, 92-3, 100, 108-11, 138, 140, 156 'greatest happiness of the greatest number' 96, 99, 101-2, 117 and St Thomas Aquinas 146, 147 Haring, Bernhard 133 Heisenberg, Werner 38, 43 Heller, Agnes 104-5 Hiroshima 102 history 48, 53 Hobbes, Thomas 112 Hollis, Martin 33, 101, 106, 134 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 19, 144 human flourishing 11, 20, 22, 109, 120, 123-4, 126, 139 human goodness 143—4 human nature 6-7, 21-2, 48, 70, 127-8, 155 and animals 109, 131 and Aristotle 143 corruption of 46 given by God 139, 146 and reason 130, 152

human person 18, 19, 48, 91-2 unity of 149 Hume, David 54, 66, 84, 88, 89, 99 Hutcheson, Francis 99 hypocrisy 138 identity 47, 48, 133 Ignatieff, Michael 123, 134, 135 immoralists 30 immortality 92 inclinations 122, 123, 127 instincts 30 integration/ disintegration 121—2, 123, 130 intuitionism 126 Islam 140 Jaki, Stanley 53 Jesus Christ 141, 142, 150, 153, 156-7 John, St 141 John's Gospel 142, 156 Jordan, William 132, 135 Judaeo-Christian framework 1-3, 136, 137 Judaism 139, 140 justice 23 Kant, Immanuel 39, 40, 43, 81-95, 117, 125 Critique of Judgment 84 Critique of Practical Reason 39, 84, 95 Critique of Pure Reason 39, 84

Index

Kant, Immanuel, conk. Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals 86, 87, 92-3, 95 life of 83 moral theory 86-94 Religion Within the Limits of Reason 91, 95 Kerr, Fergus 154 Kierkegaard, S0ren 52 Kingdom of Ends (Kant) 90 knowledge 39, 84-5, 86-7, 127, 128, 152 of basic human good 126 and determinism 41—2 moral 119 and sense experience 107 La Place, Marquis de 36, 43 language 55, 85 law 16, 63, 88, 89, 90, 91, 100, 146, 155 and Christianity 138, 139, 140 Taw of Love' 153—4 Law of Nature (Kant) 89 legalism 62, 137, 139 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 84 Leon of Salamis 23 liberal democracy 97 literary criticism 14 logical positivism 55 Louth, Andrew 53 love 93, 139, 140, 141-2, 147, 153 Luke's Gospel 141 lust 19 Macaulay, Thomas

24

163

McCabe, Herbert 41, 134, 154, 155, 156 Maclntyre, Alasdair 94, 95, 133, 136, 145 Mackinnon, Donald 104, 105, 106 McNaughton, David 29, 33 Macquarrie, John 43 Mahoney, Jack 65, 68 man see human nature man in God's image 150 Manichees 149 Maritain, Jacques 95 Mark's Gospel 142 Marlin, G. 145 Marx, Karl 24 Matthew's Gospel 140, 142 Mayo, Bernard 43, 44, 67, 72-3, 77 mean 112 means and ends 90, 103, 108, 124, 128 mental health 32 Micklem, Nathaniel 67 Midgley, Mary 14, 21, 24, 25, 95, 122, 134 and amoralism 31, 33 and freedom 53 and relativism 70, 76 and subjectivism 60-1, 67 Mill, James 97-8 Mill, John Stuart 16, 24, 97 Autobiography 98 life of 98-9 Utilitarianism 98 mind 85—6 Moore, G.E. 126 moral authority 91, 92 moral judgements 2—3, 55—7, 91, 156

164


moral judgements, cont. and amoralism 28, 30, 120 and conscience 62 and cultural differences 72-3 impartiality of 20 and reason 20, 90, 129 structure of 117-35 see also choice/s moral knowledge 119 moral precepts 87, 89 moral questions 15, 23 'moral sense' 88 moral theology 150 morality and the Judaeo-Christian framework 1—3, 136 meaning of 1, 13, 15-18 and potitics 3 and religion 5—7 as unconditional (Kant) 90 universality of 1—3, 6, 11, 20 see also Christian morality More, St Thomas 47, 65 Moses 153 motivation 88

see also relativism obligation 16, 81, 138, 147, 150, 155 O'Hear, Anthony 33, 95 opportunity 146

pain 99, 100, 131, 132 Paul, St 141, 142 perception 86 person/problem based ethics 144 Phillips, D.Z. 76, 105 phusis (nature) 73 physics 37-8 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man 47-8, 53 Pinkaers, Servais 53, 154 Plato 2, 13, 14, 24, 69, 132 and Aristotle 107, 112 and freedom 45 and reason 151 Republic 23 pleasure 12, 99, 100, 101, 131-3, 150 'political correctness' 4, 55 politics 3, 5, 13, 97, 100 Porter, Jean 133, 134 Nagasaki 102 positivism 4, 14 Nagel, Thomas 34-5, 37, 43, power-relationships 5 practical/theoretical 66, 67 Natural Law 6, 24, 117, 127, ethics 13-15 predestination 36 150-3 pressure groups 5 Newton, Isaac 36, 38 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 30 Priestley, Joseph, Essay on nominalism 151 Government 99 nomos (convention) 73 promise-keeping 90, 95 Norman, Richard 87, 95 proportionalism 102 Protestantism 6, 16, 24 objectivity 84, 86 prudence 118, 121, 153

Index

psychology 5, 50, 62 Pufendorf, Samuel von 151-2 punishment 137, 139 purposes see goals Putnam, Hilary 85, 94 Quietism 87 Quinton, Anthony

32

Rachels, James 32, 33, 66 rationalism 84, 100 Ratzsch, Del 85-6, 94 reason/rationality 4, 14, 20, 111, 112, 128 and conscience 62, 63 and determinism 41—2 and emotion 130 in Kant 39-40, 84, 86-94, 88 as moral authority 91 recognition of basic human good 126 reductionism 4 Reformation 46, 143, 151 relationships 139—40 relativism 4, 67 cultural 69-77 religion 5-7, 86, 91 Rescher, Nicholas 73, 77 responsibility 104 reward and punishment 24, 137, 139 right and wrong 11, 12, 13, 54, 58, 63, 64 and utilitarianism 96, 103 Romans (NT.) 141 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 45, 52 rules 15-16X, 16, 30, 118

165

Sacks, Jonathan (Chief Rabbi) 1, 136, 145 salvation 140 Sartre, Jean-Paul 51-2, 53 scepticism see amoralism science 3, 36, 37-8, 72, 152 Scruton, Roger 43, 91, 93, 94, 95 Second Vatican Council 65, 68 self 61 self-awareness 40 self-consciousness 84 self-control 112 self-determination 12, 47-52 self-evidence of human goods 129 self-interest and amoralism 28-9 senses 148—9 Sermon on the Mount 140, 141 Sextus Empiricus 69 sexual conduct 15, 16, 19, 62 sexuality 149-50 Shakespeare, Hamlet 22 Shaw, Russell 41, 44, 67, 76 sin 46, 138 Singer, Peter 5, 7, 13, 24, 136, 138 'Situation Ethics' 102 slavery 15, 56, 75-6 Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations 99 sociability 126 social control 16 social justice 100 social/cultural conditioning 69, 70-3 'society', meaning of 74

166


Socrates 2, 13, 18, 23, 24 solipsism 29, 31 Sophists 69 soul 18, 109, 112 and body 148-9 Spaemann, Robert 27, 33, 57, 60, 67, 68, 76, 106, 135 'experience machine7 132 Stevenson, C.L. 55, 66 'still small voice' 62, 63, 65 Stoics 149, 151 subjectivism 4, 54-61, 66, 67 Swinburne, Richard 105

utilitarianism 81, 96-106, 117, 125, 147

Tanner, Norman 68 Taylor, Charles 46, 52, 56, 66, 67, 76, 138 teleology 82, 118 temperament 88 Ten Commandments 139, 140 tolerance 55, 60, 74 tradition 156 truth 23, 59, 85 Twain, Mark 75-6, 77

wants and needs 124-5 Warnock, GJ. 94 will 16, 39, 88-9 good will 88, 89, 91 weakness of 113 see also God, will of William of Ockham 51, 150 Williams, Bernard 66, 69, 76, 77, 94, 100-1 and utilitarianism 102, 106 Winch, Peter 76 wisdom literature 141

universalizability 94

20, 89, 90,

values 2, 18, 56, 70, 74, 88, 126 aesthetic 59-60 and amoralism 29 Virtue Ethics 105, 107-13, 117, 118, 142-3 virtue/s 107, 109, 111, 112-13, 144, 153 intellectual 112 Voice of God' 63, 65, 67 voluntarism 6, 16, 151

Young, J.Z.

53

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