God and Morality: A Philosophical History (First Books in Philosophy)

John E. Hare

God and Morality A Philosophical History

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God and Morality

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God and Morality: A Philosophical History John E. Hare

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© 2007 by John E. Hare BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of John E. Hare to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2007 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hare, J. E., 1949– God and morality : a philosophical history / John E. Hare. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-23607-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-631-23607-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ethics—History. 2. Religious ethics—History. I. Title. BJ71.H37 2006 170.9—dc22 2006022477 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13 pt in Photina by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong Printed and bound in Singapore by COS Print Media Pte Ltd The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1

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Aristotle The School of Athens The Protrepticus God and Nous in Nicomachean Ethics Book I The First Sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics Heading towards the Good Virtue Larry Arnhart

7 7 12 20 34 43 51 65

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Duns Scotus The Disputà Duns Scotus, Lectura The Two Affections of the Will Justice and God Scotus and Virtue Scotus and Particularity Jean-Paul Sartre

75 75 87 91 97 105 111 115

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Immanuel Kant The Time Between Kant, Lectures on Ethics (Collins) The Groundwork The Critique of Practical Reason

122 122 135 145 156

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contents Religion Metaphysics of Morals Christine Korsgaard

162 171 176

R. M. Hare The Time Between “An Essay on Monism” The Language of Morals Freedom and Reason Moral Thinking Peter Singer

184 184 199 207 219 228 243

5 Combining the Theories The Goal of the Chapter Virtue Theory Command Theory Consequentialism

249 249 251 260 273

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Bibliography Index

290 301

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INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to look at the role theology, or thinking about God, has played in ethical theory within Western philosophy. I have chosen to focus on four figures, one each from the four main periods into which the teaching of Western philosophy is usually divided, namely ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary. In this way the book is different from one of my models, C. D. Broad’s Five Types of Ethical Theory from 1930.1 Broad chose five figures from the modern period in Europe: Spinoza, Butler, Hume, Kant, and Sidgwick. My book is like Broad’s in that I am using my chosen figures to illustrate what I see as the main options for ethical theory. But Broad was not interested in the place of theology in the philosophical systems he described. He preferred, he said, “to let sleeping gods lie.” This is a strange omission in the treatment of Butler and Spinoza, and Broad found he could not sustain it in the case of Kant. In his treatment of Sidgwick, too, God creeps in at the end. I shall adopt the opposite policy of emphasizing the connection of my four authors with theism. It is just as odd to try to avoid theism in the history of Western ethics as it would be, for example, in the history of Western art and aesthetic theory. I have chosen Aristotle, Scotus, Kant, and R. M. Hare, and I will say that these figures focus ethical theory on virtue, will, duty, and consequences respectively. By discussing a philosopher in each of the four main periods, and by giving bridge passages at the beginning of 1

C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, London: Kegan Paul, 1930.

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each chapter to get us from one figure to the next, I have approached the task of giving a complete history. But, while I have approached this task, I have produced only a preliminary framework. Building a history on this framework would be a much larger project. My method with Aristotle and Kant will be rather different than my method with Scotus and R. M. Hare. Because Aristotle and Kant are so familiar, and there are so many introductory treatments, I will give most attention to their theological starting points and go lightly over the rest of their ethical theories. With Scotus and R. M. Hare, by contrast, I will spend more time on straight exegesis of the central texts. I have devoted a whole chapter to Scotus because of the importance I attribute within the framework to the ideas he introduces, since he is a key intermediary between Aristotle and Kant. I know that some will think that exaggerated filial piety has led me to end with my own father. But I needed (like Broad) a utilitarian and I wanted a contemporary or at least near contemporary, and one whose theory I could write about rather than his applications of the theory. What other figure is plausible, given those constraints? There is an additional benefit. As Broad found with Sidgwick, there is as yet no satisfactory treatment in English of R. M. Hare’s overall moral theory, and now is a good time to attempt one.2 By focusing on four figures, rather than on four types of theory, I want to show that the differences in the actual theories of the great practitioners are more subtle than is often assumed in textbooks. The differences are real, but I want to show how intertwined they are with similarities. Usually it is more helpful to ask “What would Aristotle say?” than “What would a virtue theorist say?”, or “How would Kant reply?” rather than “How would a deontologist reply?” We can hold the first kind of answer accountable to the evidence of the texts. But the jargon terms ending in “ist” are free-floating and disastrously vague. In the closing section of each of the first four chapters I am going to look at a twentieth- or twenty-first-century successor who aban-

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There is a large secondary literature on R. M. Hare, but it is almost completely in the form of articles. The Moral Philosophy of R. M. Hare, New York: Peter Lang, 1997 by Patrick Adu-Amankwah is an attempt to defend intuitionism against R. M. Hare’s attack. See also Oliver Hallich, Richard Hares Moralphilosophie, Freiburg/München: Verlag, 2000.

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dons the role given to theological premises in the rest of the chapter. I have chosen Larry Arnhart, Jean-Paul Sartre, Christine Korsgaard, and Peter Singer. I am not proposing that these are the best current exemplars of each type of theory, but I have chosen them because they provide illuminating contrasts. I will claim that the abandonment of theism has had a damaging effect on the rest of the theory in each case. I am not trying to prove that any attempt to do ethical theory of these types without theism is going to fail. If I am right, however, about the role of theological premises in the original theories, and if I am right that these particular non-theist variants get into difficulties, then anyone who wants to carry on doing one of these types of theory without God will have to point to a non-theist variant that succeeds in finding a substitute for the work that God did in the original version. The section on Arnhart will be different from the others. I will use it not only to distinguish Arnhart from Aristotle, but also to criticize both of them for features they have in common. The reader will notice that there are different conceptions of God within these four different theories. I will label these conceptions “God as magnet,” “God as lover,” “God as sovereign,” and “God as model.” In Aristotle, God “moves everything by being loved,” and in particular draws human beings towards the divine kind of life, but God does not have any active engagement with human beings. By contrast, in Scotus, God is not only the object of love, but God loves, and chooses for human beings the route by which they are to become co-lovers of God. In Kant, God is the head of the kingdom of ends, and has essential legislative, executive, and judicial roles within this kingdom. Finally, for R. M. Hare, God is the model of how ethical thought should be done, and God has, in addition, the role, as “Providence,” of securing that the world is a place in which morality makes sense. I have started the consideration of each of the four thinkers with a section on an early work. The reader will notice that, with the exception of Scotus, the place of God is treated more boldly in each of the early works than in the later work by the same author. We might draw two different lessons from this. Perhaps the later work shows greater wisdom, and we should learn to be modest about our abilities to speak about the relation of God and ethics. Or perhaps the philosophers lost their nerve as they got older, and the discipline of philosophy itself should be rebuked for undermining their native enthusiasm for talking about God.

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I have tried to give a concrete shape to the history told in the first two chapters, using two of Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican, The School of Athens and the Disputà.3 No artist, as far as I know, has given us images that would do comparable work for the modern and contemporary periods, and this is itself an interesting fact, requiring explanation. Raphael’s project is an illuminating example of one way of thinking about the history of philosophy, a way that is characteristic of the history briefly described in the first part of the third chapter. The four types of ethical theory that I have distinguished are more different from each other in their non-theistic forms than in their theistic forms. This is what we would expect if we see the history as an abstraction in two stages. The first stage abstracts one part of God’s relation to us as especially important for morality. The second stage (historically within the last two centuries) removes that part of God’s role in the theory as well. For example, a theory can focus on God’s commandments, and use them to structure the moral life, or it can focus on God’s love, transcending the commandments, and on our freedom to respond to this love, or it can focus on the character that God wants us to have and the virtues that constitute that character. When the theist premises in the original versions of each type of theory are dropped, this has effects on the rest of the theory (though different effects on the different theories). The nontheist versions end up more different from each other than the theist versions, because there is an intelligible unity between God attracting us, God loving us, God expressing the divine will in commands, and God coordinating through Providence our various routes to happiness. Abandoning the theism abandons also the ground of this unity. In order to give substance to this claim, I have ended the book with a chapter that is different in form from the rest. It is an attempt to give a systematic theory that relies centrally on theological premises and that combines elements drawn from the four preceding chapters. I am not claiming that this is the only way to combine elements from these four types of theory successfully. I offer the theory as a model in one of the senses used in the philosophy of science. The billiardball model of the theory of gases, for example, is called a model 3

I thank the Press for agreeing to pictures in a philosophy book, which adds an expense to publication that is not usually necessary.

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because it adds to the theory significant surplus meaning (in this case, by a positive analogy) which has explanatory power, but which is not yet firmly established in preference to other possible models. The book was originally planned as a member of a series of introductory textbooks edited by Keith Yandell. The manuscript grew, however, beyond the permitted confines of the series, and the publisher very graciously allowed me to proceed with an independent volume. The result is no longer an introductory text, if that means a first book in philosophy that happens to deal with the history of ethics. The book is, rather, an intervention into the study of this history, trying to correct the prevailing omission in the secondary literature of the theological context in which the various types of ethical theory originally made sense. Nonetheless, I have tried to give an account of the ethical theory of each of my four main authors in a way that does not presuppose previous acquaintance with them. This is because the basic terms of the theories cannot be given in a neutral way, as though the theology was the frosting on an independently existing cake. Having said that, however, the importance of the theology to the rest of the theory comes in degrees, and readers will observe that the degree is higher in Scotus and lower in R. M. Hare than in either Aristotle or Kant. The book is offered as perhaps a third book in philosophy, neither baby food nor titillating for the epicure (though the footnotes try to accommodate a more exacting taste). I am very grateful to the many people who have read or commented on drafts of various chapters, especially Christopher Beeley, Matthew Walker, Marian Weekly, Catherine Hare (senior), A. W. Price, Thomas Carson, Matthew Benton, the members of the Theology Seminar at Yale, the two anonymous readers appointed by the Press, and Felicity Marsh (my editor at Blackwell Publishing) and especially Benjamin Lipscomb who have given helpful advice on every page.

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Raphael, Scuola di Atene (The School of Athens), fresco, c.1508–11. Rome, Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura. Photo akg-images/Erich Lessing.

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Chapter 1

ARISTOTLE

The School of Athens Aristotle was Plato’s student for twenty years. The relation between these two philosophers has been constantly interesting to later thinkers, even though no word of Plato’s on the subject has survived, and Aristotle is surprisingly reticent about it. One depiction of the relation is by Raphael in a sixteenth-century fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, which has been called since the eighteenth century The School of Athens. The cycle of frescoes in the room, which was the pope’s personal library, is often said to be Raphael’s greatest work. The School of Athens depicts a gathering of the most prominent thinkers of classical antiquity arranged in small groups that in turn make up a large circle, like the circle of the stars in classical astronomy. Their conversation is taking place inside a magnificent domed Renaissance church or temple, which is open at the back to the blue sky beyond. The perspective of the painting comes to a vanishing point between Plato and Aristotle (just to the right of Plato’s left hand), and they are the only figures outlined against the sky. Plato is an old man with long white hair and beard, and Aristotle is young, with his brown hair and beard trimmed. Each is holding in his left hand a book, Plato the Timaeus (which describes the causal influence of the eternal Forms) and Aristotle the Nicomachean Ethics (which describes the best life here on earth for human beings). With the index finger of his right hand Plato is pointing up to heaven, and his right arm and the book he holds in his left hand are both

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vertical. Aristotle spreads out his right hand, gesturing inwards toward the center, and this arm and the book he holds in his left hand are both horizontal. To Plato’s right are two major groups, one organized around Socrates who is energetically enumerating points on his fingers,1 and below him another group around Pythagoras, who is writing his system of the numerical proportions to be found in musical intervals – apparently copying them from a diagram on a slate held by a youth or angel. Raphael is giving us a traditional picture not just of the physical appearance of each of these philosophers (mostly imaginary) but of “the intention of his soul.” For Plato the Forms are beyond us; our eternal souls get glimpses of them in our bodily lives through disciplined contemplation. For Aristotle the forms are in the substances we experience, and our task is to make sense of this experience. There is disagreement here, and indeed Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics rejects Plato’s account of the Form of the Good, and says that if you have to choose between your friends and the truth, you should choose the truth. But to stop with the disagreement in the fresco, it turns out, is both bad art history and bad history of philosophy. The overall impression we get from the painting is not one of tension but harmony. The vanishing point of the perspective is between the two central figures. Raphael has set them up this way to suggest that they are collaborating with each other, each emphasizing a complementary and necessary part of the whole truth.2 It is as though they are together generating the forces (upward and inward) that keep the whole circle of thinkers rotating in their prescribed orbits. Raphael’s fresco is an expression of synthesis. He is drawing on a program laid down for him, perhaps by Egidio da Viterbo, who was a prominent orator at the papal court where the frescoes were 1

“He holds his fore-finger of his left hand between [the fore-finger] and the thumb of his right, and seems as if he was saying, You grant me this and this,” quoted anonymously in Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 77. 2 This is a comment about the whole room that Raphael painted, not just about The School of Athens. On the opposite wall is a fresco traditionally called the Disputà. The figures to the right and left of the altar in this fresco are mirroring the same strong vertical and horizontal gestures made by Plato and Aristotle. But the mystery of the sacrament is revealed to the whole group, despite their disagreements.

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commissioned.3 Egidio undertook to recast the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a twelfth-century textbook of theology that had received numerous commentaries over the previous three hundred years, a period dominated by the recovery of Aristotle in Europe. Egidio wanted to recast the Sentences “according to the mind of Plato,” reconciling Plato and Aristotle in the way suggested by the great Italian Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Egidio’s guiding principle was that “the highest human good is to be found in that other life which is joined to God and sees the divine essence; but here we pursue the greatest good that can be granted humanity on earth: that we be joined to God as completely as possible if we are joined in mind, in will, in contemplation, and in love.” The application of this principle to Plato and Aristotle is that these great Princes can be reconciled, if we postulate that things have a dual nature, one which is free from matter and one which is embedded in matter . . . Plato follows the former and Aristotle the latter, and because of this (in fact) these great leaders of Philosophy hardly dissent from one another. If we seem to be making this up, listen to the Philosophers themselves.

Egidio goes on to quote Plato from the Timaeus where he teaches that human-kind has the two natures, and we know one of these (natures) by means of the senses, the other by means of reason. Also, in the same book he teaches that each part of us does not occur in isolation; rather, each nature cares for the other nature. Aristotle, in the tenth book of his Ethics, calls humanity Understanding. Thus you may know that each Philosopher feels the same way, however much it seems to you that they are not saying the same thing.

Why should Egidio think that this passage from the tenth book of the Ethics makes his point? It is because he knows, and he expects his audience to know, that by “understanding” (in Greek, nous)

3

See Ingrid D. Rowland, “The Intellectual Background of the School of Athens,” in Raphael’s “School of Athens,” ed. Marcia Hall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 131–70. She adds the parentheses in the following quotations.

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Aristotle is referring to that part of us by which we contemplate God. We will come back to this. If the influence of Egidio is indeed to be found in the fresco, his program gives us a complex relationship between the two “princes of philosophy,” a difference of emphasis but an underlying unity. The present chapter is not really about Raphael, but about Aristotle. But I am going to suggest that this account of the continuity between Plato and Aristotle is essentially correct. Aristotle’s thought, especially his thought about ethics, is as much vertical as it is horizontal when he gets to his conclusion, although the vertical theme is less conspicuous on his route to that conclusion. But before discussing Aristotle, I want to go back to Plato’s predecessors, Socrates and Pythagoras. Where does the vertical theme in Plato come from? We tend to think of Plato as dependent on Socrates to the same degree as Aristotle on Plato, but Pythagoras is historically just as important in Plato’s development. Raphael may be signaling this by the placement of the figures, with Pythagoras on the diagonal that leads from Plato to Archytas of Tarentum, the old man copying from Pythagoras in the corner, who was Plato’s teacher and a Pythagorean. Plato’s interest in the Forms can certainly be traced back to Socrates’ questions to his carefully selected interlocutors, for example “What is holiness?” to Euthyphro the seer, and “What is bravery?” to Laches the general. Plato records how in each case the conversational partner, who was supposed to be an expert, finds himself unable to give Socrates the definition he was looking for, and the dialogues end in failure despite Socrates’ conversational brilliance and passion. For example, Euthyphro tries to answer that the holy is what all the gods love. But Socrates asks, “Is the holy holy because the gods love it, or do they love it because it is holy?” Socrates makes it clear that he thinks the latter, and so Euthyphro has not told him what makes something holy. I will return to this question in the final chapter. Aristotle tells us that Plato developed his Forms as an answer to the Socratic quest for definitions. What makes something holy is the pure Form of the Holy existing independently of our world in the eternal world of the Forms that we see clearly when our souls are separated from our bodies at death. In the Republic, Plato gives us a hierarchy. At the top is the Form of the Good, a Form that gives being and intelligibility to all the other Forms. Then come the other Forms that are, Plato says, “really

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real.” And finally there are material copies of the Forms, which “roll around between being and not being.” In Plato’s Symposium he gives the role of the Form of the Good to the Form of the Beautiful. The Greek word kalon that I have translated “beautiful” has a range of meanings that no single English word captures. It can mean “noble” or “fine,” and is often linked by Aristotle with “good” and with “divine.” As we shall see, he makes “noble” the final criterion for actions or activities in accordance with virtue (arête, which can also be translated “excellence”). Plato was influenced in the theory of Forms not only by Socrates, however, but by also by Pythagoras. We can see this influence in Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul that contemplates the Forms, and in the account in the Timaeus of the harmonic proportions of the world-soul and the individual soul, taken from the very diagram that is held in front of Pythagoras in the fresco. At the end of his last work, Laws, Plato says that belief in God comes from two sources: the ever-flowing being of the inner life of the soul, and the sight of the eternal order of the stars.4 In his fresco, Raphael is emphasizing this side of Plato by putting the Timaeus in his hand, and making Pythagoras so conspicuous in the overall structure. Pythagoras gave an analogy for his low view of matter, and Plato picks it up in the Republic. There are three types of people who go to the Olympic Games; the athletes go to compete, the businessmen go to make money, and the spectators go to watch. In the twenty-first century we tend to rank these in descending order; the athletes have the greatest honor and the spectators the least. In the Pythagorean analogy, the order is reversed. The most honorable (the noblest, the most kalon) form of life is to contemplate with the mind alone, in the middle is the life of business and “affairs,” and the least honorable is the man whose life is devoted to the body. Behind Pythagoras is the line of Pre-Socratics, going back to the emergence of philosophy out of myth in the seventh century. This emergence was sometimes seen in the twentieth century as a precursor of the victory of science over religion amongst the academic elite from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. But this is 4

Immanuel Kant ends his Critique of Practical Reason in a similar way: “Two things fill the spirit with ever fresh and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more persistently they are reflected upon, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (5: 161).

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anachronism. The Pre-Socratics did indeed find new explanations of the physical world that replaced the vivid narratives of gods and goddesses and their dealings with each other and with human beings that can be found in Homer and Hesiod. Aristotle, in looking back at his predecessors, describes Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus as identifying the original principle of all things in water, air, and fire respectively. But the Pre-Socratics were not abandoning religion. Their explanations can better be seen as strongly motivated by the religious desire to keep the divine free of unworthy human accretion, and they all thought of the origin of things as divine. When Heraclitus said that fire does and does not consent to be called “Zeus,” he was still full of reverence for the force that controls through its various transformations the pattern of the cosmos; but he did not want to associate this force with the rape of Ganymede and Semele or with blood-sacrifices to appease the god’s jealousy of his prerogatives. (Heraclitus, with the face of Michelangelo, is probably the brooding figure in Raphael’s fresco in the foreground, his left elbow on a marble block.) Xenophanes pointed out that the Thracian gods have blue eyes and red hair and the gods of the Ethiopians have snub noses and black skin, but he revered the one god “who, effortlessly, wields all things by the thought of his mind.” Parmenides (in the fresco on the diagonal between Plato and Pythagoras) claimed to have been instructed by a goddess that all things are one. A strong sense of the divine can be found in all the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Even Epicurus, the atomist, (who may be the figure at the bottom left with a wreath) held that the gods exist, though they have no relation to our lives except to be entertained by us. And Protagoras, the sophist, claimed that he was not in a position to know either the manner in which the gods are or are not (another translation is “that they are or are not”) or what they are like in appearance. But Plato presents him as telling the story that all humans have been given by the gods the gifts of respect and justice, so as to make possible the founding of cities; this is why each human is able to be, as Protagoras says, “the measure of all things.”

The Protrepticus Aristotle was born in 384 bce in Macedonia, a kingdom north of the Greek city states, where his father was physician to the king.

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When Aristotle was 18, his father sent him to Athens for his education, and Aristotle apprenticed himself to Plato in the Academy. He stayed there for twenty years, until Plato died and there was a dispute about who should take over the leadership. Speusippus (Plato’s nephew) won, and Aristotle lost. He went to the other side of the Aegean Sea to stay with a friend and former student Hermias, who was the local ruler. Hermias was treacherously captured by the Persians and tortured for information about his secret treaties with King Philip of Macedon. He steadfastly preserved silence and was finally crucified. Given a final wish before he died, he said, “Tell my friends and companions that I have done nothing weak or unworthy of philosophy.” Aristotle wrote a hymn to virtue for his friend, which begins by stressing the immortal and noble fruit of mortal toil: Virtue, much toiled for by the race of mortals, Noblest quarry in life, For your form, maiden, To die is an enviable fate in Greece, And to endure violent untiring labours. Such is the fruit you cast into the mind, Immortal, better than gold And parents and the soft rays of sleep.5

After his friend’s death he was invited back to Macedonia, and appointed tutor to the king’s son, Alexander. Aristotle translated at least part of Homer’s Iliad into Macedonian for him, and instructed him in the kingly virtues. When Alexander (the Great) grew up, he went on to conquer the whole known world of his time, including Athens. Aristotle, in the mean time, had returned to Athens and established his own school, the Lyceum. In 323 he left the city, “lest she should sin against philosophy twice.” The Athenians had already killed Socrates, and Aristotle was afraid that because of his association with Alexander they would kill him as well. He died the 5

Poems F675 R(3). I have substituted the first line for the translation “Excellence, greatly striven for by mankind.” Unless otherwise specified, I am using the translation in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. “Crisp” refers to the translation of Nicomachean Ethics by Roger Crisp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (NE)

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following year. We tend to think of him as a philosopher, but in fact he did groundbreaking work in all the known disciplines of his time except mathematics. He warns us against trying to take ethics in the direction of mathematics, and he probably has in mind Speusippus, who (like the Pythagoreans) had tendencies in just that direction. I am going to start with an early work of Aristotle, in order to stress the vertical theme that is prominent there and that I want to trace throughout his ethical writing. Raphael’s fresco portrayed Aristotle gesturing inwards towards the center, rather than upwards towards the heavens. Stopping with this contrast to Plato has become a commonplace in the comparison of the two philosophers, and we need to get beyond it. While Plato was still alive and still Aristotle’s teacher, Aristotle wrote a work called Protrepticus, or “Exhortation to Philosophy,” which we have only in fragments.6 He writes to encourage others to embark on the way of life that he has found at the Academy, and the work is full of passion. He writes out of conviction that this is the best kind of life a human being can live, since it is the activity of the best and most characteristic part of us, our mind or nous. He says “Therefore all who can should practice philosophy; for this is either the perfect life or of all single things most truly the cause of it for souls.”7 Aristotle has a three-part hierarchy of functions. Humans have plant-like functions, such as reproduction, and animal-like functions, such as perception. But there is also our nous, and to the extent that we live by this part of ourselves and separate its activity from those of our other parts, we are living the highest and noblest kind of human life, which is the most godlike. How do we achieve this kind of separation? Aristotle says that the key is what we think

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The relation of the Protrepticus to Aristotle’s later work is a matter of dispute. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development [1923], trans. Richard Robinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, argued that it belonged to an early Platonic phase that was later outgrown and retracted. There is an excellent reconstruction of the text in D. S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson, Authenticating Aristotle’s Protrepticus, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 29 (2005), 193–294. 7 B 96.

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about. The mind is operating at its highest level when it is thinking about the highest objects. In contemplating what is eternal and divine, our mind becomes godlike, or divine. While there are important ways in which Aristotle’s fully developed moral theory diverges from the Protrepticus, this thought survives. The interpreter of Aristotle has to make a choice. Is “God” to be written with a capital letter, or should we write “god” or “the god” in lower case? The problem with writing “God” is that it suggests to the reader that Aristotle is talking about the same being that the great monotheist religions have talked about for thousands of years. Aristotle’s god is in many ways very unlike this being, not acting in the world, and in fact not acting at all, but only thinking.8 In the surviving fragments of the Protrepticus we are not given much detail about the god’s thought. But in the Metaphysics Aristotle argues that for the god, as for us, the key to the status of this thinking is the status of its object; since the god is the highest object, the only appropriate object for the god’s thought is the god. The god is therefore “thought thinking itself.” This god does move or change things, but not by taking any action; rather, the god moves everything “by being loved.”9 The god is what everything else is trying to be like, to the degree that it is naturally fitted for that god-likeness. I said in the Introduction that I would use the image of “God as magnet” to sum up the role that the god plays in Aristotle’s ethical theory. The image is actually used by Plato (at Ion 536a), and not by Aristotle, but it fits Aristotle’s account. Plato compares the drawing power of “the deity” to a magnet transmitting magnetic force through a chain of iron rings. I am usually going to use “God” with a capital “G” in what follows, because I want to point to the continuity of the vertical theme in the philosophers who are the subject of this book.

8

There are traces in his later writing of a more traditional view: “If the gods pay some attention to human beings, as they seem to . . . it is reasonable for them to benefit most [those most like themselves]” (NE X, 8, 1179a25ff.). If this benefiting is done by divine action, the view is not consistent with 1178b21, which says about the divine life, “If someone is alive, and action is excluded, what is left but contemplation?” See Richard Bodéüs, Theology of the Living Immortals, Albany: SUNY Press, 2000, for the suggestion that these are not merely “traces.” 9 Metaphysics XII, 7, 1072b3.

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But I do not want to deny that there is a huge difference between Aristotle’s views and the views of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (which also differ on this within and between themselves in various ways). We will see in the following chapters some attempts at synthesis with Aristotle, but no orthodox theologian of any of these faiths would deny that God acts in the world. On the view given in the passage I quoted from the Protrepticus, we humans are naturally fitted to be like God through contemplation. Aristotle returns to the analogy Pythagoras gave of the three types of life: “For as we travel to Olympia for the sake of the spectacle itself, even if nothing more were to follow from it (for the contemplation itself is worth more than much money) . . . so too the contemplation of the whole is to be honoured above all things that are thought useful.”10 In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle puts the point in terms of three different ideals of the good life, or of happiness. Some people think this is the life of physical pleasure, and they are encouraged in this by the lives of the rich and glamorous who seem to specialize in the pursuit of extravagant sensory indulgence. Some people think the political life is the best. Aristotle agrees that it is more godlike to achieve good for one’s city-state (in Greek, polis) than for oneself as an individual, and that full practical wisdom is only displayed in running the polis. But he concludes the work by pointing to a third life that is still nobler, and still closer to the divine, namely the life focused on contemplation. In the Protrepticus this is what he is exhorting his readers to undertake. Indeed, throughout his ethical writing, Aristotle sees his task as recommending this kind of life. One way to imagine this is to go back to the myth at the end of Plato’s Republic in which people who are between lives choose which life to enter when they are reincarnated. Aristotle’s advice would be appropriate for those making such a choice. The vertical theme remains in his mature ethical writing. It is conspicuous at the end of the Eudemian Ethics: To conclude: whatever choice or possession of natural goods – health and strength, wealth, friends, and the like – will most conduce to the contemplation of God is best: this is the noblest criterion. But any standard of living which either through excess or defect hinders the 10

B 44, but I have substituted “contemplation” for Barnes’s second “spectacle,” and I have substituted “the whole” for “the universe.”

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service and contemplation of God is bad. This is how it is for the soul, and this is the best criterion for the soul, to be as little as possible aware of the irrational part of the soul as such.11

This doctrine is consistent with the Protrepticus, which compares the soul’s conjunction with the body to a form of punishment used by the Etruscans, who chained dead bodies face to face with the living, fitting part to part. The Nicomachean Ethics also concludes with contemplation (in Book X, Chapter 7, in Crisp’s translation): If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable to expect that it is in accordance with the highest virtue, and this will be the virtue of the best element. Whether this best element is nous, or something else we think naturally rules and guides us and has insight into matters noble and divine, and whether it is divine or just the most divine element within us, its activity, in accordance with its proper virtue will be complete happiness. That this activity is that of contemplation we have already said.

But this conclusion is in tension with the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, and in the fifth section of this chapter, “Heading toward the Good,” I will return to this tension and discuss whether it can be resolved. If the best activity is contemplation of God and whatever else is most noble, where does that leave virtues like justice and moderation and courage and generosity? In the Protrepticus Aristotle says But it is clear that to the philosopher alone among practitioners belong laws that are stable and actions that are right and noble. For he alone lives by looking at nature and the divine. Like a good 11

We do not know in what order the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics were written, and the relationship is complicated by the fact that they share three books (in the Nicomachean Ethics books five, six, and seven, and in the Eudemian Ethics books four, five, and six). These books probably belong originally with the Eudemian Ethics, but we do not know for sure. We also do not know whether the remaining parts of the Nicomachean Ethics originally belonged together. See Sir Anthony Kenny, The Aristotelian Ethics, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1978 and Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life, Clarendon Press; Oxford, 1992.

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helmsman he moors his life to that which is eternal and unchanging, drops his anchor there, and lives in accordance with himself. This knowledge is indeed contemplative, but it enables us to frame all our practice in accordance with it.12

Aristotle adds that contemplation helps with action in the same way that sight helps with motion, since animals move towards or away from what they see. In the same way we “choose some things and avoid others” in the light of the knowledge given us by contemplation. Another metaphor he uses more than once in the Protrepticus is that contemplation gives us a “boundary marker” of what is good, by reference to which the statesman determines what is just, what is good, and what is expedient.13 Aristotle does not tell us just how the statesman or the person of courage or moderation makes these connections, and the Protrepticus does not contain the contrast developed in the Nicomachean Ethics between theoretical and practical wisdom. But he does say that because we share in nous (which alone of our possessions seems to be immortal and divine) our life, however wretched and difficult by nature, is yet so delightfully arranged that a human seems [a] god in comparison with all other creatures. “For nous is the god in us” – whether it was Hermotimus or Anaxagoras who said so – and “mortal life contains a portion of some god.” We ought, therefore, either to philosophize or to say farewell to life and depart hence, since all other things seem to be great nonsense and folly.14

Frequently the term Aristotle uses to express the special status of the activity of nous in our lives is “honorable” (in Greek, timios), in the same way the divine is honorable, and we will return to the connotations of this word (unfamiliar in English) in the following section. Aristotle’s repeated mention of the divine, which I have called his vertical theme, has been troublesome to some of his twentiethcentury interpreters. There has been a shift in scholarship towards 12

B 49–51, but I have substituted “in accordance with himself ” for “his own master.” The hymn to virtue written for Hermias, which I quoted at the beginning of this section, gives the same flavor. 13 B 38 and B 47. 14 B 108–9.

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what I will call the horizontal, and this has accompanied the shift away from theism in the belief systems of many professional philosophers. Unfortunately Aristotle gets tentative when he starts talking about God. A good example is the passage I quoted from the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, which describes nous, as “being either itself divine or the most divine element in us.” We want to know which. Is nous divine, and does this mean it comes into humans, as Aristotle elsewhere says, “from outside” and perhaps leaves them at death to continue its own immortal life?15 Or is it just part of us, mortal like the rest of us, but like God in its activity? We never get a satisfactory or complete answer from Aristotle to these questions. And there are two attitudes we can take to this. If we find ourselves sympathetic to the attempt to understand the divine, and we realize how extremely hard it is to be clear about these topics, we will be patient with Aristotle and value the picture he gives us, even if it is indistinct. On the other hand, if we find the whole topic of the divine irritating, we will leave those parts of Aristotle as unfruitful problems and construct an interpretation of his thought that gives them as little room as we decently can. We will consign Aristotle’s views on this topic to a category together with his views on women and slaves, or his views on spontaneous generation or the four (or five) basic elements of matter, and try to find a way to rescue what is still valuable in his theory. For example, Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness says that what she calls the “Platonic step” of privileging the life of contemplation by linking it with the divine is taken “only once, in a passage that does not fit with its context and that is in flat contradiction with several important positions and arguments of the EN taken as a whole.”16 The one passage is the conclusion of the whole work, quoted by Egidio da Viterbo as I mentioned, and she proposes excluding it as “inserted in [its] present position by someone else.” Another example is Larry Arnhart’s book Darwinian Natural Right, which is the topic of the final section of this chapter. But we should note that the Greek words theos (“god”) and theios (“divine” or 15

De Generatione II, 3, 736b28: “It remains for the nous alone to enter from outside and alone to be divine, for no bodily activity has any connection with the activity of nous.” De Anima III, 5, 429b22: “When separated [active nous] is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal.” 16 Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 373–7.

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“godlike”) occur in the Nicomachean Ethics roughly twice as often as the words eudaimonia (“happiness) and eudaimon (“happy”). This is a startling statistic, when we consider that Aristotle considers happiness the goal of our lives. I will try to justify in what follows the claim that the divine is not only frequently mentioned, but does important philosophical work.

God and Nous in Nicomachean Ethics Book I Chapter six In this section I will discuss three passages from the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics that help us see the role that Aristotle gives to the divine. I will start with the passage that is most directly concerned with his relation to Plato. In Chapter 6 of Book I Aristotle attacks the Platonist view of the good. This is a hard chapter, because Aristotle makes use of a large number of arguments that he states in shorthand, as it were. He himself was part of the discussion of these arguments within the Academy, and he expects his audience to be familiar with them. Alas, we are not, and we often have to guess what he means. The second argument in the chapter against a separate Form of the Good goes as follows: Good is spoken of in as many ways as being is spoken of. For it is spoken of in [the category of] substance as god and nous; in quality, as the virtues; in quantity, as the measured amount; in relative, as the useful; in time, as the opportune moment; in place as the [right] situation. Hence it is clear that the good cannot be some common [nature of good things] that is universal and single; for if it were, it would be spoken of in only one of the categories, not in them all.17 17

I am quoting, with a couple of alterations, Sarah Broadie’s translation in S. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. She translates nous as “intelligence,” but I will stick with nous, and she translates ti as “what-it-is” rather than “substance.” Normally Aristotle talks not of “God” but of “divine” (the adjective) when attributing divinity to humans. Perhaps he wanted a noun here, because he was talking about the category of substance. But the translation is disputable. It would be possible to take the phrase “is spoken of in [the category of] substance as God

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What is Aristotle’s doctrine here? How is an analysis of goodness in terms of categories supposed to work? I will start with a brief account of Aristotle’s view of substance and the other categories, and then come back to this passage in I, 6.18 Aristotle thinks of

and nous” to mean “is spoken of in the category of substance, as for example God and nous,” and (independently) to suppose that Aristotle is not talking about the God in us, but God as the unmoved mover. But Sarah Broadie’s way of taking the passage as referring to God as itself the good in (human) substance has advantages. The cases Aristotle mentions in the other categories do not seem like examples at all, as though there could be lots of other examples that Aristotle could have given instead; rather, they seem like names for the value predication itself. So in the category of quantity, Aristotle gives “the right amount,” in the category of time “the right moment” and so on. The right or opportune moment is not an example of goodness predicated in the category of time, but just what goodness predicated in the category of time is; similarly with “the right amount” and “the right place.” It is worth mentioning that the parallel passage in the Eudemian Ethics uses mostly the goods predicated in the various categories (though it puts God and nous in the reverse order), without using “as” at all (Eudemian Ethics I, 8, 1217b27ff.). Another possibility is to read the passage as Sir David Ross does, translating, “For it is predicated both in the category of substance, as of God and of reason, and in quality, i.e. of the virtues.” He takes God and nous not as examples of the goodness being predicated in the category of substance, but as examples of substances of which goodness is predicated, and the virtues are the qualities of which goodness is predicated, and so on. But again Aristotle does not seem to be using the cases in the other categories, such as “right amount” and “right time” as cases of things of which goodness is predicated. For the goodness is, so to speak, already there. 18 I am relying on the account of the central books of the Metaphysics given in my dissertation, “Aristotle’s Theories of Essence,” Princeton, 1975, and John E. Hare “Aristotle and the Definition of Natural Things,” Phronesis 24 (1979), 168–79. But I subsequently discovered a more compelling account of the same sort of view in Montgomery Furth, Substance, Form and Psyche: An Aristotelean Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Furth illuminates the difference between Aristotle’s accounts in the Categories and in the Metaphysics by saying that the former is synchronic and the latter diachronic, and therefore cognizant of matter and form.

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substance as the fundamental kind of being on which all other kinds of being depend. In the work called Categories he says that Socrates is a substance in the primary sense. If he is pale (an item in the category of quality) after being indoors in the winter, the existence or being of his paleness depends on the existence of Socrates, and Socrates’s existence does not depend on the existence of his paleness. The same is true if he is fat (an item in the category of quantity) or is in the market (an item in the category of place). In the Metaphysics, by contrast, Aristotle stresses the role of substance as the cause that underlies and explains change, and he describes two fundamental ingredients in causation: form and matter. Form is the internal organizing activity of a thing that gives that thing unity through change. Matter is what form organizes. (This account does not, however, split Socrates in the way Plato splits up animals into body and soul, which can be separated at death.) Socrates is in these terms a substance in a secondary sense, a complex in which the matter is potentially just what the form is actually. Aristotle’s form/matter analysis goes through a number of different levels. If we consider a living substance, say a hedgehog, we can analyze it into its form and its matter. Its form is its characteristic hedgehog-type activity, and Aristotle says its soul is its capacity for this activity. Its matter is the flesh and bones that are organized in this activity. We can then take, say, the bones, and see that each bone can be analyzed into bony stuff (the matter) and its organizing activity for doing the kind of things a bone does (the form). And the bony stuff can in turn be analyzed into some more primitive stuff and its organizing activity. The process of development in the animal is the reverse of this process of analysis by the scientist, and can best be understood as a direction toward form. The more primitive kinds of matter are changed from simple to compound, and from inorganic to organic (though Aristotle does not have these concepts), by the imposition of form at different stages, until we have something that is ready to be a mature hedgehog. When this happens, the matter has been all used up, so to speak. There is nothing left for it to become in the direction of substance. There is still potential for change (the hedgehog can roll up in the face of an enemy, for example a car). But the only remaining change in substance is regressive. The hedgehog can decay, if squashed, into flesh and bones, and the bones into bony stuff, and eventually (if it is not eaten first) into inorganic stuff, ready for the process to begin all over again.

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Aristotle’s point, as I understand it, is that only living things have the right kind of self-directed development to count as complex substances in this sense. A heap of sand is not a substance. If we take the various grains of sand that make up the heap, they can be in contact with each other. But they do not make up the kind of unity that persists through change that science is looking for.19 The same is true if we take the drops of water that make up a lake, or the clods of earth that make up a field. This is also true of human artifacts. A ball bearing and a baseball do not have the right kind of unity through change, because the principle of their persistence is not in themselves but in their makers who designed them for some purpose. Because the baseball has a different purpose from the ball bearing, it does not have to be so perfectly spherical. Its purpose and shape are not given by an internal source of change and development but by the artist who makes it. Aristotle’s view of substance is essentially biological, and has been confirmed to a surprising degree by contemporary science. His view does not depend on his physics or chemistry, which are outdated. A current biologist, J. Z. Young, supports Aristotle’s view as follows: The essence of a living thing is that it consists of atoms of the ordinary chemical elements we have listed, caught up into the living system and made part of it for a while. The living activity takes them up and organizes them in its characteristic way. The life of a man consists essentially in the activity he imposes upon that stuff.20

This account of substance does not reduce the importance of matter as Plato’s Timaeus does, which teaches that material things are defective copies of Forms in another world. On the other hand, it does not reduce the importance of form, by teaching that everything is matter, and that we can in principle reduce psychology to biology, and biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics. If we accept Aristotle’s account of substance, at least in outline, what implications will it have for how we look at value? Life is, on the account 19

For an excellent contemporary defense of this sort of metaphysical view, see Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. 20 J. Z. Young, An Introduction to the Study of Man, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 86–87.

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I have outlined, a directional idea. To be alive is to be able to cause changes (both internal and external) in the direction that leads towards being a mature member of a biological species. If something is a hedgehog, then it is already organizing changes in a good way, the way that fits the hedgehog-type destination. Nature sets a fitting direction for how humans should live, by directing us towards our form, our characteristic human activity. Now we can return to our passage from Book I, Chapter 6. I will start to explain it by means of a humble analogy with an American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting. The analogy is designed to illuminate how seeing a central good might help us see the goods in the other categories. We might say that there is a central activity that makes a good APA meeting, and it is the doing of good philosophy. All sorts of other things go on at an APA meeting, such as placement interviews and catching up with friends. We can discuss what is a good time for the meeting, or what is a good place for it. But the committee that decides which papers will be read is doing the centrally important work. (I say this with some animus because I have been on one of these committees, and I think their work is underappreciated.) We might re-write Aristotle’s passage this way: Good APA meetings are spoken of in many ways. They are spoken of in terms of the central activity as the reading of good philosophy papers and good subsequent discussion; in quality, the states of character that produce good philosophy papers and discussion; in quantity, the number of papers and commentators that allow for good philosophy to be done (fewer than at present); in relation, the utility of the meetings to the doing of good philosophy outside the meetings; in place, the hotel that provides enough good rooms at a reasonable price for good philosophers to go there. The point is that the relation of substance to the other categories is one of priority in explanation. We can answer questions about what is the right time and the right place and the right amount because we know what the central activity is. In the same way, then, divine activity ought to be what settles questions about what is a good time and a good place and a good amount for human life. In particular, virtue is goodness predicated in the category of quality, not substance. Socrates is good in what he is, or good essentially, by being god and nous, and his virtues are not in this way essential to him or to the goodness that he has essentially. Aristotle is arguing that good is predicated across all the categories in the way that being is, and it is therefore so various that it cannot

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be something universally present in all cases and single. I will return to this objection in the final chapter of this book. My present point is not to discuss Aristotle’s quarrel with Plato, but rather his own view of the relation between the good and the divine. The most natural way to take the passage is that he is saying that the central thing that constitutes human life as good is god and nous. This brings us to the main difficulty. Sarah Broadie asks “What can it mean to say that the central human good is God?”21 Within Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology we are used to thinking that humans are not God, and therefore there is some kind of mistake in saying that we can have divine activity. It is as though in the background of our thought there was a separation or wall between the human and the divine, and it was blasphemous to attribute divine properties to human beings.22 The passages I quoted from the Protrepticus (where Aristotle quotes approvingly the saying that nous is the god in us) should make us already suspicious about such a separation when interpreting Aristotle. The Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries could be more relaxed about divinization because they made ample room for different kinds of places on the continuum between humans and gods. There were, first, a number of divinities of different grades of importance. There was also the category of “spirits” (in Greek, daimones), and of beings like Socrates’s attendant spirit (daimonion). In fact Socrates himself is described by Plato as a “spirit-like man” (daimonios aner).23 Then there are the heroes, like Hector. At the beginning of Book VII, Aristotle talks of a heroic and divine virtue, and quotes Priam saying of Hector, his son, that he “seemed not to be a child of a mortal man but of a god.”24 There is also the possibility of 21

Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 29. Eastern Christian theology is more relaxed about this, however, and does not mind talking about “deification” or “divinization” (in Greek theiosis). There is, famously, one passage in the New Testament that suggests such language (II Peter 1: 3–4, New International Version), “[God] has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature [theias koinonoi phuseos].” The Cappadocian fathers, for example Gregory Nazianzus, had no difficulty combining talk of our divinization with talk of God’s difference from us. 23 Symposium 203a. 24 NE II, 1, 1145a21–3. 22

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elevation, even during one’s lifetime, to the status of a godlike or divine man. Aristotle says, in the same place, that the Spartans are in the habit of calling someone they particularly admire “divine.” He reports the common idea that people become gods through a superiority of virtue.25 Then he remarks that the god’s state is more honorable than virtue, just as bestiality is more despicable than mere vice. I will come back to this term “honorable” in a moment. Virtue is again given second rank, just as it was in I, 6. The best activity of a human being is not activity in accordance with merely human virtue, but something that exceeds this in the way that gods exceed human beings. This brings us to a structural point about how theological language is being used here. Humanity is being attributed the capacity to be more than merely human. Compare Aristotle’s statement in the Politics (1287a27–32) that “He who commands that law should rule may thus be regarded as commanding that God and nous alone should rule; he who commands that a man should rule adds the character of the beast.” This is the very phrase we have been discussing, “God and nous.” So there is a human good for us as individuals, but the divine activity (which is not merely human) is to achieve this good for the polis through law. I want to emphasize the point that this contrast between the divine and the merely human does not need to occur in the context of a discussion of theoretical wisdom as opposed to practical wisdom. The passage in the Politics is about the making of law, and Aristotle is contrasting the rule of law and the rule of merely human beings.26 Office holders, he says, even if they are the best of men, are perverted by appetite and ambition.

25

In a similar way in III, 7, 1115b10–11 Aristotle says that the courageous person will be unperturbed as far as a human being can be, and I take this to mean that he will be afraid of the things that will be fearful to anyone who is sane. But then even the things that are not beyond the human, he will also fear, though he will stand his ground for the sake of the noble. I take it, though Aristotle does not say this explicitly, that the contrast is with the divine human person who, by contrast, will not fear those things. 26 Aristotle makes the same contrast in the Protrepticus between laws that are stable and divine, laid down for cities, and laws of other crafts, B 48–9.

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But Law is “Reason free from all passions.”27 The structural point about theological language is that Aristotle consistently uses it to get leverage up to something that is human but not merely human.28 In the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle is going to use the term anthropike, “human,” as a term for the second-rank of a comparison of activities or states of which we humans are capable: “The life in accordance with the other kind of virtue is happy in a secondary way, since the activities in accordance with it are human.”29 “Divine” is Aristotle’s preferred term for the first-rank activity or state in this comparison.

Chapter twelve Now we can go on to Book I, Chapter 12. The question of the chapter is whether happiness is a thing to be commended or instead something to be honored.30 Aristotle says that we commend the good person and virtue in general, and commendation is appropriate because (in terms of the categories) such a person has a certain quality or stands in some sort of relation to something. But we cannot, strictly, commend the gods, since it is not commendation that applies to the best things, but something greater and better. 27

Compare the first use of “divine” in Book I, where Aristotle argues in Chapter 2 that the inquiry of the Ethics is a kind of political science, for the end of this science is the human good. And then he feels it necessary to add, “while the good of an individual is a desirable thing, what is good for a people or for cities is a nobler and more divine thing.” 28 Compare the epigram from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” Pope is not saying here that humans do not forgive, but that there is something humans do (namely forgiving) which is not merely human. I am interested in the use of “human” here. Aristotle might have said, “Ethical virtue is human, but contemplation is divine,” meaning that ethical virtue is merely human, and contemplation is more than merely human, though still an activity of human beings. 29 NE X, 8, 1178a10, 14, 21. 30 Aristotle does not always make this distinction. See Topics, III, 1, 116b36ff. “Commend” is a better translation than “praise” because we do praise gods.

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Presumably, given the initial distinction between “commendable” and “honorable,” the something greater and better is honor. This is what Aristotle says in the discussion of the magnanimous man, who both thinks himself worthy of the greatest things and in fact is so. This means that he will be concerned with one thing in particular: the greatest external good, “which is what we render to the gods; such is honor.”31 In our passage in Book I, Chapter 12, Aristotle says it is obvious that what we give the gods is something greater and better than mere commendation “since the gods and the most divine (godlike) of people we call blessed and happy.” No doubt people do in fact commend the gods, by calling them, for example, just and brave, but as Aristotle says in Book X, this does not really make sense.32 What is true of the gods is also true of happiness, Aristotle says, “since we never commend happiness as we might justice, but rather call it blessed as something better and more divine.” Virtue, for example, is commended. But Aristotle says that by contrast happiness is something honorable. This also follows from its being a first principle or starting point. “It is for the sake of this that we do all the rest of our actions, and the starting point and cause of goods we take to be something honorable and divine.” The words “and divine” here refer back to the point Aristotle has been making about how it is inappropriate to commend the gods. What is the criterion distinguishing the commendable and the honorable? Aristotle, as Alexander reports, “said that among good things the honorable are the things that have more the character of origin, as gods, parents, happiness; noble and commendable are the virtues and the activities in accordance with them.”33 Aristotle’s paradigm of what is good but not commended is the gods or the divine, and the Greeks related to their gods through honor in a complex pattern that we might call “an honor-loop”, though the Greek word (time) is broader than the English: the gods have their “honors,”

31

NE IV, 3, 1123b15 (Crisp). See also IX, 2, 1165a21ff. NE X, 8, 1178b8–18. I will come back to this in the final chapter. 33 Fr. 110 R(2), 1496a34. See also VI, 7, 1141a18ff. where Aristotle says that wisdom is knowledge of the most honorable things, and then concludes that it cannot be the same as political science, since human beings are not the best things in the cosmos, but there are other things more divine, such as “the things that constitute the cosmos.” 32

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which we might better translate “functions”;34 we properly respond with “honor”, which we might here translate here as “worship.” This includes, for example, sanctuaries devoted to them, dedications, hymns, dances, libations, rituals, prayers, festivals, and sacrifices.35 In all of these the gods take pleasure, and in return they give “honor” to mortals in the form of help or assistance, especially in the areas of their own expertise.36 The difference in all of this from merely commending the gods does not lie in our saying extremely good things about them; this much is common to commending as well. Rather, we put ourselves in a subordinate or inferior position, which our honor (or worship) acknowledges but does not create. If we “think big” about ourselves, we thereby “think down on” the gods (Euripides, Bacchae 199), and fail to give them their proper honor. The same kind of honor-loop can be seen in the relation of a subject to a king, who has honor in the sense of function or office, who is given honor by the gifts and obeisance of his subjects, and who gives honor in return by helping those who give honor to him. The commendable, by contrast, is commended “for its being a certain kind and its standing in a certain relation to something else.” In terms of the categories this is to say that what is commendable is either a quality or a relation. To say it is a relation is to say that it derives its being from being related to something else. It would be presumptuous to commend a god for something he does well. To commend a god would be to “think big” about ourselves or to “think down” about the gods, by placing them in relation to our standards for ourselves. Aristotle is objecting that actually the reference to a standard goes the other way round.37 Eudoxus was right to say that

34

Thus Herodotus says that Homer and Hesiod assigned to the gods their functions (in Greek, timai) and areas of expertise (in Greek, technai). 35 See Jon D. Mikalson, Honor Thy Gods, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991, 189. 36 Thus Athena gives honor to her city in Aeschylus’s Eumenides (913–15), and Apollo gives his oracles as an honor to mortals in Sophocles’ OT (787–89). Euthyphro reflects this pattern when he says to Socrates (Euthyphro 15a–b) that our gifts to the gods bring them honor. 37 Aristotle’s point about the commendable being relative may be a different one. The virtuous person and the fast runner and the strong man are said to be good by having a certain relation to something outside themselves.

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other good things are commended by reference to the standard of the god and the good. For this reason the commendable is relative (like virtue) and the goodness of the gods is not. But we can also see that the commendable is a quality. Consider how odd it would be to commend my son for being human (which is substance not quality). I commend him for being brave, something that humans can fail to be and still be human. In the same way, in Chapter 6 virtue was described as quality, rather than substance. Suppose we put together the point that we are not commended for what we essentially are (but for qualities and relations) and the point that we give honor to what is above us, and suppose we ask why Aristotle suggests that we give honor and not commendation to happiness. I think we do not commend someone for being happy, because being happy is centrally the activity of something in us that is essential to us. This is true, even though not all humans are happy, and so happiness itself is not something essential to us. On the other hand, happiness is honorable, and this means we put ourselves in a subordinate position with respect to it, just as we do to the divine. Here is a problem. How can we be in a subordinate position to happiness, how can it be honorable, if happiness is simply the human good? I want to propose that we cannot make sense of this passage with a one-level view of the human. We have to appeal to the distinction between the human and the merely human. There is something in us that is not merely human, and the activity of this thing is appropriately honored by us. For us to call something in ourselves worthy of honor is to divide ourselves. Aristotle remarks that it is ridiculous to commend the gods with reference to ourselves, and it must also be in some way ridiculous to commend happiness with reference merely to ourselves. As far as I can see, this only makes sense on a two-level view. Eustratius (one of the Greek commentators on this passage) puts it this way, “We speak of divine things as exceeding commendation, but [merely] human things as commendable since they fail to be honored, but achieve only commendation.” So what is this thing in us that is not merely human? In the discussion of the active nous in De Anima, Aristotle says that which acts is more honorable than that which is acted upon (namely, the passive nous), Part of Aristotle’s meaning is that the virtues are relative, because they produce something, namely action. See also Categories (7, 6b15), Rhetoric (I, 9, 1367b26ff.), and Eudemian Ethics (II, 1, 1219a40–b16).

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and the first principle is more honorable than the matter. Passive nous becomes all things, and active nous produces all things, like light. In this extremely obscure passage, he says of the active nous that “it is not the case that it sometimes thinks and at other times not. In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal.”38 Similarly at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics he says that nous exceeds in honorableness, and its activity is the most continuous and the closest to immortality.39 The parallel is not exact, but suggests that the part of us that is not merely human is active nous.

Chapter ten Aristotle says that happiness is “blessed” and this is a key term for our present discussion. I want to suggest that he distinguishes the highest kind of happiness, which is blessed, from a more ordinary kind that is not. In Chapter 9 Aristotle is discussing how we get happiness. He says, If there is anything that the gods give to human beings, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, especially since it is so much the best of the human things. But this question would perhaps be more suited to another inquiry. Even if it is not sent by the gods, however, but arises through virtue and some sort of learning or training, it is evidently one of the divine things. For that which is the prize and end of virtue is clearly the best thing, and something both divine and blessed.40

The term “blessed” (in Greek, makarios) is a collateral form of a word (makar), which is used properly of the happiness of the gods as opposed to the happiness of mortals. In Homer the makares are simply the gods. There is a contrast built into the term between two 38

De Anima III, 5, 430a18ff. I will not try to explain this passage, but I am assuming that active nous is not God, if that is taken to imply that it is not part of us. I have also said that Aristotle did not believe in personal immortality, so the separation of active nous cannot be our survival of death. 39 NE X, 7, 1177a21–1178a1. 40 NE I, 9, 1099b16–18 (Crisp, whose translation is used throughout this section).

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kinds of happiness, the bliss of the blessed, and the less exalted happiness of mere mortals. What I want to ask is how much of this theological flavor is preserved in Aristotle’s use of the term “blessed.” The details of the argument in Chapter 10 are hard to make coherent. But we have a better shot at this if we do not treat “happy” and “blessed” simply as synonyms of each other.41 Here is an analogy. We can think of the tuning of a piece of music, where the pitch A is set at 440 vibrations per second. The A will and should vary in performance, between rising and falling intervals on string instruments and the voice. But A = 440 is always there as a standard against which we hear the rest of the music, and we can check ourselves against it if we feel we are slipping. In the same way blessedness is a standard of happiness against which we can see how our lived happiness in fact varies with our different circumstances. In the final paragraph of Chapter 10, Aristotle says, “What is to prevent us, then, from concluding that the happy person is the one who, adequately furnished with external goods, engages in activities in accordance with complete virtue, not for just any period of time but over a complete life? Or should we add that he will live like this and will die accordingly? The future is obscure to us, and we say that happiness is an end and altogether quite complete. This being so, we shall call blessed those of the living who have and will continue to have the things mentioned, but blessed only as humans.” Here 41

Here I am replying to Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness 373–7. Nussbaum wants to deny a distinction between happy and blessed because she thinks interpreters have used a bogus distinction between the two to make Aristotle sound more like Kant. In Kant, something has moral worth independently of whether it is part of a happy life. Our desire for happiness is placed on the side of inclination and moral worth on the side of duty. By introducing a distinction between “happy” and “blessed” we can try to make Aristotle say that virtue is sufficient for happiness but not for blessedness, which also requires external goods. I agree that this distinction is not to be found in the text. Virtue is not sufficient for happiness. Virtuous people can, Aristotle says, slip from a state of happiness because of misfortune, though they will not slip as far as wretchedness as long as they have virtue. But denying this distinction in Aristotle does not mean denying all distinction between happiness and blessedness, and I think the argument of Chapter 10 requires a distinction. Here I am agreeing with Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 31–7.

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Aristotle gives an account of happiness as activity over a complete life in accordance with virtue and equipped with the external goods that virtue needs. He then adds something.42 What is he adding? Let us take the case of a man who is virtuous and engages in virtuous activities for a while, but then through misfortune loses the necessary externals for virtuous activity, and then, through noble accomplishments or good fortune recovers them. Perhaps he goes through this cycle more than once. Let us call him Antonio, after the character in The Merchant of Venice who suffered disaster and was restored to good fortune. Such a person can properly be called happy, I think Aristotle would say, even though he has not been active in accordance with virtue at every point in his adult life. On the account of happiness in the final paragraph of Chapter 10 he is adequately furnished with external goods and active in accordance with complete virtue over a complete life (which I take to mean “over the span of his life as a whole”). But is Antonio blessed? I want to say, he is not. He does not meet the permanence condition, since he has been in and out of the best state. A blessed person is one who meets two conditions: his happiness is, first, continuous and, second, glorious and beautiful. We therefore get three possible states of the virtuous person from this chapter. He can be blessed, and so uninterruptedly active in perfect activity (except, perhaps, when he is asleep). This state cannot be lost and is divine. Then there is happiness of a secondary kind, which can be interrupted, if there is sufficient misfortune, but is resumed. Then there is the state of the virtuous person who has lost happiness through some disaster and does not regain it, but is still not wretched, because his virtue will shine through the

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The difficulty is to understand what Aristotle thinks he is adding. If we make no distinction between happiness and blessedness, as Nussbaum wants, I think the argument becomes unintelligible at this point. As Kenny says, “Aristotle would be saying that someone is only really happy if he not only currently enjoys the conditions for happiness but will continue to enjoy them until death. But that would mean that happiness could not be lost; someone who fell into misfortunes like Priam would not be someone who had enjoyed a happy life and then lost it: he would be someone whose later career showed that he had never been happy at all.” But if this is what happiness already means, then Aristotle cannot be adding anything by saying that the person will live like this and will die accordingly.

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disaster in the way King Priam’s virtue shone through the defeat and destruction of his city. Then Aristotle adds one more thing. The person in the highest of these three states is blessed, but only blessed as a human. There is a pure form of the blessed or divine activity that is not available to us. In Book X, we are compared with a god to whom we have a likeness but with whom we are not identical: “So the god’s activity, which is superior in blessedness will be contemplative; and therefore of human things the most akin to this would be the happiest.”43 The moral from these three passages in Book I is that Aristotle makes a distinction between the divine in us and the merely human. If we are happy, then we will live with the conviction that this divine thing in us is active to the fullest extent that is possible for humans. We will in this way recognize in our lives something worthy of honor, something not merely better than the rest of us but of a different order of merit. If this activity is consistent throughout our lives, then we will properly be called blessed. But there is a form of activity that is honorable and blessed in a way that is beyond us, not merely beyond the “merely human” but beyond the human, and that is the activity of the non-human God.

The First Sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics These three passages from book I suggest a view we will find articulated in Book X, but it is not the view of most of Book I, and the first sentence of the book gives a more typical picture. The first sentences of Aristotle’s works are often especially revealing about the content of the work that is to follow. Here is the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics: “Every art and every discipline, and similarly [every] action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims.”44 I will make four points about this sentence. The first point is about the phrase “is thought” (literally “seems”). It is typical of Aristotle to start with what seems right to “the many and the wise.” His method, especially in his works of practical 43

NE X, 8, 1178b21–24. This is Crisp’s translation, except that I have translated methodos as “discipline” rather than “inquiry,” for a reason I will explain shortly.

44

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philosophy, is to start by collecting ordinary opinion (“the many”), which we might call “common sense,” and the opinions of his predecessors (“the wise”). He gives these opinions of the many and wise initial credence. He says at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, “What seems to all, this we say is.”45 Aristotle is not, therefore, starting his inquiry from scratch, but from received opinion. In fact all philosophers are in the same boat in this respect, but some of them pretend they are not. However, Aristotle is not merely describing the common sense of his time. It is true that his picture is in many ways culturebound. He describes magnanimity, as we saw, as the virtue of being worthy of great honor and treating oneself as worthy of it, and says the magnanimous man accordingly has slow movement and a deep voice.46 We can imagine that if there were a meeting to which the magnanimous man was late, he would not hurry to get there, because he would know that he was the most important person coming and that the others would wait for him. Much of the description of magnanimity and the other moral virtues is tied to mores in ancient Athens. But Aristotle, though he starts from the opinions of the many and the wise, does not feel bound to stay there. His picture of the best life ends up diverging significantly from conventional opinion, when he exalts the life of the philosopher (his own kind of life). Accordingly, he feels an obligation to explain how his conception fits the familiar criteria of the chief good (such as being the most pleasant, being self-sufficient, etc.). In an analogous way, the doctor’s aim is the health of his patients. His professional account of that health may be different in some ways to the common sense notion that most of his patients will have; but it cannot be too different, because his treatment needs to bring about a state that the patient finds good. The second point is that the beginning of the first sentence contains two pairs of terms, “art and discipline” and “action and rational choice.” “Art” (in Greek techne) is being used broadly here to cover all kinds of know-how, not narrowly to cover “art” as opposed to “science.” “Discipline” is probably the knowledge-base that controls an art, as the architect (literally the “ruler builder”) controls the stonemason. True to his method, Aristotle is starting here with the opinions of his predecessors; in this case the first pair of terms 45 46

NE X, 2, 1173a1. NE IV, 3, 1125a13.

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comes from Plato.47 But he goes on in the second pair to his own doctrine. Aristotle is suggesting that action and rational choice are related in the same way as art and knowledge-base: rational choice controls action. So there is a similarity between these two pairs of terms, but also a contrast, which Aristotle emphasizes in the next sentence, “But there seems to be a difference in the ends; for some are activities, and others are products apart from these.” What is the contrast here?48 Both art and action have ends, Aristotle is saying, but art has an end that is a product (in Greek ergon, which also means “characteristic work” or “function”) apart from the activity of the art itself, whereas the end of action is not separate from the activity in this way. He goes on in Chapter 1 to give examples of the first kind – shipbuilding and bridle-making and generalship. Ship-building is an art that produces a ship, bridle-making produces a bridle, and generalship produces victory. Action, on the other hand, has as its end (we are going to discover) happiness, and happiness is activity in accordance with virtue (or excellence). Aristotle is going to distinguish different kinds of virtue, but all of them are dispositions to act or feel or think as reason prescribes; so the end of action is itself doing something or being active in a certain way. We can describe the status of the action or activity in terms of its nobility or how close it is to the divine. Suppose in a battle I charge at the enemy when the general gives the command. I am aiming at various ends, perhaps immediately the rout of the enemy. But thinking more broadly (Aristotle would say) I am aiming at the noble (kalon), and what is noble and divine is to be the kind of person who behaves in just this way for the sake of his polis.49 My action is thus an expression of its own end; it is doing what a noble person does. The end is not some47

Gauthier and Jolif suggest that the first pair of terms comes from Plato, and the second is Aristotle’s own. See R. -A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, L’Ethique a Nicomaque, Vol. 1, Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1970, 3–5. The term I have translated “discipline” can be used more narrowly for theoretical disciplines, but does not have to be. 48 The distinction is important because it is picked up at the beginning of the next two major subdivisions of Book I; in Chapter 4 his terms are “knowledge” and “rational choice” and in Chapter 7 “art” and “action.” 49 The good for the polis is more noble and divine than the good for an individual, NE I, 2, 1094b9–10.

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thing, like a ship or a bridle, which exists on its own when the artist who produces it is finished with it. Aristotle goes on to make the point that the arts come in a hierarchy. The bridle-maker, if he wants to make a good bridle, has to consult the rider (who is the expert about bridles because he is the user of them).50 The rider, if he wants to ride well, has to consult the general (who is the expert about riding because he is the user of the cavalry in battle). The general, if he wants to command well, has to consult the statesman (who is the expert about warfare because he is the user of the army to save the city). This is how Aristotle gets to the conclusion that political science, the knowledge-base of the statesman, is the most controlling and highest science, since it uses the other sciences and legislates what must be done and what avoided. The consistency of this conclusion with the conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics will be the topic of the following section of this chapter. The third point about this first sentence will take longer to make. Aristotle might mean either of two different things by saying that every art and every action seems to aim at some good. He might mean that every art and every action aims at what seems good to it. On this view even a bad person pursues what is bad because he or she thinks it good. The heroin addict takes the heroin for the pleasure or the relief. The thief steals the gold for the status (being well thought of by others) or the power that wealth gives him, and pursues those things as good.51 On the other hand, Aristotle might be making a more ambitious point: that it seems that every art and every action aims at what is in fact good. On this view we would not have, for example, shipbuilding unless ships were good. We would not have bridle-making without the utility of bridles. And actions aim at various things that are components of happiness, or means to happiness, or expressions or consequences of happiness. For 50

The interpreter of Aristotle has another choice here. Aristotle very often makes points that are confined to males, where the contemporary philosopher would like to be inclusive of female and male. I will stick to male pronouns in making Aristotle’s points, but not in making my own. 51 To pursue the evil as evil would make the subject, as Kant puts it, “a devilish being,” and this designation is not applicable to human beings. It is the devil who says, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “Evil be thou my good” (IV, 110).

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example, we want to have friends, and friendship is a component of happiness. And health is a component of happiness, so we go to the dentist as a means to long-term dental health. And dancing in the street is an expression of happiness at the end of a war. Arts at first sight fit better with this second view than actions do. It is plausible to say that the arts all aim at actual goods. This is both Plato’s view and Aristotle’s. This does not mean that all practitioners of the art aim at good. Aristotle makes the point that the same art that makes a successful doctor makes a successful poisoner. This art of knowing how different potions affect the body, and of knowing the causes of disease, enables one person to keep her patients alive and another person to cause her victims’ deaths. But the art itself, Aristotle would say, is aimed at the good of health. We might raise a counter-example: quasi-humorous expressions like “raising procrastination to an art-form” or “the art of spindoctoring.” But the fact that these expressions are paradoxical makes the point that when we call something “an art” we are thinking of it as headed towards the good; that is what gives these expressions their pretension to wit. I think Aristotle also intends the more ambitious view in the case of actions, that it seems that every action aims at what is in fact good. One reason for thinking this is, again, Aristotle’s vertical theme. In his discussion of pleasure, he says that all (both beasts and human beings) “perhaps actually pursue not the pleasure they think they pursue nor that which they would say they pursue, but the same pleasure; for all things have by nature something divine in them.”52 Here Aristotle’s view seems to be that there is something directing our pursuits so that they aim towards what is actually good even if we do not acknowledge it. Is it plausible to say that all actions are aimed at what is actually good? Is the taking of the heroin or the theft of the gold aimed at something actually good? Perhaps what is bad about the heroin addict’s decision or the thief ’s is that they embody a wrongful ranking of the goods that are to be pursued. The addict is seeking pleasure or relief from pain, and the thief is pursuing status or wealth. We might say there is nothing wrong in themselves with pleasure or status. Aristotle would certainly say that the good life will contain both of these things. What is wrong is to prefer these ends over other ends that are ranked higher by reason. Virtue only allows you to pursue 52

NE VII, 13, 1153b31–2.

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pleasure and status if they are consistent with what Aristotle calls “the noble.” The addict and the thief have placed things that can be part of a good life, if properly ordered, at the top of their priority scale, when actually they belong much lower down. Just what are the roles of pleasure and status in a good human life? There is a whole spectrum of views about this. At one end of this spectrum is the ascetic view that the best person is completely indifferent to them. The Stoics (a school founded by Zeno of Citium, c.336–c.265) thought that the sage (who lived the best human life) cared only about two things: to be virtuous and to know that he was virtuous. He could be happy on the rack – an instrument of torture in which the victim’s arms and legs are tied to an expanding frame and he is literally torn apart. The sage is indifferent to the pain and humiliation of this torture (though he may “prefer” some natural goods to others as better material for virtue). He can be virtuous even in the midst of it, and he can know that he is virtuous. Aristotle’s view is different.53 The happy person has to have more than merely virtue and the knowledge of virtue; he must have at least a reasonable measure of external goods, and pleasure and status are included here. But do Aristotle’s happy people pursue pleasure and status for their own sake, or do they only pursue activity in accordance with virtue, and then enjoy the pleasure and status that will accompany this activity as side effects? That would be a middling-ascetic view. It says that we can only properly aim at virtuous activity, but we can properly foresee pleasure and status as consequences and be pleased at the prospect.54 Now, Aristotle does think that pleasure and status accompany virtuous activity. But I think, though this is controversial, that he allows the virtuous person also to pursue these goods for their own sake as long as they are pursued subordinately to the noble. That is the least ascetic view of the three I have considered. It

53

NE VII, 13, 1153b20ff., “Some maintain, on the contrary, that we are happy when we are broken on the wheel, or fall into terrible misfortunes, provided that we are good. Whether they mean to or not, these people are talking nonsense.” 54 This is a version of what is sometimes called the doctrine of double effect. It is like saying that in warfare we are only allowed to bomb military targets; but we can foresee as a consequence that we will sometimes hit civilians, and this is permissible as long as it is not intended as an end or as a means to an end.

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says that I may eat a chocolate fudge sundae for the pleasure of it. But if I am a happy person, I will only want the chocolate fudge sundae in the context of a nutritionally balanced life, so that I will not end up obese and impaired for virtuous activity. So this aiming at pleasure is still constrained under “the noble” by the virtue of temperance. The pleasure is properly pursued as an end, but not as an unconditional good.55 Aristotle seems to put power (or rule) in the same category as status, namely something good as part of the good life, but not good without qualification. We may disagree with him on this, and place power instead in the same category in which he places money.56 Aristotle thinks wealth is not in itself a good, though it is necessary for the good life, but is only good if it is used for something good. He says of wealth that “we choose it for the sake of something else,” not for itself, unlike pleasure and status that we seek both for themselves and also for the sake of something else.57 But he also talks about the life of the money-maker, and implies that some people do not see that money has purely instrumental value (that it is only choice-worthy 55

Christine Korsgaard makes a useful distinction between things we pursue that are ends (rather than means) and things we pursue that are unconditionally good (independently of what else we pursue). See C. Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” Philosophical Review 92, 1983, 486–505. 56 Let us say that power is the ability to make other people do something or think something whether they want to or not. See Robert Dahl, “Power as the Control of Behavior,” in Power, ed. Steven Lukes, New York: New York University Press, 1986, 37–58. It seems right to say that not only can money and power be used for both good and ill (as can pleasure and status), and not only do they tend towards the corruption of the person who loves them (as do pleasure and status), but they do not have an initial valuation on their side, or a presumption of innocence until they are proved guilty. They do not have any internal resources to provide an initial resistance to the corruption process. We might imagine (though Aristotle does not) that God is already pleased if we have pleasure (unless it is an evil pleasure) or a good reputation (unless it is based on deception); but God does not care one way or the other whether we have money or power, since everything depends on the rest of our disposition. 57 NE I, 7, 1097a25–b6. It is significant that he does not say about power what he says about money.

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for the sake of something else). This is a qualification to the claim that all actions are aimed at what is actually good. It seems plausible that we sometimes aim at things like money that are not in themselves good or evil. Moreover, we sometimes seem to aim at them for their own sake. If this is right, then some actions aim at things that are neutral as though they were good as ends. We can be in error not only about the ranking, but about the initial placement of something as having intrinsic value. Finally, I want to make a fourth point about this first sentence, and I will raise it as a question. Does the sentence commit a fallacy? Consider the following argument: Every boy loves some girl, and therefore there is some girl that every boy loves. If this refers to some one girl loved by every boy, the conclusion does not follow.58 The basic structure of Aristotle’s first sentence seems to be: Every art and every action aim at some good; therefore there is some good, at which every art and every action aims. Is not this a straightforward example of the same logical mistake? Suppose I ask my students, “Why did you come to class?” and they answer, “Because I wanted to learn something about Aristotle,” or, perhaps, “Because I need an ethics class for my major.” Then I might ask again, “Why do you want to learn something about Aristotle?” or, “Why do you want a philosophy degree?” and they might say, “Because Aristotle is a great philosopher, and if I understand him I am likely to get closer to the truth about how we ought to live.” Or they might say, “Because it will help me get into law school.” And suppose I persist, “Why do you want the truth here?” or, “Why do you want to go to law school?” Aristotle thinks that at some point they are all going to give the same answer; they are going to say, “happiness.” They may have different conceptions of what happiness is. They may think it is a life centered around contemplation and truth, or they may think it is a life centered around making lots of money and the status that money will give them, or they may think it is a life of sensory pleasure. But in any case, they will be aiming at

58

We can see why the fallacy is sometimes called “quantifier shift,” if we put it into symbolic form. The premise is that for all x, there is a y such that x loves y. The conclusion is that there is a y such that for all x, x loves y. What has happened is that the order of the quantifiers has been changed, or shifted, and the order matters for validity in this inference.

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what they think is happiness.59 Now we need to ask Aristotle, “Do you have any argument that there is only one such end that we humans pursue?” Why could it not be that when we trace back through the objects of our desires, we get to many independent things we want for themselves? I might want truth and understanding, friendship, and physical pleasure. But if these are all independent intrinsic goods, what is their relation to happiness? This is the topic of the next section. But I want first to free Aristotle of the charge of committing a fallacy in the first sentence. Aristotle is not saying, “The good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim,” though that was the most widely used English translation in the twentieth century.60 Aristotle would be guilty of the fallacy, if he intended us to think he had established in this one sentence the existence of just one chief good for human beings. But he does not intend this. The question of whether there is such a good remains open. His argument should be construed as follows. He starts by pointing out that every art and every action seems to aim at what I will call a “local” good. By that I mean a good that is located by that particular art or that particular action. Thus, shipbuilding aims at building a ship. The action of charging against

59

This is Aristotle’s point in Chapter 5 of Book I, and it is the less ambitious point I distinguished earlier. Aristotle also holds the more ambitious view that human life is in fact aimed at contemplation, whether we realize this or not. 60 Sir David Ross, The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1925. But the Greek has no words corresponding to “to be.” This addition of “to be,” though it is perfectly natural, is misleading. For if you hear that some people declared that x is y, or that they declared x to be y, you take it that they are committed to the existence of x. Strictly speaking this is not entailed, but it is strongly suggested. On the other hand, if you hear that they declared that x would be y, you no longer assume that they are committed to the existence of x. Consider a house-proud couple, who declare that the Emperor of China would be welcome in their house. They may know perfectly well that there is no Emperor of China, and they are saying that if there were one, he would be welcome in their house. What the Greek says in the first sentence is that they declared x y, and this is neutral between these two readings (that x is y, and that x would be y, if x existed).

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the enemy on horseback aims at routing the enemy. Aristotle then asks us what would be necessary if there were to be a “global” good.61 A global good would, he says, have to be related to everything in the way shipbuilding is related to ships and charging to rout. In other words, it would have to be that at which everything aims. But Aristotle is not yet committing himself to the view that there is such a good, let alone claiming that he has proved there is. He will go on to to claim that there is such a good, but he has not done so in the first sentence. And so there is no fallacy. The first sentence of the first chapter, and I think also the first sentence of the second chapter, is conditional: Should there be a chief good for human beings, it would necessarily be that at which everything aims.

Heading towards the Good In this section we will ask what kind of good Aristotle is talking about, and whether his view in the Nicomachean Ethics is consistent. Aristotle distinguishes, as Plato had done in the Republic, three kinds of good.62 There are goods like money that we pursue always for the sake of something else (they are “not-complete”), complete goods like pleasure and status, that we pursue both for their own sake and for the sake of something else (they are “more complete”), and complete goods like happiness, that we pursue only for their own sake (they are “most complete”). The chief good, Aristotle says, will be both most complete and self-sufficient. He says that we regard something as self-sufficient “when all by itself it makes a life choice-worthy and lacking nothing.” This second criterion adds to the first that not only is the chief good pursued only for its own sake, but it does not depend for its activity on the presence of something else. Self-sufficiency here does not mean having no attachments to anyone or anything beyond oneself. In fact, Aristotle says that because we are social beings our good is social in the sense that it includes the good of other people (family, friends, and fellow-citizens). Also, he is not saying that a self-sufficient good has to be a single, un-mixed ingredient that in isolation makes a life worth living. Rather, the self-sufficient good

61 62

See Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, 8ff. NE I, 7, 1097a25–b16.

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makes a life worth living all by itself, but it is in itself complex: activity in accordance with virtue. Aristotle concludes, “We think happiness to be the thing most of all worth choosing, not counted as just one thing among others. Counted as just one thing among others it would clearly be more worthy of choice with even the least good added to it. For the good added would cause an increase in goodness, and the greater good is always more worthy of choice. Happiness, then, is obviously something complete and self-sufficient, in that it is the end of what is done.”63 This might seem to imply that the chief good has to include all the complete goods, since happiness has to be the sort of thing that could not be made better by the addition of even “the smallest of goods.” But it is doubtful whether this totally inclusive idea makes sense. How could the idea of happiness already include, for example, the total pleasure from the best possible number of scoops of icecream that are part of the best possible life? There is no right answer to the question “How many scoops is that?” Aristotle is denying that happiness is “counted as one (good) among many.” But this does not mean that happiness counts all complete goods inside itself, but that happiness is not to be counted along with other good things at all. We do not list happiness as one of the good things in life (along with ice cream), because happiness is itself a whole life that already has the one (complex) thing which makes a life worth living. Aristotle then gives a three-step argument from the characteristic human function (ergon) to the conclusion that happiness is “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and indeed with the best and most complete virtue, if there are more virtues than one.” The first step is to show that humans have a characteristic function or activity. Aristotle’s argument for this in the Nicomachean Ethics is perfunctory. But this is because he has a worked-out theory elsewhere for biological species in general, which I described briefly in an earlier section of this chapter. A life-activity (or activity of the soul, since psyche in Greek means both life and soul) is the characteristic activity of a species if, and only if, every normal member of this species and no member of a lower species can perform it.64 Suppose we grant 63

NE I, 7, 1097b16–21 (Crisp). See David Keyt, “Intellectualism in Aristotle,” in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Vol. 2, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983, 367. 64

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him that nature sets a fitting direction for how humans should live, by directing us towards our form, our characteristic human activity. The second step is to show that a good human life performs its characteristic activity well. To see why Aristotle should think this, imagine that the inhabitants of the planet of some star far away are setting up an intra-galactic zoo, and have dispatched emissaries to collect the best human they can find. What kind of human should they be looking for? There are all sorts of things that humans can do. But the aliens should not look for a human that can reproduce well, for even plants can do that (and some of them on a scale that puts humans to shame). They should not look for a human that can run well (for cheetahs can do that better) or smell keenly (given the superiority of the canine sense of smell). No, they should look for a human that can think well, because that is what humans do uniquely among animals.65 A good human life will be one that performs the human function well. The third step is to argue that an activity is performed well if it is performed in accordance with virtue. This is easy because of the definition of “virtue” (which is the same word in Greek as “excellence”). So a good human life is one that performs the characteristic soul-activity (which is thinking) in accordance with virtue. Aristotle adds that if there are more virtues than one (involved in performing this characteristic function well), then happiness is activity in accordance with the best and most complete of them. In Book X, Chapter 7, Aristotle concludes the whole argument of the work by returning to this argument from human function. If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable to expect that it is in accordance with the highest virtue, and this will be the virtue of the best element. Whether this best element is nous, or

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Strictly it is a kind of thinking that is unique. A deer can think it is thirsty and go to a brook in order to drink. But it cannot have the universal thought, “Whenever deer are thirsty, they should go to drink.” Aristotle sees species functions as arranged (like arts) in a hierarchy. Plants are lower than animals because normal plants lack functions (such as moving and perceiving) that normal members of animal species have. Animals with more senses are higher than those with fewer. We get the same three-part hierarchy here as in the Protrepticus.

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something else we think naturally rules and guides us and has insight into matters noble and divine, and whether it is divine or just the most divine element within us, its activity, in accordance with its own proper virtue, will be complete happiness.

Aristotle goes on to say that a life of contemplation is superior to one that is simply human because someone lives thus not insofar as he is a human being, but insofar as he has some divine element in him . . . But we ought not to listen to those who exhort us, because we are human, to think of human things, or because we are mortal, think of mortal things. We ought rather to take on immortality as much as possible, and do all that we can to live in accordance with the highest element within us.

Then, at the beginning of the following chapter, he adds, “The life in accordance with the other kind of virtue [i.e. the kind concerned with action] is happy in a secondary way, since the activities in accordance with it are human.”66 Now we can ask whether Aristotle is consistent in his position about the chief good in Books I and X of the Nicomachean Ethics. This is not a straightforward question, because there are different kinds of inconsistency. One kind is a flat-out change of mind, where a person said or thought one thing and now says or thinks its opposite. But it is also possible for an author to express herself clumsily and contradict herself when in fact she has a perfectly consistent view that needs more careful statement. A third possibility is a development of an author’s views, which leads to a kind of inconsistency different from either of the first two kinds. She starts with one view – that A is paradigmatically B, because B is C – but then she decides that what makes something C is D, but B is not D. So she ends up denying that A is B, except in a secondary sense. The following are two examples of this kind of development. First, an author starts with the commonsense idea that substance is paradigmatically something like Socrates, an individual member of a species. Socrates underlies qualities, locations, etc., for example being pale or being in the market. But then the author asks what 66

NE X, 7, 1177a 12–16, 1177b26–34, 1178a 9–10 (Crisp) but I have kept the Greek nous and added parentheses.

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makes something the kind of thing that can underlie even when the qualities, locations etc. change and decides that it is form of a certain kind (the characteristic activity of the species). Socrates is not form, however, but a composite of form and matter, and he is therefore substance only in a secondary sense. This development is what happens in the shift from Categories to Metaphysics Books VII and VIII. Here is a second example. An author starts with the commonsense idea that the good life is paradigmatically a life lived in accordance with practical wisdom (at its best the life of the statesman). But then the author asks what makes something the kind of thing that can rule and direct a city, and decides that it is the activity of the highest part of us, nous. But activity in accordance with practical wisdom is not the activity of nous (namely contemplation), but a composite of this with handling particular things that change in the world. So the political life is happiness only in a secondary sense. This development is what happens in the Nicomachean Ethics in the shift from Book I to Book X. There are three ways to try to rescue Aristotle’s consistency that I want briefly to reject, before exploring this suggestion further.67 One possibility is that Aristotle means throughout the Ethics to distinguish our human good and our divine good. Contemplation is the divine good, and activity in accordance with practical wisdom, in its most complete form the life of the statesman, is the human good. This is what he sounds as though he is saying when he distinguishes a happiness “in a secondary way” that is concerned with action. But this proposal does not fit the fact that our virtuous practical lives are regarded as both human and godlike throughout the Nicomachean Ethics (indeed throughout Aristotle’s ethical writing). A second possibility is that Aristotle has consistently in mind a single life that is a mixture of contemplation and virtuous practical activity, and he means to say that this life is happy in two different ways; its com-plete happiness is the happiness of the contemplator and its secondary happiness is the happiness of practical virtue. But this view does not fit Aristotle’s tendency to distinguish the three lives (as Pythagoras did), for example in Book I, Chapter 5, which 67

The first is from H. H. Joachim, Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1962. The second is from David Keyt, “Intellectualism in Aristotle.” The third is from Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

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distinguishes the life of physical pleasure, the life of politics, and the life of contemplation. Finally, a third possibility is to say that Aristotle has a consistent picture of two different lives, one of which is complete happiness and the other of which is happiness in a secondary way. The idea is that everybody would be best off with complete happiness, if that were available, but some people, by defects of natural endowment or circumstance, cannot make it, and can be happy only in the secondary way. But this interpretation does not do justice to the whole-hearted endorsement of the life of practical virtue that we get in Book I and in the discussions of ethical virtue in the following books. The early books do not give us the impression that Aristotle regards the life of practical virtue as a second best. We should attribute to Aristotle the third kind of inconsistency I mentioned above. The use he makes of the notion of “the divine” is helpful in understanding the shift that happens here. Aristotle starts with the dichotomy between art and action, and sets up happiness as acting well (in Greek, eupraxia), under the knowledge-base of the statesman who knows how to use status, pleasure, nous, and every virtue in order to achieve this end. As he says in the function argument I have just been describing, the human function is “some sort of life of action of the [part of the soul] that has reason.”68 Aristotle is reflecting a common picture or “common sense” that the most admirable human being is a ruler, or leader. When Socrates asks Meno what virtue (excellence) is, Meno’s initial reply is, “Simply the capacity to govern human beings, if you are looking for one quality to cover all the instances.”69 Similarly, in the Protrepticus Aristotle says that the best humans are by nature rulers, the best part of us is by nature the part that rules us (namely nous), and the best species by nature rules the other species.70 In Nicomachean Ethics Book I Aristotle brings in the notion of “the divine” as a component of this common picture, “For while the good of an individual is a desirable thing, what is good for a people or for cities is a nobler and more divine thing.”71 But the question that makes the shift in Aristotle’s ethical thought is the question “What gives the ruler’s wisdom this kind of authority?” Aristotle’s answer to this question leads him to 68 69 70 71

NE I, 7, 1098a3–5, emphasis added. See VI, 5, 1140b7. Meno 72d1–2. B 29, 38, 95. NE I, 2, 1094b9–10 (Crisp).

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the conclusion that the kind of life that is immersed in governing is the good life only in a secondary way. This answer is formally inconsistent with some statements in Book I, but the inconsistency is of the third kind I distinguished. In the Protrepticus we already find the thought that makes the shift, and again it is associated with the notion of “the divine.” The faculty that rules us by nature, nous, is divine, and its characteristic activity is to look at the divine and the eternal; it is divine and stable because it is imitating what is immortal and stable.72 The statesman on this basis has the boundary markers by reference to which he should determine what is just, what is good, and what is expedient.73 But then our noblest good must be activity in accordance with the characteristic virtue of this highest faculty, and this activity is not action at all but contemplation. I am not claiming that Aristotle’s thoughts about this in the Nicomachean Ethics undergo no change from the Protrepticus. But the basic pattern is repeated. “Whether it be nous 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 excellence will be complete happiness.”74 Contemplation is not even finding out about God and the essences of things, which is a kind of detective action, but rather contemplating these exalted objects when they have been found. There will still be a need in the contemplative life for the practical virtues, for the contemplator is still aiming at what is noble (kalon) and will not be content with meanness or cowardice or self-indulgence; but the exercise of these virtues will look different than it would if the practical virtues were the focus of his life. For example, the magnificent man is described as making great expenditures, such as equipping the city’s warships and paying for excellent theatrical productions at the city’s festivals of Dionysus. But the contemplative life will not need such extravagant resources, and indeed will be reluctant to spend all the time and energy that being magnificent requires. “We can do noble acts without ruling earth and sea.”75 So the conclusion in Book X of the

72 73 74 75

B 50. B 47. NE X, 7, 1177a13–17. NE X, 8, 1179a3.

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Nicomachean Ethics is that happiness has two kinds, and both of them are themselves presumably mixtures (though Aristotle unfortunately sets aside as “too large for our present project” the discussion of the separation of nous from the human compound of soul and body). There is the life focused on contemplation, which still needs temperance and bravery and generosity; and there is the life focused on the practical virtues, which still needs the boundary markers given by understanding, though the quality and quantity of firsthand reflection in this life may be reduced. Even if we grant the conclusion in Book X that the best kind of happiness is focused on contemplation, we can still think of ethics as asking about action. A sentence at the beginning of Book II, Chapter 2, helps us understand this combination: “Our present discussion does not aim, as our others do, at contemplation; for we are examining [what virtue is] not in order [just] to know what virtue is, but in order that we might become good.”76 Once we conclude that the highest virtue is contemplative wisdom, and that the best kind of happiness is focused on activity in accordance with this virtue, we still need to know how to act. Aristotle’s view is that we become virtuous by acting in accordance with the virtues, so the answer to the question of how to act is also going to answer the question of how to become good. He uses the analogy of the racetrack, and Greek racetracks were shaped like a U, ending on the same line where they began and going around a turning post in the middle. We start off with certain principles we inherit from our parents and society, and (because we are human) we ask questions about these as we get older. We reach the turning post when we acquire a vision of the good human life, knowing what virtue is and what happiness is. Then we can race back to the original line (where the judges sit), but now with the principles not merely secondhand but fully appropriated as our own. But suppose what we discover at the turning post is that the noblest and best human life is not, as we originally learned from common sense, a life focused on practical virtue but a life focused on contemplation. We still have to apply this discovery to our

76

NE II, 2, 1103b27–8, parentheses added. The sentence is often translated with “we are examining” used intransitively, in the sense of “conducting an examination.” The Greek verb can be used this way, but is more often used transitively. I owe this reading to R. M. Hare.

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practical lives, to our decisions about what to do with our money and our time and our friends. We will not have either the best or the second-best life unless we know how to make these decisions.77 I would like to end this section with a personal remark about the life focused on contemplation and the life focused on practical virtue, since I have, at different times, tried to lead each of them (in a contemporary form). I have taught at university and written books, but I have also worked on staff in Congress and as a consultant in a hospital, trying to apply whatever understanding I have of what is good to making law and advising doctors. There is a real tension between these life-ideals, and there are real frustrations as a result. In Congress, decisions have to be made on a fast-flowing schedule where there is very little time or energy for careful first-hand reflection. On the other hand, academic life often seems remote from the immediate welfare of one’s society (Aristotle would say, one’s polis), and the best human life should surely contribute directly to this. I have not settled in my own mind which of the two ideals is better, and I do not know how to do so.

Virtue In the final section on Aristotle, I want to look at his treatment of virtue and practical reason. He gives his official definition of ethical virtue in Book II, “Virtue, then, is a state involving rational choice, consisting in a mean relative to us, and determined by reason – the reason, that is, by reference to which the practically wise person would determine it.”78 Aristotle subsequently gives most of the terms in this definition more detailed treatment. I will focus on the two ideas that virtue lies in a mean, and that the mean is defined by reference to reason. The virtues, Aristotle says, lie in a mean between excess and defect. Some of them, like courage, can be described in terms of emotions like fear and the appetite for risk. Some of them, like generosity, can be described in terms of domains of operation such

77

Protrepticus B 51, “This knowledge is indeed contemplative, but it enables us to frame all our practice in accordance with it.” 78 NE II, 6, 1107a1–3 (Crisp).

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as how much a person retains and how much he gives or spends. But in each case there is some continuum, and the virtue is a disposition to feel or act in the middle of that continuum (which is just the right amount). Thus the brave person feels not too much and not too little fear and appetite for risk (but just the right amount to fight well as a soldier). The generous person spends and keeps not too much and not too little (but just the right amount to preserve the size of the estate). Aristotle also says that the virtues can be thought of as peaks, rather than intermediates. For example, suppose we are considering how many calories we should eat in a day. We could imagine a graph with a descriptive continuum on the horizontal axis and degrees of excellence on the vertical axis. I am simplifying here by excluding related variables connected with nutrition. The horizontal axis will range from zero calories to, say, ten thousand (when we are dead), and the vertical axis from the worst to the best state. At the junction of the axes, zero calories coincides with the worst state (we are dead) and as the number of daily calories increases our state gets better. But at some point eating more calories does not improve our state, and indeed starts to damage it, until (as the calories increase into the many thousands) we reach again the worst state (we are dead). The line we would draw on this graph would be a curve from the base up to a peak and then down again to the base. In this way Aristotle can say both that the virtue (the disposition to eat the right amount of calories) is a peak (on the vertical scale) and in a mean (on the horizontal scale). This picture of the graph is, however, misleading. It suggests that we could work out what to do by looking at the extreme possibilities, and taking a path in the middle. But the mean Aristotle intends is, in his terms, “relative to us” and not what is intermediate by strict numerical proportion. His example is Milo the boxer, who is considering how much to eat. Suppose ten pounds is a lot to eat, and two pounds is a little; it does not follow from the doctrine of the mean that Milo’s trainer will prescribe six pounds. For the right amount depends on whether one is a boxer, or (for example) an accountant and whether (if one is a boxer) one has just started training or is in full career. Aristotle’s point is not that the right amount is different for every individual, but that it is relative to the life one is leading (and it is an objective question how much is right for each kind of life). But if so, then how are we to determine what is the virtuous mean? Aristotle’s answer is given in the rest of the quotation: the

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mean is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason “by reference to which the person of practical wisdom would determine it.” We are not given here a decision procedure in advance of a decision, but a description of the kinds of decisions that a good person makes. Aristotle is saying that when we look back at the decisions that the person of practical wisdom makes, we will see a pattern according to which the reasons he gives for his decisions locate them between the typical decision-patterns of two recognizable types of non-virtuous people, one type on the side of excess and the other on the side of defect. The doctrine of the mean is not itself going to tell us what risks to take for what ends at what times. If we want an account of these matters, we need to know more about this reason-giving that characterizes the decisions of the person of practical wisdom and the target that Aristotle thinks this person is aiming at. There is the beginning of an answer in his discussions of individual virtues, such as courage and generosity. The courageous person will feel fear, for example when the enemy is charging towards him in battle, but will be able to resist “for the sake of what is noble (since this is the end of virtue) in the right way and as reason requires.”79 So we have a name for what Aristotle thinks virtue aims at: “the noble.” But what is this? He never gives an explicit definition, but there are some associations that he very often makes. The noble is contrasted with the shameful (aischron, which can also be translated “ugly”) and the base, and associated with what is worthy of honor. This means that it is valued for its own sake, not merely for what we can do with it. The term has an aristocratic flavor, and the contempt for what is merely useful is typical of aristocratic valuesystems.80 The masses have to spend their time scrabbling about to get enough food to eat and to find shelter and clothing. The many, Aristotle says, do not even have a notion of the noble, and they

79

NE III, 7, 1115b12 (Crisp). For the case of generosity, see IV, 1, 1120a24. 80 Compare the scene in the novel Girl from the South by Joanna Trollope, which is about an old family from Charleston, South Carolina. A prospective son-in-law is describing his sister to the matriarch of the family: “‘Well – she’s a midwife’. Sarah looked at him. Her finely penciled eyebrows said everything. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘how very, very useful’.’’

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cannot be virtuous.81 Only gentlemen, what the Eudemian Ethics calls “noble-and-good” people, have the leisure and the resources for “the finer things in life.” This is why the Spartans, who had no leisure, could be good people but not noble-and-good; they valued virtues like courage, not for the sake of “the noble,” though, but for the sake of things like health and friendship.82 The class connotations of the word “noble” can also be seen in the Greek word I have translated as “generosity,” which can be translated literally as “the state of being free” in the sense that is opposed to being a slave.83 It is characteristic of the “free” person to be concerned with what is noble and not with the merely useful. The noble is associated also with what is rare and hard to achieve. This is one reason it is worthy of honor. Nobility also characterizes those who rule. Those who will never rule, for example slaves and women, will never have complete virtue. The final association I want to mention is that the noble belongs with the divine. This fits well with all the previous associations. In Homer deities are gentlemen and ladies on a grand scale. Aristotle quotes Homer more frequently than any other author in his description of the moral virtues (thirteen times in this section of the Nicomachean Ethics), and in Homer the gods bear the same kind of patronage relation to the heroes as the heroes bear to the common folk. It makes sense in this context to think of the gods as having the noblest kind of life, with the greatest ease and freedom and control over others. I discussed earlier the notion of an “honor-loop” that is characteristic of the relation between both gods and humans and high-class humans and their clients. At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle tells us that happiness is activity of the best thing in us, which is nous, or whatever else seems to be the natural ruler and leader, and to understand “what is noble and divine” by being itself either divine or the most divine element in us.84 Many of the terms that I have claimed are associated with “the noble” are collected together by Aristotle when he is talking about the objects contem-

81

NE X, 9, 1179b15. EE VII, 15, 1248b37–49a3. 83 See John E. Hare, “Eleutheriotes in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Ancient Philosophy 8, 1988, 19–32. 84 NE X, 7, 1177a12–16. 82

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plated by nous; they are “extraordinary, amazing, difficult, and divine, but useless.”85 If virtue aims at the noble, how is this consistent with Aristotle’s claim that every action aims at the agent’s own happiness? Surely the noble is an ideal independent of the agent, a way of life that could go on whether the agent existed or not, and that could indeed call on the agent to make significant sacrifice (for example of his life in battle)? It is telling, however, that when Aristotle considers this case of dying in battle he feels that he has to give a justification in terms of the brave man’s reward either by posthumous honor or by the brief moment of exaltation before being killed. (He might also have made the point, though he does not, that if the brave man is not willing to die, he has to live the rest of his life with dishonor.) Aristotle never departs from the view that everything we do aims at our own happiness, and therefore if we are also aiming at the noble it must be as a description of the best life for ourselves. Having said that, however, thinking about the noble does take Aristotle towards a less restrictive view of our happiness. It is noble to enlarge our conception of happiness to include the wellbeing of our households and friends. Friendship in Aristotle is a more inclusive relation than we tend to think it, so that clients and fellow-citizens are counted as kinds of friends. A catchy way to put this is that the “me-self ” becomes a “we-self ” by this gradual enlargement, as though I could become elastic and fit others inside my skin. Aristotle uses the language of “a different himself ” to talk first about a father’s relation to his son, and then a virtuous friend’s relation to his friend. The father loves the son as “a different himself ” because the son came from him, and the virtuous friend loves his friend as “another himself ” because he relates to the friend and to himself in the same way (for example, he likes to spend time with himself and with his friend and there is a basic unity in griefs and joys internal to himself and with his friend).86 So the happiness of a good person will require the happiness of his family and friends (broadly construed). But he will only aim at their happiness to the extent that they have these special relations with him. Aristotle is not proposing here that we value every

85 86

NE VI, 7, 114166–7. NE VIII, 12, 1161b28 and IX, 4, 1166a32ff.

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human being as an end in himself or herself, or that our happiness counts morally no more and no less than anyone else’s. Another limit to how much we love a friend and how much we love ourselves is that we do not wish to become gods ourselves, and we do not wish our friends to become gods.87 The reason we do not want this for our friends is that if they become gods they will be too superior to us to remain our friends. So we want the greatest good for our friends “as human beings.” Aristotle adds the additional qualification that we do not strictly want all the greatest goods for our friends, “since it is for himself most of all that each person wishes what is good.” The reason we do not want ourselves to become gods, even though that would be the best state, is that we would not any longer be ourselves. The god already possesses the good perfectly “in virtue of being what he is.” But we humans, though we can become divine in a way through the activity of nous (which Aristotle says each person seems to be, or at least primarily to be), cannot become divine in the way the god is without becoming a different substance (and so, perishing). Here we have the distinction between the divinity we can have, as human, and the divinity we cannot. The picture of a “noble” life gives rational choice a way to make decisions. But the Aristotelian analogy of the racetrack might give us pause about whether we really have choice at all. In the terms of the analogy we can only reach the turning post if we start from the right starting line, and then ask “why” questions about the practices and principles we are being raised with. If a child has been brought up in an environment in which he does not have virtuous models to internalize, it is forever too late. It is natural to ask Aristotle whether the acquisition of virtue is itself voluntary.88 Aristotle thinks we acquire virtue by being trained in good habits, but does he think the connection between this training and our acquisition of virtue is causal, and so under causal law? I think the best way to interpret him is to say that he does not raise the question in this form. The same 87

NE IX, 4, 1166a20–2 and VIII, 7, 1159a5–12. The text of the first of these passages is disputed, but see J. A. Stewart, Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics, II, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892, 357–61. He argues against taking the passage as an interpolation. 88 The Eudemian Ethics answers this question affirmatively, on the basis that we are praised and blamed both for our virtues/vices and for the actions that flow from them, EE II, 6, 1223a4–15.

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should be said about the notion of free will in Aristotle, which does not occur in its modern form in his writing.89 Because Aristotle did not have the idea that there is a single set of laws to which all natural things are subject, he did not bother about whether human choosing is consistent with such a set of laws, and so about whether universal determinism is true or there is free will inconsistent with such determinism.90 A virtuous action is voluntary, he says, because its origin is in the agent. Saying that a virtuous action is voluntary, however, is only part of what Aristotle means by saying that it is chosen. He says that children do things voluntarily (sometimes he even extends this description to non-human animals), but they do not strictly speaking choose. For choice we also need reason. But what is this reason? Aristotle says “Mere thought moves nothing.”91 It is tempting to think he means that what moves us, by contrast, is desire (which adult humans share with children and animals). But he, in fact, continues, “[thought] must be goal-directed and practical . . . So rational choice is either desire-related nous or thought-related desire, and such a first principle is a human.” As I will mention in Chapter 3, Hume proposed that thought or reason is itself inert, contributing to action only by inferring conclusions from premises and by working out means to previously established ends. This leaves it to desire to settle on the ends. But this is not Aristotle’s position. He is saying, rather, that reason is involved in determining the ends as well as the means, but it is reason in the context of desire. They are united in the apprehension of ends, and neither is enough by itself. If reason does not play this role, the person will be muddled or cloudy or conflicted, because of the desires and other passions that he feels. The good person is someone whose reason and desires are in harmony. There are two different kinds of end that are involved here, and they function very differently. One kind is happiness, under the 89

R. -A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, L’Ethique a Nicomaque, p. 266: “The concept was invented only after eleven further centuries of philosophical reflection.” But in the next chapter I will claim that we can find something like the concept in Augustine. For the view that Aristotle does have a concept of will, see Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will, London: Duckworth, 1979. 90 See Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, p. 130. 91 NE VI, 2, 1139a35–6 (Crisp).

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description “the noble,” which has a high degree of generality. The person of practical wisdom will have insight into the best kind of life for humans to live. If I was right earlier there is a shift in the conception of this end from Book I to Book X. The other kind of end has a high degree of specificity, and is perceived only in the situation in which a choice has to be made. Aristotle talks about perception in this context, but he does not mean sense perception, rather, something analogous, involved in seeing what to do. If I am deciding whether to accept a late paper from a student, I am trying to discern whether the student is someone who is genuinely trying to do good work under stressful circumstances or is manipulating me in order to make his or her life easier. Aristotle uses the term nous to describe the apprehension of both kinds of end, the end which is general (“the noble”) and the end which is specific to a situation.92 He uses “nous” because the apprehension is intuitive (like perception), rather than discursively working out the practical conclusion (like deliberation). Practical wisdom, on the other hand, is discursive, finding out the way to realize the general end in the specific situation that confronts the agent. The harmony between reason and desire can break down. Aristotle discusses this breakdown under the heading “incontinence” (akrasia), sometimes translated “weakness of the will.” This translation is misleading because it suggests that Aristotle has a concept of the will that would be familiar to us. But his picture is different in many ways. He introduces the discussion of incontinence with a six-fold distinction in the states of a human being; divine (which exceeds the merely human on the one extreme), virtuous, continent (able to overcome wrongful desires and passions that are present), incontinent (unable to do so), vicious, and bestial (which exceeds the merely human on the other extreme, and which Aristotle says is mostly found amongst barbarians).93 Thus Aristotle’s account of the virtue of courage, unlike ours, is that the brave person does not feel wrongful fear and love of risk in the first place. To feel wrongful desire or passion and resist it successfully is not, for him, virtue but continence. Suppose a woman suffers from agoraphobia but nonetheless overcomes her fear and goes shopping in the mall. On Aristotle’s account she is not being brave, but continent. A 92 93

NE VI, 11, 1143a35ff. NE VII, 1, 1145a15–22.

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brave person would not feel such fears to begin with, though this point needs to be qualified by what Aristotle says about the divine human person, for even a brave but non-divine person, who is “unperturbed, as far as a human being can be,” will feel fears that Hector the hero did not.94 Centuries of thought about original sin have made it easy to assume that even a good person’s will is subject to temptation and the vestigial pull of “the flesh.” Aristotle’s account of incontinence is, by contrast, an account of a certain complex kind of ignorance to which the virtuous person is simply not liable. To explain this, I need to describe the kind of error in deliberation that Aristotle thinks occurs in incontinence. I will present his account as a kind of civil war between a “good” syllogism and a “bad” syllogism both present within the incontinent person.95 A temperate man is not prone to wrongful desires for fatty food. When presented with some fatty food he ought not to eat (a donut), he knows how bad it is for him, and he leaves it on the plate without even being tempted. An incontinent man also knows that fatty food is bad for people (the “good” universal premise), and he knows roughly how many calories this donut has and that he is over his healthy limit (the “good” particular premise). If he put these two premises together, he would naturally refrain (like the temperate man). But he also knows that sweet food is pleasurable (the “bad” universal premise). And he knows that this donut is sweet (the “bad” particular premise), a knowledge activated by perception.96 94

NE III, 7, 1115b10–11. Again this is a reference to the merely human. This is one classic reading. See Richard Robinson, “L’Acrasie selon Aristotle,” Revue Philosophique, 145 (1955), 261–80. But Aristotle does not use the term “syllogism” here, and the analysis could proceed in terms of the conjunction of the two types of end I have just described. 96 To see the significance of perception here, consider the case where the incontinent man is not presented with the donut on a plate, but there is a note on the table saying there are donuts in the cupboard. He will find the note much easier to resist than the sight and smell of the donut, even though it is perfectly easy for him to go to the cupboard. The point is that physical perception, the sight and the smell, has power over him, as if it could cause his hands to reach out all on their own to the forbidden food. But Aristotle allows that there are cases of incontinence where the incontinent person is not swept away by passion like this, but plans ahead, presumably to be in a situation where he can predict that the good syllogism 95

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What happens to him is that his desire for this sweetness in front of him is so strong that it puts out of gear, so to speak, the “good” particular premise, so that he half-forgets during the episode all those unfortunate calories and/or his own need for a diet. Aristotle says that he knows but does not use the knowledge.97 Because of this, the civil war inside him is won by the “bad” syllogism, and he eats the donut. Aristotle concludes, however, that the incontinent man has preserved throughout the episode the knowledge of the good universal premise, and it is not this knowledge that is “dragged around like a slave.” Now we can ask what kind of end has the power to produce virtue (in this case, temperance), and this brings us back again to the divine. Aristotle says in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics that knowledge of the chief good will have great “influence” on life (the term is from his theory of dynamics).98 Though he disagrees with Plato about the Form of the Good, his own account of happiness is supposed to share with Plato’s theory the feature that if we see the highest good clearly, we are more likely to act in accordance with it. Perception of lesser goods (for example, physical pleasures) is less likely to derail us, if our desire-related nous or our thought-related desire is already fully engaged by a vivid insight into the highest good. Thus Aristotle says that bodily pleasures are pursued inordinately by those “who have nothing else to enjoy.”99 My hypothesis is that Aristotle uses the language of “the divine” in order that we will recognize and feel the “influence” of the highest good at its full strength. The language has two referents, the God who moves us and the divine in us. In Metaphysics XII Aristotle says that God moves by being loved, drawing us to be as like God as we are capable of being. In the Nicomachean

will lose the civil war, NE VII, 6, 1149b14–18. See John Austin, “We often succumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse,” from “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, eds J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, 146n. A full account of incontinence needs to distinguish many more sorts of cases than Aristotle discusses. 97 It follows that the syllogisms do not have the same particular premise. See Norman Dahl, Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 98 NE I, 2, 1094a23. 99 NE VII, 14, 1154b5.

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Ethics, human and non-human animals are said to “have something divine” or “something superior to themselves” that seeks their own appropriate good.100 For human beings, pleasure is not a reliable tracking system except for those who are already good people. But God is nonetheless drawing humans towards their good, even though this good is not what the wicked would think or say that they were pursuing. Aristotle is assuming that we already want to be like God, or to be “blessed,” and he uses theological vocabulary for our final end to help us become good, which he says is the goal of thinking about ethics.101 A twenty-first-century person influenced by centuries of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought will have certain puzzles about Aristotle’s theology. Three questions in particular Aristotle will seem to leave strangely open. The first is whether there is one God or many. Sometimes Aristotle talks in the singular and sometimes in the plural, and he does not seem to mind the tension (or at least does not try to resolve it): Within six lines he says, “Anything to do with actions would appear petty and unworthy of the gods” and “the god’s activity which is superior in blessedness will be contemplative.”102 Second, he talks both about divinity being outside us and inside us: “Nous is either divine itself or the most divine element in us.”103 Third, he does not commit himself about whether God (or the gods) helps us achieve happiness or whether we do it ourselves.104 But similar ambiguities can in fact be discovered either in the sacred texts

100

NE VII, 13, 1153b32 and X, 2, 1173a4–5. NE II, 2, 1103b26–9. 102 NE X, 8, 1178b17–23 (Crisp). See Bodéüs, Theology of the Living Immortals. 103 NE X, 7, 1177a15–16. 104 At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics he leaves this question for discussion “in a different inquiry,” NE I, 9, 1099b14, and then at the end he says, 101

If the gods pay attention to human beings, as it seems they do, it would be reasonable for them to take pleasure in what is best and most akin to them, namely nous; and reasonable for them to benefit in return those who most of all like and honour nous, on the assumption that these people attend to what is beloved by the gods, and act correctly and nobly. X, 8, 1178a24–29.

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or in the theological traditions of the three major monotheistic faiths, and Aristotle is not unique in his difficulties at these points.105 I will close with three themes in Aristotle’s discussion of the divine, all of them continuous with his predecessors (“the wise”) including Plato. The first theme is the divinity of law. Heraclitus had spoken of the obligation to hold fast to the law of the city, “for all human laws are nourished by one which is divine”106 Aristotle says, “He who commands that law should rule may thus be regarded as commanding that God and nous alone should rule.”107 We get closer to the divine when we ascend to the level of the city and its laws. Socrates in the Crito imagines the laws coming down, like a deus ex machina at the end of a tragedy, to confront him with the impiety of escaping from prison. He is to serve them, they say, as children are to serve their parents, and if he does not, “then you will have to face our anger in your lifetime, and in that place beyond when the laws of the other world know that you have tried, so far as you could, to destroy even us their brothers, they will not receive you with a kindly welcome.”108 There is an echo of this spirit in the civil religion that attends, for example, US presidential inaugural addresses. “God” and “Country” are objects of a linked loyalty, a felt link between the country’s laws and the laws of the cosmos. Aristotle thinks that the statesman can appeal to the authority of the divine if his ethical instruction is genuinely aimed at the good of the city, and that we will feel the motivation to obedience to what is nobler than we are as individuals. The second theme is the aristocratic extrapolation I mentioned when discussing “the noble.” The idea was that the gods ruled the elite of society in a way similar to that in which the elite ruled the many, and the elite were in this way the most like the gods (and were sometimes officially divinized by their fellow-citizens). Earlier

105

The Hebrew Scriptures talk about “gods” as well as “God,” e.g. Psalm 16:4. Various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologies likewise have different emphases on God’s transcendence and immanence, and different accounts of the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human freedom. 106 Diels 114. 107 Politics III, 16, 1278a28–30. 108 Crito 54c4ff.

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I stressed the connection between the divine and honor. In Homer, divine rule was exercised physically and without much moral constraint, but, since Xenophanes, the Pre-Socratic philosophers had been uneasy with this aspect of Greek religion. Xenophanes was a monotheist, and rebuked Homer for these disgraceful and presumptuous stories. He thought of God as “effortlessly setting all things astir by the power of his nous.”109 In the same way, Socrates rebuked Euthyphro, the religious expert, for the disgraceful stories he told about the gods. Socrates hoped to make progress in defining holiness, when he asked, “What is that supreme result which the gods produce when they employ our services?” But Euthyphro never produced a satisfactory answer.110 Socrates gave his own answer in the Theaetetus: that we should become “like the divine so far as we can, and that is to become just and holy with the help of wisdom.”111 Aristotle answers Socrates’s question in the passage I have already quoted. We do what is most noble and gives most pleasure to the gods when we contemplate, because this is how we are most like them; we will then be happy. But the happiness is still aristocratic in the sense that it puts us above others, who properly honor us as we honor the gods. The Pythagorean picture of the three lives exalts the contemplative life at the expense of the other two, which are the only options available to most other people. The third theme is that contemplation gives us access to the imperishable. Earlier I stressed the connection between the divine and blessedness (especially its permanence condition). In the Physics, Aristotle singles out Anaximander among his predecessors for thought about what is divine, deathless, and imperishable: Hence, as we say, there is no source of this [the infinite], but this appears to be the source of all the rest, and “encompasses all things”

109

Diels 25. Aeschylus, the tragedian, gives the chorus a great opening prayer to Zeus in The Suppliants 96–103 (see the discussion in Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1947, 45 and 212), which reflects this new view: “For gods act without effort:/ High from their hallowed seats/ they somehow make their own thinking/ come all at once to pass.” 110 Euthyphro 13e10ff. 111 Theaetetus 176b.

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and “steers all things,” as those assert who do not recognize other causes besides the infinite . . . And this, they say, is the divine; for it is “deathless” and “imperishable,” as Anaximander puts it, and most of the physicists agree with him.112

Aristotle has a more elaborate account of causation, and a different account of infinity, but he does not depart from this central tying together of the divine and the imperishable, which is the destination and source of all change in the cosmos. The characteristically human means of connection with this source and destination is contemplation. In the Timaeus Plato says, He who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal, and since he is ever cherishing the divine power and has the divinity within him in perfect order, he will be singularly happy.113

Plato goes on to describe the process of feeding the divine principle within us upon the harmonies and revolutions of the cosmos. Aristotle preserves the sense that the divine in us is sustained by thinking about what is the most beautiful (most kalon, most noble), which is what is fully active but without change. In the Metaphysics, this is God, since God is fully active by possessing the object of God’s nous, which is God.114 Aristotle, at the end of the Eudemian Ethics, repeats these last two themes. He says, To conclude: whatever choice or possession of natural goods – bodily goods, wealth, friends, and the like – will most conduce to the contemplation of God is best: this is the noblest criterion. But any standard of living which either through excess or defect hinders the service and contemplation of God is bad. This is how it is with the soul, 112

Physics III, 4, 203b5–15. Timaeus 90c. The Greek for “the divinity” is daimona. See also Phaedo 80d–81a. 114 Metaphysics XII, 7, 1072b20. 113

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and this is the best criterion, to be conscious as little as possible of the irrational part of the soul in so far as it is irrational.115

Contemplation of God involves, as in Plato, an appropriate degree of separation from the irrational part of the soul. But it also provides a criterion (together with service of God) for the proper allocation of natural goods, which will follow the principle that the noblest people should get the noblest goods since contemplators and servers of God have the noblest object in their activity. In this way Aristotle derives what he describes in the Protrepticus as “boundary markers” by which the statesman can determine what is just, what is good, and what is expedient.116

Larry Arnhart I will end this chapter by describing a contemporary version of Aristotelian ethical theory that does not give the place within the theory that Aristotle gives to God or gods. The example I have in mind is Larry Arnhart’s book Darwinian Natural Right.117 This book is an example of how the new discipline of evolutionary psychology (a revised version of what was called “sociobiology” in the 1980s) has been mined for data to support a non-theist ethical theory of an Aristotelian type. The book is, however, just an example, and I do not mean to imply by the selection that it is the most successful example. Nor do I mean to claim that any such attempt is bound to fail in the 115

I have used Kenny’s translation in Aristotle on the Perfect Life, p. 99. Kenny points out that the Oxford Classical Translation emends theon (“God”) to theion (“divine”) twice in this passage, without good warrant. F. Dirlmeier, Aristoteles, Eudemische Ethik, ubersetzt und kommentiert, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962 argues that even if we retain “God,” it has to mean the highest part of ourselves. But Kenny shows that this reading cannot be sustained. 116 B 47. I will return to Scotus’s use of this principle in Chapter 2. 117 Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998 (henceforth DNR). Some of the material here is taken from John E. Hare, “Evolutionary Naturalism and Reducing the Demand of Justice,” Religion in the Liberal Polity, ed. Terence Cuneo, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005, 74–94.

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same way that I will claim Arnhart’s attempt fails. I have chosen this book because of its self-conscious attempt to construct an Aristotelian system of evolutionary ethics. My objections will not be so much to Arnhart’s attempt to do Aristotle without theology, but to his desire to make a de-theologized Aristotelian system reach the same conclusions about how to live as systems that derive from contemporary theological premises. Arnhart says, “Aristotle says so little about religion in the Nicomachean Ethics that one could easily infer that it contributes nothing essential to the ethical life of human beings.”118 What is surprising about this is that, as I have tried to show, Aristotle mentions God or the gods or the divine in the Nicomachean Ethics rather often. While Arnhart gives a grudging place to Aristotle’s talk of God, he simply does not notice many of the passages where Aristotle talks about the divine. This is a pattern repeated in much twentieth-century scholarship, though it is starting now to be corrected. The pattern is also conspicuous in the secondary literature on Kant from the twentieth century. The twentieth-century interpreter encountered all these theistic passages in the author he or she was interpreting, and found them embarrassing – relics of a bygone era from which the author needed to be extracted. So we had Bertrand Russell’s account of Lebniz’s system in five axioms, none of which mentioned God. And when Lewis White Beck interpreted the First Critique of Kant he told us that the theistic passages were due to clumsy editing, survivals of a pre-critical period of Kant’s thought that a more careful editing would have removed. The result of this de-theologizing was that the great authors of our tradition were left with incoherent systems. I have tried to show the importance of his theology to Aristotle, and I will try to do the same for Kant. Arnhart concludes, on the final page of his book, “Perhaps the greatest human good, which would satisfy the deepest human desire, would be to understand human nature within the natural order of the whole” (emphasis added). By “natural” here he intends a contrast with the supernatural, which he says is stressed by Christians. This contrast is anachronistic if applied to Aristotle, since Aristotle makes no contrast between natural and supernatural, but contrasts the 118

DNR 251. Arnhart does not deny that religious people can be helped by thinking about God, but he thinks the deepest human good is to understand our situation within the natural order, DNR 275.

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natural with the artificial. But Aristotle does have a contrast between the merely human and the divine in humanity, and also between this human–divine and the God who attracts us from outside the human sphere. This gives his theory a way to acknowledge the aspiration of humans to be more than merely human, and Arnhart’s exclusion of this dimension of Aristotle’s theory prevents him from acknowledging this. It is as though Arnhart is stuck with the “commonsense” position before the shift that I have attributed to Aristotle, the shift that comes with the thought (already present in the Protrepticus) about nous and the imperishable. Arnhart sets up his system this way: the good is the desirable, and the desirable is what is generally desired by human beings. I will call this “the double identity.” The premise is similar in function to the first sentence of the Nicomachean Ethics, setting the stage for the whole book. By “generally desired” Arnhart means that these desires are found in most people in every society throughout human history, though not necessarily in every person, since there may be defective individuals who lack them. The connection he makes with evolution is that evolution gave us these desires, operating selectively on our species in the hunter–gatherer stages of our development during the Pleistocene, because these desires enhanced our chances of survival and reproduction.119 There are twenty such desires that he lists, and the framework of his argument is that if a desire is general in this sense, belonging to this list, then its fulfillment is good. I do not want to deny that there are desires that are general in this sense. That is an empirical question, and we should listen to what comparative anthropologists tell us about it. Arnhart has done ethical theory a service by bringing together much of the germane scientific literature, not just from anthropology but from ethology and cognitive and social psychology. What I want to deny is the double identity. Arnhart denies that there is any valid principle of ethics that requires disinterested benevolence. The following quotation comes in a discussion of Darwin’s inconsistency about ethics. Arnhart says, Darwin is wrong in thinking that female sympathy – as rooted in maternal care – can expand into a disinterested universal sentiment of humanity. After all, even maternal care manifests itself as a love of 119

DNR 17, 30, 66, 81–2, 124.

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one’s own offspring and a willingness to defend them against strangers. And although sympathy can be expanded to embrace everlarger groups based on some sense of shared interests, this will always rest on loving one’s own group as opposed to other groups. Darwin’s appeal to universal humanitarianism can only be explained as a utopian yearning for an ideal moral realm that transcends nature, which contradicts Darwin’s general claim that human beings are fully contained within the natural order.120

Arnhart thinks Darwin is misled by a false sense that there is something wrong with motivation directed towards one’s own happiness. Here Arnhart prefers Aristotle to Darwin. He continues, When individuals or groups compete with one another we must either find some common ground of shared interests, or we must allow for an appeal to force or fraud to settle the dispute. The only alternative, which I do not regard as a realistic alternative, is to invoke some transcendental norm of impartial justice (such as Christian charity) that is beyond the order of nature.

How does Arnhart reach the conclusion that there is no authoritative norm of formal justice (counting each person as one and no person as more than one)? The key is the double identity, the claim that the good is what is generally desired. When Arnhart looks at the desires he thinks evolution gave us in our hunter–gatherer stage he does not find a desire to respect humanity as something valuable in itself. What he does find (among the list of twenty) are desires for social status, for political rule (though this is, he says, a natural male desire not a natural female desire), for war (again a male desire), for wealth (that is, enough property to equip for a good life, and to display social status), and for justice as reciprocity. What is justice as reciprocity? It is fairness in exchange; a benefit for a benefit and a harm for a harm. Arnhart takes the notion from Hume, and for Hume justice as reciprocity extends only as far as utility. A person will be motivated towards reciprocity to the extent that she perceives that she will be benefited or that she will avoid harm. If we imagine,

120

DNR 146, emphasis added. See also 76, “Throughout most of human history, the social instincts within a tribe never extended beyond the tribe.”

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therefore, a society in which those whom we exploit will not be able to harm us because of their weakness, we will not be moved by justice as reciprocity to end the exploitation even if they resent it. This is Hume’s conclusion, that no inconvenience would result from the exercise of such a power, and therefore the restraints of justice would be totally useless, though we might be motivated by compassion and kindness.121 Aristotle notoriously held that women are inferior to men, and therefore should never rule either in states or (over adult free males) in households, and he justified slavery on the basis that some people are by nature incapable of ruling themselves.122 Arnhart wants to let Aristotle off the hook on slavery on the grounds that the ancient philosopher is being deliberately confusing, so as to make us work out his hidden views, which are more humane.123 But for Aristotle to deliberately mislead us in this way seems to me quite alien to his character, which is one of constantly seeking greater clarity. We should take his statements about women and slavery as giving his own views. What is relevant in the present context is to connect these views with his account of human nature. Aristotle thinks that some humans simply do not have the kind of rational self-control that makes ruling or freedom appropriate, and that is especially distinctive of human life. More deeply, humans by nature desire wealth, power over others, and high social status. Here Aristotle and Arnhart are in agreement. For Aristotle, as for Arnhart, the human good includes wealth and power and status. I think that Aristotle is for the most part right about the desires we are born with. He is not right, however, in the inference to the human good. We do naturally desire these things, but it does not follow from the fact that we desire them that they are good.

121

See Jonathan Harrison, Hume’s Theory of Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981, 276. 122 See Politics I, 1, 1252a31–4 and NE X, 6, 1177a8–9. 123 Arnhart is here relying on a typical interpretive strategy of Leo Strauss. Indeed Arnhart’s book begins and ends with quotations from Strauss. It is worth pointing out that Jonathan Lear, whom Arnhart cites as an ally in this interpretive strategy (DNR 173) does not in fact take such a position. See Jonathan Lear, The Desire to Understand, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 197 and 208.

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One way to see this is to see that the natural desires conflict. I will illustrate this from Arnhart’s own treatment of the moral status of women and slaves. He says The natural pattern of desires typical for men is not the same as that typical for women. Men typically have a stronger desire for sexual promiscuity, while women typically have a stronger desire for intimate companionship. Men typically have a stronger desire for dominance, while women typically have a stronger desire for nurturance. Men typically desire the solidarity of comradeship, while women typically desire the solidarity of kinship. Because of their typical desires, the distinctive virtue of men is courage, while the distinctive virtue of women is sympathy.124

We have here a refinement of the initial double identity. What is good is not merely what is generally desired by humans, but what is generally desired by natural subgroups of humans, such as males and females. This view is quite compatible, Arnhart says, with a feminist naturalism, and he quotes remarks by Carol Gilligan and other second-wave feminists about “a different voice.”125 But these feminists were not actually in favor of separating the political and domestic spheres and granting a complementary preeminence in the political sphere to males and in the domestic sphere to females. Arnhart has a term for conflict in natural desires, and he should use it here too, though he does not. It is the term “tragedy.” We find tragedy whenever two natural desires conflict with no resolution by common self-interest. Arnhart does not give us any way to proceed in such cases except by coercion. What he cannot say, and what I want to say, is that a practice can be wrong (not merely tragic) even if it does fulfill “natural” desires by the “naturally ruling” males. If Arnhart is to be consistent, he should say that male and female mating strategies in general are tragic. He does say that lifetime monogamy is unnatural, a frustration of natural desires, and therefore presumably bad. After the children can manage on their own, he says, there is no natural need for a couple to stay together.126 The natural, and so best, strategy is what he calls serial monogamy, a 124 125 126

DNR 123. DNR 127. DNR 265.

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succession of committed relationships. But he should, I think, go further, and admit that for males, even in a committed relationship, there is a natural desire, which is therefore good to fulfill, to be unfaithful.127 Arnhart cannot, as far as I can see, have it both ways. Given that what frustrates a natural desire is bad, he cannot both say that males have a natural desire for promiscuity, and that what is best (and not merely tragic) for males is monogamous-albeit-sequential fidelity. If males, in virtue of their natural political dominance, can enforce a double standard, according to which infidelity in females is punished but infidelity in males is not, there will not be any obstacle in nature (as Arnhart views it) to their doing so. The sense of tragedy is also the only conclusion I think Arnhart is entitled to in the case of slavery, and I will end this chapter with this point. He thinks that there is a natural human desire for exploitation: “Like other social animals, human beings are naturally inclined to exploitation through coercion and manipulation.”128 But there is also a natural inclination on the part of slaves to resist exploitation. The result is, one would have thought, tragedy; one natural desire pitted against another.129 But Arnhart does not in fact conclude with tragedy. He concludes that slavery is wrong and should be abolished, because it is inconsistent with justice as reciprocity, which is a natural human desire. On this account it is because human slaves, unlike ant slaves, will effectively resist exploitation that human slaveowners are required by this kind of justice to acknowledge their claims. The problem with this account is that for millennia of human history, the resistance of slaves was futile. Slavery was only abolished in Britain when William Wilberforce and his friends obeyed the claims of the kind of universalist morality that Arnhart thinks is unrealistic. The root problem here is that Aristotle and Arnhart are both wrong to hold that it follows from the fact that we naturally desire something that the satisfaction of that desire is good. 127

Statistics are hard to be confident about here. An interesting study on a college campus reports that if an attractive stranger of the opposite sex approaches and proposes intercourse, 100 percent of the women in the study refuse, and 75 percent of the males accept. R. D. Clark and E. Hatfield, “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,” Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality 2, 1989, 39–55. 128 DNR 167–8. See also 196. 129 Arnhart does sometimes express himself this way, e.g. DNR 170.

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Aristotle is simply more consistent in moving from his premises to his conclusions about the relations between masters and slaves and between men and women. The point I end with is that Arnhart is stuck in a difficulty that Aristotle is not. Arnhart does have the notion of the supernatural and he ties a certain set of moral notions centered on impartial justice to a system that has such a God at its center. These moral notions have the resources to reach the moral conclusions Arnhart himself wants to reach; I will return to this in the final chapter. But, by rejecting these notions, he has given himself the project of reaching these same conclusions without the same conceptual background. He has proposed premises from evolutionary psychology to fill the gap. But if I am right, these premises cannot do the work he wants them to do.

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Raphael, La disputà del sacramento, (The Triumph of Religion), fresco, c.1508–11. Rome, Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura. Photo akg-images/Erich Lessing.

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Chapter 2

DUNS SCOTUS

The Disputà In this chapter I am going to focus on the ethical theory of Duns Scotus, a Franciscan theologian and philosopher who lived at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I want to begin, however, by saying something about the different worlds in which Scotus and Aristotle lived. I will use as a guide for this purpose Raphael’s fresco called the Disputà, situated on the opposite wall of the Stanza della Segnatura from the fresco called The School of Athens that I described in the previous chapter. The two frescoes are symmetrical in placement, both occupying a semi-circular area (the top half of two opposite walls) that Raphael has made to appear to recede in space. But there is one immediately striking difference between the two frescoes. The School of Athens presents a single circle of people in discussion, while the Disputà presents two semicircles, one on top of the other. The upper group is resting on a bank of clouds supported by angels, and the lower is on the ground. In the center of the upper group is Christ enthroned, with God the Father above him and the Holy Spirit as a white dove below him. There are four progressively smaller circular areas painted in gold (a color that does not appear in the School of Athens at all), each directly below the one above it: first the area where God the Father is represented, and the surface of the fresco is here (and only here) indented with small cup-shaped depressions and incised with lines representing rays of light, so that the gold leaf coruscates and

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sparkles. We only see the lower fraction of this circle. The second golden circle surrounds Christ and partly encompasses his mother on Christ’s right (the only woman in either fresco) and John the Baptist on his left. Extending from Mary’s right and John’s left are two seated rows, each alternating figures from the time of Jesus and from before him in Jewish history. The third golden circle surrounds the Spirit who is flying down towards the people in the lower group, on the ground. The fourth, the smallest, is the circular vessel called a “monstrance” sitting on the altar, in the middle of which is the white circular Host, the consecrated bread in which Christ is present at the Eucharist. The gold represents the presence and glory of the divine. Sadly, my readers, who can only see the image in black and white and grey, will miss it. In The School of Athens there is a single focus point, between Plato and Aristotle, but in the Disputà there are two, one for the earthly realm and one for the heavenly. The vanishing point for the lower area is at the base of the golden monstrance. The sacramental Host is between the two, representing the role of the Eucharist as joining the two realms. The lower semicircle of men is a group of theologians, who, like the philosophers opposite them, form into smaller circles of passionate conversation. They are standing on a geometric pavement like that of The School of Athens, with four steps up to the level of an altar in the center of which is the monstrance. All of this suggests a church. But unlike The School of Athens, there is no completed temple structure. There is the beginning of a huge columnbase behind the figures on one side of the altar and there is a church being constructed in the distance behind the group on the other side.1 The separation into two semicircles allows us to see three key differences between the Greek view we discussed in the previous chapter and the Christian view of how things are. In Aristotle’s scheme there is a God (or gods), as we emphasized in the first chapter, but there is no distinction between natural and supernatural. When Aristotle uses the term “nature” (phusis) he intends a contrast not with what is supernatural, but with what is artificial (techne). In Aristotle’s system God is natural in every way except that God does not grow or move or change (having no matter). But in Raphael’s 1

Perhaps the idea is that theology will not be complete until the Church is.

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Christian picture there are two realms, heaven and earth, and God in heaven and the presence of God on earth are glorious. This glory is represented on earth in the monstrance, the altar cloth, and the halos around the heads of the saints. Here is the second key difference between the Christian and the Aristotelian stories. In the Christian story, God acts towards us. There is a movement in the fresco from the Father through the Son to the Spirit who is flying towards us. The Host on the altar unites us. The saints are sanctified by the Spirit. Moreover the whole scene (human figures, angels, clouds, and church) is God’s creation. In Aristotle God contemplates Godself, but does not act at all, let alone act towards us. The three persons of the Trinity in the fresco are ranked not only in height (with the Father above the Son and both of them above the Spirit) but also in how much we see of them. We see by far the most of Christ. God the Father is obscure, and the Spirit is a small bird whose face we do not see. Here is the third major difference from Aristotle’s account. In the divine realm, what we see most clearly is Christ (who is both divine and human) and in particular Christ crucified. He is holding up his hands showing the nail holes in them, and he is naked to the waist so that we can see the lance wound in his side. The humans sitting beside him to his right and his left are brought together by his sacrifice that earned their salvation. In Plato and Aristotle there is no comparable idea of self-sacrifice, either human or divine. One small example will make the difference vivid. Two of the gospels tell a story of Jesus with his disciples in the temple, where they see a poor widow putting two small coins in the treasury, while rich people are putting in substantial gifts. Jesus comments that she actually put in more than they did, because she had so much less to give. “She out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”2 Aristotle describes the virtue of generosity (his word, eleutheriotes, refers literally to the state of being a free man and not a slave) as maintaining the size of one’s estate by proportioning what one gives out and what one takes in (as we now design a thermostat to maintain the temperature in a room). Aristotle’s contrast is with the prodigal person (the Greek is asotos, literally “not preserving,” and is the same word used in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son who wasted his share of his

2

Mark 12: 41–4, and Luke 21: 4.

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father’s estate). In Aristotle’s scheme, the poor widow is not generous but stupid – she simply cannot afford the gift. This is one place amongst many where Aristotle has a view that both contrasts with what Jesus says and is closer to what now passes for common sense. One last point about this story: Jesus is not merely commending a more radical generosity. He is also holding up as a model a woman who is poor and he is condemning the rich.3 In Aristotle it is impossible for either women or the poor to be fully virtuous. The ideal of self-sacrifice can be and has been abused in practice so as to encourage some people (particularly women) to sacrifice themselves for other people (most of them men). But it is important to see that self-sacrifice need not be presented in the Christian story as an end in itself. Pope Innocent XII condemned as heresy the view that we should not care about our own happiness. Jesus, after all, is displaying his wounds on the heavenly throne, the symbol of his triumph. He instructed his disciples during his time on earth, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”4 There is in this account a final reward, but the final reward follows a radical selfdenial and a focus outside the self on God and neighbor. The theme of self-sacrifice is clearest in the part of the narrative that deals with Jesus’ death. This event is understood in many different ways in the New Testament, but one central interpretive key is redemption: that Jesus died on our behalf, an innocent man on behalf of the guilty. Jesus makes the willingness to die for our neighbors the paradigm of loving them. Our relationship to God, which we violate by disobedience, is restored by God’s forgiveness through redemption. In Paul’s letters especially, we are given a three-fold location in time for the complex relation of our morality to God’s work on our behalf. (Paul is represented in the fresco in the upper

3

In Luke, the story is immediately framed by Jesus condemning the teachers of the law “who devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers” (Luke 20: 47) and the disciples admiring the wealth of the temple, which Jesus says will be destroyed (Luke 21: 5–6). The suggestion is that the widow’s plight is a consequence of an unjust economic system associated with temple worship. 4 Luke 9: 23–4, emphasis added.

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semicircle, seated nearest to us in the group on Christ’s left. He is holding a sword, the traditional instrument of his martyrdom.) We are forgiven for our past failures on the basis of Jesus’ sacrifice. We are reconciled now with God through God’s adoption of us in Christ. And we are given the hope of future progress in holiness by the work of the Holy Spirit. All of this theology requires more detailed analysis, but this is not the place for it. Jesus sums up the law in the two “great commandments,”: to love God with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.5 This last phrase might seem to be commending self-love, but it is more likely that Jesus is assuming selflove, rather than prescribing it, and then prescribing that we should have the same love for our neighbors. These two commandments have several implications that are inconsistent with the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and that come from ideas of God and God’s relation to human beings found in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Morality and religion are connected in the Hebrew Bible primarily by the category of God’s command. Such commands come already in the first chapter of Genesis. First, God creates by command – for example “Let there be light.” Then, after the creation of animals, God gives a command to them, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and repeats the command to the humans created in the divine image. In the second chapter there is another command. God tells Adam that he is free to eat from any tree in the garden, but he must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Eve and Adam disobey, and eat of that fruit, they are expelled from the garden. God is setting up a kind of covenant by which humans will be blessed if they obey the commands God gives them. Human disobedience is not explained in the text, except that the serpent says to Eve that they will not die if they eat the fruit, but will be like God, knowing good and evil, and Eve sees the fruit is good for food and pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom. After they eat, Adam and Eve know that they are naked, and are ashamed, and hide from God. Their turning away from God and from obedience to God makes their action sin (offense against God). As the story goes on to describe

5

Mark 12: 29–31. Both ideas can be found in the Pentateuch. See Deuteronomy 6: 5 and Leviticus 19: 18.

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their descendants, Genesis says that wickedness spread to the whole human race, and calls this a corruption of the heart, a basic orientation away from God.6 God wipes them out, except for Noah and his family, in a flood. Genesis continues with God’s command to Abraham to leave his ancestral land and go to a land God promised to give him and his offspring. Then there is the command to Abraham to kill his son, a command he was prevented at the last minute from carrying out. Abraham is represented in Raphael’s fresco holding a knife. I will return to Scotus’s treatment of this terrible story. Abraham’s greatgrandchildren end up in Egypt, because of famine, and become, through the generations, the people of Israel, who suffer under Pharaoh’s yoke. Under Moses, the people are finally liberated, and during their wanderings in the desert, Moses receives from God the Ten Commandments, in two tables or tablets. In Raphael’s fresco, Moses is holding the tablets on his lap. The first table concerns our obligations to God directly, to worship God alone, keep God’s name holy, and keep the Sabbath day holy. The second table concerns our obligations to other human beings, and all of the commands are negative (do not kill, commit adultery, lie, steal, or covet) except for the first, which tells us to honor our fathers and mothers. “Command,” “covenant,” “sin,” and “heart” (or “will”) are a family of terms that belong together. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but it is tempting to say that any one of these terms in their connection to God implies all of the others. One more term belongs here: “kingdom.” The Greeks had the notion of a kingdom, under a human king (though the Athenians in the classical period were suspicious of such an arrangement). But they did not have the idea of a kingdom of God. This idea is explicable in terms of law, and is introduced as such in Exodus in connection with the covenant on Mt Sinai.7 The kingdom is the realm in which the laws obtain. This raises a question about the extent of this realm. The Ten Commandments are given in the context of a covenant with the people of Israel, though there are references to God’s intention to bless the whole world through this covenant. The surrounding laws in the Pentateuch include prescrip-

6 7

Genesis 6: 5. Exodus 19: 5–6.

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tions and proscriptions about ritual purity and sacrifice and the use of the land that seem to apply to this particular people in this particular place. But the covenant that God makes with Noah after the flood is applicable to the whole human race, and universal scope is emphasized in the Wisdom books, which make a continual connection between how we should live and how we were created as human beings. For example, in Proverbs 8 Wisdom raises her voice to all humankind, and says that she detests wickedness, which she goes on to describe in considerable detail. She says she was the artisan at God’s side when God created the world and its inhabitants. I will take it, though this is controversial, that the Ten Commandments are supposed to apply to all human beings. Within Christian doctrine, the kingdom of God is only fully realized at the second coming of Christ, though Christ talks of it as already inaugurated in his work on earth; to the extent we are obedient followers, we are already doing the work of the kingdom. The idea of God that is central in the account I gave of the Greeks is the idea of God attracting us, like a magnet, so that we desire to become more like God. In the account I have just given of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the central notion is that of God commanding us. It is tempting to simplify this contrast by saying that the Greeks favor the good in their account of the relation of morality and religion, and the Judeo-Christian account favors the right, or obligation. It is true, I think, that the notion of obligation makes most sense against the background of command. But the picture is over-simple because the Greeks had room in their account for the constraint of desire; thus the temperate or brave person in Aristotle’s picture has desires for food or sex or safety that have to be disciplined by the love of the noble. Aristotle uses “right” (in Greek dei) together with “noble” in connection with avoiding what is shameful, like a bad reputation.8 On the other side, the Judeo-Christian account adds God’s love to the notion of God’s commands, so that the commands are embedded in a covenant by which God blesses us and we are given a route towards our highest good, which is union with God. The rest of the history I will describe in this book is a crossfertilization of these two traditions. On the ground in the fresco the places of greatest honor (the only four seats) are given to Jerome and

8

NE III, 6, 1115b12. There are many other such examples.

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Ambrose, next to the altar (Jerome on the left), and below them Gregory and Augustine (Gregory next to Jerome). These are the four great “doctors” (teachers) of the Western church. It is a sign of the completeness of the separation between East and West by the time of the Renaissance that Christendom can here be portrayed with no representative from the East.9 Already by the third century the Christian Church, originally a small group of Jews in Palestine, had extended itself “from India to Mauretania, from the Caspian to the barbarian tribes of Britain.”10 When the emperor Constantine (by birth, pagan) was finally baptized on his deathbed in 337 the faith became the faith of the empire.11 Three of the four great doctors were in contact with each other. All three of them reflected deeply about the relation between their faith and pagan philosophy. Jerome (331–420) was the translator of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures into Latin. He became the least enthusiastic of the three about the philosophers after a warning from Jesus in a dream, “You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian.” Ambrose was born in 340 and was bishop of Milan from 373–97. The empire had again split, and Ambrose assumed a position of authority and influence with Theodosius, the emperor of the West, who outlawed Arianism in his domains in 381. Western theological reflection was, until Augustine, significantly less developed than that of the East. But Ambrose could read Greek (for example, Origen and Plotinus), and when Augustine arrived in Milan, Ambrose encouraged him to get to know the thought of the Greek Neo-Platonist philosophers.12 Augustine, the youngest of the three, lived from 354–430. His best-loved work, the Confessions, is a kind of autobiography, telling the story of the turning of a heart to God. He describes his childhood paganism in North Africa and then coming under the influence of

9

The only possible exception is Origen, who may be the large figure on the left standing with his back to us, with two books at his feet. None of the Cappadocian Fathers I referred to in the previous chapter is included. 10 Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967, 71. 11 In 325 Constantine convened a universal council of bishops at Nicea to combat the Arian heresy, though what we usually call “the Nicene Creed” was actually passed in 381 at the Second Council, held in Constantinople. 12 See Augustine, De Beata Vita I, 4.

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the Manichees, an ascetical sect who taught of a cosmic battle between two material kingdoms of light and darkness. Augustine says that, in the end, this doctrine made him too passive, as though his heart was simply the place where the battle occurred and he had no active role in it. Moving to Italy, he came to know the NeoPlatonists. They led him to see that reality is fundamentally spiritual and matter can be transcended in a gradual ascent up to the Beautiful and the Good itself. But again, this did not do justice to the evil that was, he saw, within his will, not just in some material principle outside his will. He quotes from the beginning of John’s Gospel, and observes that the Neo-Platonists already knew, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” but they did not know, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Human beings, Augustine saw, are created for union with God, but we have the tendency to turn towards ourselves, to a private good, instead of to God. If we turn to God, we receive divine illumination, through intuition of the eternal standards (as in Plato, the Forms). If we turn towards ourselves, we lose the sense of the order of creation, and so the order of our loves is distorted. But we are born into this state of disordered desire, and we do not have the power, of ourselves, to help ourselves.13 Augustine says, “God bids us do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him.”14 This dictum does not violate the principle that we must be able to do what we ought to do, because Augustine is not (despite appearances) denying that we are able to do what God commands, only that we are able to do so on our own. He gives primacy to the virtue of loving what ought to be loved, especially God. His famous saying, “Love, and do what you will,” does not express a discarding of the moral law, but a confidence that humans who do truly love God will also act in accord with the other precepts of divine and moral law. The fresco takes a six-hundred-year leap from Gregory to Bonaventure (1217–74) and Aquinas (c.1225–74). I am not going to try to fill in the intervening period, except to mention Anselm (1033–1109), who moved from Normandy to England to lead a

13

For a good recent discussion of Augustine’s notion of original sin, see Jesse Couenhoven, “Responsibility Without Freedom? A Critique of the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin,” PhD dissertation at Yale, 2004. 14 On Grace and Free Will, 16. 32.

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Benedictine monastery, and was then appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He took vocabulary and concepts from Augustine and significantly reworked them, becoming one of Scotus’s main sources in the next century.15 The monasteries had handed down the learned tradition through the intervening centuries, but the tradition they preserved was incomplete. The works of Aristotle survived in Constantinople, in the Eastern Empire, but were lost to the West. They were translated into Syriac and Aramaic and Arabic in the Muslim world, and were commented upon with great learning and depth by, for example, Avicenna (980–1037) in Iraq and Averroes (c.1126– c.1198) in Spain, and by Jewish scholars, especially Maimonides (1135–1204). Scotus was strongly influenced by Avicenna’s metaphysical theory. When the Aristotelian texts were finally translated into Latin in Spain, they produced a second extraordinary rebirth of philosophy and theology in Western Europe, a second “renaissance” of which Bonaventure and Aquinas are the chief figures.16 Aristotle became known simply as “the philosopher” and his system became the main philosophical standard against which the Western European thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries measured themselves. Raphael gives Bonaventure and Aquinas halos (because they are saints) and inscribes their names in the halos so that we can be sure who they are. Aquinas is immediately to Augustine’s left and Bonaventure is on the other side of Pope Sixtus II (wearing the triple crown). They are chosen as the most prominent representatives of the two main orders of Friars, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The Franciscan order (to which Scotus belonged) was a radical reform movement started by Francis of Assisi, who lived from 1181 to 1228. Francis spent his life ministering to the outcast, and in the

15

See Jeffrey Brower, “Anselm on Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 222–56. I accept Brower’s comment (p. 251) that I have been incautious in saying that Anselm’s ethical theory is a natural development of certain views in Augustine. It would be better to say that Anselm used materials found in Augustine but puts them to significantly different use. 16 We can describe the rebirth of learning under Charlemagne (742–814) as the first.

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process gave up his own considerable inheritance and social status. He tried to follow directly Christ’s instructions to his first disciples not to take any gold or silver or copper in their belts.17 He undertook for himself a rule of obedience to God, poverty (because possessions easily come between the soul and God), and chastity (because sex and marriage easily become distractions from a life of service). His single-minded love of God first attracted groups of men (the Friars Minor or “little brothers”) and then women (the “Poor Clares”). At the end of his life Francis gave up control of the order and retired to solitude, prayer, and writing (the Testament and the Canticle of the Sun). He is said to have communed with birds and animals. By tradition, his identification with Christ was so strong that he received in his own flesh the marks of Christ’s crucifixion. Bonaventure joined the Franciscan Order in 1243. His prominence in Raphael’s fresco may be due to his role in the iconography of the whole room. He expresses the same view of the need to reconcile Plato and Aristotle as The School of Athens on the opposite wall. In this view, Plato, the master of wisdom, erred “in looking only upward to the realm of the immutable ideas,” while Aristotle, the master of natural science, “looked only earthward to the everyday sensible world” that Plato neglected. Of these two failures, Bonaventure thought Aristotle’s was the greater; but what was necessary was to combine the science of Aristotle with Plato’s wisdom, in the way he thought had already been modeled by Augustine. Some of the arts faculty in Paris had become enamored of “the philosopher” to an extent that Bonaventure considered incompatible with faithful Christian witness. Bonaventure’s view was that the project of combining science and wisdom required knowledge of revelation, which the pagan philosophers did not have, and so failed to understand the Fall and the consequences of Original Sin. The Dominican Order is represented in the fresco by Thomas Aquinas (dressed in the black and white of the order). He spent most of his life in Paris, where he wrote his great work, the Summa Theologica (which was supposed to be a complete summary of theology, but was never finished). Aquinas is sometimes regarded as synthesizing Aristotle with Christianity, as though this involved a choice of Aristotle over Plato. But this fails to recognize the extent to which

17

Matthew 10: 7–19.

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Aquinas is already indebted to Augustine. The whole picture of being which underlies the Thomist system is deeply Augustinian and so Christian–Platonist. Moreover, Denys (a perhaps sixth-century NeoPlatonist wrongly identified with the Dionysius the Areopagite, converted by Paul in Athens) is his most quoted source after the Bible and Augustine. The need for a radical choice between Plato and Aristotle is one that the fresco does not illustrate, and that I have been arguing against. When Aquinas does appropriate Aristotle, he is willing to make substantial corrections; three main areas in which he finds this necessary are the doctrine of the world (especially the creation), the soul (especially the resurrection), and God (especially God’s action towards us).18 He does agree with Aristotle that “every man naturally wills happiness; and from this natural willing are caused all other willings, since whatever a man wills, he wills on account of the end.”19 He also agrees that intellectual contemplation of God is the central component of the highest good. But even in the detailed treatment of the virtues, for example magnanimity, it is fascinating to see how differently he treats them by bringing them into contact with the model of the life of Christ and with the Christian virtue of humility. Aquinas still recognizes a vice of pusillanimity, for example, but it is the vice that tempted Moses, to excuse himself from God’s call to leadership on the grounds of his weakness and stuttering. Aquinas’s account of natural law is that while everything participates in some manner in the Eternal Law (which is in God’s mind), the rational creature “participates in Divine Providence by providing for itself and others. Hence, it participates in the eternal plan through which it has a natural inclination to its due act and end. And this sort of participation in the Eternal law by the rational creature is called the Natural Law.”20 In the Counter-Reformation, Aquinas was adopted as the chief authoritative teacher in the

18

These three problems (the world, the soul, and God) become preoccupations of subsequent philosophy, e.g. in the first, third, and fourth antinomies of Kant’s first Critique. 19 Summa Theologica (ST) I, q. 60, a.2. But the interpretation is controversial. See Scott MacDonald, “Egoistic Rationalism: Aquinas’s Basis for Christian Morality,” in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy, ed. Michael Beaty, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. 20 ST I–II 91, art. 2.

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Roman Catholic church, and this partly explains why, of all philosophers and theologians, an account of his views is the most likely to provoke his followers to wrath. But Scotus already avoids attacking Aquinas directly (though not always), and so the Counter-Reformation cannot be the entire explanation. There is a figure six from the right, hooded and obscured except for his piercing eyes, who has been identified by some scholars as Savonarola, a fiery Dominican friar who tried to reform religion in Florence. During the Lent of 1496 he persuaded the people to collect the “vanities” together, the masks and frivolous books and secular songs and pictures of nudes, and burn them in a great fire. He was forbidden by the ecclesiastical authorities to go on preaching, but refused to comply. The next year he was excommunicated, and in 1498 he was publicly hanged and himself thrown on the fire. Luther later hailed Savonarola as his predecessor in the Reformation, and published Savonarola’s commentary on the Psalms, written in prison. In 1510, at the very time Raphael was painting the Disputà, Luther came himself to Rome, and visited the Vatican, commenting that he went there with onions and came back with garlic. Consideration of Luther will take us to the central figure in the next chapter, who is Immanuel Kant. Some scholars identify the figure immediately to Ambrose’s right as Duns Scotus, dressed in Franciscan garb, though other scholars have said (based on facial resemblance) that this is Bernardinus of Siena.21 Whether it is Scotus or not, Scotus is the topic of the rest of this chapter.

Duns Scotus, Lectura Scotus was born in the town of Duns, Scotland in 1265 or 1266. His full name was John of Duns, the Scot. He entered the Order of Friars Minor in 1281 and studied at Oxford until assigned to the University of Paris in 1302. He had to leave Paris because of his defense of Pope Boniface VIII against the claims made by the emperor Philip the Fair. As part of the controversy the Pope deprived the university, which

21

See Heinrich Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputà, Rome: Gregorian University, 1975, 68.

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was supporting the emperor, of the right to confer degrees. In 1304 this decree was revoked, and Scotus returned to Paris and received his doctorate. In 1307 he was sent to Cologne, where he died the following year. One result of his early death is that we do not have a completed version of his thought, and we have to rely on various early or partial versions. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that there is as yet no definitive text edited to modern standards of philology, though the Vatican critical edition has been begun. We still rely for much of the corpus on a text originally prepared in 1517 by John Major (who was born twenty-five miles from Scotus but about two hundred years later, and who was the main teacher at the college outside Paris where Calvin did his degree). I will start again with an early writing, the Lectura.22 Scotus, like many Scholastics, bases his writing on the discussion of questions laid out by Peter Lombard (whom he calls “The Master”). Lombard (c.1095–1160) had written Four Books of Sentences, a compilation of statements from Fathers of the Church and some later thinkers. The first book is about the Trinity and the divine attributes, the second about creation and sin, the third about the Incarnation and the life of grace and virtue, and the last about the sacraments and the last things. I mentioned this work in connection with Egidio da Viterbo in the first chapter. At the time of Scotus all candidates in theology were required to comment on the Sentences as preparation for the doctorate. Philosophers and theologians for three centuries were helped to avoid talking past each other because they were made accountable to the same questions. The defect of the method was that topics not covered in the Sentences tended not to receive much discussion. Bonaventure had produced perhaps the most elegant example of this type of writing fifty years before Scotus began his training. The Lectura is the first treatment we have from Scotus of these questions; we have at least two other, later versions. In the prologue, Scotus asks, “Is a science called speculative or practical because of its end?” and then, “Is theology a practical [or theoretical] science?” His answer to the first question is that a science (or body of knowledge) is called practical or theoretical (speculative) by reason of its object. His answer to the second is that theology is a practical science. He starts with what he assumes is common

22

Lectura prologue, 4, qq1–2.

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ground with his opponents. Practical knowledge extends to practice, and knowledge that remains within the intellect alone is theoretical knowledge. But this means that there must be some other power than intellect that is in agreement with what is in the intellect and takes the person towards action. The only plausible candidate for such a power is the will. A commanded act only counts as an action because it is preceded by an act of will, which itself is preceded by an act of intellect. For example, the intellect thinks about good health. The will takes this good and commands it, and this results in the action of eating healthy food. So far this is common ground. But does this mean that the answer to the initial question should be that a science is called speculative or practical because of its end? This depends on what is meant by “end.” If what we mean is “intended result,” this is too restrictive for a practical science. After all, a physician can have practical thought about good health without actually operating or prescribing some treatment. What makes his thought practical is that it is suitable for ending up in such actions through the will, whether it actually does end up that way or not. And what makes it suitable for this is that it has the right kind of object. So this is Scotus’s conclusion. A science is called practical or theoretical by reason of its object, i.e. what it is about. Later he says that if we ask about the moral status of a practical thought, the determining factor is not whether the thought ends up in a right action, but whether the state of mind is right. Scotus’s example is that a person can be generous at heart even if (like a friar, though Scotus does not say so) he does not have any personal property to give away. He can still desire “to carry out such liberality through imaginary acts.” We can now go to the second question, about whether theology is a practical or a speculative science. The answer will turn on the object of theology, and Scotus says the object is “God as one who should be loved . . . according to rules from which action can be chosen.” There is an important difference here between Scotus and Aquinas (who is closer to Aristotle in this respect). Scotus thinks the will is a faculty superior to the intellect.23 Both writers hold that our end is to contemplate and love God. But Scotus thinks the intellectual part of this is introductory to the loving, which is the most important. Aquinas thinks (I say this with trepidation) that the loving is preparatory to

23

Ord. IV suppl., dist 49, q. 9, art. 2.

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and consequent on the contemplating, which is the most important. Scotus concludes the present question by saying that theology is practical and that it is an intellectual habit (a branch of knowledge) the main function of which is to direct the will to love correctly. He considers the objection that theology has to do with the end, namely God, not the means to the end, whereas the will does not need direction about the end, but only about the means. Aristotle had said that deliberation is about the means, not the end. Scotus replies that the will does need direction about the end, as well as the means. He concedes that the will always aims at the good (thus rephrasing in terms of the will Aristotle’s first sentence in the Nicomachean Ethics, as I interpreted it). The problem is that the good can be specified in opposite ways, so as to produce good acts and bad acts. Beatitude, or happiness, is union of our will with God, so that we enter into the love that is between the members of the Trinity (in Latin, we become condiligentes, co-lovers). But the will does not necessarily aim at the good specified in this way, and therefore it requires direction so as to give it this aim. This is the function of theology. Moreover, the will needs direction not just for the object (e.g. healthy food) but also for how to pursue it (e.g. temperately). Finally, we want to know God not just for the sake of knowing God, he says, but for the sake of loving God most of all. For all these reasons, theology is practical. Later on, in replying to another objection, he says that every practical science deals with theoretical items in no greater detail (no more distinctly) than is necessary for practice; therefore we only know about God to the extent that it increases our love of God. There is one final objection. How can theology be a practical science, when science is (on Aristotle’s account) concerned with what is universal and necessary but practical knowledge is always about what is contingent and what we can change? Scotus replies that there are necessary truths about contingent things. For example, it is contingent that a stone falls; but it is necessary that if it falls unimpeded, it fall in a straight line. In the same way, it is contingent that I love God. But it is necessary that God is to be loved most of all by me. This follows logically from the premise that God is the being greater than which nothing can be conceived. The premise is a conceptual truth. If something greater than God could be conceived, then God would not be God. So theology is practical in directing us to what we should love most. Scotus does concede, however, that there can be degrees of

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readiness towards action that do not correspond to degrees of practical science. An artisan can “know by experience” how to make something, without knowing how to articulate the way she does it, and can be nonetheless very ready to act. Scotus does not draw the explicit parallel, but it is implicit. A person can love God most of all, without much articulate knowledge of theology. To what extent is Scotus’s view of theology different from the view of Aristotle? There is a change in Aristotle’s views from the Protrepticus, where he makes no distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom, to the Metaphysics, where he uses “theology” as one name for the first philosophy, and the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, where philosophy is the activity of contemplation, the chief component of the best life for a human being. On this view, theology is not itself a practical science, even though practical science might have theology (as well as other forms of contemplation) as its end. Rather, the relation between practical wisdom and the life focused on contemplation is like the relation between medical science and health (the end it is trying to produce); theology is like health itself, already the end at which we are heading. Though Scotus attributes the view he is opposing (that theology is a theoretical science) to Henry of Ghent, it is also the view of Thomas Aquinas.

The Two Affections of the Will In this section, I want to look at Scotus’s view of the two affections of the will, and their connection with freedom of the will. Scotus took from Anselm the view that there are in the will two affections or inclinations, the affection for advantage and the affection for justice. The affection for advantage is an inclination towards our own happiness and perfection. The affection for justice is directed towards what is good in itself, regardless of its relation to us. Aristotle’s account of motivation had nothing corresponding to the affection for justice. The closest he came was his view of friendship, where two people who have the highest kind of friendship want to benefit each other not for their personal advantage but for one another’s sake. But as we discussed in the previous chapter, this is not really a counterexample, because Aristotle’s view is that in this kind of friendship the friend is another self. This is what enables the friends to forget their own pleasure and profit, and the friendship is contingent on the

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maintenance of the special relation. Because of the absence of the affection for justice in Aristotle’s account, he is committed to the view that everything we do is for the sake of our own happiness (even if we do not represent this to ourselves). Aquinas inherits this view, and I quoted his statement of it earlier, though the interpretation of this statement is much disputed. With the distinction between the two affections in place the motivational question is more complex. Both affections will be operative in most of our choices; Scotus is not suggesting that we lose the inclination towards our own happiness and perfection. Even the blessed in heaven, he says, will have the affection for advantage. But there is one part of our motivation, the higher part, which is not directed towards the self, and this part has the task of restraining or moderating the lower part so that we end up with a love for the highest good, God, for God’s own sake, independent of our own salvation. The most vivid way to put this point is counterfactually. If God were to require us, which God does not, to sacrifice even our salvation for the sake of God’s glory, we should be willing to do so. This thought lies behind the words of Jonathan Edwards, repeated at the close of Presbyterian ordination services for generations, “I would be willing to be damned for the sake of the glory of God.”24 These words echo expressions of Moses and Paul and perhaps even of Jesus. Moses said that he would be willing to be blotted out of the book of life, Paul said that he would be willing to be cursed, and Jesus in fact took separation from his Father as the price for saving his people.25 This account of the two affections helps in understanding the Fall of Adam and Eve and, before that, the Fall of Lucifer (or Satan). Lucifer, Adam and Eve, and all of us are created or born with both affections. The question, however, is how we rank them. Do we put our happiness first, and pursue what is good in itself only accidentally, because we can see it will result in our advantage? Or do we rank the affections the other way round and pursue our own happiness only to the extent that we can see that it is consistent with what is good in itself? The first of these two rankings is, according to Scotus, an inordinate affection for advantage. He suggests that Lucifer started by loving something good in itself, namely union with 24

Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections ed. John E. Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, Chapter X. 25 Romans 9: 3, Exodus 32: 32, and Matthew 27: 45.

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God, but came to love it inordinately as his own advantage. Scotus goes on to say that we humans are now born with this wrongful ranking and it can be reversed only by God’s assistance. I will return to this later. The connection of the two affections with freedom of the will is complex. It is interesting that Aristotle, as well as having no doctrine of the affection for justice in Scotus’s sense, also had no doctrine of freedom of the will. Scotus says that we only have this freedom because we have both affections. It is some confirmation that he is right, that Aristotle does not have room for the affection for justice, and he does not have room for the freedom of the will either. Freedom in Scotus has both a metaphysical and an ethical dimension. I will start with the ethical; then, after discussing the metaphysical dimension, I will try to describe the connection between the two. Scotus recounts the thought experiment of Anselm about an angel who had the affection for advantage but not the affection for justice.26 Such an angel, says Scotus, would be unable not to will what is advantageous, and unable not to will it above all. But then this would not be imputed to the angel as sin, because the pursuit of the advantageous would be triggered automatically by apprehending it in the intellect, just as bodily appetites are triggered by sense perception. For the angel to be held accountable, it would have to have the affection for justice in addition to the affection for advantage, since the affection for justice is the “first checkrein” on the affection for advantage and opens the possibility of not pursuing what is most to our advantage, or at least the possibility of not pursuing it above all. Scotus concludes that the affection for justice “is the liberty innate to the will, since it represents the first checkrein on this affection for the advantageous.”27 In this passage, there is a principle operating that we can only be held accountable for wrongdoing that we are able to avoid. Scotus is arguing that the affection for justice gives us this ability to avoid inordinate pursuit of our own advantage, and therefore gives us both freedom and accountability. 26

Anselm included the reverse possibility, that the angel might have the affection for justice but not the affection for advantage, but Scotus does not mention this because when he recounts the thought experiment he is in the middle of replying to three objections, all of which assume that humans and angels have the affection for advantage. 27 Ord. II, dist. 6, q. 2.

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The metaphysical dimension in Scotus’s account of freedom is best seen in his commentary on Book IX of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (which is about potentiality, or a thing’s power to do something or have something done to it).28 Scotus suggests that there is a fundamental divide between natural and voluntary powers, and he tries to identify this distinction with Aristotle’s distinction between nonrational and rational powers. This identification is a considerable stretch, and Scotus’s position is in fact quite different from Aristotle’s. But this attempt to use Aristotle’s language is an interesting example of the authority Aristotle had at this time. While Scotus will sometimes disagree with him, this produces anxiety, and Scotus will make a reconciliation if he can. Aristotle distinguished rational from nonrational powers by saying that the former are capable of contrary effects but the latter produce only one effect. Fire will melt wax and harden clay, but these are deterministic effects on different materials, so that in both cases we have a non-rational power which is “determined to one” even though it does, with different materials, produce opposite effects. With a rational power, by contrast, a person can decide to go to the market or not go to the market. As Aristotle said, a person can use the knowledge of medicine to cure by therapy or kill by poison. But Scotus takes the intellect not to be a rational power (which would seem very odd to Aristotle), since the intellect is “determined to one (effect)” by its objects of cognition. He thinks that when an object is presented to the intellect, such as the proposition that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, the intellect receives it in the way the eye receives a visible object. Scotus attributes also to Aquinas (perhaps wrongly, but the texts of Aquinas are obscure here) the view that the will is determined by the presence in the intellect of a dictate of reason, so that the will always goes for what appears best. This would mean, Scotus thinks, that the will too is a non-rational power, causally determined just like the sense appetites. By contrast, his own view is that we can will to refrain from acting as reason dictates, and we can even will to act contrary to reason. His example is a case of fornication, where the object does not seem preferable from either the side of justice or the side of longterm advantage, but merely for pleasure. The will, he says, is a selfdetermining power for opposites. This means that at the very time

28

Questions on the Metaphysics IX, q. 15.

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when it is willing one thing, it has within itself the real power (not merely the logical possibility) not to will it or to will the opposite. I am choosing chocolate, and at the time of the choice I have the power to choose not-chocolate (for example, vanilla). This does not mean that I have the power to choose both chocolate and notchocolate at the same time (which would be a contradiction). Scotus therefore denies Aristotle’s claim, “Everything that is, when it is, it is necessary for it to be.” The present as well as the future is contingent. What is the relation between the ethical dimension of freedom and the metaphysical dimension? Here I am being speculative, since Scotus does not discuss the question in exactly these terms. I think we can say that the ethical dimension explains how the metaphysical possibility of freedom is actualized. The metaphysical dimension gives us the formal condition that a power has to meet if it is to be free, namely that it has to be self-determining. But in order to actualize this power it has to have content provided by the affection for justice in addition to the affection for advantage. Allan Wolter puts it this way: But liberty comes to its full perfection when the human will (which is physically free to elicit an act in regard to either inclination) freely determines itself in accord with this higher inclination and elicits an act that tends towards a good in an objective and honest manner, namely, in accord with the intrinsic value or goodness of the object as such.29

This is not to say that freedom of the will is simply constructed out of the two affections, or that it can be reduced to them. But the affection for justice is nonetheless a necessary condition for the exercise of freedom, and because of this intimate connection Scotus calls this affection “the ultimate specific difference of a free appetite.” “Specific difference” means the characteristic whose presence turns a member of a genus into a member of a species (e.g. rationality turns “animal” into “human”).30 The presence of the affection for justice is what turns an appetite into a free appetite. Perhaps we can think of the

29

Allan B. Wolter, ed., Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986, 13. 30 Reportatio 2, dist. 6, q. 2. n. 9.

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will as an executive power, which is additional to the mere power-tox and the mere power-to-y (the power to pursue chocolate and the power to pursue vanilla) and can select which of these powers to actualize. Scotus talks about a “superabundant sufficiency.” He distinguishes between two kinds of indeterminacy. There is the indeterminacy that matter has without form. As we discussed in the previous chapter, there are different levels of this relation between matter and form. We can distinguish between the life of the organism and the body that is the potential for this life, we can distinguish the parts of the body (e.g. a bone) from the stuff (e.g. calcium) that composes it, and we can distinguish the stuff from the elements that make it up. In each case, the form is a functioning organization of the matter, which is a potential for just that organization. But without the form, the matter is at each stage indeterminate. This is what Scotus calls the indeterminacy of defect. But there is a second kind of indeterminacy that is, so to speak, from above rather than from below. My will is indeterminate between chocolate and vanilla not because it does not yet have form, but because it has both forms and is the executive power to select between them. This is why the will is superabundant in its indeterminacy rather than deficient. Scotus gives another thought experiment by way of analogy, though he recognizes it is incomplete. Fire has the power to heat, and it does not require anything external to itself to determine itself to burn. But suppose, without losing any of its perfection as heat, it were given the perfection of coldness. Then it would have an indeterminacy of superabundance, between heating and cooling. This is like a will that already has the power to pursue advantage being given the power also to pursue justice. The thought experiment is inadequate because it is reductive in a way Scotus does not want to be. He does not want to reduce the freedom of the will to the two affections, or to construct it out of them. The fire, even if it is given the perfection of coldness, does not have what I called the executive power to determine itself to either burn or freeze.31 But the indeterminacy of superabundance is nonetheless explained in both cases by the addition of a new power to an already present natural power, namely the fire’s natural power to burn and the will’s natural power to seek advantage. This

31

Questions on the Metaphysics IX, q. 15, art. 2.

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is how what I called the ethical dimension of freedom explains the actualization of the metaphysical dimension. We do not have here two different types of freedom. The metaphysical dimension gives a logical explanation and the ethical dimension gives a causal (though not deterministic) explanation.

Justice and God Scotus says, A free appetite is right in virtue of the fact that it wills what God wills it to will. Hence, those two affections, the affection for advantage and the affection for justice, are regulated by a superior rule, which is the divine will, and neither of them is the rule for the other. And because the affection for advantage on its own is perhaps immoderate, the affection for justice is bound to moderate it, because it is bound to be under a superior rule, and that rule . . . wills that the affection for advantage be moderated by the affection for justice.32

In this passage we are said to reach a right decision by putting our wills in conformity to God’s will for our willing, and this involves the freedom of both God’s will and ours. Scotus insists that if the divine will were not free, humans would not be free either.33 He is responding to propositions like “God necessarily does whatever he does immediately,” which was subject to condemnation by the Bishop of Paris in 1277. This proposition is found in the writings of Siger of Brabant, and is presented there as a position of Aristotle. One form of divine freedom that Scotus is concerned to preserve is God’s freedom in prescribing the moral law to us. Scotus makes a distinction here between the first and second tables of the Ten Commandments. The first table, dealing with our direct relation to God, is natural law in the strict sense, which we know to be true just by knowing its terms. Scotus says this because he thinks the principle that God is to be loved is necessarily true, and that the first table follows from this principle. The only hesitation he expresses is 32

Ord. II, dist.6, q. 2. There is a good discussion of this in Mary Elizabeth Ingham, Ethics and Freedom, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989, 102ff.

33

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about the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. He thinks he can defend the necessity of the obligation to worship regularly, but there is probably something contingent about the periodicity of every seven days. When we come to the second table, however, which deals with our relations to our neighbors, what we find is no longer natural law in the strict sense, but only in an extended sense. The laws against murder, adultery, theft, and so on, while extremely fitting, are not strictly necessary. It would be possible for God not to prescribe that humans follow these laws, while it is not possible even for God not to prescribe that God is to be loved. One example that Scotus likes to use, perhaps because he is influenced by Francis’s rejection of his own property, is the proscription on theft. This proscription only makes sense if there is private property. But, Scotus says, the institution of private property is not itself necessary for human beings. Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, were fully human, but probably did not have private property. After Pentecost, the Church “held all things common,” as do monastic communities, without ceasing to be human.34 In heaven we will still be human, but will not have property. Scotus might also have appealed, though he does not, to nomadic tribal groups that do not have the institution. So, private property and the need to protect are not deducible from human nature. If they were deducible, then it would be necessary for God to prescribe them to humans. But, says Scotus, we see cases in which God provides a dispensation from this or that provision of the second table, in the sense of telling humans on particular occasions to do what contravenes one of these laws. In the case of theft, the example is the command to the Israelites to take the gold of the Egyptians under the threat of divine plagues.35 In the case of adultery, the example is the command to Hosea to marry Gomer the prostitute.36 In the case of murder, the example is the command to Abraham to kill his son Isaac.37 In the case of lying, the example is the commendation of the Hebrew midwives for deceit.38 In considering these 34

Acts 2: 44. Exodus 11: 2 and 12: 35. 36 Hosea 1: 2. 37 Genesis 22. 38 Exodus 1: 19–21. See also Joshua 6: 17, though Rahab is not specifically commended for lying. 35

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cases, Scotus is entering into a long history of discussion. Thomas Aquinas (I say hesitantly) denies that there are contraventions of the law in these cases, because he holds that God (who owns everything) transfers temporal ownership, for example of the gold from the Egyptians and of Isaac’s life from Isaac, so that there is no theft or murder in these particular instances. But if this seems too easy a solution, and if we want to go on holding that God did command these things, then we seem stuck with some doctrine of divine dispensation.39 One objection often raised to divine command theories of ethics is that they make ethical rightness arbitrary.40 After all, if what is right is simply what God commands, and God is not bound by any antecedent standards, could not God command just anything, and it would be right? In Scotus, the second table of the law is, in a sense, arbitrary. It is within God’s discretion, (in Latin, arbitrium). But this is not arbitrary in the modern pejorative sense implying that a decision is made without the rational grounds that should be present. A decision to grade papers by the alphabetical order of the students’ names is arbitrary, because the grading should be done on the papers’ merits. But God does have a reason for prescribing a set of laws to human beings, namely that these laws are a good route for humans to get to their final end to become co-lovers with God. What Scotus is denying is that the route that God prescribes is the only possible route, and so is mandatory for God to prescribe. He is not denying that the route fits our nature, or that once God has prescribed the route, it is necessary for us to follow it. Accordingly he makes a distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power.41 Once God has ordained a route it is necessary for us to follow it. But God’s absolute power exceeds God’s ordained power, and so God can ordain a different route, and then that will be the one binding on us. Another objection that is often raised to divine command theories is that they are inconsistent with human autonomy. They seem to 39

For an example of a philosopher who denies that Abraham should take it to be God commanding him to kill his son, see Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, Chapter 12. 40 I will return to these three difficulties in the final chapter. 41 Ord. I, dist. 44.

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put all human beings in the position of young children who are required to obey their parents without passing independent judgment on the merits of what their parents tell them to do.42 I will say more about autonomy when we come to Kant’s theory in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to point out that autonomy requires endorsement in a person’s will of the standards by which she lives. But it does not require that a person invent or create those standards. It may well be that the appropriation of moral law requires considerable maturity and self-discipline. But it is a caricature of Kant and of autonomy to require that the moral agent create the law she then obeys. She has to will it, but she does not have to create it. As Scotus says, we have to “will what God wills us to will.” A third objection often raised to divine command theories is that they are inoperable in a pluralist society. They make moral obligation depend upon God’s commands, and in a religiously pluralist society there are apt to be many citizens who do not believe in God. Does this mean that they do not have obligations? Scotus did not live in a pluralist society of this kind. But, even for us, a divine command theory does not have this implication, any more than scientific ignorance about H2O prevented Scotus’s contemporaries from having a relation to water. This reply will not silence the objector. Surely a religious believer can have a disagreement with a person who does not believe in God about what we are morally obliged to do. But if “morally obligatory” means “commanded by God” then these would not be genuine disagreements; the two parties to the conversation would simply be talking past each other. One way to deal with this difficulty is to concede that the two parties mean somewhat different things, but to insist that there is nonetheless enough overlap for genuine disagreement. A better suggestion is that a divine command theory is not a theory about meaning, but about what makes something morally obligatory.43 The analogy with water will then be that the ordinary meaning of “obligatory” can be shared by believers and non-believers, just as the ordinary meaning of “water” (an odorless,

42

For a forceful statement of this objection, see Patrick Nowell-Smith, “Morality: Religious and Secular,” in The Rationalist Annual, London: Pemberton Publishing Co, 1961. 43 Both these suggestions have been made by Robert M Adams. For the second, see R. M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods.

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colorless liquid, etc.) can be shared by those who know and those who do not know that water is H2O. The objector might still reply that divine command theory should not be used as a basis for the morality used in public policy discussion, since the basis should be common to the participants. But at this point she is asking for something that may not be available. It is not clear that there is a neutral account of the basis of morality that the participants in public discussion in pluralist societies share. The demand that religious believers surrender their theological premises before entering the discussion is mere oppression, if there is no neutral ground (and perhaps even if there is), and is unlikely in practice to achieve concord (in Aristotle’s sense, such that the citizens can agree on a decision because they agree about what is best).44 A question will naturally arise about the kind of theory I have been attributing to Scotus. Is Scotus saying that God can make opposite prescriptions for the same circumstances? To return to Abraham, surely it is one thing to will to kill one’s son if one thinks he is going to come back to life, and another thing to will to kill him if one thinks he is going to stay dead? The story in Genesis could be taken to imply that Abraham thought Isaac was going to come back to life, and this is also stated in the New Testament and is the version of the story used by Scotus.45 But it is consistent with the story told this way to say that God does have to proscribe killing the innocent in cases where they stay dead. So perhaps divine dispensations can occur only where there is a change in the relevant circumstances. It is not easy to know what Scotus thinks about this. On the one hand, he seems to deny it quite explicitly. He says, My question then is this. Granted that all the circumstances are the same in regard to this act of killing a man except the circumstances of its being prohibited in one case and not another, could God cause that act which is circumstantially the same, but performed by different individuals, to be prohibited and illicit in one case and not prohibited but licit in the other? If so, then he can dispense unconditionally . . . But if God cannot cause this act [of killing], which under such circumstances was formerly prohibited, to be no 44

NE IX, 6, 1167a23. See Genesis 22: 5 “We will come back,” and Hebrews 11: 19. I will mention another way to take the story in Chapter 5.

45

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longer prohibited, even under the same circumstances, then he cannot make killing licit – but that he did so is clear in the case of Abraham and in many other instances.46

However, the term “circumstances” is used by Scotus in a way slightly different from the contemporary use. He calls the “circumstances” of the act the end, object, manner, time, and place. It is not clear whether the eventual resurrection of Isaac enters into Abraham’s end (or intention), or whether the end is confined to producing his son’s death. There are other passages where Scotus ties divine dispensation to a change in circumstances (in the modern sense). For example, he discusses marriage and bigamy, and defends the principle of a oneto-one sexual partnership. But he then has to deal with the case of the patriarchs who had more than one wife, and suggests that God allowed it because there was a need for God’s people to multiply rapidly, “to increase the number of those who worshipped God, something which would not have occurred otherwise.”47 He concludes, For the secondary type [i.e. natural law in the extended sense], dispensation occurs in a situation where the opposite seems to be generally more in harmony with the primary law of nature. And it is just in this secondary sense of natural law that monogamy pertains to the law of nature and bigamy is opposed to such . . . But from this it does not follow that in a special case the opposite could not be licit, or even in some cases necessary.

In this case, therefore, Scotus thinks he sees the difference in circumstances (in the modern sense) that produces the divine dispensation. But it does not follow from this that he thinks God can only dispense where there is some difference in circumstances (in the modern sense). We should probably say that we do not know what Scotus thinks about this. We can also say that he does not hold that God is bound to make the same prescriptions (for example, the second table) for humans in all possible circumstances (in the modern sense) in which they might find themselves. 46 47

Ord. III, suppl. dist. 37. Ord. IV, dist. 33, q.1ff.

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There are two sides of Scotus’s ethical thought that are hard to put together, but which we can now propose a way to combine. The first is his emphasis on God’s freedom. In the passage that I quoted at the beginning of this section, Scotus says that the human affection for justice is not itself authoritative, because it is regulated by a superior rule, the divine will. On the other hand, he says, “the moral goodness of the act consists mainly in its conformity with right reason, which dictates fully just how all the circumstances should be that surround the act.”48 By “right reason” he means to include our right reason. It is easy to conclude from this and similar passages that Scotus is saying that divine command is not necessary for the moral goodness of an act, since our right reason is sufficient, and therefore that Scotus is not a divine command theorist at all.49 But we need to make some distinctions. First, there is a difference between moral goodness and moral obligation. I will return to this distinction in chapter five. It is possible that moral obligation is constituted by God’s command, but moral goodness is possessed by anything that takes us to our end. Perhaps God chooses to command one amongst many possible routes to this end. A second distinction is between our knowledge of both moral goodness and obligation, and our knowledge of what makes them good or obligatory. It is possible that what makes something good or obligatory is some relation to God (different in the two cases), but that we can know it is good or obligatory without knowing this relation. Perhaps God reveals the commanded route to our reason without revealing that the divine will has chosen it. Since God has prescribed for us a route to our final end that is in perfect harmony with our nature, we can expect to see this harmony by means of our reason. We can see that when we tell the truth, respect each other’s lives and property, honor our parents, and so on, we progress towards the life that we are made for, the life of being colovers with God. But Scotus insists that what we see is a harmony, or a beauty, or a fittingness, and not an entailment of the commands from our nature. Perhaps what we see with reason is the goodness of the command, since Scotus also says that moral goodness fits or is in harmony with our nature. His term for the relation between moral goodness and our nature is that the former “supervenes” on the 48

Ord. I, dist. 17, 62. This is Richard Cross’s conclusion in Duns Scotus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 90. 49

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latter, and this is a term to which I will return in the fourth chapter of this book, when talking about the theory of R. M. Hare.50 So we can make two claims together: first that we can know moral goodness by reason since it fulfills our nature, and second that what makes something obligatory is that God has prescribed it to us as opposed to other fitting routes that God could also have prescribed. Whatever fulfils our nature and takes us towards our final end is good, we might say, but only what God chooses from all these good things is obligatory. In these terms, we can have access by reason to what is good, but it is not conformity to our reason that makes something good but rather that it draws us to our end; and it is not conformity to our reason that makes something obligatory but rather that God commands it.51 I will close this section by discussing what Scotus says about justice in general, in a passage that can usefully be compared with a fresco (Good Government) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, painted in Siena’s city hall about thirty years after Scotus died.52 Two of the labels in the fresco are wrongly attached, but the doctrine is the same as in Scotus (though it no doubt comes from Aristotle). Scotus distinguishes the way in which God is just to Godself as a quasi-other, from the way God treats others. Then, within the second class, he distinguishes (again with Aristotle) commutative and distributive justice. In distributive justice equality of proportion is required; in commutative justice, quantitative or numerical equality. Proportional equality is when the parties get what is proportionate to their status or contribution and quantitative equality is when they obtain equal 50

Quodlibet, q. 18, “So the being’s secondary goodness [of which moral goodness is one type], which supervenes on [the primary goodness or nature] or is accidental to it, consists in its being perfectly suited to or in complete harmony with something else –something which ought to have it or which it ought to have.” I have discussed this passage more fully in God’s Call: Moral Realism, God’s Commands, and Human Autonomy, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001, 59–78. 51 Copleston says that “it is not the content of the moral law which is due to the divine will, but the obligation of the moral law, its morally binding force.” A History of Philosophy Vols. I–III, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1962, 547. If I am right, the positive side of this dictum is true, but not the negative. I will return to this question in the final chapter. 52 Ord. IV, dist. 46.

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amounts. For example, Aristotle says at the end of the Eudemian Ethics that the noblest people should get the noblest goods, and lesser people lesser goods (or a lesser share of goods). Both groups will receive in this way what is proportionate to their merit. Scotus is writing during a period that is still roughly feudal, based on the relation of superior and vassal. He can say, “as distributive justice in our republic bestows on persons of various gradated stations of life the goods that pertain to their station, so too in the hierarchy of nature as a whole our princely God distributes to the more noble natures those greater perfections suited to them, whereas the less noble natures receive lesser perfections.” Lorenzetti’s fresco pictures an angel on one side giving arms to the noble and money to the merchant. Commutative justice is held by Scotus to include equal punishment. Lorenzetti pictures an angel on the other side beheading with a sword a man who has himself used the sword to kill, and crowning a man holding a palm (probably a martyr). Scotus holds commutative justice in the strict sense does not apply to God, since there is no equality between creator and creature, though there could be something akin to it such as obtains between master and servant. But God could administer distributive justice strictly, because God could give natures the perfections that are their due or are suited to their degree of excellence. So there could be a kind of justice that God has in relation to others as well as the justice God has to Godself as a quasi-other. Scotus concludes, however, that while there is, from generosity, a kind of secondary justice in which God gives us what is our due, the only unqualified justice is what God has towards Godself. Later I will argue that because of the love of God for God (which is necessary), God also loves the love of God in God’s creatures. If this is right, God has a kind of derivative justice towards God’s creatures, which springs from God’s self-relation, “although not in a necessary manner.”53

Scotus and Virtue Aristotle gives a central place to virtue. Scotus’s theory is, I have argued, a divine command theory, and it is worth asking what place 53

See Thomas Williams, “The Unmitigated Scotus,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 80 (1998), 162–81.

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this leaves for virtue. Does Scotus reject what Alasdair MacIntyre describes as the picture of morality as “a larger scheme in which the virtues [and not rules] have the central place”?54 Partly yes and partly no. MacIntyre’s account of virtue is based on the idea that the virtues have the function of taking us to “human-nature-as-it-couldbe-if it realized-its-telos[end].” His idea is that humans have such an end, and that without this end virtue becomes unintelligible. It is true that Scotus significantly modified the role of final causation (teleology) in his ethics (indeed, in his metaphysics). But this relocates rather than removes the central place of virtue in the moral life. I will proceed by discussing first Scotus’s views on final causation and then his views about virtue. My aim is to reduce the sense of difference from Aristotle, though in previous sections of this chapter I have emphasized the divergence. A preliminary point to make is that Aristotle’s own account of virtue does not make much use of final causation. Aristotle is not concerned to justify the moral and intellectual virtues by linking them, so to speak, to the human design plan. He does give such explanations of sight, for example, which enables us to make finer discriminations than any of the other perceptual faculties. But unlike Arnhart, who wants to show how virtue gives us a reproductive advantage, Aristotle does not produce functional justifications of the virtues, and this is fundamentally because he is not concerned with justifying the virtues at all, though he thinks they are non-controversially part of the happy and noble life (the best life for human beings), and so take us to our end.55 We are misled by modern anxieties about morality into thinking that a great philosopher must give us arguments for being brave or generous. But Aristotle seems to think the virtues are obviously part of the best life, and his project is to describe them and illustrate them, not to somehow prove them worthy of our aspiration. 54

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 239 and 51, and 1984 (2nd edn), 257 and 53. The following account of Scotus’s teleology is directed also against John Milbank’s view of Scotus in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. 55 See John McDowell, Mind and World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 79, who calls the attribution to Aristotle of an attempt to provide a naturalistic foundation for ethics “a historical monstrosity.”

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Scotus takes from Aristotle the doctrine of the four causes, or the four kinds of explanation for the existence or character of a thing.56 I described in the previous chapter Aristotle’s use of the distinction between matter and form. Matter gives us what Aristotle calls “the material cause” of a thing (Socrates is made of flesh and bones), and form “the formal cause” (in Socrates, humanity). But the formal cause can be regarded in two additional ways. Aristotle labels it “the efficient cause” when it is that “from which” the change occurs (the form in the seed of Socrates’s father, Sophroniscus). He calls it “the final cause” when it is that “for the sake of which” the change occurs (the form in the mature Socrates that controlled the development of the philosopher from the embryo). In Scotus, the doctrine of the final cause undergoes a significant shift. For our purposes, the most important aspect of this shift is that Scotus restricts final causation (causation by purpose or end) to causation by an intelligent agent. He argues for this as follows: An essential cause must explain the existence of a thing in such a way that the thing would not have existed if the cause had not functioned. But the last perfecting form or function of a thing (e.g. mature human functioning) cannot be an essential cause, because the thing exists prior to its perfecting form or function. So final causes can only be essential causes if they are linked to what does have to exist prior to the thing, namely the efficient cause (what Aristotle calls the cause “from which”). For example, the form in the male parent’s seed is the efficient cause, according to Aristotle, of the human embryo. In the same way, the form of a house in the mind of a builder is the efficient cause of the house that he builds. We can combine these premises and conclude that the final cause of an effect is the end or purpose (the telos) that an intelligent agent adopts in producing that effect. A telos is first cognized by the agent, then loved by that agent, and then the agent produces the effect for the sake of that telos. This does not mean that the telos is the end or purpose of the existence of the agent, but that it is the end or purpose of the agent producing this effect. God

56

I am indebted in this section to lectures by Marilyn Adams at Yale in 2003. She is not to be held responsible, however, for my errors. The main relevant texts from Scotus are A Treatise on God as First Principle, trans. and ed. Allan B. Wolter, Franciscan Herald Press: Chicago, 1966, Chapters 1–2, 3.27–34, 4.27–28.

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has the purpose of creating co-lovers, and so creates first the human soul of Christ, then angels, then other souls, then body, and then the physical world. The first point to make about this shift in the account of final causation is that it does not require Scotus to stop saying most of what Aristotle says about virtue. We will see in the succeeding history all sorts of figures who want to go on saying that humans are made for some kind of union with God, and that this is the fundamental basis for the moral life, but who do not want to tie this to a physics or a biology that includes final causation in the thing itself rather than in God’s intention for it. Even so, there can still be purpose in our existence, a purpose God has for us even if we do not see it. But the route to achieving this purpose goes from God’s purposing through our own purposing. Scotus is not required to deny that our best life is one in accordance with virtue, and, if there are multiple virtues, in accordance with the best of them. A life of virtue will be the most pleasing to God, and will take us closest to God. Scotus will also say, it is true, that this best and most perfect life in accordance with the virtues is only an essential cause of our existence to the extent that God is intending this life for us. But this in no way diminishes the importance of virtue in the good life. It removes one kind of justification for virtue, namely the deduction of its authority over us from our nature independently of God’s intention. But this is not a difference from Aristotle if Aristotle is not interested in justifying the virtues, as I suggested. It is merely a terminological question whether we say that Scotus maintains a teleological view. What does Scotus say about the centrality of virtue? One good place to look is his treatment of the infused virtue of charity.57 To understand this, however, we need to look first at the distinction between the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) and the natural virtues, roughly those listed by Aristotle and distinguished in turn into moral virtues (such as temperance and courage) and intellectual virtues (such as prudence and wisdom). Natural virtue is a habit produced by repetition, and inclines one to perform similar acts repeatedly.58 Understood this way, virtue is not sufficient for

57

Ord. III, suppl., dist. 27. Ord. III, 33, unica, n.5. I am indebted in this discussion to Mary Elizabeth Ingham, Ethics and Freedom, 179ff.

58

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moral goodness, which requires in addition a determination by right reason that an act is fitting in all its circumstances. Scotus is not, however, denying efficacy to virtue. He thinks an act of will is the primary cause of an action, but the action is more perfect if it comes from a virtuous habit in addition to the act of will. This is our ordinary experience, he says. He does not give an example, but it is not hard to think of one: We admire a person who is habitually generous and wills to give to someone in need without a second thought more than a person who has to work out the right thing to do from scratch. Actually, we hardly ever start from scratch; but the more ingrained the habit of virtue, the better we usually think the person to be. Scotus uses the term “firmness” for when virtue has become “second nature” for a person in this way. In such a case, we have two efficient causes of the action, “efficient co-causality,” of which the free act of will is primary (and could be sufficient for the action by itself) and the natural habit is secondary (adding to the perfection of the action).59 A virtuous action that arises from a natural virtue is more perfect in this way, but is not yet meritorious. Here we enter a part of Scotus’s thought that will be strange to many Protestants. A meritorious act is one that is pleasing to God, and deserves God’s favor. At the Reformation, the view that humans could do things that deserved God’s favor was condemned as “works righteousness” and was held to be inconsistent with the doctrine that we are saved “by God’s grace alone.” Catholics replied that, according to traditional doctrine, meritorious acts are only possible by God’s infusion of the theological virtues, and so are not accomplished by humans solely by their own powers. I am not going to go further into this dispute until we get to Kant. What is important for now is to describe Scotus’s view of merit. He addresses the question, “Is there some theological virtue inclining one to love God above all?” According to the usual Scholastic method, he starts with arguments for the opposite view to the one he holds himself. Two of these arguments are from Aristotle. First, this virtue would have to be a form of friendship, since it

59

Firmness does not mean that it is strictly impossible for the agent to act contrary to the virtue. See Bonnie Kent, “Scotus on Virtues,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 352–76.

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involves loving, but Aristotle denies that we can have friendship with God since God is so much our superior. To this, Scotus replies that there is a kind of extended friendship or “superfriendship” that is possible even with God. Second, Aristotle has a principle that if there is a virtue, it must be possible to live by its prescriptions; but it does not seem possible to love God above all. To this, Scotus replies that it is possible, at least with the nature we were created with; but he later makes a distinction between different senses in which God can be loved “above all,” and argues that in one sense this is only possible with infused theological virtue. Before he gets to this, he asks three subsidiary questions. First, is it morally right to love God above all? Yes, he says, because it is self-evident that what is best is to be loved most. He distinguishes here between love (charity) and the other two theological virtues – faith involves belief or understanding rather than love, and hope involves the affection for advantage rather than the affection for justice. Second, what is the object of charity? Scotus says it is the divine essence in itself, not that essence in virtue of its relation to us when we love it, nor in virtue of the joy we get from loving it. Third, is our nature sufficient for loving God above all? It would seem not, because our affection for advantage makes us love ourselves most. But Scotus replies that before the Fall we had the capacity to do what right reason prescribes, to love most what is best. Even after the Fall, there are cases like that of the brave citizen described by Aristotle, who lays down his life for his city. Aristotle himself attributed this to the desire for a brief moment of glory. But Scotus thinks the brave citizen is putting something else before himself, namely the safety of his city. What is meant by “above all”? Scotus distinguishes an intensive sense and an extensive sense. The intensive sense is how fervently we love, and the extensive sense is how much we are willing to sacrifice for the object of our love. Scotus says that mere intensity of feeling, without the will to sacrifice, is not sufficient; but he also says that both feeling and will are important, as long as they go together. There is a complete singleness of mind that would be obeying the precept to love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and Scotus says that this is something we cannot achieve in this life. The reason is that “in this life there cannot be that recollection of our faculties with all impediments removed, so that the will could exert the sort of effort it could if our powers were all united

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and recollected and all impediments were removed.”60 Scotus agrees with Augustine and the Master (Peter Lombard) that the precept to love God with all our powers is not fulfilled in this life, “for the propensity of the inferior powers in the present state impedes the superior powers from acting perfectly.” But below this level of completeness there is a lesser degree possible for us in this life, but only with the additional power given us by the infusion of the theological virtue of charity. Scotus suggests that it is improbable that the highest part of the soul in its direct relation to God could be perfected except directly by God. God thus gives us the love by which we love God to this degree. If God gives us the power for this degree of love, to what extent is this love still free? Here Scotus uses his previous discussion about the possibility of “efficient co-causality,” of virtue and an act of will being two efficient causes of the same effect. But this time the priority of virtue and the act of will is reversed.61 In the previous discussion, the act of will was the primary cause (which could be sufficient by itself) and virtue was a secondary cause (making the action more perfect). But when we consider merit, or God’s accepting (God’s being pleased by) our action, infused virtue is the primary cause and the act of will is secondary. Both are, however, necessary in this case (though they were not both necessary in the previous case). We have here a kind of “synergism”: God and the human being both contributing causally, but God’s contribution taking priority in the order of God’s accepting what we do. The centrality of virtue in this account can be put this way. What God regards above all in judging us is the virtue that God has infused into us. Nothing that we do can please God without this.

Scotus and Particularity In the final section about Scotus, I am going to take up a metaphysical doctrine that he held, but I am going to make an extended ethical use of it that is not to be found (as far as I know) in Scotus’s texts, though it is consistent with his ethical views.

60 61

Ord III, suppl., dist. 27, art. 3. Ord. I, 17, question 1.

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The metaphysical doctrine concerns how substances are individuated.62 Scotus starts with natures, such as humanity and bovinity (the natures of humans and cows). These natures are common, so humanity is common to Socrates and Plato and bovinity is common to Beulah and Marigold. What individuates one member of the species from another, the “contracting difference,” cannot be common to different individuals. Scotus sides with Aristotle (against Plato) in saying that the nature exists in the individual and not as a real entity independent of the individual, and he thinks the same is true of the contracting difference. So what does the contracting difference consist in? In Aristotle there are texts that suggest that what individuates one member of a species from another is matter, or some quantity of matter.63 This is how I interpreted Aristotle in the previous chapter. But Scotus holds that the contracting difference must be something positive that confers a higher degree of unity and perfection, which explains why the individual cannot be divided into parts in the way a species has members. He is here treating the contracting difference as a further branch in the tree of definition (e.g. for “human”), which starts with substance, which is divided into nonbodily and bodily, which is divided into inanimate and animate, which is divided into insensible and sensible (i.e. animal), which is divided into non-rational and rational (i.e. human). In each case, there is something positive conferring a greater and more perfect kind of unity. The contracting difference gives us something that is a perfection of the common nature. Following Aristotle’s doctrine in the Categories, Scotus says that what individuates a substance cannot be something accidental (such as quantity); for accidents depend on substance, not substance on accidents. Finally, individuation cannot be the result simply of adding sharable features together. Socrates, it is true, is snub-nosed and fat and a philosopher. But however long the list of sharable qualities we generate, we do not get something that is in principle unique; and Scotus thinks the contracting difference should give us this. The answer Scotus gives is that there must be an individual essence that marks off each individual substance within a species. Traditionally the name given to this is a “haecceity” – literally, a

62 63

I am relying chiefly on Lectura II, dist. 3. Metaphysics VII, 8, 1034a5–8.

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“thisness.” Scotus does not use this term, but the concept is his. Thus the individual substance Socrates has an individual essence, which we might call “Socrateity,” and Beulah has the individual essence “Beulahhood.” A haecceity is in principle intelligible, and is in fact intelligible to God. It is not intelligible to us, because of the limits of our knowledge after the Fall, so that our ability to refer to an individual essence outruns our ability to conceive it. It is, however, possible to love what one does not understand. This is how we can love the individual essence of God (as I described in the previous section), even though we do not understand it. The same is presumably true, though I do not know of a place where Scotus says this, about our love of our neighbors and even our love of ourselves. We can love the individual essence of our neighbor, or of ourselves, without understanding it. There is a biblical passage that contains a related idea. We are told in Revelation that God has for each of us a new name written on a white stone, which God will give us in the next life but which we do not yet know.64 Names in Scripture can express character, as when Jesus gave Simon the name “Peter,” literally “rock,” and said “On this rock I will build my church.”65 So we can think of God as already calling us by a name that expresses what God is calling us to be, even though we do not yet know this name. There is a passage in Scotus about “particular happiness” that fits his metaphysical doctrine about individual essences.66 He says that the natural will (the affection for advantage) “is directed towards a perfection in which the will is really perfected; but real perfection is not something general or universal, but something singular. Therefore the will desires happiness in particular.” Moreover, since the particular adds perfection beyond that of the universal, “the natural inclination of the will is towards something particular and not to something universal.” Since our happiness is being co-lovers, particular happiness should be a way of being a co-lover that is unique to each of us. This emphasis in Scotus on the particular endeared him to the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins imagines himself gathering and releasing the same air Scotus breathed in Oxford, walking past the same walls that “He haunted who of all 64 65 66

Revelation 2: 17. Matthew 16: 18. Ord. IV, suppl., dist. 49, question 9.

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men most sways my spirits to peace; / Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller.”67 Many of Hopkins’s poems express the idea of the “inscape” that is present in each thing and defines it, even though we see it only imperfectly. Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.’68

When Hopkins mourns the cutting down of each of a row of poplars on the way to the village of Binsey, he mourns each particular tree, not just the multiple members of the species. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene.69

We can apply this metaphysical doctrine about individual essences to ethical theory in a way that Scotus himself does not, though it is consistent with his views. The precept that we should love our neighbors follows, Scotus says, from the precept that God is to be loved, because if we are to love God we are also to love the love of God in our neighbor (even if our neighbor does not yet manifest that love). But this love of God in the neighbor is a particular perfection, unique to each neighbor. Our treatment of each neighbor should therefore reflect this love of the different and unique kinds of actual and potential God-loving, to the extent that we can know them. Scotus does not tell us how much knowledge we get of individual essences, though he says we do not get complete understanding. Perhaps (as Hopkins thought) we get glimpses. Since the individual essence is a perfection of the common nature, our difference in our treatment of different neighbors has to respect the common nature (humanity) that they all share. We are not allowed to violate (in the name of 67

“Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” in Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, 40. 68 “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame,” Ibid., 51. 69 “Binsey Poplars,” Ibid., 39.

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particularity) our duties to tell the truth, refrain from coveting, etc. Our ethical duties to each other do not end with our duties to the humanity in each person, however, but also include our duties towards the unique difference that constitutes each individual person as that person.

Jean-Paul Sartre In this final section of this chapter, I am going to describe an ethical theory based on will that makes the individual human will rather than the divine will the ethical authority. Existentialist ethics, especially in the form presented by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), does not refer back to Scotus in the way evolutionary ethics in the form presented by Larry Arnhart refers back to Aristotle. There is a link to Scotus through Heidegger’s dissertation; but the dissertation is about a text that was not actually by Scotus, though it had been thought to be his, and in any case is not primarily about ethics. There are, nonetheless, significant similarities between Scotus and Sartre. I will mention three, two of them negative and one positive, but even in stating the similarities we will see how much difference Sartre’s atheism makes to the rest of his theory. The premise that there is no God plays a foundational role. He says, “Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheist position.”70 He quotes Dostoyevsky saying “if God did not exist, everything would be permitted,” and says this is “the very starting point of existentialism.” As in the discussion of Arnhart, my goal is not to show that an atheist (this time a voluntarist) has to end up with the kind of incoherence that Sartre concedes in his own theory. I am also not claiming that Sartre is the best example of a contemporary atheist voluntarist. But the contrast between Sartre and Scotus is illuminating because Sartre, while he 70

J. -P. Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1957, 51. (The first half of this, 9–51, is taken from Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 1946, trans. Bernard Frechtman, and the second part, 52–96, from Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1943, trans. Hazel E. Barnes.) Sartre also says it would make no difference if God did exist; this is presumably because he thinks we would still have to live as if God did not.

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does not refer to Scotus, tracks so closely what Scotus’s theory would be like without God. The first similarity is that both Scotus and Sartre deny that moral law can be deduced from human nature. In Scotus, this denial takes the form of the assertion that the second table of the law is not natural law, strictly speaking, but only in an extended sense. For example, we do not know simply from the force of the term “human” that humans must not take each other’s property. In Sartre, the slogan is that “existence precedes essence.”71 This slogan needs unpacking. “Existence” is being used in a technical sense, deriving from the German Existenz, and is confined to “the particular way of being of a human being” as opposed to anything else we might say “exists,” such as rocks or tables or hedgehogs. “Essence” here is the defining property of a thing, and Sartre gives the example of a paper cutter, which is given its definition by the artisan who makes it. Sartre says that when people believed that God made human beings, they could believe that humans had an essence in this way; but now that “we” do not believe this, we realize that humans give themselves their own essences, (“First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.”72) Since Scotus grounds the human telos within the intentions of God, he fits Sartre’s critique exactly. The second similarity (following from the first) is that both Scotus and Sartre deny that humans are bound by necessary moral laws (with the exception, for Scotus, of the first table). In Scotus, this denial takes the form of the assertion that God can provide dispensations from the second table of the law, such as the dispensations given to Hosea and the Hebrew midwives, though we cannot give dispensations to ourselves. Sartre’s, view is that “there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it . . . If God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct.”73 Each individual has to decide whether to steal or kill, and there is no moral law to settle the matter. As we shall see, however, Sartre still thinks that we have to make moral law for all human beings. 71 72 73

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 22–3.

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The third similarity is the stress in both Scotus and Sartre on human freedom. For Scotus it is only free powers that are rational powers, and since it is our rational powers that make us human (as opposed to other forms of animals) Scotus is making our freedom our defining characteristic. For Sartre, “man is freedom”; but, again, this notion needs unpacking. Sartre’s notion of freedom depends on his ideas of the “in-itself ” and the “for-itself.” I will try to explain these ideas, although there is a great deal of heavy Hegelian ontology in the background that I will not be able to describe at much length. The two ideas are correlative in that the “in-itself ” is defined as what appears to the “for-itself ” or human consciousness. The “initself ” (in French, en-soi) is not (as in Kant) what is there independently of human consciousness. Sartre thinks there is no such thing; there is only what appears and that to which it appears (the foritself). But that which appears is more than merely the appearance. A table appears, when we see it, but it is there even when we do not see it. In fact, Sartre thinks that what appears as “table” is more than “table” (which is just a label that conscious beings put on it) and is continuous with and inseparable from everything else. Taking this to its logical conclusion, Sartre thinks that what appears is a single whole, rather like the “One” of Parmenides. It is “uncreated,” it does not undergo change, and it is “glued to itself.” The sense of the “initself ” as wholly indeterminate is what Sartre calls “nausea.” He describes in his novel of that name a character who has the experience of a tree root gradually “melting” back into this formless whole. (All this is contrary to Scotus, who thinks, like Aristotle, that species forms and individual essences are in things, though not separable from the things they are in.) On the other hand the “for-itself ” (in French, pour-soi) is always reaching out to what it is not. Conscious beings are always imagining things or desiring things or making meaning out of things, and all of these activities are fundamentally forms of “nihilating” (from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing”). They are attempts to project onto the “in-itself ” or make part of the “initself ” features and characters that neither the “in-itself ” nor the “for-itself ” actually possess. The sense of human consciousness as doomed to this necessarily fruitless endeavor is what Sartre calls “anguish,” and again his novels and plays are full of vivid descriptions of people who experience this. (All this is contrary to Scotus, who thinks, like Aristotle, that we have “right reason” that can

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decide what is fitting on the basis of what it successfully perceives in the world outside itself.) Now God, if such a being were to exist, would be “the in-itself-foritself,” as Hegel describes God. This is because God is, according to traditional Scholastic theologians such as Scotus, the being whose essence is to be. This is one way to interpret God’s name, given to Moses from the burning bush, “I am that I am.”74 For Sartre, essence is “for-itself ” and being is “in-itself,” so God has to be this combination, “the in-itself-for-itself.” This is enough to show, Sartre thinks, that there cannot be a God, since the “for-itself ” and the “in-itself ” are mutually exclusive; but the disproof requires this premise about the “in-itself ” and “for-itself,” which would not be shared by any Scholastic theologian. In any case, Sartre says that the truth about human freedom is that it is the impossible project of being God, the “in-itself-for-itself.” Humans desire to let go of their distinct existence and project themselves onto a world that is whole and determinate. Thus humans feel the need to fill holes they see, making a sacrifice of themselves so as to restore “the density, the uniform and spherical plenitude of Pamenidean being.”75 This can be seen (symbolically) in various ways. The infant sucks his thumb, in order to fill the hole of his mouth. Another example is sex: “In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution.” The fundamental project is, by losing the self, to transform the in-itself into an “ens causa sui” – in Scholastic theology a being which is the cause of itself, and hence God. But, says Sartre, “The idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.”76 The desire for fullness or totality makes us choose not just for ourselves, but for the world. Sartre tells the story of a student who came to him with a dilemma: Should he join the resistance to the German occupation of France or should he stay at home and look after his mother? The Germans had killed his brother and he felt a desire for revenge, but on the other hand he felt his mother’s dependence upon him and wanted to respond to it. Sartre makes the point that there

74

Exodus 3: 14. Another translation is “I am who I am”, or “I will be that [or who] I will be.” 75 Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 85ff. 76 Ibid., 90.

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are two different ethics in dispute here, an ethic of duty to society and an ethic of particular attachment, and he thinks that there is no appeal to a neutral third ethic that can settle the issue between them. Once a choice has been made, there will be justifications internal to that chosen ethic for staying at home or for going to England to join the Free French; but the fundamental choice has to be made itself without appeal to external grounds. In this sense, Sartre says, we create or invent the ethic by which we live. And we invent it not just for ourselves, but for the world. Once inside the ethic we have chosen, it will seem to us that everyone should be willing to sacrifice family for country, or vice versa. “If I want to marry, to have children, even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man.”77 Sartre thinks that when a person makes this kind of decision she lays aside any reference to her distinct individuality and decides what is best for all. In that sense, she creates man in her own image, and that is another way of being God. This human project is doomed to frustration. It is absurd. This is more than just the kind of absurdity where there is no point to what we do. Camus, contemporary with Sartre but not a self-styled “existentialist,” re-tells the story of the mythical hero from ancient Greece, Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a rock up a mountain only to see it roll down again to the bottom. This project was absurd in the sense that there was no point to it. Camus describes Sisyphus persevering in the task, despite its fruitlessness, but shaking his fist at the gods who gave the task to him. There is a “disproportion” between human hopes and fears and “the silence of the universe.”78 But the human situation for Sartre is worse than this. We have these projects that do not make sense, as in Camus; but Sartre thinks we give them to ourselves, and we cannot avoid doing so. To recognize that they do not make sense is required by honesty, and to hide this from ourselves is “bad faith.” One form of bad faith is to pretend that there is a God who gives us our tasks. Another is to pretend that there is a “human nature” that does the 77

Ibid., 18. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien, New York: Vintage Books, 1960, 16 and 22.

78

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same thing. To live authentically is to realize both that we create these tasks for ourselves, and that they are futile. Sartre would not consider it a serious objection that morality and the world, on his view, do not make sense. The demand to make sense is a symptom, as he sees it, of the very disease he has analyzed. To sum up the comparison between Sartre and Scotus, both think of the moral law as prescribed by will, Scotus by God’s will and Sartre by human will. Both say that it cannot be deduced from human nature. Both describe the human situation as the attempt to be like God. But for Scotus this means trying to repeat in our will God’s will for our willing. For Sartre, this means the absurd project of trying to be something that does not and could not exist. Often Sartre’s most vivid presentations of his points come in his novels and plays; and, while one must usually be careful not to read an author’s philosophical views straight from his literary work, in Sartre the connection seems intimate. I will close with a passage from the novel called Troubled Sleep, which tells the story of Mathieu Delarue. This character starts the novel unable to commit himself to anything – to his mistress, to the Communist Party, to the war (or against the war). But he comes to see that he is completely free from any social or private constraints. He can be whatever he chooses. This total freedom is, however, anguish – because there is also no reason for any choice. He considers suicide, which would at least end the need for decision. But he decides against it, again for no reason. Finally he joins the French army, and in 1940, when the army is in full retreat, he suddenly decides (with a few other soldiers) to go up to the belfry of a church they are passing and attack the German column that is advancing towards them. There is no hope of achieving anything by this. He simply wants to see whether he can hold out for fifteen minutes. He made his way to the parapet and stood there firing . . . Each one of his shots wiped out some ancient scruple. One for Lola, whom I dared not rob, one for Marcelle, whom I ought to have ditched, one for Odette, whom I didn’t want to screw. This for the books I never dared to write, this for the journeys I never made, this for everybody in general whom I wanted to hate and tried to understand. He fired, and the tables of the law crashed about him – Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself – bang! in that bastard’s face – Thou shalt not kill – bang! at that scarecrow opposite. He was firing on his fellow men, on

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Virtue, on the whole world: Liberty is Terror . . . He looked at his watch; fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. Nothing more to ask of fate now except one half-minute, just enough to fire at that smart officer, at all the Beauty of the Earth, at the street, at the flowers, at the gardens, at everything he had loved. Beauty dived downwards obscenely, and Mathieu went on firing. He fired; he was cleansed, he was all-powerful, he was free. Fifteen minutes.79

79

J. -P. Sartre, Troubled Sleep, trans. G. Hopkins, New York: Bantam, 1961, 200.

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Chapter 3

IMMANUEL KANT

The Time Between In this chapter, my main focus will be on Immanuel Kant. But I will try in this first section to give some sense of the figures in the intervening period. I will, in line with the project of the book, stress the theology of the period. Unfortunately, I will not be able to rely on a great artist’s fresco for visual support in describing these figures. This is not accidental. The Renaissance was the last time that a major patron would have the confidence to sum up intellectual history in a single visual program in this way. The mosaics in the Library of Congress in Washington are an interesting contrast. They selfconsciously select the figures appropriate for an American national library. Raphael’s program was also highly selective (I mentioned the exclusion of Eastern Christianity), but it had the aspiration to be a synopsis of what was important for humankind. The Italian Renaissance in philosophy can be said to start with the humanists of the fourteenth century, especially Petrarch (1304–74), and was given additional impetus after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when refugees came to the West with Greek texts that had been unknown for centuries. Petrarch was opposed to the teaching of the late Scholastics, especially those that tended toward the extreme Aristotelianism that I mentioned in the previous chapter, which took Averroes as its chief guide and commentator. Petrarch refers to “those ‘scribes’ who are most learned, not in the Law of Moses and the Christian Law, but, as they flatter themselves, in the

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Aristotelian law.”1 The humanists rejected the scholastic method in general. The lamentable history of the word “dunce” is one symptom of this: I quote from the Oxford English Dictionary, The system [of Duns Scotus] was attacked with ridicule, first by the humanists, and then by the reformers, as a farrago of needless entities and useless distinctions. The Dunsmen or Dunses, on their side, railed against the “new learning”, and the name of Duns or Dunce, already synonymous with “cavilling sophist” or “hair-splitter”, soon passed into the sense of “dull obstinate person impervious to the new learning”, and of “blockhead incapable of learning or scholarship”.

The program of Raphael’s frescoes may have been the work of Egidio da Viterbo, following the ideas of Marsilio Ficino, who was born in Florence in 1433. This is also the year in which Brunelleschi began the Pazzi chapel, the chapter house of Santa Croce in the same city. The architectural interiors imagined by Raphael owe a great deal to Brunelleschi. I mention this chapel in order to guard against a certain misapprehension about the Renaissance, that “humanism” means the glorification of the human in place of God. The chapel is an example of the power of mathematical proportion to move the human spirit. Every detail of the interior is structured in a system of ratios that the observer may not understand, but feels. The result is (at least to this observer) a religious experience.2 The experience of being in the chapel is that there is an order and beauty governing the universe, of which humans are privileged to be spectators but which they do not control. The comparison with being inside a late-Gothic cathedral in northern Europe, built at the time of Scotus, is not that the cathedral expresses a relation to God and the chapel does not. Rather, the relation is different. The cathedral takes the eye up to dizzying heights, where the smoke of incense rises to the presence of God, symbolizing our prayers going beyond this world to God. The chapel also takes us beyond itself, but through the universal laws of 1

Petrarch, “On His Own Ignorance,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, eds Ernst Cassirer et al., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948, 59. 2 The contemporary Florentine humanist Gianozzo Manetti states in his book, On the Dignity and Excellency of Man, in Two Views of Man, trans. Bernard Murchland, New York: F. Ungar, 1966, that the truths of the Christian religion are as clear and self-evident as the axioms of mathematics.

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order and beauty governing the whole universe including the stars above and the soul within. “Such harmony is in immortal souls,” says Lorenzo to Jessica in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, as the two lovers sit on a grassy bank at night looking up at the stars and hearing music from the distant house. Marsilio Ficino identified Plato as the primary ancient teacher of this wisdom, and (like Bonaventure) cited Augustine as his guide in elevating Plato in this way. His choice of Plato was determined by his belief in a harmony between Plato’s thought and the Christian faith, and he set about making Latin translations of all the Platonic texts and also (for the first time) of the Neo-Platonist, Plotinus, so that this wisdom could be available to his contemporaries who did not know Greek. It is interesting to compare Ficino’s use of the myth of Sisyphus with that of Camus, whom I mentioned at the end of the previous chapter. Like Camus, Ficino uses the myth to describe the human condition, “So that we seem to be rolling the great stone of Sisyphus up the steep slopes of the mountain.”3 But for Ficino, the problem that produces this labor is “that we are weighted down by the burden of a most troublesome body.” This is the principle that Egidio da Viterbo emphasized in Plato, but which we also found in Aristotle’s Protrepticus, in which he compared the soul’s conjunction with the body to an Etruscan form of punishment in which a living body was chained face to face with a dead one. In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo tells Jessica that they would hear the celestial harmony of the spheres “Did not this muddy vesture of decay so grossly close us in.” Ficino was not opposed to Aristotle, and indeed attempted a reconciliation between Plato and Aristotle (which Raphael’s frescoes express). But he did oppose the same extreme Aristotelianism as Petrarch did, suspecting it of tendencies towards atheism. Aristotle, however, had his proponents during the Italian Renaissance, especially in the medical schools and in northern Italy. Indeed there was a continuous Aristotelian tradition in Spain, comparatively untroubled by the Reformation, culminating in Francisco de Suarez (1548–1617). In Spain, however, the tradition did not have the antitheological tinge that it did in northern Italy. Suarez claimed that law, unlike advice or counsel, requires the command of a superior. 3

“Five Questions Concerning the Mind,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, 209.

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The precepts of the natural law come to us from God, and can be distinguished into those (like “do good and avoid evil”) that are known immediately and intuitively by all normal human beings, those (like “do no injury to anyone”) that require experience and thought to know (so that most people do not have the knowledge), but which are then self-evident, and those (like “lying is always immoral”) that are not self-evident but can be derived from the more basic precepts. He disagreed with Scotus about divine dispensation from the law. In the case of the despoiling of the Egyptians, for example, he distinguished three different kinds of divine authority (a distinction we will also find in Kant): legislative, executive, and judicial. God was not acting as legislator in giving the gold to the Israelites, he said, but either as lord transferring dominion over it, or as judge giving the Israelites their fair wages that the Egyptians had withheld.4 On the other hand, Suarez accepted Scotus’s position that it is God’s command that creates obligation. “Natural goodness provides the material for God’s command and justifies it; the formality of command alone makes obligation supervene upon natural goodness.”5 He also accepted Scotus’s double account of motivation – that we are motivated by what is just (in Latin honestum) and not only by what is good for us. In northern Europe, the Renaissance spread more slowly. Desiderius Erasmus, born in Holland (c.1466–1536) and Martin Luther, born in Saxony, (1483–1546) were friends, and shared a disgust at contemporary abuses in the Church. Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly to ridicule practices such as the sale of indulgences (which Johann Tetzel was claiming could get the buyer up to 1,902,202 years off purgatory). Many of the central figures of the Reformation were humanists in the Renaissance sense. This is true of John Calvin (1509–64), for example, and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), the prominent follower of Martin Luther. If Erasmus and Luther had not quarreled (about freedom of the will), and if Erasmus had been successful in persuading Luther that reformation was possible without rupture, Luther would have taken his place as another in the string of reformers of the Church, and especially of 4

De Legibus 2. 15. 20. Quoted in J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 61.

5

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monasticism, who had pointed to abuses resulting from the growth of the Church’s power and privilege. Luther and Calvin both have intellectual antecedents in the philosophers and theologians who followed Scotus in the two hundred years after his death, during which he was the dominant philosophical figure in Europe. Amongst the Franciscans, William of Ockham (c.1285–1349) was in many ways more radical than Scotus. He suggested, for example, that God could command that God not be loved, overturning the necessity of the first principle of Scotist ethics, that God is to be loved, and the necessity of the first table of the law. Ockham added that though God could logically command such a thing, it would be psychologically paradoxical to obey such a command (because it would be both loving God and not loving God at the same time). Ockham was, moreover, a nominalist where Scotus had been a moderate realist about universals. For Scotus, the species-natures of things are real, though not separate from the members of the species; for Ockham, the only things that strictly exist are individual substances (like Socrates) and singular (not common) perceptible qualities (like Socrates’s paleness). An important successor in this tradition was Gabriel Biel (1410–95) who followed Scotus in saying that the second table of the law is not strictly necessary and that the first table is necessary (implicitly repudiating Ockham’s view about hating God). Biel also repeated Scotus’s view that God does not will something because it is good or right, since this would make God’s will subject to created principles of morality. However, he thought we could rely upon our right reason to give us sufficient access to the content of this divine will: Even if God should not exist, which is impossible, and thus there were no divine reason, or if divine reason should err, one would still sin if one acted contrary to the right reason of an angel, of a man, or contrary to any kind of right reason one can conceive. This would be the case even if there were no right reason at all, but only its dictate.6 6

II Sent. dist. 34–5, q. 1 art. 2. He is not denying that, as it is, God’s will is the foundation of the second table. See Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967, 93ff. and Luther: A Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzenbart, New York: Doubleday, 1989, 118–19.

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He also said, however, that grace sometimes agrees with nature and sometimes does not, especially not in our naturally greater love of ourselves than of God. “It follows that natural inclination is not always right.”7 Bartholomaeus von Usingen was a disciple of Biel and the teacher of Luther, so there is no doubt about the historical connection with the Franciscans, even though there is controversy about the extent of the influence.8 Luther broke with Rome in 1520, publicly burning the papal bull that gave him sixty days to recant or be condemned as a stiff-necked, notorious, damned heretic. He published in the same year a treatise on Christian liberty, defending the priesthood of all believers and the two paradoxical theses that a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and that a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. We have perfect freedom as children of God but we use this freedom to meet the needs of others. Luther distinguished (as, we will see, Kant does) between the inner man and the body, and said that while the body is not in itself evil, it has a tendency that needs to be restrained by the inner man, which alone is free. If we were solely free, he said, we would not need the law; but we are composite, and so do need it. Like Scotus, Luther did not deny the existence of the natural law, binding on all human beings, but he insisted that it is prescribed to us by God’s will and that we do not know and should not inquire about any cause or ground of this will. In particular he opposed the system of Aristotle (“that stinking philosopher”) and any who tried to replace the authority of Scripture with the authority of a pagan. God is he for whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule and standard; for nothing is on a level with it or above it, but it is itself the rule for all things . . . What God wills is not right because he ought or was bound so to will; on the contrary, what takes place must be right, because he so wills.9 7

Collectorium Circa Quattuor Libros Sententiarum, ed. W. Werbeck and U. Hofmann, Vol. 3, Tubingen: Mohr, 1979, 522–3, dist. 29, qu. un., not. 3. 8 The nominalist tradition or via moderna was adopted by Gregory of Rimini, who was General of the Hermits of St Augustine which would be Luther’s order a century and a half later. 9 John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961, 195–6.

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We cannot by our own devices do what God commands, Luther said. But this does not make God a tyrant who gives us impossible commands simply in order to punish our failure. He quoted Augustine’s view that God bids us do what we cannot, so that we may learn our dependence on God, and then Luther added the analogy of a parent teaching a child to walk; the parent tells the child to come to him, the child gets to her feet and starts to totter, and the parent holds out his hands to support her the rest of the way. This analogy should not be taken to imply, however, that Luther thought we could contribute to our own salvation. It is grace alone that saves us, through faith. The law has, Luther said, two uses in our lives. The first is “to bridle the wicked,” so that those who would not otherwise do what the law requires may be motivated by fear of the consequences of disobedience. The second use is to reveal to us our sin, so that we may despair of our own ability and turn to God for grace. Luther has a doctrine of “two kingdoms,” like Augustine’s earthly and heavenly cities. There is “the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people, and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they must needs keep the peace outwardly, even against their will.”10 He thinks that Christians are at the same time both righteous and sinners (simul justus et peccator), and that they thus belong to both kingdoms at the same time. God sees them as righteous through Christ’s atonement, but they still sin. We will later see Kant’s translation of this view “within the boundaries of mere reason.” Calvin’s historical connection with Scotus is likewise certain, though again the extent of the influence is controversial.11 He attended the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, a Scotist stronghold, and did his preliminary work in philosophy there. John Major (translator of Scotus) was the preeminent teacher of the collège, though we do not know whether he was there during the same years as Calvin. Calvin said, in much the same words as Luther, “God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness that whatever he wills, by the very fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous.”12 There are, however, differences from Luther. First, there is what Calvinists call 10

Ibid., 370–1. For references to some of the secondary literature, see John E. Hare, God’s Call, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001, 50. 12 Institutes 3. 23. 2. 11

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the “third use” of the law. The law is not merely to restrain the wicked and bring us to a knowledge of our sin, but also to give us guidance about how “a man may live his life among other men holily, honorably, and temperately.”13 Calvin emphasized the positive correlates to the prohibitions in the Decalogue. For example, we ought not to steal, but this also means that we ought to respect what belongs to our neighbors. And Calvin attributed to nature and natural law a larger role in human improvement, though it is God’s grace alone that produces our salvation.14 There is a “seed of religion” that survives in all human beings, though it does not produce the fruit of a life pleasing to God without God’s assistance.15 This seed gives us the “sense of the divine” that we all have, and that does not require proofs from natural theology. Calvin also gave a larger place than Luther to the possibility (through grace) of the Christian renewal of human social institutions, and he devoted himself to reforming the social institutions in Geneva. He also stressed the worth of ordinary human life, saying that carpenters are just as “called” by God as monks or clergy.16 This theme came to Kant through Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who grew up as a Calvinist in Geneva, converted to Roman Catholicism, and then converted back again to Calvinism. Kant’s most important philosophical predecessor was Gottfried von Leibniz (1646–1716), who was not primarily an ethicist, but who objected to Descartes’s voluntarism. Voluntarism cannot allow, Leibniz thought, for the fundamental truth that God and we must belong to a single moral community. We are not mere “earthworms,” 13

Institutes 3. 19. 15. There is a large and fast-growing secondary literature evaluating this claim both for Calvin and for post-reformation reformed thought. See Stephen John Grabill, “Theological Foundation for a Reformed Doctrine of Natural Law,” PhD dissertation at Calvin Theological Seminary, 2004, and Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003. An interesting figure is Francis Turretin (1623–87), who makes extensive use of natural law in a Calvinist framework. 15 Institutes 1. 4. 1. 16 This theme is well described in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, Chapter 13. 14

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fit to be crushed underfoot.17 He said that the true good is “whatever serves the perfection of intelligent substances” and the nearer we approach to this perfection, the closer we get to happiness. Kant accepted this principle in his early career as giving the “primary formal ground” of all obligation, though he added that “no particularly definite obligation flows” from it.18 After Leibniz there was, in Germany, a long-running battle between rationalists and pietists. I will take as my exemplars of the two schools Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Christian August Crusius (1715–75). Kant’s teacher Martin Knutzen (1713–51) attempted a reconciliation of the two forms of thought, and it is useful to think of Kant himself as trying the same thing.19 Wolff was a very successful popularizer of the thought of Leibniz and combined material from other sources to create a whole ethical system (embedded in Leibnizian metaphysics and natural philosophy). From Leibniz, he took the principle that this world is the most perfect of all possible worlds, which is God’s sufficient reason for creating it, and he accepted also Leibniz’s determinism. We have the power of choice only in the sense that we select what pleases us most. Perfection is the principle of human motivation. Pleasure is the apprehension of perfection, and the degree of pleasure we feel is proportional to the degree of perfection we intuit. Desire and aversion, then, arise directly from pleasure and pain. We are obligated to do what will make us and our condition, or that of others, more perfect; this is the law of nature, which Wolff (like Biel) said would be binding on us even if (per impossibile) God did not exist. Wolff saw no problem about the connection between virtue and happiness, since both result directly from our perfection. He also saw no problem about the connection between virtue and duty, since a duty is simply an act in accordance with the natural law, which prescribes the pursuit of perfection. Wolff divided up our duties into those to self, 17

Theodicy 402–3. Prize Essay, 2: 298–9. I will take my translations of Kant, unless otherwise specified, from the volumes of the Cambridge Edition. The pagination I shall cite is from the Academy Edition. 19 The influence of Knutzen on Kant is controversial. For an account, see Manfred Kuehn, Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; but Kuehn gives a smaller role to the influence of pietism on Kant than I am going to do. 18

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to others, and to God. Of these duties, he spent the most time on duties to self, holding that everything that we strive for is in fact selfperfection, whether we see this clearly or not. Wolff ’s work was offensive to the pietists. This was a group attempting to revive the intensity and fervor of the Lutheran Reformation in Germany. To Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1704), its first leading figure, the devastation of the Thirty Years War was the result of Germans losing true religion, which requires the heart’s repentance and a radically new life, not merely doctrinal orthodoxy. The pietists argued for a new focus, from “true” doctrine to right action, from theological speculation to devotional earnestness, from ontological to psychological interest, from an intellectualized to an experiential approach to the Christian faith, from systematic theology to biblical exposition, from that which God has done in history to that which he wants to do in every human being now, from passive reliance on God’s initiative to human responsibility.20

August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), a pietist leader, complained about Wolff to the King of Prussia, who banished the philosopher from the kingdom. The immediate offense was Wolff ’s claim that Confucius already knew (by reason) all that mattered about morality, though he did not know anything about Christ. But underlying the dispute about general revelation was the wider objection that Wolff had missed the heart of the gospel, that salvation was (as Luther had said) only by Grace, and only through Faith (sola gratia, sola fide). Wolff was subsequently restored to favor under the next king, Frederick the Great, and returned in triumph to Prussia after being elected to the French Academy (the first German to be so honored after Leibniz). Crusius was the most important philosopher among the pietists. He accepted the double theory we found in Scotus, that motivation includes the drive to increase our own appropriate perfection (from which come the desires for truth, clarity, good reasoning, the arts, bodily improvement, freedom, friendship, and honor) and the disinterested drive for perfection (from which comes the general 20

F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eighteenth Century, Leiden: Brill, 1973, 23. Many of these themes can be found in Kant.

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desire to help others). Crusius emphasized that there are actions that we ought to do regardless of any ends we have, even the end of our own perfection, and he restricts moral obligation to such actions. It is plausible to see here the origin of what Kant calls “the categorical imperative.”21 But Crusius not only recapitulated Scotus; he added to him. There is a third drive, he said, distinct and incommensurable with these first two; he called it “the drive of conscience,” which is “the natural drive to recognize a divine moral law.”22 His idea was that we have within us a separate capacity to recognize divine command and to be drawn towards it out of a sense of dependence on the God who commands us, and who will punish us if we disobey (though our motive should not be to avoid punishment). It is a good thing, Crusius thought, that we do have this drive of conscience. For there is no way that most of us could, most of the time, reason out what we ought to do. God therefore gives us a “shorter path” to knowledge of the divine law, and makes the divine will evident in such a way that it can come to everyone’s knowledge. In this way noone is excused from accountability.23 Here, I will argue, Kant diverged. Crusius also tied our freedom to the presence of drives other than to our own perfection or happiness, again like Scotus. We are only free because we are not bound to pursue what we think will bring us the most good or perfection, and our freedom is (contrary to Leibniz) a freedom for opposite courses of action even in identical circumstances. Here too Kant followed Crusius. But Kant was not simply a pietist. He reflected also the polemic against pietism within the Lutheranism of his period. Francke would not have objected, as Kant did, that “the supposed favorite of heaven mounts to the point where he fanatically imagines that he feels special works of grace within himself (or even presumes to be confident of a fancied occult intercourse with God).”24 Kant was also strongly influenced by the British empiricists, of whom I will mention two. I am omitting Thomas Hobbes (1588–1649) and John Locke (1632–1704) on the grounds that 21

See J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, 445–56. A Guide to Rational Living, in Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant, vol. 2, ed. J. B. Schneewind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, §132, 574. 23 Ibid., §135. 24 Religion 6: 201. 22

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they are only indirectly relevant to understanding Kant. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was a Presbyterian (Calvinist) minister who was charged with heresy for holding that the standard of moral goodness is the promotion of the happiness of others, and that it is possible to have this knowledge of good and evil without knowledge of God. He distinguished between objects that are naturally good, which excite personal or selfish pleasure, and those that are morally good, which are advantageous to all persons affected. He took himself to be reading our task as agape, Greek for the love of our neighbor that Jesus prescribes. This love is benevolence, Hutcheson said, and it is formulated in the principle that “that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers.”25 Because the definitions of natural and moral good leave a possible gap between the two, we need some assurance that morality and happiness are coincident. Hutcheson thought that God has given us a moral sense for this purpose. This moral sense responds to examples of benevolence with approbation and a unique kind of pleasure, and benevolence is the only thing it responds to – as it were, the only signal it picks up. The moral sense is, like Scotus’s affection for justice, independent of our attachment to our own advantage. The result of our having a moral sense is that when intending the good of others, we “undesignedly” end up promoting our own good as well, because we end up gratifying ourselves along with others. God shows benevolence by first making us benevolent and then giving us this moral sense that finds joy in this way. To contemporary British opponents of moral sense theory, like Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753, in his sermon on “passive obedience,”) this seemed too rosy or benign a picture; our joy in approving benevolence is not enough to make morality and happiness coincident, and we need also obligation and divine sanction. Kant referred to Hutcheson as his main exemplar of someone who takes “the internal empirical route” of basing morality upon an internal moral sense. David Hume (1711–76) is the last preparatory figure I will discuss, since Kant says that thinking about Hume “interrupted my dogmatic slumbers.”26 One basic principle of Hume’s, which distinguishes him acutely from Kant, is that for him reason cannot command or move 25

Inquiry II.III, §VIII, 177–8. Prolegomena, 4: 260, but Kant is referring to Hume’s attack on causation, not his ethical theory.

26

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the will. Since morals clearly have an influence on actions and affections “it follows that they cannot be derived from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already proved, can never have any such influence.”27 For Hume, an action, sentiment, or character is virtuous or vicious “because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind.” The denial of motive power to reason is part of Hume’s general skepticism. He accepted from Locke the principle that our knowledge is restricted to either sense impressions or necessary relations of ideas independently of experience (in Latin, a priori). From this principle he derived more radical conclusions than Locke: that we cannot know about causation or the soul, and the only thing we can know about morals is that we get pleasure from the thought of some things and pain from the thought of others. The idea of morality implies some sentiment of sympathy or (Hume later said) humanity, common to all human beings, which “recommends the same object to general approbation.” The skepticism is not about morality itself but about the role of reason in morality. Hume thought we could get conventional moral conclusions from the moral sentiments, which nature has given us. In this way, he was Calvinist in contrast with Kant’s Lutheranism. He was also Calvinist in another way. He thought we could not rely on rational proofs of God’s existence, although humans have what Calvin called a sense of the divine. Again, Hume’s skepticism is about reason and not about God, though scholars disagree about this, and it is hard to be sure how to separate his own views from his prevailing irony.28 Hume never identified himself as an atheist, though he had plenty of opportunity in the atheist circles he frequented in Paris, and his work on natural religion ends with the remark that “to be a philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.”29

27

Treatise of Human Nature III.1. Compare Aristotle’s views discussed in Chapter I, “Virtue.” 28 For a contrary view, see Norman Kemp Smith’s introduction to Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947, 25–44. Hume was scornful about popular religion, but (it can be argued) preserved a place for true religion, which would give us the hope we need for the moral life. 29 Dialogues part XII, penultimate paragraph.

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Kant, Lectures on Ethics (Collins) I am going to start discussing Kant with reference to an early work, as I did with Aristotle and with Scotus. Kant was born in Königsberg in Prussia in 1724. Prussia was one of roughly three hundred kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and free cities that formed the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon finally destroyed this thousand-year-old empire when he beat the Austrians at Austerlitz and then the Prussians at Jena in 1806, two years after Kant’s death. Both of Kant’s parents were devout members of the pietist church, and Kant went to school at the Collegium Fridericianum, a pietist school, under Franz Albert Schultz (the leader of the pietists in Königsberg). At the school the day started at five thirty with a half-hour of devotions and came to a close with a similar half-hour at nine in the evening. Each classhour ended with a short but “rousing” prayer; a morning hour was devoted to religious instruction, and for four weeks before every communion service the pupils were assembled frequently to be warned of the evil state of their souls and encouraged to discover and confess their sins . . . When young and active boys are expected unanimously and daily to give evidence of great religious fervour, they are bound to do so without observing strict proportion to the emotion actually felt.30

Kant hated the hypocrisy produced by all of this, and several times in his writing breaks into odes to the virtue of sincerity. He came to distrust fervent displays of religious emotion. But we have to be careful not to confuse these reactions with a rejection of the doctrinal content of pietism, or of Christian orthodoxy more generally. Kant simply does not tell us whether he believed, for example, in the historical resurrection of Christ. He describes himself, in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as a philosophical theologian, and says it is not the business of the philosophical theologian to deal with such matters.31 He does, however, tell us that belief in the 30

Theodore M. Greene, in his introduction to Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960, xxiii and xxviii. 31 Religion 6: 9.

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existence of God and in God’s activity on our behalf is necessary for a coherent pursuit of the moral life.32 At the age of sixteen, Kant entered the university of Königsberg, to read theology. After university, he acted as a family tutor for several years (in order to earn his living), until he was appointed a privatdozent at the university, giving courses of lectures on logic and metaphysics, mathematics and natural science, and physical geography. He twice failed to get a professorship. When he tried to enlist the help of Schultz, in 1765, the old man, apparently worried by the direction of Kant’s thinking, asked him, “Do you fear God with all your heart?” Kant was able to still his teacher’s doubts, and received his endorsement. On the other hand, he did not regularly attend church. This does not tell us whether the reason was that (like Kierkegaard in the next century) he was offended by the practice of the Church or whether he had ceased to believe in central Christian doctrines. In 1770 (at the age of 47), he was finally appointed professor, and published his Inaugural Dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World. This was followed by a silence in his publication record while he worked on the Critique of Pure Reason, which he finally published in 1781. In this work, he accomplished what he described as “a Copernican Revolution,” achieving in philosophy what Copernicus had achieved in astronomy. To understand what he means by calling it “Copernican,” it is useful to follow the remark that he was interrupted from his dogmatic slumbers by his “recollection” of David Hume.33 He tells us what doctrine of Hume’s had this effect, though he does not tell us how many years earlier the waking from slumber occurred, and it is in fact difficult to establish the chronology. The doctrine in question was that reason cannot “give birth to” the concept of cause and effect. If objects are causally related, they must stand in a necessary relation such that the existence of one object necessitates the existence of the other. But, Hume argued, reason can only establish the logically necessary relation of ideas (a priori), 32

The position of the morally good atheist is, he says, possible but “rationally unstable.” See John E. Hare, “Kant on the Rational Instability of Atheism,” in God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Andrew Dole and Andrew Chignell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 202–18. 33 Prolegomena 4: 260.

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and the existence of one thing can never make the existence of another logically necessary. So reason is mistaken; the truth is simply that we regularly experience one thing after another and form the habit of associating the two of them together: “In reality [causation] was nothing but a bastard of imagination, impregnated by experience, which subsumed certain representations under the law of association and mistook a subjective necessity (habit) for an objective necessity arising from insight.”34 But Hume was not skeptical of the claim that we have sense-experience, and Kant’s response to him was to identify causation as a structure self-imposed by the human understanding, a structure through which things have to appear to us if we are to experience objects at all. This is why Kant’s revolution is Copernican. Just as Copernicus said our perception of the motions of heavenly bodies can best be understood as a product or function of our own movement, so Kant says that our knowledge of causation can best be understood as a product of the structure of our own understanding. We can, contrary to Hume, have a priori knowledge of causation because it is a pre-condition of the possibility of experience itself.35 In the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, Kant says, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”36 At the end of the Critique, Kant describes the

34

Prolegomena 4: 257–8. I am interpreting the Copernican Revolution here in one of the standard ways it has been interpreted from the beginning. See Karl Reinhold’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks, trans. James Hebbeler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, which first popularized Kant’s system and of which Kant approved. On this interpretation, there are three levels to Kant’s system. First, he is an empirical realist, i.e. he thinks the objects of our experience are real. He is not concerned to prove this, but to undermine objections to it. Second, he is a transcendental idealist, i.e. he thinks the pre-conditions of our experience such as space and time and the categories of the understanding lie in the structure of our own consciousness. Third, he is a transcendent realist, i.e. he thinks things in themselves (noumena) are real independently of their appearing to us. 36 KrV B xxx. There is a pattern to the changes in the second edition, and later in the second edition of Religion, whereby Kant responds to difficulties that had been found in the first edition by readers who cared about the 35

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relation between his response to Hume and his own ethical theory; the former is accomplished by laying out the limits of human knowledge, which at the same time enables us to have moral faith in what is beyond our knowledge. We know things only as they appear to us (as phenomena) through the structure imposed by our understanding, and not as they are in themselves (as noumena).37 The distinction is fundamental to Kant’s project, and was already present in his Inaugural Dissertation in the distinction between the sensible (perceptible) and intelligible worlds. To expand the remark I quoted at the beginning of this paragraph, Kant denies knowledge of things-inthemselves in order to make room for faith or belief in them. The human will, and its freedom, and God are all, for Kant, noumena; but we also live, as creatures of sense and creatures of need, in the world of phenomena. Our happiness, by which Kant means the satisfaction of our desires as a sum, is something we experience in the world of sensation, and this satisfaction is subject to the causal laws of nature. Our moral lives, on the other hand, are conducted under the laws of freedom, for the sake of conformity to those laws. Kant uses two terms here from Leibniz: Leibniz entitled the world, in so far as we take account only of the rational beings in it, and of their connection according to moral laws under the government of the Supreme Good, the kingdom of grace, distinguishing it from the kingdom of nature, in which these rational beings do indeed stand under moral laws but expect no other consequences from their actions than such as follow in accordance with the course of nature in our world of sense.38

Kant thought that if we do not hold fast to this distinction, which means denying knowledge of things-in-themselves, but believing (having faith in) their existence, we will end up losing our morality, and he thought Hume had done exactly that. He thought that Hume had imprisoned us inside the kingdom of nature. relation of Kant’s philosophy to traditional Christian faith. Note that this very kind of subordination of knowledge to faith could be expressed in the sentence I quoted from the end of Hume’s Dialogues. 37 Sartre was concerned to deny this distinction between noumena and phenomena, as we saw at the end of the previous chapter. 38 KrV A812 = B840.

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To finish recounting Kant’s astonishing productivity, he turned to ethical questions after the Prolegomena, publishing Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785. He followed this with his second critique, Critique of Practical Reason, in 1788 and a third critique, Critique of Judgement, in 1790. He published Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in 1793–4, Toward Perpetual Peace in 1795, Metaphysics of Morals (for which the Groundwork is the groundwork) in 1797–8, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint in 1798, and Conflict of the Faculties also in 1798. He died in 1804. I am going to follow this order in the present chapter, giving a section each to the Lectures on Ethics (1784), the Groundwork, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Religion, and the Metaphysics of Morals. I will end with a section on a contemporary version of a Kantian theory that does not give to God the role that Kant gives. The Lectures on Ethics are notes taken by students of a set of lectures that Kant gave nearly thirty times, changing the content as his thought developed. The set of notes I will discuss was named for Georg Ludwig Collins, who attended the university in 1784. This means that the teaching in them is slightly earlier than Kant’s published ethical work of the critical period (the period of the Critiques). It is controversial how accurate the notes are to Kant’s lectures. Kant was scornful about the philosophical ability of students who devoted themselves to note taking. On the other hand, the practice of taking detailed notes and distributing them was highly developed at this period, and the Collins notes may be the work of a professional whose basic version was then altered by students who heard new material, year to year. In any case, I am going to assume that the material is roughly as Kant delivered it, though not word for word. The Lectures have three parts, with the last divided into two sections. Kant used a standard textbook by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (a Wolffian), and repeats most of the textbook’s divisions. The first part is called “On Universal Practical Philosophy,” the second “On Religion,” and the third “On Morality,” divided into “Duties to Oneself ” and “Duties to Others.” In the first part, Kant discusses the basis of morality. He describes four options. The basis must be, he says, either empirical (from experience) or intellectual (from reason); and each of these options has two variants, internal (inside us) and external (outside us). His example of a thinker who takes the external empirical route is Montaigne, who makes social custom the basis of morality. His

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example of someone who takes the internal empirical route is Hutcheson, who thinks morality is based on an internal moral sense. But all empirical theories end up making the first principle of morality contingent (it could be otherwise), whereas Kant thinks it is necessary. A society may or may not have a custom, and a person may or may not sense that something is wrong. But, Kant thinks, moral wrongness is not variable in this way; if something is wrong, it is wrong whatever customs your society happens to practice and however you happen to feel. I will come back later to the distinction between the internal and the external forms of the view that morality is based on reason. Kant, having established that the first principle is based on reason, lays out the difference between two kinds of rational imperative, hypothetical and categorical. He uses the distinction I noted in Crusius. A categorical imperative is one that tells me to do something or not do something whatever ends I have (whatever I want).39 Kant says it is hard to find an example of this, but his choice is the imperative “Do not lie.”40 A hypothetical imperative tells me to do something or not do something if I have this or that end. Of hypothetical imperatives there are two types, one that starts from an end that all humans have, namely happiness. So a hypothetical imperative of prudence (or a pragmatic imperative) tells me “Insofar as you want to be happy, you must do so and so” (e.g. make friends). Kant comments that we never say this kind of thing because there is no point to it; we all want to be happy. On the other hand, there are hypothetical imperatives that start from ends that some people have and others do not. So a technical hypothetical imperative tells me, “Insofar as you want to construct a hexagon, you must draw a circle and . . .” and proceeds to give me the rule. Kant is widely (though not universally) condemned for his absolutist position about lying. We will come to his argument for this posi39

Lectures on Ethics 27: 246–7. Ibid., 27: 257. The Cambridge Edition emends the text at this point, to read the opposite of what it actually says (reading leicht “easy” for nicht “not”). This is not a necessary change, since Kant does find it hard to give examples of practical principles of reason. See the second Critique, “thus the judgement of pure practical reason is subject to the very same difficulties” KpV 5: 68. The prohibition on lying is his only example in this part of the Lectures, and it ends up giving him more trouble than any of his other examples.

40

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tion in the following section. In the Lectures, he makes a distinction between lying (in Latin, mendacium) and saying what is false (in Latin, falsiloquium). Not every intentional untruth is a lie, though every lie is an intentional untruth. Kant says that if I intend to mislead someone or at least to hide what is on my mind, because the other person means to misuse the truth (say, by stealing my money), and I act or speak in such a way that he draws the conclusion I wish him to draw, such an untruth is not a lie, though it is certainly still an untruth.41 A categorical imperative is binding on a person whatever ends she has. Kant says that this means the subjection of our will “under the rule of universally valid ends.”42 He is not making the linguistic point that a moral rule contains only universal terms, so that it makes no individual reference (in the way “Kant ought to write shorter sentences” makes individual reference to Kant). This cannot be Kant’s intention, for he says it is hard to find an example and there is nothing hard about finding imperatives without individual reference, for example “Use all other human beings as tools for personal advantage” or “Eat only bananas.” Even without Kant’s note about the difficulty of giving examples, we can tell that he is not making a purely linguistic point by looking at the argument he gives. He contrasts a pragmatic rule with a moral rule. Pragmatic rules concur with my own choice, to the limited extent that I know what will make me happy, but moral rules are those “by which my action holds good 41

Ibid., 27: 447. See Roger J. Sullivan, Kant’s Moral Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 170–7. In his reply to Constant (1797), On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives, Kant considers the case where a murderer asks about a friend who has taken refuge in one’s house and takes the absolutist position that “truthfulness in statements which cannot be avoided is the formal duty of an individual to everyone, however great may be the disadvantage accruing to himself or to another.” But Kant’s theory does not require this position, since he elsewhere allows conflicts of duty, in which cases “the stronger ground of duty should prevail,” Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 224. 42 Ibid., 27: 257–8. In the Mrongovius notes, which supplement Collins’s notes but date from a year or two earlier, Kant is reported as saying that when people will in accordance with a categorical imperative, they will “what accords with the universal form of the understanding and can at all times become a rule,” 27: 1429.

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universally, and these are derived from the universal ends of mankind.”43 After introducing the idea of a categorical imperative, Kant goes on to say that our free doing and refraining in accordance with duty gives us an intrinsic goodness, which makes us worthy to be happy. The highest created good is a world “in which all rational beings are happy and are worthy of happiness.”44 Kant clarifies his view by contrasting it with the views of the Stoics and the Epicureans. Epicurus, he says, held that the highest good was happiness and that welldoing was simply a means to happiness. Zeno the Stoic taught that the highest good is morality, with happiness merely its consequence. For Epicurus, the pattern or archetype is the man of the world, while for Zeno it is the sage (who can be happy on the rack). Christianity differs from both in holding that we are aiming at the union of holiness (or moral perfection) and happiness, and the pattern is Christ. In this way both Greek schools end up reducing the ideal, by subtracting one part of it. Kant concedes that holiness is too high for human achievement, but says that Christianity remedies this situation by adding belief in divine assistance, if we do what we can.45 God helps us please God, which we could not otherwise do. Now we can return to the distinction between internal and external forms of the view that morality is based on reason. The external form of this is the view of Crusius, that obligation “has arisen from lex arbitraria [arbitrary law] and has its ground in the will of another [i.e. God].”46 Kant objects that the moral law, if it is in this sense arbitrary, is not necessary, since it depends on God’s free will. But, he 43

Ibid., 27: 258. This requires considering what people actually want, which is consistent with the linguistic point but not reducible to it. 44 Ibid., 27: 247. The highest created good is distinguished from the uncreated Supreme Good, which is what governs the kingdom of grace in the account Kant borrows from Leibniz. 45 Ibid., 27: 251. See also 351, where Kant condemns the lazy, “who wish to do nothing at all themselves, but leave everything to God. To remedy such timorousness, bear in mind that we may hope that our weakness and frailty will receive a supplement through divine aid, if we have but done as much as we were able to.” 46 Ibid., 27: 262. This need not imply “arbitrariness” in the modern sense, only that the law is within the legislator’s discretion, and has its ground in his or her will (here, God’s).

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thinks, the moral law is as necessary as the proposition that a triangle has three angles.47 Neither of these principles have an author, strictly speaking, and God has to will in accordance with them, just as we do. The difference between us is that God does not have obligations, because the function of obligation is to constrain inclination, and God does not have inclinations to be constrained; God’s will is perfectly holy, as ours can never be.48 Kant has now excluded three of the alternatives for the basis of morality, and this leaves the fourth. The basis of morality is internal to reason. The discussion of the highest created good leads to a discussion of motivation. Kant places more emphasis on reward in the Lectures than he does later, but the difference is hard to chart because he changes his terminology, so that what at first seems a contradiction turns out not to be, when the definitions of the terms are taken into account. Kant’s starting point in the Lectures is human weakness in relation to God’s demand, though he is concerned (like Leibniz) that we not grovel. He condemns those who “take all their sins and lay them at God’s feet, and sigh, and think thereby they honour God; they fail to see that such mean and petty eulogy from worms such as we are is but a reproach to God.”49 The proper relationship with God is more like an idealized picture of a good student’s relation to his professor (perhaps especially in Germany). The student is aware of his potential and its value, but is also aware of his inadequacy in relation to the discipline (of which he and the professor are both servants, even though the professor understands immeasurably more). The student knows that he needs the professor’s help. His greatest reward and his greatest honor will be the professor’s “well done.” In our relationship with God, Kant says we should have a heart that freely wills obedience, “as the teacher of the gospel says.”50 Kant contrasts the right and the wrong ways of fearing God. If we obey out of fear of Hell (or, for that matter, out of desire for Heaven), this

47

Ibid., 27: 283. I have discussed this more fully in God’s Call, 94–6. Kant’s view is thus different from that of Scotus, but only in respect to the second table of the law. Scotus thinks that the first principle of ethics, that God is to be loved, is necessary and that even God has to will it. 49 Ibid., 27: 1426. This passage is from the notes of Mrongovius, which also supplement those of Collins at this point. 50 Ibid., 27: 274. 48

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is not morality at all, but prudence.51 But there is a kind of reward appropriate to morality, which is God’s “Well done, thou good and faithful servant”52 A pure moral ground is a more potent impulse than one intermingled with pathological and pragmatic motives. These latter have a greater effect on our sensuous nature, but the motive power to which the understanding looks is one of universal validity. It is true that morality is not very impressive: it is not particularly pleasing, but it refers to a pleasure of universal validity: as such it must please the Supreme Being, and this constitutes the strongest motive force.53

To interpreters of Kant who do not believe in God, this kind of motivation can seem opaque. They think they can understand fear of Hell or hope of Heaven, but the desire to please God from the mere love of God escapes them. Kant’s terms in this passage are “motive” and “ground” – “The divine will is the motive to action, not the ground of it.”54 This distinction can be illumined by the same analogy of the student and the professor. The student is motivated by the desire to please the professor, and to receive the “well done.” But what grounds the student’s scholarly activity is the merit of that activity itself, deriving from the merit of the material being studied, which is also what grounds the professor’s scholarship. Perhaps the ideal scholar does not need any motive in this sense, and the ground is enough by itself; but actual students need the additional motivation. If, on the other hand, pleasing the professor is an empirical external ground, then the point of the student’s work is merely to get a good grade, and he is not a serious scholar at all. Kant distinguishes, as Suarez did, between God’s legislative, executive, and judicial functions. He says that we have to recognize our duties as God’s commands, and this relates to all three divine roles. God is the author of the obligation of the law (again, as in Suarez), though not the author of the law itself. God gives us the assistance 51

Note the difference from Aristotle, for whom practical wisdom is “prudence” because practical wisdom is directed at happiness. 52 Matthew 25: 21. 53 Lectures 27: 259, emphasis added. 54 Ibid., 27: 309. The Cambridge Edition’s translation is “not a motivating ground.”

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required to live according to the law. And God sees our hearts, as we do not, knows whether we are committed to obedience, and rewards us accordingly.

The Groundwork Kant’s best-known ethical work is Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In a way, it is unfortunate that this work has been such a success, because it has skewed subsequent interpretation of Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant is explicit that he does not intend the Groundwork to be a first exposition of his whole ethical system. He distinguishes the project from the Lectures, which covered “Universal Practical Philosophy” in the manner of Wolff or Baumgarten. In the Groundwork, he says he is only going to cover what belongs in the province of pure reason, as opposed to experience. This means he is not covering “the actions and conditions of human volition as such, which are for the most part drawn from psychology.”55 Even within the province of pure reason he confines himself to seeking out and establishing the supreme principle of morality. The application of this principle to a whole ethical system is an important project, but one he leaves for later. So we do not get in the Groundwork Kant’s system of duties (to self, others, and God), his discussion of virtue, his argument for belief in God and immortality, or his treatment of our sociality and our political responsibilities. To someone who reads only the Groundwork, Kant’s moral philosophy can seem much narrower in focus than it is, because Kant deliberately restricts his scope of inquiry in this work – Imagine someone complaining about the narrowness of Aristotle’s metaphysical views, after reading only the Categories. I am going to proceed by discussing three formulations that Kant gives of the supreme principle of morality, what he calls “the categorical imperative.” The first formulation uses the notion of universal law, or the law of nature, the second the notion of an endin-itself, and the third the notion of autonomy. Kant then ties these three together in the concept of a kingdom of ends. A guiding principle of my interpretation will be that Kant intends these formulations to be understood in terms of each other. They are supposed to be 55

Groundwork 4: 391.

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formulations of the same principle, and Kant nowhere says that any one of them is supposed to stand alone. There has been a tendency in the secondary literature to give too much weight to Kant’s first formulation, in terms of universal law.56 If we pay attention to the interdependence of the formulations, we will see that key terms in one formulation are often best explained by means of another. Why does Kant think there is only one, supreme principle of morality? The drive to find unity in a supreme principle was common to Aristotle, who thought he had found something, namely happiness, that grounds all human action, and to Scotus, who held that there is one primary practical principle, that God is to be loved, and this is primary because it connects us to the good at which every other good aims. R. M. Hare, by contrast, while he would have liked to make the principle of utility the supreme principle of all morality, did not think he had a way to show this. Kant thinks that his principle is necessary, and that he can show that it operates (in one of its formulations) behind every other moral principle. The first formulation states, “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”57 We met this basic idea in the Lectures, but there are some differences in terminology. A maxim is, Kant says, “the subjective principle of an action.” An agent could normally give the maxim for her action by giving her reasons for acting in a particular way. In other words, her maxim tells her to do something for some reason. But at least two kinds of obscurity remain. A hard-headed empiricist about motivation might be skeptical about whether there is such a thing as the intention with which an action is done, since there are likely to be all sorts of desires and attachments and beliefs running around (or just sitting there) in an agent’s head. Perhaps no single item prevails and there is just a muddy mixture. Kant shows no signs of worrying about this. A second difficulty is that it is not clear what level of generality a Kantian maxim has. Kant gives examples such as “When I am in need, let me make a false promise [a promise I intend not to keep] to repay some money in order to secure 56

I have been influenced by Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, who traces the “empty formalism” objection in, for example, Hegel and MacIntyre to a failure to see Kant’s intentions in relating the formulations together. 57 Groundwork 4: 421.

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a loan.” This example has a high level of generality (e.g. “when I am in need,” as opposed to “when my family is about to run out of food and I have lost my job, etc. etc.”). Kant thinks maxims can be taught, so they cannot include details that would make them unwieldy for educational purposes. His theory would be different if maxims were allowed to be highly specific, and some objections to the theory would be removed. We will come back to this in the next chapter. Kant says that the categorical imperative in its first formulation requires the agent to act only on a maxim through which she can will it to become a universal law. There is a process here, in which the maxim is the vehicle of its own transformation into a universal law. The motivation behind the original maxim drives the process, even as the maxim is screened by the test that the categorical imperative provides. Some maxims allow this kind of universalization and others prevent it (such as the maxim of making a false promise). What is this test? Most simply, I ask myself, “Can this maxim be willed universally?” Kant gives an alternative version of the first formula to make this point clearer, “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.” Since he is talking about the actions of free agents, he does not mean that the maxim will literally become a law of nature, which would imply that humans became merely mechanical beings. Like Scotus, Kant accepts a dichotomy between the realm of nature and the realm of freedom. But nature has one feature that makes the analogy useful; nature is a system in which the same kind of cause produces the same kind of effect in a lawful way wherever and whenever it occurs. Kant is asking us to imagine a similar system, but a system of moral permissions, in which the end incorporated in our maxim is included. We would have to be able to say: “Whenever someone is in need, he may make a false promise to repay some money in order to secure a loan.” Kant thinks that when we consider a system including this principle, we will see that it is incoherent. The argument works like this. It is incoherent to will an end and not will the means to that end.58 If a unique opportunity to take some 58

I am indebted here to Christine Korsgaard, “Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: the Argument of Groundwork I,” in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Paul Guyer, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, 51–79. She says that the maxim (of the false promise) “is derived from a hypothetical imperative: ‘If you will to get some ready money, then make

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action arises, and I know this action is a necessary means to some end I have, and if there is not some more important end that forbids my taking the action, it is incoherent to adopt the end and not take the action. Now making a false promise requires the institution or general practice of promise-keeping. I cannot get someone to believe that my promising to repay a loan will secure the promised repayment unless people generally keep their promises. But if I will the maxim of a false promise as a universal law, I am willing a world in which people are allowed to make false promises, a world in which the institution of promising cannot survive. Kant says, “No one would believe what was promised to him but would only laugh at any such assertion as vain pretense.”59 I am therefore willing to destroy the means to the very end I am willing, and this makes my willing incoherent. I am committed to not destroying the institution of promising by my own maxim because I will to employ it as a means to my end. A biological analogy is helpful here. False promises are related to the institution of promising as a tapeworm is related to the intestines. First, the parasite feeds off its host and cannot survive if the host is destroyed. But, second, the parasite will end up killing the host and so killing itself, unless it passes on to another host. A person who follows the categorical imperative does so, Kant thinks, because she values the law-like form in which she can will her maxims. She values the fact that she wills what is morally permissible for everyone to will. Why does she value this? It is important to see that Kant does not ask this question. I will return to this in discussing Christine Korsgaard at the end of the chapter. Some scholars have drawn from Kant the answer that humans are essentially rational beings and the nature of reason is to seek the universal.60 Reason proceeds in science by looking for the law that explains why a particular event occurs, and does not rest with a mere description of the event; since we have only one reason, with its different employments, we may suppose that it proceeds the same way in moral life. But in the Groundwork, while Kant describes the categorical a lying promise.’ This hypothetical imperative, in turn, is derived from the rational principle that whoever wills an end wills the necessary means, together with the ‘causal’ law that lying promises are a means to, or will cause, the possession of the ready money.” 59 Groundwork 4: 422. 60 KpV 5: 120, Reason is “the faculty of principles.”

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imperative as commanding conformity to the universality of law as such, he does not propose this as a reason to care about morality. If this were his proposal, it would be defective for two reasons. First, it does not acknowledge the non-universal moral thinking I discussed in relation to Scotus.61 Universalizing is no doubt one of the things practical reason does, but it is not the only thing, and it may not be the most important thing. Reason may be different in its practical and theoretical employments. But, second, even if we grant that moral thinking universalizes, the question remains why we should value it. Why should not someone say to Kant, “Well, if that is what you mean by ‘rationality,’ then I am not going to be rational”? We get closer to an answer with the second formulation of the categorical imperative in terms of the end-in–itself, “So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”62 By humanity, Kant means “rational nature” as this is present in a creature of sense and a creature of need.63 Humanity, Kant is saying, should never be treated as a mere means. This is true, he says, about humanity in myself as well as humanity in other people. I am not allowed to treat myself as merely a means to other people getting what they want. The word “merely” is important. Kant is not forbidding using people, in the way a student uses a professor to get an education or a professor uses a publisher to produce her books. But we 61

I defend the idea that moral judgment does not require that every term be replaceable by a universal term in The Moral Gap, 150–9. The moral maxim may have a subject term, an addressee term, a recipient term, and an action term, and the requirement that a singular term be replaceable by a universal term may apply to the item in the action term-position (since the maxim is giving a reason for an action that should apply to any action of just that type), but not the items in the other term-positions. 62 Groundwork 4: 429. 63 See e.g. Religion 6: 26. Kant is vulnerable to the objection that some humans are not able to reason, but should still be treated with respect. Moreover, many people think we should not treat other animals as mere means. Finally, Kant is sexist about the capacity of women to reason with full maturity. See Anthropology 7: 208–9, “Woman, whatever her age, is declared to be civilly immature; the husband is her natural curator.” But we can take this as a mistake about women rather than a mistake about morality.

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must never merely use a human being. What does this mean? Kant tells us that to treat another person as an end in herself is to share as far as possible her ends. If we return to the example of the false promise, this gives us another reason to think it morally forbidden. By making a false promise I am preventing the person I am promising from sharing my end (which is to get money without paying it back). False promising is a form of deception and what is being concealed is the end I actually have in making the promise. The same is true in cases of coercion, where, again, there is no sharing ends, but one person’s end is imposed by force on another. Here is another example. It is the end of a long day and I go to a restaurant for dinner. To treat the waitress as merely a means is to treat her as if she were a conveyor belt on legs, there only to get the food quickly from the kitchen to my table. To treat her as an end-inherself is to share as far as possible her ends.64 Perhaps she too has had a long day, and would like a little patience from her customers. Kant’s point is that her ends count morally as much as mine. What does he mean by “as far as possible”? He means that I do not need to share her immoral ends.65 But all the ends she has that are morally permitted (as far as I can reasonably know them) I should try to make my own.66 Now we can return to the question of why a person should value the fact that she is willing what is morally permissible for every person to will. The answer given by the second formulation is that I value those people and so I want to share their ends. Kant makes a distinction between “dignity” and “price.” Something has price if it can be exchanged for something of comparable value (e.g. a used book is worth a certain amount of money). Something has dignity if it is beyond price in this sense. (This does not imply that there are no limits on how much we should spend, e.g., to save a life. But the only thing of comparable value to a human life is another human life.) Kant thinks that humanity has dignity. If my end, incorporated in my maxim, is morally permissible for everyone to will, this means it is consistent with the morally permissible happiness of everyone. 64

Groundwork 4: 430. See MM 6: 388 and 450. 66 When Kant discusses this example in relation to his first formulation, he says that the duty to help others is an imperfect duty, implying that we have discretion about which people to help, since we cannot help all. 65

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Caring about the morally permissible happiness of other people is the main part of treating them as ends-in-themselves. We can still ask, however, why we should think that human beings have dignity. What gives them dignity rather than price? The best answer is provided by the formulation of the categorical imperative in terms of autonomy. The human will has to be regarded, Kant says, “as not merely subject to the law but subject to it in such a way that it must be viewed as also giving the law to itself.”67 We should hear in this an echo of Luther’s treatise on Christian liberty, with its two theses that a Christian is both subject to none and subject to all. But there are also antecedents to this idea of autonomy in Cicero and Aristotle, who says that citizens “are all who share in the civic life of ruling and being ruled.”68 Giving the law to oneself does not mean creating the law. Neither humans nor God create the law, or make it in the sense of bringing it into existence, since the law is necessary.69 Rather, we make the law in the sense of making it our law, appropriating it or putting ourselves under it. Kant uses similar language about God in the second Critique. We “will that there be a God.”70 At first hearing this sounds like blasphemy. But Kant does not mean that we create God by our will. Rather, we will that God be our God. If we did create God, God could not play the role in our lives that Kant’s theory requires, with power over nature that humans and their artifacts do not have. The opposite of autonomy is heteronomy, where something else makes law for us (from the Greek heteros “other” and nomos “law;” autonomy is from autos “self ” and nomos). Kant considers various forms of heteronomy, repeating the same distinction between empirical and rational options that he made in the Lectures. Again, he identifies two varieties under each heading: personal happiness (as in Epicurus) and moral sense (as in Hutcheson) under the empirical head, and perfection (as in Leibniz) and Crusius’s form of divinecommand theory under the rational head. The critique of the last of

67

Groundwork 4: 431. Politics III, 12, 1283b42. Ernest Barker adds “in turn” in the Oxford translation, but this is not in the Greek. 69 We saw this point in the Lectures, where Kant made the comparison with a triangle having three angles. 70 KpV 5: 143 68

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these is worth quoting in full, since it is often misinterpreted. The principle of perfection, Kant says, is better than the theological concept, which derives morality from a divine, all-perfect will; it is better not merely because we cannot intuit the perfection of this will but can only derive it from our concepts, among which that of morality is foremost, but because if we do not do this (and to do it would be a grossly circular explanation), the concept of his will still left to us, made up of the attributes of desire for glory and dominion combined with dreadful representations of power and vengefulness, would have to be the foundation for a system of morals that would be directly opposed to morality.

Those who read Kant’s argument as an attack on divinecommand theories in general naturally construe it as presenting the following two-horned dilemma: We have two choices with a divinecommand theory – either we derive the notion of God’s perfection from our moral concepts or we do not. If we do (the first horn), the derivation is crudely circular. It says we have moral obligations because God commands them, and we should obey God’s commands because they are morally right. But if we separate (the second horn) our notion of God’s will from our moral concepts, then the explanation of our obligation will depend merely on our ability to please God and his ability (if we do not) to hurt us. The relationship between us, stripped of right, reduces to one of power. But then morality reduces to self-interest, and will not be what (on Kant’s view) morality must be. Neither choice is available to us, and so the divine-command theory should be rejected. This cannot be, if Kant is consistent, Kant’s argument. For Kant accepts the view, throughout his life, that we should recognize our obligations as God’s commands. For example, in Lectures on Ethics he says, “Our conduct towards God is of three kinds. We may reverence, fear and love Him. We revere God as a holy law-giver, love Him as a benevolent ruler, and fear Him as a just judge” (which is different, Kant says, from merely being afraid of God’s punishment when we have transgressed). “To revere God is to regard His law as holy and righteous, to respect it and seek to fulfil it in one’s dispositions.”71

71

Lectures 27: 322.

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I will come shortly to the passage in the Groundwork about God being the head of the kingdom of ends, and the passages in the second Critique and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason about recognizing our duties as God’s commands. Because this is a sustained theme in Kant, we are better off regarding his attack in the Groundwork as directed not at divine-command theories in general, but at some specific variety. The form Crusius gives us is an excellent candidate. Kant objects to Crusius on three grounds. He starts by saying that we cannot intuit God’s perfection. This starting point makes sense if he has Crusius in mind. Crusius had proposed that we have access to divine perfection through “the drive of conscience,” a “shorter path” separate from morality. Kant’s position is that we cannot intuit God’s perfection, because human intuition is limited within space and time. This is his first objection. Our access is, therefore, through concepts. Either these will be moral concepts, or some other. This presents a Crusius-type divine-command theory with a dilemma. Suppose we take the first option, and reply that we can know what God wills, since he wills what the moral law prescribes. Here is the second objection. This would be, Kant says, crudely circular. He may be objecting to just such a circle in the passage from Crusius I quoted earlier: “Finally, the third of the basic human drives is the natural drive to recognize a divine moral law.”72 Crusius adds the word “moral” at a key point in his definition without showing how he can simultaneously insist on the separation of the three basic drives. It is a crude circle to argue that A is B by adding B to the definition of A. What is needed is a “third term,” C, that can be connected first with A and then with B.73 Kant’s theory provides a mediating third term 72

Crusius Guide to Reasonable Living (GRL), §132, emphasis added. See Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960, 107. At GRL §134, Crusius makes the claim that the drives are separate: “It is thus not specially necessary to show that the drive of conscience is distinct from the previously distinguished basic drives, as its object is so very different from those of the other drives.” 73 An instructive comparison is Kant’s worry in the third section of Groundwork that he may have argued in a circle about morality and freedom (4: 450). Kant thinks he has extricated himself from this circle when he points out that “when we think of ourselves as free, we transfer ourselves

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in the fact that God and we share an end, namely the highest good. If this is right, it is not divine-command theory as such that Kant is objecting to, but one form of it (namely, that provided by Crusius), which does not provide such a mediating term. Finally, there is a third point Kant makes against Crusius. If we think we can understand what God is telling us to do without using moral concepts, we will be left without morality at all. Kant must have in mind a form of the divine-command theory that forbids us to say “we should obey God because God is righteous and cares for the well-being of all creation.” A Crusius-type divine-command theory either argues in a crude circle or insists that we should obey God’s will just because it is his will, whatever our direct intuition tells us that will is.74 This makes nonsense of morality. The point (though not the ground) of morality, as Kant sees it, is to further one’s own perfection and the happiness of others.75 But Crusius seems to be asking us to adopt a morality that ignores this. It is not that Crusius is making the gross claim that what should move us to obedience is hope of reward or fear of punishment. Indeed, I started from his view, which he holds in common with Scotus, that we have sources of motivation other than happiness-based ones. It is notable that Kant, in his reply, does not say that his opponent bases morality on hope of reward or fear of punishment, but rather “that the concept of God’s will remaining to us,” if we separate the drive of conscience from morality, will be drawn from “such characteristics as lust for glory and domination and bound up with frightful ideas of power and vengefulness.” Kant is interested in what our idea of God will be like if we allow the separation of the drive of conscience that Crusius suggests. And we find that Crusius does emphasize that God will

into the intelligible world as members” (4: 453). He gives us a third term mediating between morality and freedom, namely our membership in the intelligible world. 74 See Robert M. Adams, “Autonomy and Theological Ethics,” in The Virtue of Faith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 123–7. Adams approves of Tillich’s notion of theonomous ethics: “The theonomous agent acts morally because he loves God, but also because he loves what God loves.” Kant on my reading, but not Crusius, has a theonomous ethics. 75 In the Metaphysics of Morals, he calls these the matter of morality, 6: 398.

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punish us if we do not obey, even though this is not to be our motivation for obedience.76 It would have been easy for Kant, if he were making a general attack on divine-command theory, to talk about not basing morality on fear of punishment or hope of reward, and I suspect that is the way his argument is usually taught. But it is not what he says. All three steps of the argument are specifically tailored to Crusius. Kant sums up his three formulations in the “very fruitful concept” of the kingdom of ends, “a systematic union of rational beings through common objective laws.”77 He uses Aristotle’s conception of the relations between substance, form, and matter to explain this. The formulation in terms of universal law (or the law of nature) gives as it were the form of morality, Kant says, and the formulation in terms of the end-in-itself (together with the notion of autonomy) gives the matter. He is indicating that we do not get the whole of morality with just one formulation, just as Aristotle says we do not get perceptible substance with just form or just matter. The first formulation gives us the form because it abstracts from all content of the maxims we consider (as we get the form of the first movement of a sonata in the classical period by abstracting from all the different melodies and rhythms and harmonies that composers have put into it). The second formulation gives us the matter because it tells us what we are trying to bring about: we are trying to achieve the morally permissible ends (because we share them) of all the people whose lives are affected by what we do, including ourselves. The concept of the kingdom of ends puts these ideas together, in the way substance puts together matter and form. We are to think of ourselves as members of a kingdom governed by universal laws of morality, and any maxim we act on must be suitable to be willed as a law for such a kingdom. This kingdom, Kant says, has a head or sovereign, who is “a completely independent being, without needs and with unlimited resources adequate to his will.”78 Members of the 76

“The motive of conscience,” he says, “is therefore merely a motive to recognize certain indebtednesses, that is, such universal obligations as one must observe even if one does not wish to consider the advantages and disadvantages deriving from them, whose transgression God will punish and, if his law is not to be in vain, must punish,” GRL §133, emphasis added. 77 Groundwork 4: 433. 78 Groundwork 4: 434.

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kingdom make the law and are subject to the law (they are autonomous), but the sovereign, in addition to being a member, has a special role: other members are subject to his will, while he is not subject to the will of any other member. There is no doubt Kant is talking about God. He says that membership in the kingdom of ends does not by itself guarantee us happiness, though living out the duties of this membership makes us worthy to be happy. To secure the union of virtue and happiness, what he calls in the Lectures the highest created good, the sovereign of the kingdom of ends would have to be also the sovereign of the kingdom of nature (since our happiness comes to us through nature).79 Because the project of the Groundwork is limited to discussion of the supreme principle of morality, Kant does not go on to make the argument that the moral life requires that we believe in the reality, or at least the possibility, of this highest good. But in the second Critique, he says that the moral law leads to the recognition of all duties as divine commands, not as sanctions – that is, chosen and in themselves contingent ordinances of another’s will – but as essential laws of every free will in itself, which must nevertheless be regarded as commands of a supreme being because only from a will that is morally perfect (holy and beneficent) and at the same time all-powerful, and so through harmony with this will, can we hope to attain the highest good, which the moral law makes it our duty to take as the object of our endeavors.80

This argument will be my focus in the following section.

The Critique of Practical Reason In order to understand this argument, we need to return to the idea of the highest created good (henceforth the highest good), which Kant discussed in the Lectures. The highest good contains two components, he said, our virtue and our happiness; we need a moral theory that will not compromise either one. Interpreters sometimes object that Kant ought not to put this kind of stress on our 79 80

Ibid., 4: 439. KpV 5: 129.

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happiness. After all, he says in the Groundwork that adding happiness as a consequence of virtue will add a strong incentive, but “never any increase in its intrinsic worth.”81 Why is the addition of happiness not a pollution of the moral goal, encouraging us to be virtuous in order to be happy? Kant’s reply is, “To be happy is necessarily the demand of every rational but finite being and therefore an unavoidable determining ground of its faculty of desire.”82 In Scotus’s terms, every rational but finite being is born with the affection for advantage. To say this is not to condemn the affection for advantage, as we saw in the previous chapter. Indeed, the consequence is that any moral theory that tries to set up our final end without happiness as a component is doomed to frustrate us. It will be in that sense inhumane. Kant and Aristotle unite on this point.83 Saying that the highest good includes our happiness as well as our virtue does not imply that we should be virtuous in order to be happy. It does not make the value of virtue instrumental. Rather, it acknowledges that we care about two things, one of which is unconditionally good (namely virtue), the other conditionally good (namely happiness). Happiness is only conditionally good, Kant thinks; we cannot wholeheartedly approve of it if it is not accompanied by virtue. Sometimes he puts this in terms of an order of priority. Kant thinks that what is morally good precedes happiness in the order of justification, in the sense that enlarging one’s own happiness is only good if it is consistent with the moral law that gives no special weight to anyone, including oneself. In the first chapter, I construed Aristotle as putting happiness first, as the highest good, and then looking to see what components it has. To some extent the comparison is misleading because Kant and Aristotle do not mean the same thing by “happiness.” Kant thinks we are happy as natural (as opposed to free) beings, but Aristotle does not have this distinction. In one respect, though, the comparison is apt; for both philosophers, happiness is desired as the agent’s own advantage. Aristotle puts this first and Kant puts it second. One difference from the Groundwork is that in the second Critique Kant has lost the confidence that he can prove that we are under the moral law. In the final section of the Groundwork, he worried that he 81 82 83

Groundwork 4: 439. KpV 5: 25. NE VII, 13, 1153b20. Kant attributes the inhumane view to the Stoics.

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had been arguing in a narrow circle, that we are under the moral law if we are free, and free if under the moral law. But he thought he could get out of the circle (perhaps he should have said, he could widen the circle) by pointing out that we have to assume ourselves free in order to understand ourselves as rational beings. In the second Critique, he is content to start from what he calls a “fact” of reason – that we are under the moral law – and he does not attempt a justification of this claim except by dismantling various objections to it. Kant thinks the highest good requires two things: a system actually in place whereby happiness is in the end proportional to virtue, and a possible state in which everyone is virtuous and everyone is happy.84 We can work only on the parts of this that are accessible to our efforts, namely our own virtue and the happiness of those affected by what we do. If we did not believe virtue was at least consistent with happiness, given that we are creatures of need, we would not be able to persevere in the moral life. Kant then presents what he calls “the antinomy of practical reason.”85 An antinomy is an apparent contradiction between a “thesis” and an “antithesis” (though Kant does not use these labels). We meet morally good people who are miserable (consider, for example, people with clinical depression) and bad people who are triumphantly happy, as far as we can tell. If we could rely on the virtue of other people to bring us happiness, then we would have what Kant calls in the first Critique “self-rewarding morality.”86 This is because if we assume that virtue aims at the happiness of others, and that virtue can achieve its aim (for there would be no point in aiming at it otherwise), a world in which everyone was virtuous would be a world in which everyone was happy.87 But in a world in which many people are not committed to the moral law, other people will often be a source of unhappiness, even to the virtuous. Indeed, Kant says in the Lectures, “a virtuous disposition is just as likely to increase the pain of this life” (because the virtuous

84

I have argued for this in more detail in The Moral Gap, Chapter 3. KpV 5: 113. It is not completely clear what the “antithesis” is supposed to be here. 86 KrV A810 = B838. 87 This is only roughly true, because this world would still contain natural evils, like floods and cancer, though the victims of these evils would be surrounded by competent and compassionate caregivers. 85

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person knows he does not deserve his misery).88 Sometimes Kant makes this argument empirically (from our experience of evil afflicting good people), and sometimes a priori (from our knowledge that we do not have the power over nature that would be required to produce the proportioning of virtue and happiness). This second way of making the argument is more in line with his usual treatment of antinomies of reason, and it points to his solution. He makes use of his distinction between phenomena and noumena to make the point that, because of the limits on our knowledge, we do not know that there is no agent (personal or impersonal) producing the proportioning of virtue and happiness that the highest good requires. Theoretical reason therefore does not veto the belief that there is some such agent, and we can ask what it would have to be like. Since Kant has argued that the moral life requires belief in the possibility of the highest good, we are not merely free to believe there is such an agent; we are required to believe it. The attributes of an agent that could produce the proportioning of our virtue and our happiness turn out to be the attributes the Groundwork ascribed to the head of the kingdom of ends. This being must have unlimited power and benevolence. It must be “a cause of all nature, distinct from nature.”89 Kant argues that this being therefore must have understanding (of the moral law) and will (to govern in accordance with it). In this way the postulate of the possibility of the highest derived good (what Kant calls, in the Lectures, the highest created good) is also the postulate of the reality of a highest original good, namely God. Kant does not spend significant time on the sorts of difficulties that Hume discusses in his work on natural religion, for example why we should believe in just one God rather than a committee (since committees tend to produce the sorts of error and waste we experience in the universe). This is because the context of Kant’s argument is different. He is not trying to produce a design argument within speculative reason for the existence of God, but he is arguing for a postulate of practical reason. At this stage of the argument, he assumes already the need for the proportioning of virtue and happiness, which is the possibility that has to be explained. But there is, nevertheless, more philosophical work needed here, since we have not shown that the monotheistic God (of 88 89

Lectures 27: 302. KpV 5: 125.

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Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is the only way to explain the possibility of the highest good, even if we grant that this possibility has to be explained. Kant also argues for a postulate of personal immortality. The highest good includes our virtue as its primary component, but Kant does not think we are virtuous by the time we die. We do not have “complete conformity of dispositions with the moral law.”90 In fact, Kant thinks, we will never have the kind of holiness that God has. We can, however, believe in an infinite progress towards this kind of holiness. We can also believe that the eternal being “to whom the temporal condition is nothing, sees in what is for us an endless series the whole conformity with the moral law . . . and the required holiness is to be found whole in a single intellectual intuition of the existence of rational beings.” There are several puzzles about this idea. The first is that it requires noumenal change. Even after the death of this body, Kant is suggesting, we go on progressing, and therefore changing. The next life is not one of immutable contemplation of the divine. But this means that we need a conception of change not linked to time, if we assume that the next life bears the same relation to time as God does, “to whom the temporal condition is nothing.” Aristotle held that time is the measure of change, but it might be possible to think of change as under a different measure, or of different kinds of time. This is all philosophical work that is yet to be done. A second puzzle is this: even if we can think of noumenal change, it is not clear why it is just (“without indulgence or dispensation, which do not harmonize with justice”) for God to count as holiness and so reward what is in fact only infinite progress towards holiness. If the standard for admission to a program was a 3.5 grade point average, would it be just to admit a student who was continually improving towards that goal, but never in fact reached it? Another way to put this difficulty is that if God can count as holiness an infinite progress towards holiness, God should be able to count as holiness the amount of progress we make during this life (and then the reason to postulate immortality is gone); for in both cases God looks at the stable disposition of the heart underlying our progress. Perhaps the strange mathematical notion of going to a limit allows an infinite asymptotic approach to count. Another solution is to 90

Ibid., 5: 122.

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think more about the puzzling notion of intellectual intuition. We do not have such a faculty, for on Kant’s view intellectual intuition makes what it perceives, unlike our intuition that receives what it perceives. Kant is saying, therefore, that God sees/makes our lives a whole of the best kind possible for finite beings, and this kind is an infinite progress. So the example of the grade point average is not sufficiently similar, since the administrators of the program do not make the student into a suitable candidate. We will come back to what this means for our freedom in the next section. Faced with the difficulties in this argument, a typical reaction is to dismiss the whole thing. But a person who believes in God and in an eternal relation to God knows already that there are likely to be enormous difficulties in understanding this relation, and is going to be grateful to Kant for getting somewhere with the project even if he does not complete it. I said the same sort of thing about Aristotle, whose theology likewise gets into difficulties. Kant is aware that some will think the practical postulates are mere wishful thinking, as though we could validly argue that something is true just because we very much want it to be (like an undergraduate who very much wants to get into medical school). His reply comes in a section “on the primacy of pure practical reason in its connection with speculative reason,” and I will conclude by comparing Kant and Scotus with Aristotle on the primacy of practical reason.91 Aristotle’s position is that theoretical wisdom is superior to practical wisdom, in that the activity of the first (especially contemplation) constitutes our highest end whereas the activity of the second (especially governing the polis) is a means to this end. Scotus, by contrast, says that theology is a practical science, the primary function of which is to direct the will to love in the right way. Kant says that speculative reason would have primacy if practical reason were only allowed to start from what speculative reason could offer from its own insight, i.e. what can be experienced or the necessary conditions for experience. But in fact, practical reason has its own starting point that speculative reason knows nothing about: the “fact of reason” that we are under the moral law. Speculative reason has, as it were, veto power, if there is some contradiction within its own domain. This would be the case if a person concluded she was going to get into medical school just because she wanted it so badly, for we 91

Ibid., 5: 119.

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know that medical school acceptances are not produced in that way. But speculative reason does not have the authority to “close its borders” and insist that the only things that exist are those in its domain. It has to take what is postulated by practical reason and do its best to integrate it. “One cannot require pure practical reason to be subordinate to speculative reason and so reverse the order, since all interest is ultimately practical and even that of speculative reason is only conditional and is complete in practical use alone.”92 Kant ends, however, with the caution that we must not think the practical postulates have extended our theoretical cognition.93 This would be mere delusion. But it may, he suggests, be providential that we cannot see God or prove God’s existence with speculative reason; if we could, we might lose our freedom, because “God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes,” and we would end up conforming to the moral law from hope or fear, not from duty. It would be like a puppet show, in which “everything would gesticulate well but there would be no life in the figures.” It is better that practical reason gives us our “first view into the realm of the supersensible, though only with weak glances.”94

Religion Kant starts the preface to the first edition of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, So far as morality is based on the conception of the human being as one who is free but who also, just because of that, binds himself through his reason to unconditional laws, it is in need neither of the idea of another being above him in order that he recognize his duty, nor, that he observe it, of an incentive other than the law itself . . . Hence on its own behalf morality in no way needs religion . . . For morality needs no end, either in order to recognize what duty is or to impel its performance. 95

92 93 94 95

Ibid., 5: 121. Ibid.,5: 138. Ibid., 5: 147. Religion 6: 3.

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Kant is interested here in how we recognize our duties and in how we come to observe them; he claims that we do not need to bring in God in either case, insofar as we think of human beings as free and as binding themselves to the moral law. This passage is sometimes taken as follows: “The first thing Kant says about the relation of religion to morality [in Religion] is that ‘morality does not need religion at all.’ ”96 This reading detaches the consequent.97 It supposes that since humans are free, in Kant’s view, and do bind themselves to the moral law, we do not need to bring in God for our recognition or our observance of the law. But this cannot be Kant’s view, because he moves during the first two paragraphs to the following statement, which begins the third paragraph: “Morality thus inevitably leads to religion, and through religion it extends itself to the idea of a mighty moral lawgiver outside the human being, in whose will the ultimate end (of the creation of the world) is what can be and at the same time ought to be the ultimate human end.” So we need to understand the first paragraph, in particular its first sentence, in such a way as to be consistent with the third paragraph. Fortunately, there is no difficulty in doing so. We emphasize the first three words: So far as morality is based on the conception of the human being as free. Kant’s point, as I understand it, is that we are not merely free beings; we are also what he calls “creatures of need.” If we were merely free, then we would not need the idea of a being over us, because we would be like God, who has no idea of a being over God. In the Groundwork, Kant distinguished between ordinary members of the kingdom of ends and the head of the kingdom, who is also a member, but who (unlike the other members) is not subject to the will of any other. Kant thus does not say that “morality does not need religion at all.” What he says is that morality does not on its own behalf need religion. When we add this phrase, the resulting claim is quite consistent with the claim that our morality needs religion, because of the sorts of beings we are. And this is just what Kant goes on to say. We belong to two worlds (sensible and intelligible) and, as such, we do need the idea of a being over us, and of an incentive other than morality. Morality presupposes that we are free, but freedom does not exhaust

96

Merold Westphal, “Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy: the Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate,” in Kierkegaard Studies, 1998, 1–22. 97 “So far as x, then y. x. Therefore y.”

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the features of our agency by which our moral lives are structured. We are also creatures of need who have the end of our own happiness, and will always do so. Kant’s point here is like Luther’s point in his treatise on Christian liberty. Luther says about the Christian, “Insofar as he is free he does no works, but insofar as he is a servant he does all kinds of works.”98 Luther replies to people who say, “We will take our ease and do no works and be content with faith,” by making a distinction: “That would indeed be proper if we were wholly inner and perfectly spiritual men. But as long as we live in the flesh . . .” Luther, like Kant, is insisting on our composition. We are not merely free, not merely inner men, but live in the flesh, remaining “in this mortal life on earth”; therefore, we have to hold the body and its inclinations in check. Kant makes his point in terms of ends. So far as we are merely free, our morality needs no end, i.e. no material determining ground of the free power of choice. One key here is the distinction between matter and form, which recurs several times in these two paragraphs. The lawfulness of an action or maxim is the formal determining ground or the formal condition of the use of freedom in general.99 But there are four possible material determining grounds, of which this passage mentions only three. They are my own happiness, the happiness of others, my own perfection, and the perfection of others. After eliminating the first, my own happiness, he says, “But then there are only two determining grounds left,” naming them as my own perfection and the happiness of others.100 By saying 98

Three Treatises, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970, 294. Religion 6: 4–5. 100 Kant does not need to mention the fourth possibility, as he shows in the Metaphysics of Morals, because we are not responsible for the perfection of others; they are. The other three possibilities Kant does discuss in the first paragraph of Religion. 1) To say that I should make my own happiness the determining ground would leave me outside morality. 2) To say that I should make my own perfection the determining ground is ambiguous. I might be aiming at my moral perfection, but then that is the same as making the lawfulness of an action or maxim the ground, and so is the same as the formal determining ground. Or I might be aiming at my natural perfection, for example skill in the arts and sciences, taste, physical agility, etc. But these are only conditionally good; they are only good in the service of a morally 99

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morality needs no end, Kant is not denying the moral significance of intention. For example, Kant is not denying that when I testify in court I should intend to bring about the result that I tell the truth.101 He is not a utilitarian, to be sure. But he does not deny, either, that we are judged morally on the basis of what we intend to bring about. He is not saying that we should be indifferent to the intended consequences of our actions; if we were indifferent in this way, we could not act on a maxim at all. What Kant intends to rule out is that morality on its own behalf requires one of these four material determining grounds: my own happiness, my own perfection, and the happiness and perfection of others. If this is right, we can make good sense of what Kant means in the second paragraph when he says that morality does have “a necessary reference to such an end, not as the ground of its maxims but as a necessary consequence accepted in conformity to them.” He proposes an end that collects together the four material determining grounds, namely the happiness of all of us proportionate to the perfection of all of us. This end, which he also calls the ultimate end that reason can justify, is necessary for us, not as a ground but as an intended consequence. It is the result of the conduct that our reason proposes to us, the world that our reason would create if this were in its power. Another way to put this is that the adoption of this end is subjectively necessary for us, distinguishing between the subjective ends we have and the objective ends we ought to have. The highest good unites appropriately the ends we have (our subjective ends) with the ends we ought to have (our objective ends), so that happiness is proportioned to duty. But we cannot adopt this end as an intended consequence without believing it possible; and we cannot believe it possible without assuming “a higher, moral, most holy, and omnipotent being who alone can unite the two elements of this good.” This requires us to believe not merely in the possibility but in the actual existence of God.102 good will. 3) To say that I should make the happiness of others the determining ground would likewise be to embrace a merely conditional good. Here Kant departs from certain forms of utilitarianism. 101 Kant’s example is, “One who still finds it necessary to look around for some end when his testimony is rightfully demanded of him is in this respect already contemptible.” 102 Ibid., 6: 6–7.

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Kant goes on to distinguish between two tasks, that of the biblical theologian and that of the philosophical theologian. He says he is going to take on only the second of these tasks. He is going to stay within the boundaries of mere reason, and use history and Scripture only in order to show their consistency with what lies in his proper domain. He is going to leave the doctrines of biblical theologians as they are, since any modification would be not his business, but “a privilege of divines.”103 Some interpreters read this as “cagey,” concealing Kant’s true intention to subvert biblical religion, out of fear of the censor. But it is better to take him at his word. For the most part he is going to leave the biblical doctrines as they are, and see what they look like if translated in terms of the moral concepts.104 He introduces this language of translation in the preface to the second edition. He asks us to imagine revelation as two concentric circles, with the revelation to reason in the inner, smaller circle and historical revelation in the outer area of the larger circle beyond this. He says he is going to try the experiment of seeing whether he can start from “fragments” in the outer circle and “lead them back” within the inner circle by translating them in terms of the moral concepts. In fact, he takes not just any fragments, but the four main pillars of the Christian revelation, namely creation, fall, redemption, and the second coming of Christ. His translation of these doctrines forms the framework of the book as a whole. Kant begins with the question of whether humans are good or evil by nature. His response is to make a distinction. We are born with both a predisposition to good and a propensity to evil. The predisposition is essential to human beings, whereas the propensity is not. This is Kant’s translation of the doctrines of creation and fall. Human good is more fundamental than human evil. What does Kant mean by “good” and “evil”? He returns to the distinction between our happiness and our duty (the two items in the highest good), and says that there are two possible rankings of these. “The good maxim” ranks duty above happiness, so that we will do what makes us happy only if we can see that it is consistent with our duty. What Kant calls “the evil maxim” is the opposite ranking: we will do what is our duty only as a means to our own happiness. Our problem is that we are 103

Ibid., 6: 9. He does object on moral grounds to some traditional interpretations of doctrine and Scripture, e.g. of election, atonement, and the binding of Isaac. 104

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born under the evil maxim. This propensity to evil is both innate and imputable to us, in the sense that we choose it.105 Here is another puzzle. Kant echoes Augustine’s insistence that evil is not simply a force that attacks us through our body or our passions (as NeoPlatonism suggested). We choose evil in our will, and so can be held responsible for it. The puzzle is how to understand freedom. If the ranking of my own happiness first is innate, how can I choose it? If I am born with defective eyes it is not because I choose to be blind. Kant retreats at various points in Religion (including this one) to the claim that the workings of the noumenal world are inscrutable to us. Somehow or other, we do not know how, we are free enough to endorse in our wills the default setting we are born with. Again, Luther is a source. In The Bondage of the Will, he dissented from the view that the source of evil is the flesh, in the sense of the “lower and grosser affections,” locating it instead in “the highest and most excellent powers of man, in which righteousness, godliness, and knowledge and reverence of God, should reign – that is, in reason and will.”106 His point was that, because the will is corrupt, it does not have the power in itself to choose what is good. “What can the will choose that is good, when it is thus evil and unprofitable? Or rather, what can the will pursue, when reason can propose to it nothing but the darkness of its own blindness and ignorance? Where reason is in error and the will turned away, what good can man attempt or perform?” Erasmus had argued that if we are subject to this radical incapacity, then it does not make sense to hold us accountable to the law: “It would be ridiculous to say to a man standing where two roads met: ‘You see two roads; go by which you will,’ when only one of them was open.”107 Luther replied, Here is the very thing that I said of the arguments of human reason: reason thinks that man is mocked by an impossible commandment, whereas I maintain that by this means man is admonished and awakened to see his own impotence. It is true that we stand where two roads meet, and only one of them is open – indeed, neither is open;

105

Religion 6: 32. Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1957, 280. 107 Ibid., 158, emphasis added. 106

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and the law shows us how impossible is the one, that leading to good, unless God bestows His Spirit.

Kant argues the same way. He concedes that we do not have the power in ourselves to help ourselves. Translating biblical language about becoming “a new man,” he says that what we need is a revolution in the will by which the innate ranking of happiness over duty is reversed. The problem is that the propensity to evil is radical, in the sense that it “corrupts the ground of all maxims,” and it cannot be “extirpated by human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims – something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted.”108 So Kant returns to the doctrine of the Lectures, that we need to appeal to divine assistance. He is not saying we are merely passive in this, for we have to do what we can to make ourselves worthy. He believes that there is still in us (however wicked we become) the predisposition to good, which is like a seed of goodness trying to grow. God sees the activity of this seed, and supplements it with divine grace so as to effect a revolution in the will. Again, it is inscrutable how God’s grace and our efforts cooperate to achieve this result; but as in the second Critique Kant uses the vocabulary of intellectual intuition to describe God’s work on our behalf.109 Kant’s appeal to divine grace at this point in his argument puts him in a delicate position. He ends the first book of Religion, saying that “we can admit an effect of grace as something incomprehensible but cannot incorporate it into our maxims for either theoretical or practical use.”110 Theoretical reason cannot cover works of grace, since it cannot extend the concept of cause and effect beyond objects of experience, and hence beyond nature. Practical reason is similarly restricted, since we can only reason practically about what we can do, and works of grace are not things we can do.111 So we end up 108

Ibid., 6: 37. Ibid., 6: 67. As in the second Critique, there are difficulties with the idea of noumenal change. 110 Ibid., 6: 53. 111 This is why Kant says, at 6: 44, “The human being must make or have made himself into whatever he is or should become in a moral sense, good or evil.” Nicholas Wolterstorff calls this “The Stoic Maxim” in “Conundrums in Kant’s Rational Religion,” in Kant’s Philosophy of Religion 109

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admitting these works as what Kant calls parerga (Greek for “worksby-the-side”), meaning that they do not belong to religion within the boundaries of reason alone, but border upon it. In terms of the two concentric circles, they are in the region of the outer circle at the periphery of the inner circle. Kant’s view of them, as expressed in this passage, is that we have to believe in them, but we cannot appropriate them with our reason in either its theoretical or practical employment. His view of religion, then, is not reductive. It is not his project to eliminate the outer circle in favor of the inner one.112 Kant separates himself from deists by accepting special revelation (revelation to particular people at particular times and places), but says that it is not necessarily necessary.113 He gives the honorific title “pure rationalist” to the view that “allows revelation, yet claims that to take cognizance of it and accept it as actual is not necessarily required for religion” (emphasis added). Because we are creatures of sense and creatures of need, and not merely rational beings, we need a “vehicle” (a mode of access) beyond mere reason for pure moral faith. We need “something that the senses can hold on to.”114 Under this heading come historical, ecclesiastical faith, and sacraments, and Scripture. So these are necessary for us; but it is possible that they will not always be necessary, so they are not necessarily necessary. We have here a translation of the biblical notion of a final state in which “they will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light.”115 The pure rationalist is Reconsidered, ed. Philip J. Rossi and Michael Wreen, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991, 40–53. But Kant is not denying God’s assistance in accomplishing the revolution of the will. As he goes on to say, we are morally good or evil only in so far as we choose to be either, but that does not prevent us also choosing to accept whatever assistance is available. 112 Kant is not completely consistent here, but see Religion 6: 136, where he talks about the pure religion of reason having a presently still indispensable covering, which “might always be useful and necessary as a vehicle,” but which is able to cease, in the sense that the pure moral faith has an intrinsic firmness. 113 Religion 6: 154. I am disagreeing with Allen Wood, “Kant’s Deism,” in Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, 1–21. I argue this more fully in The Moral Gap, 41–5. 114 Religion 6: 109. 115 Revelation 22: 5.

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different from the naturalist, who denies the reality of all supernatural revelation, and the “pure supernaturalist,” who holds that belief in it is necessary to universal religion. Kant insists, however, that the vehicle by itself (without pure moral faith) is dead. Again this is a translation of a repeated biblical motif, that God detests outward ceremonies if they are not accompanied by devotion of the heart. Kant is also repeating Luther’s contempt for “works righteousness” that takes external actions to have saving power in themselves. One surprise to those who have read only the Groundwork is how strongly Kant emphasizes, in Religion, the social dimension of moral goodness and evil. He is sometimes represented as an individualist, as though he thought that all that matters morally is the individual will and the conformity of its maxims to the categorical imperative. But even in the Groundwork, the final formulation of the categorical imperative is in terms of a kingdom of ends. In Religion, he explains further why it has to be a polity of some kind. Kant says that evil comes to us through our sociality, through the conditions of life we impose on each other. When we are with other people, we compare ourselves with them, and this brings “envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these.”116 But from our earliest moments we need other people in order to survive. Kant’s view is that because we make one another evil, there has to be a radically changed society if there are to be morally good people. So reason prescribes the highest good as a social good.117 But this gives us the duty of promoting a union of people into a whole system of well-disposed human beings, a “universal republic,” and Kant’s view is that this duty in turn “needs the presupposition of another idea, namely, of a higher moral being through whose universal organization the forces of single individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for a common effect.” We need a kingdom with a sovereign, not merely a republic. This idea that we are spoilt through society shows the strong influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), which Kant acknowledges. Kant also valued Rousseau for his passionate expression of the equal worth and so the right to equal treatment of every human being. Kant is scornful of moral elitism in any form,

116 117

Religion 6: 94. Ibid., 6: 97.

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including the view of those who think that because they are “saved” they are better than other people. He ends Religion as follows, We cannot see how those who, in their opinion, have been exceptionally favored (the elect) might in the slightest outdo the naturally honest human being, who can be relied upon in daily affairs, in business and in need; on the contrary, taken as a whole, they can hardly withstand comparison with him, which proves that the right way to advance is not from grace to virtue but rather from virtue to grace.118

Metaphysics of Morals Metaphysics of Morals is Kant’s last major work on ethics. It is divided into two parts: the Doctrine of Right, which gives Kant’s view of our proper relation to the State, and the Doctrine of Virtue, which will be my focus in this section. This part of the work is itself divided into discussions of our duties to self and our duties to others, giving a great deal more time (like Wolff and Baumgarten) to duties to self.119 Virtue is defined at the beginning as “the capacity and considered resolve to withstand . . . what opposes the moral disposition within us.”120 In one way, this account of virtue is like that of Scotus. The Scotist theory gives the primary place in morality to the will, but adds that the will needs to be supplemented by virtue (efficient cocausality) to make the action more perfect. According to Scotus, virtue has the function of enlisting our feelings on the side of what right reason prescribes. He is, in this respect, following Aristotle, who defines virtue as the disposition to feel and act according to right reason. But Kant’s view is also narrower than that of Scotus.121 118

Ibid., 6: 201–2. I have replaced “human beings” with “human being.” Kant explicitly sets aside duties to God (which Wolff and Baumgarten discuss), as proper to a different inquiry, at MM 6: 487. The section on duties to self is three times as long as the section on duties to others. 120 MM 6: 380. 121 Another difference from Scotus is that Kant denies that virtue is a habit, at MM 6: 383–4. But Kant has a narrower conception of habit, as “a mechanism of the way of sense,” 6: 479. There is a good discussion of this in Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 42ff. and 75ff. Much of what Scotus calls “habit,” Kant calls 119

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The definition of virtue I quoted treats virtue as a kind of courage (Kant uses the Latin fortitudo). This does not reduce virtue to what Aristotle calls “continence” (the self-discipline even a successful criminal needs, which Aristotle thinks is not a virtue at all), for Kant’s definition includes the disposition to will as the moral law prescribes. Nevertheless, a whole range of virtuous affection is excluded by this emphasis on courage. According to Aristotle, virtue prevents untoward affections (like excessive fear), but it also prompts the desire to laugh at a good (but not vulgar) joke and the desire to share one’s wealth with a needy fellow-citizen (as long as this is consistent with maintaining the size of one’s estate). This difference between Kant and Aristotle corresponds to a deep difference in anthropology. Kant inherits from Luther the notion that, even if we have been justified by God (and a revolution has taken place in our will), we are still sinners under discipline (at the same time just and a sinner, or, in Latin, simul justus et peccator). This is how Luther understands Paul’s words in Romans, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do . . . As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.”122 On this picture, there is always the job of disciplining errant inclinations, and it is too sanguine to think (as Aristotle did) that the virtuous person is simply without them. Kant modifies somewhat his emphasis on courage, when he talks, at the end of the Doctrine of Virtue, about the practice of virtue. He says that we should “aim at a frame of mind that is both valiant and cheerful in fulfilling its duties.”123 He concedes that virtue involves sacrificing many of life’s joys, “which can sometimes make one’s mind gloomy and sullen. But what is not done with pleasure but merely as compulsory service has no inner worth for one who attends to his duty in this way and such service is not loved by him.” What kind of pleasure is Kant talking about? First of all, there is what he calls “moral feeling,” or “respect,” which is the “feeling of the effect that the lawgiving will within human beings exercises on their capacity to act in accordance with “character,” which he differentiates as being formed from principles that bring desires under a rule, (though not “mechanical” rules that are “the shackles of a permanent immaturity,” What is Enlightenment, 8: 36). 122 Romans 7:15–17. 123 MM 6: 484.

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their will.”124 This moral pleasure is preceded by recognition of the law.125 Humans have, as it were, a receptor that receives only signals from the moral law, and responds to them with pleasure and pain (like Hutcheson’s moral sense). Kant thinks all humans have this, however wicked, and that we would become mere animals if we lost it. This moral feeling is not itself, however, the ground of our obligation, but is a consequence of our recognition of obligation. Just as Descartes thought the pineal gland is where the mind comes into contact with the body, so respect, for Kant, is where duty meets the inclinations. There is an internal connection between recognizing something as prescribed by the moral law and respect, although the recognition and the feeling are not the same (and it would be possible for a purely rational being to have the first without the second). Separate from this moral feeling are feelings like love and sympathy. Kant realizes that the term “love” has many uses. In general, love differs from respect in that love attracts and respect constrains. If we separate off sexual love and friendship and familial loves, there is still what Kant calls “practical love.” It is not a feeling, but simply what the categorical imperative commands, namely to make others’ ends my own (provided that these are not immoral ends). There is also another kind of love that is a feeling of satisfaction in the wellbeing of people just because they are people.126 It is a delight in human beings, and if we lack it Kant suggests we suffer from “anthropophobia.” Sympathetic joy and sadness are likewise feelings of pleasure and pain; we get them from seeing the joy and sadness of others.127 Kant thinks we have a duty to cultivate these feelings, and not to avoid the places (such as sickrooms or debtors’ prisons) where we will experience the painful ones.128 124

Ibid., 6: 387. Ibid., 6: 377. Kant sometimes talks as though “respect” (being a form of constraint) is only a negative feeling, and then we need a name for the corresponding positive feeling of moral pleasure. Kant’s most sustained discussion of respect is at KpV 5: 72ff. 126 Ibid., 6: 450. MM does not discuss in this context our love of God. 127 Ibid., 6: 456. 128 Kant also uses the idea of magnanimity that we found in Aristotle (though his conception is somewhat different). He says that both strength of soul and kindness of soul (involving feelings) must be found “united 125

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In the Lectures, Kant talks about the education of children, and says that learning pure ethical judgment is like learning to appreciate wine (which is much harder if the wine is mixed with other drinks).129 In the same way, children should have morality presented to them unmixed with other inducements, such as pleasure. Kant thinks that morality will then reveal its full attractive power, though it will also arouse the opposition of the wrong kind of self-love. But there are two vices to avoid, one on each side of the virtuous relation to pleasure. Kant takes his names for these from Baumgarten. There is, on the one hand, the “ingratiating” ethics that tries to mix duty and pleasure. But there is also a “morose” ethics, which sets morality in opposition to all pleasure, and renounces all claims of moral persons to happiness. Kant is sometimes taken to advocate a morose ethics in the Groundwork, but he does not. He does deny “true moral worth” to the actions of people who are “so sympathetically attuned that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy around them.”130 He says that such actions are on the same footing as what we do from an inclination to honor, which “if it fortunately lights upon what is in fact in the common interest and in conformity with duty . . . deserves praise and encouragement but not esteem.” But Kant is not setting morality in opposition to all pleasure, or all inclination. His point is the same as in Religion: that moral worth resides only in what we choose.131 If an action comes solely from inclination, it is not free and so is not imputable to us. He thinks there is a special kind of approval, “esteem,” that we attach only to good choice.132 But this passage does not condemn combinations of good willing, which we should esteem, and good inclination, which we should praise and encourage. Kant in the same subject in order to bring out what is more ideal than real, namely, the right to the title of magnanimity,” Anthropology 7: 293. I have been influenced here by Louden in Kant’s Impure Ethics, 74–7. 129 Lectures 27: 303. See Groundwork 4: 411, footnote. 130 Groundwork 4: 398. 131 Religion 6: 44. 132 Kant’s distinction between “praise” and “esteem” is like Aristotle’s distinction discussed in Chapter 1 between “commendation” and “honor.” Both philosophers want to move in their second term to a different order of merit.

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says that we recognize good willing, and so recognize whether we should esteem someone, only when good willing is opposed to inclination. He continues with his example of the sympathetic person, but now imagines this person depressed, without his previous feelings of sympathy. If he “nevertheless tears himself out of this deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, simply from duty; then the action first has its genuine moral worth.” Kant’s target is a moral sense theory like that of Hutcheson, who identifies the sense of duty with an empirical feeling or sentiment. Kant’s view is that, if all we have are sentiments, we have lost morality completely. But this does not mean that Kant condemns good sentiments; we should “praise and encourage” them, but not “esteem” them. Kant has a doctrine of virtue, therefore, and virtue is not reduced to the disposition to do one’s duty. His account is, however, narrower in scope than Aristotle’s. He does not try to itemize or analyze systematically the different virtues and the different feelings or desires that they organize. There is nothing within his system to prevent him doing this. He believes, though cautiously, in the Aristotelian theory of the four humors or temperaments.133 He could have expanded his account of the inclinations in terms of the melancholic, the phlegmatic, the sanguine, and the choleric (for example, “the sanguine person is carefree and of good cheer”), but he seems to have had insufficient confidence in the theory. He has the conviction that we should regard nature as doing nothing in vain, a view surprisingly like Aristotle’s, though Kant’s teleology is justified on the basis of the needs of science together with the limitations of human understanding, rather than insight into the essences of things. He thinks it absurd for human beings to suppose that “perhaps someday another Newton might arise who would explain to us in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced.”134 So he could have attempted an account of the virtues, based on our observed tendencies to respond in distinct ways to distinct environments, and on a rational design plan to harness those tendencies in promoting the highest good. But he does not attempt this, and perhaps again the reason is that he had insufficient confidence in the empirical base.

133 134

Anthropology 7: 286–8. KU 5: 400.

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Christine Korsgaard I will end this chapter, as I did the previous ones, with discussion of a contemporary figure whose theory belongs to the same general type as that of the main subject of the chapter, but who does not give God the same role within the theory. I have chosen Christine Korsgaard, a preeminent contemporary Kant scholar who also has an ethical theory of her own.135 She starts from what she calls “the normative question,” which is the question in the first person (i.e. using “I”) for a moral agent: “Why must I do what morality says?” where this is understood not as a prudential question (“Why is morality in my interest?”) but as a question about justification, all things considered, “Why should I accept the moral demand as a demand upon me?”136 Her answer to this question relies on Kant’s notion of autonomy. She draws the connection between autonomy and the moral law most elegantly in the following passage: The problem faced by the free will is this: the will must have a law, but because the will is free, it must be its own law. And nothing determines what that law must be. All that it has to be is a law. Now consider the content of the categorical imperative, as represented by the Formula of Universal Law. The categorical imperative merely tells us to choose a law. Its only constraint on our choice is that it has the form of a law. And nothing determines what the law must be. All that it has to be is a law.137

But Korsgaard goes beyond Kant in asserting that autonomy is the source of obligation or, alternatively, the source of all value.138 She 135

Some material in this section is re-worked from a review of The Sources of Normativity (henceforth SN), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, in Faith and Philosophy vol. 17, 3, 2000, 371–83. 136 SN 16. 137 SN 98. The first premise, that freedom has to be under law, is supported by the claim that freedom is a kind of causation, and all causation is under law (so as not to be merely random), Groundwork 4: 446. 138 SN 91, and Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (henceforth CKE), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 240–1.

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is thus a “constructivist” or “creative anti-realist” about moral obligation and her theory belongs in a family of such theories held by Kantians who are followers of John Rawls. For example, J. B. Schneewind lays out, in Kant’s name, what he calls a “constitutive” method of ethics, “Reflecting on one’s motives one finds oneself giving them a unique kind of approval or disapproval; in any particular situation one is to act from the approved motive or set of motives, and the act so motivated is the appropriate action. There is no other source of rightness or wrongness in actions.”139 Our possession of a constitutive method of ethics shows, he says, “that we create the moral order in which we live, and supply our own motives for compliance.”140 This is not Kant’s view. We have seen already that he thinks the moral law is necessary, and so does not have a creator at all, human or divine. Rather, God and we are, non-symmetrically, authors of the obligation of the law but not of the law itself. We endorse the law, but we do not bring it into existence. To understand why Korsgaard is a constructivist, we need to look at what she thinks is the only alternative, namely “substantive moral realism.” This is the view that there are intrinsically normative entities outside us to which our value system is a response. So we are supposed to have to choose between the view that moral value is like a hedgehog, something outside us that we discover, or like a hedge, something we create. Korsgaard rejects substantive moral realism for two main reasons. The first is that she thinks “the metaphysics of the modern world” make substantive moral realism untenable, and by this she means primarily that God is dead, as Nietzsche announced in the nineteenth century.141 She does not attempt to justify this claim, and the resurgence of religious faith in recent history might make one pause. Perhaps she means “the metaphysics of professional philosophers in major Western universities,” but even that claim would be controversial. The second reason she gives for rejecting substantive moral realism is that she thinks it is no help with the normative question:

139

J. B. Schneewind, “Natural Law, Skepticism and Methods of Ethics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1991), 298. 140 Ibid., 302, emphasis added. 141 SN 4–5.

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to say, “We have obligations because they exist” is redundant. It is an example, as Wittgenstein puts it, of language “idling” or “going on holiday.”142 Or we might say, as Aristotle does about Plato’s Form of the Good, that it is “of no use.”143 Korsgaard endorses instead what she calls “procedural moral realism,” which grants that there are moral truths, moral facts, and moral knowledge, but holds that these are derivative from the procedures by which we answer moral questions. “There are facts, moral truths, about what we ought to do, but that is not because the actions are intrinsically normative. They inherit their normativity from principles which spring from the nature of the will – the principles of practical reasoning.” The issue here is about the direction of explanation. The procedural moral realist thinks that there are answers to moral questions because there are correct procedures for arriving at them. The substantive moral realist thinks that there are procedures for answering moral questions because there are moral truths or facts that exist independently of those procedures, and which those procedures track or map. We do not need, however, to restrict ourselves to these two choices, to see moral value either as hedgehog or as hedge. I have developed elsewhere a view I call “prescriptive realism” that, I claim, preserves the merits of moral realism and moral expressivism without the pitfalls of either.144 I will say more about this in the final chapter. Roughly, we have cognitive access to certain moral facts, for example to the moral law, which might be necessary (as Kant thinks) or a combination of what is necessary and a route contingently chosen by God (as Scotus thinks) or the route necessarily entailed by human nature (as in the view many scholars attribute to Aquinas). To make a full-blooded moral judgment is to feel attraction to what we understand the moral law to command and repulsion from what we understand it to forbid, and to endorse with our will this feeling of attraction or constraint. There are ingredients here of cognition, emotional response, and volition. All three of them can be found

142

Philosophical Investigations §38 and §88. Nicomachean Ethics I, 6, 1096b20. 144 God’s Call, Chapter 1. Expressivism is the view that moral judgment standardly expresses the will, or some other conative faculty or disposition. See also John E. Hare, “Prescriptive Realism” forthcoming in Realism and Religion, ed. Michael Scott, Ashgate 2006. 143

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separated in Kant’s complex account of respect in the second Critique.145 The point is that Korsgaard’s use of one of these features, the first-person procedure of endorsing, does not show that there is no place for the other two. Her account is problematic for another reason. She thinks that Kant intended the formulation of the categorical imperative in terms of universal law to give us, all by itself, the moral law. But she thinks Kant fails to see that prescribing universal law does not yet settle the question of the domain over which the law of the free will must range.146 The law might be the law of acting on the desire of the moment, and then the agent will do whatever she happens to desire. Or the law might range over the agent’s whole life, and the agent will be some sort of egoist. “It is only if the law ranges over every rational being that the resulting laws will be the moral law.” But then if we are going to answer the normative question, we need a further argument for setting the domain in this way. Korsgaard thinks she can provide one, from the nature of reflection, but I do not think the argument works. Her starting point is the observation that what distinguishes humans from other animals is their ability to act on the basis of a self-conception, what she calls “a practical identity.” We have many such identities, such as “sister” and “philosopher,” but she thinks these identities share the feature that they give rise to unconditional obligations. “When an action cannot be performed without loss of some fundamental part of one’s identity, and an agent could just as well be dead, then the obligation not to do it is unconditional and complete.”147 The acting self here concedes to the thinking self its right to governance. “This is a relation not of mere power but rather of authority. And that is the authority that is the source of obligation.” We can, Korsgaard concedes, shed our practical identities, by ceasing to think of ourselves under one or another description. But we cannot, as agents, have no practical identity at

145

See Karl Ameriks, “On Schneewind and Kant’s Method in Ethics,” Ideas y valores, 102 (Dec.), 1996, 48, and “Kant und das Problem der moralischen Motivation,” in Kants Ethik, ed. Karl Ameriks, Paderborn: MentisVerlag, 2004, 98–116. 146 SN 99. I have already suggested that Kant does not intend the first formulation to be self-sufficient. 147 SN 102–4.

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all. For unless we are committed to some practical identity, we will lose our grip on ourselves as having any reason to do one thing rather than another – and with it, our grip on ourselves as having any reason to live and act at all. This reason for conforming to our particular practical identities is not a reason that springs from those identities. It is a reason that springs from our humanity, from our identity simply as human beings, as reflective animals that need reasons to act and to live. If we recognize this, we have recognized the force of the moral law, or at least, we have done so if we also recognize that valuing humanity in our own persons rationally requires valuing it in the persons of others. This argument fails at two points, first in the claim that practical identities generate unconditional obligations, where this is “a relation not of mere power but rather of authority,” and second in the claim about reflection. The claim about practical identities is sometimes true but not always. Consider cases where a person is split between different practical identities. A heroin addict can be under the sway of a practical identity that requires her to live a certain way, and she may feel that if she cannot live that way, she could just as well be dead (or, to put this differently, she may be willing to die to get what her practical identity requires). But she may not endorse that identity except at those times when she is immersed in it. The fact that she feels that her very identity is at stake in obtaining something does not show that she has an obligation, let alone an unconditional obligation, to obtain it. It is true that while she is immersed in the identity, she cannot question the overridingness of the reasons that the identity gives her for action. But this is a measure of power rather than authority. If we deny that addictive behavior is action from a practical identity, consider the person who is both a sister and a philosopher. R. M. Hare discusses what to do, if you have promised your family to go on a picnic, and an Australian philosopher comes for a visit. Perhaps, immersed in professional activity, you cannot question the obligation to your visitor, but this does not give you an obligation to break your promise. Do we want to say that a Nazi who has endorsed his Nazism is given an obligation to kill Jews just by his endorsement? G. A. Cohen replies to Korsgaard with such a case: the idealized Mafioso: “When he has to do some hideous thing that goes against his inclinations, and he is tempted to fly, he steels himself and we can say of him as much as of us, with the same exaggeration or lack of it, that he steels

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himself on pain of risking a loss of identity.”148 Here Korsgaard bites the bullet. She argues that the Mafioso does have the obligation to do the hideous thing (though it is not a moral obligation but some other kind). “There is a sense,” she says, “in which these obligations are real – not just psychologically but normatively. And this is because it is the endorsement, not the explanations and arguments that provide the material for the endorsement, that does the normative work.”149 On her view, if the Mafioso (or the Nazi) can endorse reflectively the judgment that he should go out and kill, then he should. She is prepared to say, for example, that if human beings decided that human life was worthless, then it would be worthless. “The point is just this: if one holds the view, as I do, that obligations exist in the first-person perspective, then in one sense the obligatory is like the visible: it depends on how much of the light of reflection is on.” Korsgaard thinks that endorsement must be the source of normativity because otherwise we are stuck with substantive moral realism. I have suggested, by contrast, that we can combine a first-personal endorsement with the view that the values we are endorsing are independent of our endorsement. We are better off not having to say that the Mafioso has an obligation to do the hideous thing. Korsgaard goes on to argue that the Mafioso has a deeper obligation to give up his immoral role. This is because “the activity of reflection has rules of its own; and one of them, perhaps the most essential, is the rule that we should never stop reflecting until we have reached a satisfactory answer, one that admits of no further questioning . . . Following that rule would have led the Mafioso to morality.” Here the argument again breaks down. There is nothing in the nature of reflection as such that requires giving priority to the way humans are the same (namely that they have practical identities) over the ways they are different.150 Suppose it is true that 148

SN 183. The case is idealized, Cohen says, “because an expert has told me that real Mafiosi don’t have the heroic attitude that my Mafioso displays.” 149 SN 257. 150 It is possible to define “reflection” or “reason” in such a way that it brings morality with it. Tom Nagel does this in The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, and in his reply to Korsgaard at SN 203. Susan Wolf uses a similar strategy, that reason is by definition receptivity

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valuing your practical identity implies valuing the human capacity to set a practical identity, you can still value your differences from other human beings more. It is possible to be a fully reflective Nazi (though it might require that such a person hand himself over to the authorities if he discovered he had a Jewish grandmother). We will return to this question in the next chapter. Korsgaard, though a fine interpreter of Kant’s ethics in many ways, has a blind spot about his religion.151 She betrays this when she glosses the kingdom of ends as “a republic of all rational beings.”152 J. L. Mackie is more accurate here. He says, “But for the need to give God a special place in it [the kingdom of ends] would have been better called a commonwealth of ends.’153 If we believe in God, we can construe ourselves as having a practical identity as what Kant calls “God-fearing” people (“who picture to themselves a divine judge”) and this has the potential to give us an answer to the normative question.154 Korsgaard considers the example of a student who takes a logic course because it is required by her department.155 It might seem that she acts more autonomously if she takes it because she independently sees its merit. But she acts autonomously out of her practical identity as a student only if she places the right to make and enforce some decisions about what she will study in the hands of her teachers. Similarly a good citizen as a citizen does not pay her taxes because she approves of the way the government is proposing to use them. She can vote for that reason for a candidate proposing taxes. But once the vote is over, she must pay her taxes to the values there are in the order of their ranking, in Freedom Within Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, Chapter 4. But then, the question is why we should do this kind of reflection. 151 She discusses Kant’s Religion at CKE 27–35, and her conclusion is, “Optimism [about the progress of the human race] is restored, but it is an optimism based on a moral faith in humanity.” 152 SN 99 and 127. See also R. M. Hare, Sorting Out Ethics, Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1997, 26, “The Kingdom of Ends is not really a kingdom, but a democracy with equality before the law.” 153 J. L. Mackie, Ethics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, 45. 154 Lectures 27: 309. See also KrV A748–50 = B776–8. Kant describes himself as God-fearing in this way at Conflict of the Faculties 7: 9–10, “I have always pictured this judge as standing at my side.” 155 SN 25ff. and 105–7.

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because it is the law. In the same way, if a person sees herself as God-fearing she can act autonomously out of this identity by repeating in her own will the will of God as far as she can determine it (which, Kant says, requires the use of our practical reason). This is both a form of substantive moral realism, because God is, according to this view, an intrinsically normative entity independent of our apprehension and it involves first-person endorsement. The answer it gives to the normative question is that God is the supreme uncreated good, and doing what God commands is best.

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Chapter 4

R. M. HARE

The Time Between Writing recent history is the hardest, because we distinguish the important and the unimportant less clearly in what is closest to us. It is conventional to identify two major schools of Western philosophy in the twentieth century, one called “analytic,” or “Anglo-American” and one called “continental.” Both schools read Kant. But the continental school also reads Hegel, and in general the German idealists who followed Kant. The analytic school has not read Hegel (with a few exceptions).1 The manner of Hegel’s writing is emulated in one school and deplored in the other. When we abstract from the stylistic differences between the schools, however, and when we get more distance from the twentieth century, I expect we will see more and more parallels between the ways the two schools developed. They were, after all, responding to much the same external environment. Recent generations of philosophy graduate students seem willing to learn from both traditions. R. M. Hare is the philosopher whose work will be the focus of the present chapter. He is firmly within the analytic school, and that has been my own training, but I will nonetheless start with the response to Kant in Germany. 1

Peter Singer, whose work I will examine in the final section of this chapter, is one such exception. His book Hegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, in the “Past Masters” series, is an excellent brief introduction to Hegel’s thought, though Singer tries too hard to de-theologize it.

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Starting with Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) a whole succession of Kant’s followers tried to “go beyond” Kant by showing that there was finally no need to make the separation between our knowledge and the thing-in-itself beyond our knowledge.2 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was originally a student of theology in the seminary at Tübingen. He introduced the idea that we should understand the truth of ideas as relative to their original context, against the background of a history that is progressing towards a final stage of “absolute knowledge.” At this stage Spirit (in German, Geist, which means also “mind”) understands that reality is its own creation and there is no “beyond” for it to know. In this world-history, Hegel located the Reformation as “the all-enlightening Sun” of the bright day that is our modern time. Indeed he aspired to be a “Second Luther.” The notion of absolute knowledge is a response to Kant, and a denial of any final distinction between the thing-in-itself (noumenon) and the thing-as-it-appears (phenomenon). Hegel thinks all reality is in the end Ideal or Spiritual. He thinks of Spirit as progressing historically through various stages of knowledge and of freedom, each stage (the thesis) producing first internal contradiction (the antithesis), and then a radical transition into a new stage (the synthesis) which itself becomes the thesis in a new triad. A brief digest of this history is going to be hard to understand, but that is true of the longer version as well. Spirit started with immediate sensation and moved through conceptualization to self-consciousness, which required the consciousness of other self-consciousnesses (perhaps as a kind of mirror for itself) and therefore engendered conflict, self with self. Hegel described here a “master–slave” dialectic in which the slave, initially deprived of freedom, reaches an awareness of his value in the product of his labor. In terms of freedom, Spirit started out immersed in particular cultural forms (in ancient civilizations such as the Chinese), proceeded through questioning these (notably in the person of Socrates), learnt to posit universal forms of thought (in Stoicism), and in Christianity, reached a stage of “unhappy consciousness” that emphasized the tension between its spiritual being and the material conditions of life. At the Reformation, it 2

Fichte’s project was a “moral idealism” in which the will of the individual becomes essentially one with the infinite Ego which is ordering the universe morally.

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realized that each individual human being has, in his or her own heart, a direct spiritual relationship to God. In the French Revolution, it abortively tried to produce radically new, free, and rational institutions from scratch. But it will reach a stage of absolute freedom, in which all members freely by reason endorse the organic community and concrete institutions in which they live. Hegel thought Prussia at his time was close to this stage. The accounts in terms of knowledge and of freedom are connected by the idea that we are free, not when we are caused to act by our desires, but when we reason universally, and so in accordance with universal Spirit – “Being-in-and-for-Itself ” – which is one and is returning all things to one. Spirit comes to the consciousness that it has produced the concepts through which it thought, and that it is identical with the whole. Hegel is giving a philosophical account of the biblical notion of all things returning to God, “so that God may be all in all.”3 Hegel thus accepted Kant’s view that we are not free when we act from innate or socially conditioned desires, but only when we choose according to rational and so universal principles. But he had two related criticisms of Kant’s ethical thought. First, he objected to the “empty formalism” of the categorical imperative in its formulation in terms of universal law, and insisted that morality be understood concretely in terms of the current stage of the progress of Spirit through different conceptions of freedom. Second, Hegel objected that Kant’s stress on the conflict between reason and desire (or inclination) divides human beings internally from themselves. Hegel agreed with Kant in tying freedom to reason as opposed to mere desire; but he thought that he had an answer to the question of how moral reason and the desire for happiness can be reconciled, and that Kant did not. Hegel’s answer was that, in the organic community, the interests of the individual and of the community coincide, so that when I do what is morally right I am also doing what is good for me and what I desire. Hegel’s followers split into two groups, sometimes called “Right Hegelians” and “Left Hegelians” (or “Young Hegelians”). Right Hegelians promoted the generally positive view of the Prussian State that Hegel expressed in his Philosophy of Right. Left Hegelians rejected this view, and with it the Protestant Christianity that they 3

I Corinthians 15: 28. We encountered the idea of ”Being-in-and-foritself ” in Sartre’s dismissal of God.

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saw as its vehicle. In this way, Hegel’s peculiar way of promoting Christianity ended up producing its vehement rejection by thinkers who shared many of Hegel’s social ideals. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74) wrote The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, launching the historical–critical method of biblical scholarship with the suggestion that much of the Bible is myth or “unconscious invention” that needs to be separated out from a historical account of the period. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–72) wrote The Essence of Christianity, in which he depicted all religion as the means by which “man projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself.” Feuerbach thought that religion resulted from humanity’s alienation from itself, and that philosophy needed to destroy this illusion so we could learn to love humankind and not divert this love to an imaginary object. Karl Marx (1818–83) followed Feuerbach in this diagnosis but was interested primarily in social and political relations rather than psychology. He became suspicious of theory (for example Hegel’s) on the grounds that theory is a symptom of the power structures of the societies that produce it. Marx returned to Hegel’s thoughts about work revealing to workers their value, through what they produce, but argued that under capitalism, the worker was alienated from this product because other people owned both the product and the means of producing it. Marx urged that the way to undo this alienation was to destroy the institution of private property. He believed, like Hegel, in a progress through history towards freedom, but thought it would take a Communist revolution to bring this about. His ideas were appropriated by a succession of revolutionary movements (though this does not mean he would have endorsed the results). A very different response to Hegel (and Kant) can be found in the work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), a Danish religious thinker whose religious origins, like Kant’s and Hegel’s, were Lutheran. Kierkegaard mocked Hegel constantly for presuming to understand the whole of human history while located in a particular, small part of it. On the other hand, he used Hegelian categories of thought himself, especially in his idea of the aesthetic life, the ethical life, and the religious life as stages through which human beings develop by means of internal contradiction and radical transition. Kierkegaard’s relation with Kant was problematic as well. He caricatured Kant (in an amalgam with Hegel) in the character of Judge William in Either/Or, who is stuck within the ethical life, unable to

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reach the life of faith. On the other hand, his descriptions of the religious life were full of echoes of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kierkegaard wrote most of his work pseudonymously, taking on the names and voices of characters who lived the lives he describes. In the aesthetic life, the goal is to keep boredom at bay, which requires sufficient distance from one’s projects that one is not stuck with them but can flit from one to another without pain. This life tends to fail, because it requires (in order to sustain interest) the very commitment that it also rejects. The transition out of this life is accomplished by making a choice for one’s life as a whole, a radical choice that requires admitting the aesthetic life has been a failure. In this choice, one discovers freedom, and thus, the ethical life. But this life too tends to fail, because it acknowledges a demand, the moral law, that is higher than we can meet by our own devices. Kierkegaard thought we have to realize that God’s assistance is necessary even for the repentance that is the transition into the religious life. He also suggested that, within the religious life, there is a “repetition” of the aesthetic life and the ethical life, though in a transformed version. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was the son of a Lutheran pastor in Prussia. He was trained as a classical philologist, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was an account of the origin and death of ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche became opposed to orthodox Christianity and promoted ancient Greece instead. He saw the intimate link between Christianity and the ethical theories of his predecessors, especially Kant. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he says, The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. Presuming we have gradually entered upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian God, there is now also a considerable decline in mankind’s feeling of guilt.4

This is the “death of God,” which Nietzsche announced, and which he predicted would also be the death of Kantian ethics. It is harder to know what Nietzsche was for, than what he was against. But 4

Friedrich Nietzche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman, New York: Vintage books, 1967, 90–1.

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Nietzsche clearly admired the ancient Greeks, and thought we would be better off with a “master” morality like theirs, rather than a “slave” morality like that of Christianity. “Mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures.”5 By this last clause, he meant mastery over other people; the model of this mastery is the “overman” who is free of the resentment of the strong by the weak that Nietzsche thought lay at the foundation of Christian ethics. I am not going to say more about continental ethics after Nietzsche, though it would be an interesting project to trace the theological themes I have been discussing through Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) to Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). I gave a brief account of Sartre’s theory in Chapter 2. Fichte and Hegel had followers also in Britain, including T. H. Green (1836–82) and F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), and the start of the analytic school is sometimes located with G. E. Moore’s paper, “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903) which attacked them. The lineage of the “analytic” or “Anglo-American” school goes back to the successors of Hume in Britain. I will start with Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), although I do not want to imply agreement with his assessment of the originality of his ethical views. The basic principles of utilitarian thought can be found already widely disseminated before his time (I mentioned Hutcheson as a predecessor in the previous chapter), and an example contemporary with Bentham is The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy by William Paley (1743–1805), in which these principles are given a theological context. Paley’s book was immediately adopted as a textbook at Cambridge, and his success is said to have stirred Bentham to bring out his own version of utilitarian doctrine in Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).6 Paley thought he could demonstrate that following the will of God meant promoting the happiness of all, and that happiness was the sum of pleasures, but 5

Ibid., 59–60. For an illuminating comparison see Ernest Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1902, 165–90. The relation of Paley and Bentham, like that of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, is an example of an over-reaching theistic theory producing an over-emphatic rejection in the name and for the sake of social change.

6

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he also thought (like Kant) that we need to believe in God as the final granter of happiness if we are to coherently sustain motivation to do what we ought. Bentham tried to dispense with this theological context. His grounds were radically empiricist, that the only “real” entities are publicly observable, and so do not include God (or, for that matter, duty or right or time or relations or qualities). He was concerned to give a justification of morality in a public language, which he thought required getting rid of theological premises. But the effect was to make motivation again problematic (as it was for Hutcheson, and we will see it is for Mill and Sidgwick), especially because Bentham held to the view that humans are moved to action only by desire for some pleasure or aversion to some pain, though he sometimes allows that we can take sympathetic pleasure in the pleasure of others. Do we always get most pleasure from doing what is morally right? Bentham’s answer to the problem about moral motivation was that law and social morality could provide individuals with adequate motives for right action through the threat of social sanctions and that what he called “deontology” (i.e. personal or private morality) could mobilize hidden or long-range interests that were already present but obscure. Bentham articulated utilitarianism through a calculus of pleasures, according to which we are to decide between alternative courses of action by calculating how much pleasure and pain will be the consequence of each action for all the parties affected. Bentham thought he could identify the unit of pleasure that stays constant for this kind of calculation, and it is the minimum state of sensibility that can be distinguished from indifference. He then distinguished between a number of “dimensions” in which these units vary, such as intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity (how soon the pleasures will come), fecundity (how many other pleasures a pleasure will produce), and purity. Bentham said that intellectual activities are no “higher” or better than sensual activities, because the former do not produce any more pleasure than the latter, measured in the same units and dimensions. Bentham and his associates devoted themselves to a far-reaching social agenda in the areas of prison reform, the abolition of capital punishment, welfare programs, the enlargement of the right to vote, birth control, and the humane treatment of animals. John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was brought up by his father according to strict utilitarian principles. He started Greek at the age of 3 and Latin at the age of 8, by which time he had already read in Greek the whole of Herodotus, and six dialogues of Plato (including the

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Theaetetus). He launched into a program of what he called “youthful propagandism” on behalf of the utilitarian agenda. At the age of twenty, however, he had a collapse, and a prolonged period of “melancholy.” He subsequently came to see (during “a later period of the same malady”) that Coleridge had diagnosed his condition in these lines: Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

He realized that his education had neglected the cultivation of feeling, of which hope is a crucial instance. He finally emerged from the gloom when he read Wordsworth, especially “Intimations of Immortality.” The famous passages (e.g. “But trailing clouds of glory do we come /From God, who is our home”) he calls “passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy,” but he rejoiced to find someone who had experienced the same disappearance of youthful enthusiasm and yet had found compensation in tranquil contemplation.7 In his Three Essays on Religion (published posthumously in 1874) he returned to the idea of hope, saying that “the indulgence of hope with regard to the government of the universe and the destiny of man after death, while we recognize as a clear truth that we have no ground for more than a hope, is legitimate and philosophically defensible.” Without such hope, we are kept down by “the disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while.’ ”8 Mill could not believe, however, that God was omnipotent, given all the evil in the world, and he insisted, like Kant, that we must be God’s co-workers, not merely passive recipients of God’s assistance. Mill developed Bentham’s position in various ways. The basic principle stayed the same, as expressed in Utilitarianism (1861): “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that acts are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong, as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”9 But Mill accepted, as Bentham had not, that there are 7

J. S. Mill, Autobiography, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969, 90. J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion, London: Henry Holt, 1874, 249–50. 9 J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. George Sher, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979, II, 2. 8

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qualitative differences in pleasures, simply as pleasures. He thought the higher pleasures were those of the intellect, the feelings and imagination, and the moral sentiments, and he observed that those who have experienced both these and the lower pleasures, tend to prefer the former. He thought that he could, if not prove, at least commend the principle of utility in such a way as to deserve our assent to it. He took his task to be twofold: to show that happiness is (first) desirable and (second) the only thing desirable. He showed that happiness is desirable by pointing to the fact that we all in fact desire it, and so we all (as an aggregate) desire the happiness of all (again as an aggregate, though this is unclear in the text, so that John desires John’s happiness, Joanna Joanna’s, etc. This does not show why Joanna’s happiness should be desirable to John.) Turning to the second task, Mill conceded that virtue is also “to be desired disinterestedly, for itself,” but he took this to be consistent with the principle of utility. For although virtue is not “naturally and originally” part of happiness, it can become so, and will become so given the right kind of training.10 Mill also thought that he could provide utilitarian justification for holding that there are correlative rights and obligations, because these are conducive, in the long run, to the general happiness. Finally, Mill is unclear about the role of moral rules in his system. He thought that they represent the accumulated wisdom of the species and that most people most of the time have to rely upon them, but he also thought that we would ideally test each action by the consequences of that action. R. M. Hare gives an account in Moral Thinking of how to combine these thoughts, and we will return to this. Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), in Methods of Ethics, distinguished three methods, each of which claims to be self-evident: Intuitionism (which is, roughly, the commonsense morality that some things, like deliberate ingratitude to a benefactor, are wrong in themselves independently of their consequences), Egoistic Hedonism (the view that an individual ought to aim at a maximum balance of happiness for herself, where this is understood as the greatest balance of pleasure over pain), and Utilitarianism, or Universalistic Hedonism (the view that she ought to aim at the maximum balance of happiness for all sentient beings present and future, whatever the cost to herself). Of 10

Ibid., IV, which is full of Mill’s belief in progress through education and “opinion.”

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these three, he rejected the first, on the grounds that no concrete ethical principles are self-evident, and that when they conflict (as they do) we have to take consequences into account in order to decide what to do. But Sidgwick found the relation between the other two methods more problematic. Each principle separately seemed to him self-evident, but taken together they seemed mutually inconsistent. He considered two solutions, one psychological and the other metaphysical. The psychological solution was to bring in the pleasures and pains of sympathy with others’ pleasures and pains, so that if we do good to all we end up (because of these pleasures) making ourselves happiest. Sidgwick rejected this on the basis that sympathy is inevitably limited in its range, and we feel it most towards those closest to us. The result is that even if we include sympathetic pleasures and pains under Egoism, it will tend to increase the divergence between Egoistic and Utilitarian conduct, rather than bring them closer together. The metaphysical solution was to bring in a god who desires the greatest total good of all living things and will reward and punish in accordance with this desire (Broad describes this being as a celestial Jeremy Bentham). Sidgwick recognized this as a return to the utilitarianism of Paley. He thought this solution was both necessary and sufficient to remove the contradiction in ethics – but this was only a reason to accept it if, in general, it is reasonable to accept certain principles (such as the uniformity of nature) that are not selfevident and that cannot be proved but “we have a strong disposition to accept them, and . . . they are indispensable to the systematic coherence of our beliefs.”11 Sidgwick did not commit himself on this one way or the other. G. E. Moore (1873–1958) was strongly influenced by Sidgwick at Cambridge, but rejected his views about intuitionism.12 For our purposes, his most important work was Principia Ethica, published in 1903, the same year as “The Refutation of Idealism” that I mentioned previously. The primary subject of this book was goodness. Moore thought that intrinsic goodness is a real property of things, even though (like the number two) it does not exist in time and is not

11

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Indianapolis: Hacker, 1981, 509. 12 For a fuller treatment of the history, see John E. Hare, God’s Call, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001, 1–48.

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the object of sense experience. He explicitly aligned himself with Plato and against the class of empiricist philosophers “to which most Englishmen have belonged.”13 Goodness is objective, in the sense that it is there independently of us (though not in space and time). To call something good is to point to a value property – the goodness of the thing. His predecessors, Moore thought, had almost all committed the error, which he called “the naturalistic fallacy,” of trying to define this value property by identifying it with a non-evaluative property. For example, they proposed that goodness is pleasure, or what produces pleasure. But whatever non-evaluative property we try to say goodness is identical to, we will find that it remains an open question whether that property is in fact good.14 For example, it makes sense to ask whether pleasure or the production of pleasure is good. This is true also if we propose a supernatural property to identify with goodness, for example the property of being commanded by God. It still makes sense to ask whether what God commands is good. This question cannot be the same as the question “Is what God commands what God commands?” because that is not an open question. But if these questions are different, then the two properties, goodness and being commanded by God, cannot be the same, and to say (by way of a definition) that they are the same is to commit the fallacy.15 Intrinsic goodness, Moore said, is a simple, non-natural property (i.e. neither natural nor supernatural) and indefinable. How do we have access to non-natural properties? Moore thought we had a special form of cognition that he called “intuition.” By this, he meant that the access is not based on inference or argument, but is self-evident (though we can still get it wrong, just as with sense13

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1903] 1993, 162. 14 There are different accounts of this fallacy to be found in Principia Ethica. The general problem is to understand what is supposed to happen in a philosophical analysis, as Plato saw at Meno 80 d. Moore’s point can be profitably narrowed to the claim that goodness cannot be identified with any of the natural or metaphysical properties with which it has been identified in the tradition within which Moore is working. See R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals, Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1961, 86–93. (LM) 15 If we accept some recent theories of semantics, we can say (contrary to Moore) that two terms can have different meanings but refer to the same causal property. I return to this point in Chapter 5.

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perception). He thought the way to determine what things had positive value intrinsically was to consider what things are such that, if they existed by themselves, in absolute isolation, we would yet judge their existence good. By reflecting on this question, together with a group of like-minded souls, he reached the conclusion that “by far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.”16 Standardly, Moore thought, our wills join together organically the cognition or intuition of goodness and something non-cognitive, like a desire. I say “standardly” because Moore thought it possible to have the cognition without the non-cognitive element. This might be clearer in an aesthetic example. I can distinguish the cognition of the beautiful qualities of a painting from the emotions caused in me by this cognition. The cognition of these qualities has little value, Moore said, apart from the appropriate emotions, and the emotions have little value apart from the cognition of an appropriate object; but it is possible to have the cognition without the emotion. Separate from both of these is the judgment that the painting warrants the emotion, which Moore called, following Kant, the judgment of taste.17 So we have three elements here, the cognition, the emotion, and the judgment, and these same distinctions can be made about the good more broadly. At Cambridge, Moore was a colleague of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). After leaving Cambridge in 1910, Whitehead wrote Process and Reality, the founding work in so-called “Process Thought,” of which we will see an example in R. M. Hare’s first book “An Essay on Monism.” Russell was not primarily a moral philosopher, but he expressed radically different views at different times about ethics. In 1910 he agreed with Moore that goodness (like roundness) is a quality that belongs to objects independently of our opinions, and that when two people differ about whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right. By 1922 he was holding an error theory (like that of John Mackie, 1917–81) that although we mean by “good” an objective property in this way, there is in fact no such thing, and hence all our value judgments are, strictly speaking, 16 17

Principia Ethica, 188. Ibid., 238, 247–8, 259.

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false. Then, by 1935, he also dropped the claim about meaning, holding that value judgments are expressions of desire or wish, and not assertions at all. Wittgenstein’s views on ethics are enigmatic and subject to wildly different interpretations. He wrote at the end of his Tractatus (which is about logic), “It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)”18 Perhaps he meant that the world we occupy is good or bad (and happy or unhappy) as a whole, not piece by piece. But Wittgenstein’s importance for ethics lies primarily not in what he said about ethics but in how other people who wrote about ethics understood what he said about other parts of philosophy (especially logic and the philosophy of language). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was taken up by the Logical Positivists in the so-called “Vienna Circle,” of which Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) was a leading figure, though Wittgenstein himself was never a Logical Positivist. The Logical Positivists held a “verificationist” theory of meaning, that assertions are meaningful only if they can in principle be verified by sense experience or if they are tautologies (for example, “All bachelors are unmarried men.”) This seems to leave ethical statements (and statements about God) without meaning. And A. J. Ayer (1910–89) took just this position in Language, Truth and Logic (1936). Ayer accepted Moore’s arguments about the naturalistic fallacy, but, since Moore’s talk of “non-natural properties” seemed to Ayer just nonsense, he was led to emphasize and analyze further the non-cognitive ingredient in evaluation that Moore had identified. Suppose I say to a cannibal, “You acted wrongly in eating your prisoner”; Ayer thought I am not asserting anything more than if I had said simply, “You ate your prisoner.” I am, rather, evincing my disapproval. It is as if I had said “You ate your prisoner” in a peculiar tone of horror, or had written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks.19 These do not add anything to the literal meaning of the sentence. They merely serve to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker. Ayer claimed that the function of ethical words is purely “emotive,” meaning that they are used to express feeling about

18

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1921] 1961, 6.421. 19 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, London: Gollancz, 1936, 107–8.

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certain objects but not to make any assertion about them. Sometimes this is caricatured as “the yah/boo theory” of evaluation; as though we could say what we meant by “You acted wrongly in eating your prisoner” by saying “You ate your prisoner. Boo!” This account is, Ayer said, a kind of subjectivism (as Russell described his own later views), the kind that treats moral judgments not as reports of our feelings, but as expressions of our feelings. Moore had pointed out, correctly on Ayer’s view, that if ethical statements were simply reports of the speaker’s feelings, there could be no ethical disagreement. There is no conflict between person A’s report that he (person A) feels positively about eating prisoners and person B’s report that she (person B) does not. Since Moore took it as obvious that we do disagree about such matters he concluded that this kind of subjectivism is false. Unfortunately for Ayer, his own kind of subjectivism led to the same result. If “Eating people is bad” and “Eating people is good” do not express propositions at all, they cannot express inconsistent propositions. Ayer had to say that when we think we are disagreeing about questions of value, we are actually disagreeing about the non-evaluative facts that lie behind our attitudes (for example, facts about the consequences of cannibalism). This emotivist theory of ethics had its most articulate treatment in Ethics and Language by Charles Stevenson (1908–79). Stevenson was a positivist, but also the heir of John Dewey (1859–1952) and the American pragmatist tradition of William James (1842–1910) and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Dewey had rejected the idea of fixed ends for human beings, and stressed that moral deliberation involves competition within a person between different ends, none of which can be assumed permanent. Stevenson applied this analysis to the competition between people with different ends, and stressed the role of moral language as a social instrument of persuasion. On his account, normative judgments express attitudes and invite others to share these attitudes, but they are not strictly speaking true or false. In Oxford, after the second world war, John Austin (1911–60) assembled a group of like-minded philosophers on Saturday mornings during the term.20 They would choose an area of inquiry, and 20

Austin describes his method in “Ifs and Cans” and “A Plea for Excuses,” in Philosophical Papers, 2nd edn, eds J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

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one of them would be delegated to “collect” from dictionaries and non-philosophical literature the vocabulary in that area within ordinary language, together with expressions where the vocabulary was used correctly, and expressions where the use was plausible but could be seen to be wrong. The next stage was to make up “stories” or narratives as contexts for these expressions, and after that to try out accounts of the meaning of the terms and their combinations in the light of all the collected data. Finally, the work of other philosophers, linguists, and grammarians could be checked. The goal, distinct in this respect from Wittgenstein’s later work, was an analysis of ordinary language and its multitude of distinctions. Austin did not suppose that ordinary language was infallible, but he did think that it preserved a great deal of wisdom that had passed the test of centuries of experience, and that traditional philosophical discussions had ignored this resource. He performed this kind of study himself in various areas, of which the most important for our purposes was his study of verbs like “promise” and “warn,” which seem, in some of their uses, to be performing an action rather than describing one or stating that it occurs. For example, “I promise to pay you back” makes a promise, rather than stating that a promise has been made. In Austin’s terms, an “illocutionary act” is what I do in making an utterance (e.g. hinting that the door is open), while a “perlocutionary act” is what I may succeed in doing by means of an illocutionary act (e.g. getting you to shut the door). Austin labeled as “the descriptive fallacy” the mistake of thinking that all language is used to perform the illocutionary act of describing or reporting. It has come to be commonly held that many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts: for example, “ethical propositions” are perhaps intended, solely or partly, to evince emotion or to prescribe conduct or to influence it in special ways. Here too KANT was among the pioneers. We very often also use utterances in ways beyond the scope at least of traditional grammar. It has come to be seen that many specially perplexing words embedded in apparently descriptive statements do not serve to indicate some specially odd additional feature in the reality reported, but to indicate (not to report) the circumstances in which the statement is made or reservations to which it is subject or the way in which it is to be taken

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and the like. To overlook these possibilities in the way once common is called the “descriptive” fallacy.21

“An Essay on Monism” In the remainder of this chapter I am going to focus on the work of Richard Mervyn Hare, and one of his students, Peter Singer. I have chosen Hare as an example of a fourth type of ethical theory, “consequentialism,” which holds that what makes an action right or wrong is the goodness or badness of its consequences. But Hare’s consequentialism is only one feature of his position, and we will have to look at the overall theory to provide the proper context. Hare’s proof of utilitarianism, a form of consequentialism, comes in Moral Thinking, which I will discuss in the fifth section of this chapter, but his endorsement of utilitarianism is already suggested in The Language of Morals and “flirted with” in Freedom and Reason. Hare was born in 1919, and went to Rugby and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Classics and Philosophy. In 1938, at the time of the Munich agreement, he decided against pacifism and joined the Officers Training Corps. He was commissioned in 1940 and posted to India where he was attached to the 22nd Mountain Regiment of the Indian Artillery. He was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, and was sent to work on the Burma–Thailand railway. While a prisoner, he wrote a book, “An Essay on Monism” (henceforth, EM), which will be the topic of this section. The book was not published, because he came to despise it (though, on his return, he typed it carefully from the ledger in which it was written, edited it, and made five copies). This presents his literary executor with a delicate problem. One does not want to do him harm by exposing views he did not like to the public; on the other hand, the central goal of the book is one that stayed with him, and the book’s solutions (though inadequate) display many themes that illuminate his later work. I have adopted the compromise of keeping the book unpublished, though available with his papers in the Balliol College library, and constructing this secondary narrative that draws out the relevant themes together with a few quotations. 21

John Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965, 3. The capitalization “KANT” is as the original.

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First, though, I want to locate the book within the context of his subsequent career. After the war, Hare completed his undergraduate degree at Balliol, and in the same year was elected a Tutorial Fellow at his college. It was the custom not to take doctoral degrees before appointment, and to receive immediate tenure. Hare used to complain that the system of doctoral degrees and seven years’ probation until tenure produced thousands of books that no-one wanted to read. He won the T. H. Green prize in 1950, for which the assigned topic was “Practical Reason” and the examiners were H. J. Paton, Gilbert Ryle, and P. H. Nowell-Smith. Paton held the chair in Moral Philosophy, and Hare learned Kant’s ethics from him. Ryle held the chair in Metaphysics, and “transformed British philosophy almost single-handedly,” leading a “revolution” in which “romantic philosophy” was routed and the new philosophy from Vienna and Cambridge prevailed.22 Hare revised the first half of the prize dissertation, and published it as The Language of Morals (henceforth, LM) in 1952. He became a member of Austin’s Saturday morning group, and provides one of the most worked-out applications of Austin’s method. Three years after his next book appeared, Freedom and Reason (1963, henceforth, FR), he was elected White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. He published Moral Thinking (henceforth, MT) in 1981, and in 1983 he retired (a few years early) from Oxford and moved to the University of Florida at Gainesville, returning to his home just outside Oxford each summer. He returned permanently to England in 1997. His final book (apart from collections of papers) was Sorting Out Ethics, which appeared in 1997. He died in 2002. “An Essay on Monism” was dedicated “To the Mussalman Gunners and Drivers of the Fourth (Hazara) Mountain Battery, Frontier Force, who know more philosophy than they tell of.” Hare attached a postscript to the book, which I will quote in full. I began this Essay behind the bars of a Singapore gaol, in a ledger looted from the prison office. Much of the central part, including the important and difficult section on epistemology, was written sitting on my eighteen inches of bamboo sleeping shelf, in a leaky tent by the Burma–Thailand railway, when an acute attack of dysentery had given me a brief respite from carrying earth on my head. I wrote the

22

R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” Utilitas 14, 3 (2002), 269–305.

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last chapter on board a troopship coming home, gladly contending with an atrocious wireless which howled out bad music ten feet away from my ears. It was written for my own satisfaction; but if any should chance to read it, I owe him an apology. There is much in this Essay which might be called presumptuous, and some things which might be called childish. A disinterested reader may well ask in indignation how a writer so ignorant could be so arrogant. As he lights on each new error, he may well writhe at the conceit in which it is clothed. For all this I am sorry; my excuse must be that there are circumstances – and I have had my fill of them – in which one becomes absolutely convinced of the contemptibility of the human race in general, and of the supreme importance of oneself in particular. A mind so bent by the stresses of life, may, however, be also more resilient than one which is straight and level; and it may be that in the past years life has taught me some things which I might otherwise have missed, although the manner of learning them may have led me to express them in too truculent a fashion. But in any case, my ultimate retort to such a critic must be that this is my book, and not his, and that if he does not like it, he may leave it. Perhaps in a few years I will write a better one.

The Essay has four parts: metaphysic, aesthetic (which covers epistemology as well as “aesthetics” in the usual sense), ethic, and religion. The central thesis of the first part is that there is a unique, ordered activity constituting each thing (Hare calls it a “rhythm” from a Greek cognate meaning “flowing,” which recalls the dictum of Heraclitus that everything flows). This activity extends back to the causes of the thing and forward to its effects. His example, drawing again from Heraclitus, is a waterfall, which has to be taken to include the water that has flowed into it and from it to the sea, and before it was water the air that condensed into it and the air into which it evaporates.23 In this account, the strong influence of Whitehead is 23

I am usually going to footnote my criticisms of Hare’s positions rather than putting them in the text, and I will put references to his books in the text. Some of my criticisms I discussed with him. But I wish I had undertaken this project when I could still have gone over it with him. In the Essay the “things” constituted by unique rhythms are said to include a pair of boots, a flame, a waterfall, a person, a society, and a sentence, and it is not clear how any notion of “rhythm” could explain what holds each of these together as a unit (it is interesting to compare Scotus’s idea of an

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evident, and indeed, his Process and Reality was one of the few books available to the prisoners in Singapore. Hare’s book is an essay on monism because it teaches that there is, in the end, only one ordered activity, the World-Order, of which all individuals are aspects.24 Hare intends a contrast with dualism, which posits two fundamental principles, form (or mind) and matter, but fails to account for the interaction between them. He also contrasts his view with two forms of what he calls “short-cut monism,” namely materialism (the view that everything is matter) and idealism (the view that everything is form or mind). Each of these monisms has part of the truth, but cannot account for the truth in the other. The first part of the book ends with a discussion of his central goal, which is an overall account that will make sense of science, morality, and religion and “discover that order and unity which shall underlie and explain the apparent disorder and disunity of experience.” (EM, 2) It is important, he warns, not to bring God in too soon (like the god brought down on a stage machine at the end of a Greek tragedy), because then the philosophical problems do not get sorted out but simply re-emerge more obscurely as problems in theology. But philosophy does not present a complete picture, since it cannot explain the origin of the order that it describes. “The main thing is that science, philosophy and religion are no longer at loggerheads, but can each contribute its own share to what is the object of all human activity, the sane and profitable living of our life, at harmony with the universe in which we are set, and at harmony within ourselves” (EM, 61 and 118). The second part of the Essay, “Aesthetic,” is divided into two sections, one on epistemology and one on aesthetics in its more usual individual essence). No doubt this defect is part of what caused Hare to reject the book. But even with this defect, there is much of value in the Essay, especially for someone trying to understand Hare’s work as a whole. One admirable feature is the scope of the work, which attempts to cover the whole of philosophy in 231 typescript pages. After Kant this kind of overall vision has been rare. Indeed, one way to look at the history I have been describing is as a progressive diminution of scope, starting with Aristotle who did ground-breaking work in every available “academic” discipline except mathematics, and Scotus who was a theologian at least as much as a philosopher. 24 There is a parallel here to Sartre’s monism, mentioned in Chapter 2.

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sense. The first section starts with the notion of “person” as an ordered activity that is conscious, where this consciousness is divided into cognition and will. Cognition and will are each both mental and physical; the difference between them is that, whereas cognition is being affected by something, will is causing something. A person, then, is “the passage from a coherent system of cognition into a coherent system of will” (EM, 72). The limit of the person is the limit of consciousness (and those bodily activities of which the person is not conscious are not parts of the person). The grammatical sign of personhood is the first person “I.” “I” am a set of occurrences held together by what Hare calls a “value,” which is the coherence that combines the relevant causes and effects into a single entity. In terms of cognition, I am the set of experiences of external objects that cohere with my own, ordered activity. In terms of will, I am the set of chosen effects I produce that again cohere with this value.25 Hare’s epistemology is Kantian inasmuch as he holds that all knowledge is knowledge of how things appear. Indeed, Kant is the thinker most cited in the Essay. Hare insists, however, that the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-it-appears are the same thing in different aspects, and that the appearance is one of the effects constituting the unique activity of the thing. A person gets knowledge, as opposed to mere cognition, by using will to adjust the machinery of cognition, like a radio operator finding a station on his set. Cognitions are collected and organized into judgments, which can be true or false. Inferences about the future are possible to the extent that a person has knowledge of the coherence already present within what he has cognized and willed. The second section of the second part is much shorter, and deals with beauty and art. Beauty is the coherence of a thing with itself insofar as a person perceives this from the outside. Hare describes a notion of “sympathy” by which the ordered activity (the “rhythm”) of two things produces a new, ordered activity between the two, without disturbing the original activity of either one. Beauty excites 25

This is a precursor of the “prescriptivity of ‘I’” that Hare describes as the “clinching move” in his proof of utilitarianism in R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981 (MT). About this he says, “I have a clear visual memory of the room in which it came to me in the middle of the night.” See Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” 301.

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sympathy, and is thus at once objective (in the object) and subjective (in the spectator). Hare explains art in terms of the ability of the artist to excite sympathy in the audience with some order inside himself through the vehicle of the artwork, so that “after listening to a fugue of Bach, a piece of music worked out largely by abstract mathematical principles, and containing, as far as I am able to detect, no specific emotional reference whatever, I feel as if I had assisted at the disentangling and setting at peace of my whole being.”(EM, 135) The third part of the Essay is called “Ethic.” The central notion is “will,” which I have already described.26 Just as cognition needs will in order to produce knowledge, so will needs cognition in order to produce action. Hare distinguishes between meaning and criteria, and proposes that the criterion for moral goodness is consequentialist, i.e. producing the good of other sentient beings.27 But the meaning of “goodness” has to be given in terms of the unique, constituting activity of each thing; it is possible to have goodness even in the absence of other people, in self-discipline. Goodness is the activity whereby a person wills such effects as shall be in accordance with his own constitutive order. Trying to be good is the struggle to make what we do coherent with what we are. Hare gives the example of Sir Philip Sydney, who chose, when dying at the end of a battle, to give the last cup of water to a fellow soldier (EM, 165). He could have quenched his thirst, but this would have been merely animal. The characteristically human response was to cooperate with “the law that gives freedom” (Hare refers to James 1:25 and 2:12). Moral goodness is in this sense subjective, because it resides in the will of the subject, though its results are objective. It is the other way round from beauty, which resides in an object, but results in appreciation by a subject. Hare says, “The only way to understand what a good action is, is to do one . . . A completely bad man, if such there were, would have absolutely no idea of the nature of Goodness, whereas a completely ugly man might well have a fine appreciation of Beauty.”(EM, 161) 26

Hare’s focus on will is another continuity with Scotus and Kant. As we learnt from Scotus, nothing is willed that is not first cognized. 27 EM, 183. The distinction between meaning and criteria re-emerges in LM, though it is drawn differently. The assumption that we should analyze ethics in terms of willed effects is also characteristic of Hare’s subsequent work.

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Not all our actions, on this view, extend our freedom or autonomy. Negative sin (most sin) is allowing oneself to be merely animal. Positive sin is willing against one’s goodness, saying (Hare quotes from Milton’s Satan) “Evil be thou my good.” Such disorder (or “arrhythmy”) will not survive, because it is inconsistent with the order of the whole universe. Even if it appears to bring success, it will not bring happiness. Hare quotes Emerson: “You cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice.”28 Even so, Hare insists, moral goodness must be aimed at for its own sake. If I aim at it for the sake of my happiness I lose “the ought.” If an agent repents of his positive sin, there is still the problem of the damage done by the disorder, that cannot be undone just by forgiveness from somebody else. The agent’s will has to be involved in the repair if there is to be a “new creature.” Hare suggests that the Christian doctrine of atonement provides resources to solve this problem, since Christ is both man and God, and can atone as man and forgive as God. How are we to live ethically? Hare proposes an ethic of love, which he contrasts with an ethic of power. An ethic of love is the imperative to combine the individual constituting activities of two people into a larger constituting activity of both without losing the uniqueness of the individuals. This is also how Hare defined “sympathy,” and he claims that this is what is meant by the New Testament word agape (which he distinguishes from eros). The ideal goal of society, Hare says, is to extend sympathy in this way; but all we can do, usually, is to remove obstacles to this kind of union, rather than create it. The final part of the Essay is about religion. Philosophy, Hare says, can explain the place of religion amongst other human activities, but it must not explain religion away by describing it as a kind of ethic, or psychotherapy, or science, or art. “Religion is either the most important activity that a man can pursue, or it is nothing; and in any philosophy which aims at completeness, religion must find a part as integral and essential as science, art, or morals.”(EM, 202) Hare identifies himself not merely as religious, but as a Christian, “I am myself, I hope, a Christian; at any rate, I observe the practices and 28

Ibid., 173. He is quoting Emerson from William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: The Modern Library, 1902, 34.

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subscribe to the doctrines laid down by the church.” But he starts with religion in general, as the relation between humans and gods, which is best understood through an analysis of the activity of worship.29 We need, Hare says, a sense of fit or harmony between ourselves and the world outside us. This could in principle be achieved in either of two ways, by changing things outside us to fit us, or by changing ourselves to fit the world outside. The first alternative is magic, and Hare mentions as an example the paintings on cave walls of elk and bison, pierced by the arrows of a successful hunt. The idea, he says, was to bring about the result by painting it. But our ancestors did not find this worked very well. The second technique, worship, is to change ourselves so as to be in harmony or rapport or coherence with the powers that rule the universe outside us. Worship requires as its object something different from us, but also something with which we can enter an intimate relation. In this way, worship is like the appreciation of beauty, but the other way round. When we appreciate something beautiful we perceive it as something cohering with itself, and we enter by sympathy into relation with it. This is true also in worship, with the difference that we modify ourselves so as to be in harmony with this external coherence. Worship characteristically uses myth and symbol. Hare cites a poem by Henry Vaughan, which he loved throughout his life, My soul, there is a country Far beyond the stars, Where stands a winged sentry All skilful in the wars . . .

This is not a piece of astronomy, and Hare says it is silly to ask if the lines are (scientifically) true. The right question is, rather, “Do they help us worship?” Religious language is sacramental, although not in the narrow sense in which only some parts of worship (like Holy Communion) are sacraments. 29

Hare repeats much of this account of the development of worship in “Religion and Morals,” in Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell, London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, 176–93, especially 185–8. The paper was adapted from a lecture given at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 1954. Hare writes as a “Christian empiricist.”

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Hare says that myth goes through three stages of development. His example is the myth that God lives in the sky, which starts off indistinguishable from believed fact, remains useful as myth even when it is no longer believed as fact, but finally loses usefulness even as myth when we learn too much about the sky. A different example is life after death, a myth which Hare says is still useful, indeed necessary, since we cannot understand sin and punishment without it. The Essay ends by asking whether we should believe in the Christian God, the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hare’s answer is that we should, because this gives us an answer to three questions that would otherwise remain unanswered: why anything should exist at all, why there should be order rather than chaos, and why there should be persons. Hare says, All through this Essay I have been, for reasons which should be evident, attempting, perhaps unsuccessfully, to conceal a conviction, without which the Essay would not have been written; a conviction that in God lies the answer to life’s problems. We have been playing at philosophy, and have played, I hope, according to the rules of the game. But the game becomes a serious occupation only when it is animated by the one thing that can make it – or any other human activity – a serious occupation, namely Faith in God. (EM, 224)

The Language of Morals When Hare returned from the war, he went back to Balliol College and finished his degree in Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy). As he says in his autobiography, “There had been a revolution in philosophy as a whole in Britain, and nowhere was this more apparent than in moral philosophy.”30 The new “emotivism,” prefigured before the war by A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936), had been developed in a less belligerent form in Charles Stevenson’s Ethics and Language (1944). H. J. Paton, the new White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, was a great interpreter of Kant’s moral theory, and drew to Hare’s attention “the essential similarity between Stevenson’s ‘attitudes’ and Kant’s ‘maxims’.” Hare’s contribution in The

30

Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” 287.

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Language of Morals can be understood as a restatement of a rational ethics in the Kantian mold, acknowledging the recent developments in the philosophy of language associated with Austin and the “ordinary language” school. Hare’s return to Oxford, and his exposure to the “revolution” that had taken place, had consequences not just for his view of ethics but for his view of religion. He met regularly with a group called (defiantly) “The Metaphysicals,” whose “discussions tended, as time went on, to centre upon the nature and justification of Christian belief.”31 Hare’s most influential contribution was his part in the “University Discussion” with, amongst others, Antony Flew and Basil Mitchell.32 He accepted from Flew a version of the verificationist theory of meaning, and accepted therefore that we cannot meaningfully assert that God exists (since we do not know what experience would disconfirm this). But he suggested that a religious believer can nonetheless have a “blik” (roughly, an attitude with which one acts in the world). For example Hare describes the blik of a paranoid student, convinced that his teachers (at Oxford, the “dons”) are out to get him, and that any apparently kind don is trying to manipulate him into letting down his guard. Hare describes his own blik, which makes me put my confidence in the general non-homicidal tendencies of dons; in my own continued well-being (in some sense of that word that I may not now fully understand) if I continue to do what is right according to my lights; in the general likelihood of people like Hitler coming to a bad end. But perhaps a formulation less inadequate than most is to be found in Psalm 75 [where God says]: “The earth is weak and all the inhabiters thereof: I bear up the pillars of it.”

He said that this is not a scientific assertion, but makes a great deal of difference to how we live, and in particular to whether we can sustain the moral life. Throughout his adult life, Hare attended Anglican worship regularly, and said the creeds (though always a little ahead of the

31

See Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic, London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, 1. 32 In R. M. Hare, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, eds Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, New York: Macmillan, 1964, 99–103.

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congregation, as though to express his distance). He knew many of the psalms by heart and sang tenor in the choir. He loved the language of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and supported efforts to keep it in use. His preference was for “low church” worship, and he had a strong sense of the Fall (like Luther and Calvin). He used to say, gloomily, that it was guilt that made the world go round. Hare called his theory in The Language of Morals “universal prescriptivism” and claimed that it gives us “a rationalist kind of non-descriptivism to replace the irrationalist kind.”33 Value judgment on this theory is prescriptive, because it expresses the will or desire of the person making the judgment. This preserves the emotivist insight that there is a difference between the language we use for evaluation and the language we use for ordinary statement. Value judgment is universal or universalizable (it can be made universal) because it is implicitly or explicitly about features that can in principle be shared between things. This allows us to keep hold of Kant’s insight about the connection between morality and reason. I will try to explain both of these claims in what follows. The other essential influence is G. E. Moore’s account of “the naturalistic fallacy.” Moore had held that no value judgment can be reduced to, or completely analyzed in terms of, a judgment in nonevaluative terms. For example, it is fallacious to define right action in terms of what produces the most pleasure for the affected parties. The “open-question argument” purported to show this, by showing that any such definition would make it trivially true that an act that had the proposed character (e.g. pleasure-maximizing) was right; whereas, Moore said, this is always an open question. Hare’s contribution was to give a formal characterization of what is missing from any such definition, namely that every value judgment, and no purely descriptive judgment, entails an imperative. I will also try to explain this in what follows. At the beginning of the book, Hare says that ethics is the logical study of the language of morals. The term “logical” here bears weight. “Logic” is not confined to what would be studied in a “formal logic” course. It is closer to what Wittgenstein sometimes called “grammar,” namely the rules governing some linguistic practice. But

33

“A Philosophical Autobiography,” 288. The term “non-descriptivism” refers back to Austin’s term “the descriptive fallacy,” which I quoted earlier.

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Hare’s use of the phrase “logical study” suggests something tighter or more systematic than mere grammar.34 The logical study of moral language reveals, Hare says, that its function is to guide conduct. It is prescriptive, designed to answer the question “What shall I do?” He distinguishes between two types of prescriptive language, imperatives and value judgments, and then distinguishes, within the first class, between singular and universal imperatives and, in the second class, between non-moral and moral value judgments.35 The form of imperative with which we are most familiar is the second-person singular imperative addressed to a single person, e.g. “Shut the door”36 A universal imperative would be addressed to everyone, and would not make any reference to an individual person or time or place. The difference between non-moral and moral value judgments is explained later; moral principles apply to humans just in so far as they are humans (as opposed, for example, to potters,

34

In MT, 3–4, Hare distinguishes between the logical properties and nonlogical properties of value words, though both are presumably part of their grammar, and proposes that general words like “ought” and “must” (like “all”) owe their meanings entirely to their logical properties. In Wittgenstein’s famous comparison of language to a medieval city, all higgledy-piggledy and surrounded by more orderly suburbs, the term “logic” suggests the suburbs. In Freedom and Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, 75, (FR) Hare acknowledges, however, that moral words are “Janus-like,” facing both in the direction of their logic and in the direction of our actual disordered practice. See footnote 51 of the present chapter. 35 It is important to note that Hare distinguishes value judgments from imperatives because he is sometimes described as holding that value judgments are imperatives, e.g. by T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1998, 190. This is not his view, although he does hold that value judgments entail imperatives and therefore must themselves in some sense “contain” an imperative. See LM, 28: “No imperative conclusion can be validly drawn from a set of premises which does not contain at least one imperative.” 36 A first-person singular imperative would be addressed to the speaker herself: “Let me shut the door.” A third person singular imperative would be addressed to some third party: “Let Joe shut the door.” In neither case is “Let” to be read as a second-person imperative meaning, roughly, “Allow.”

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carpenters, beggars, or poets).37 We cannot therefore escape from moral judgment, because we cannot stop being human in the way we can stop being potters or poets. An analysis in terms of prescriptions has this important advantage over an emotivist analysis; prescriptions can be entirely rational and unemotional.38 Hare quotes the builder’s instruction, “Supply and fit to door mortise deadlatch and plastic knob furniture.” Prescribing is also not the same as getting someone to do something (though the prescriber may often intend the addressee to do something). We can distinguish on these grounds between value judgment and propaganda, which the emotivists found hard to do. Within a prescription like “Shut the door,” we can separate (as different parts of the meaning) what Hare calls the “phrastic” and the “neustic.” After writing The Language of Morals, he adds a third term, the “tropic,” and I will present the theory with all three terms, because it is clearer that way. The phrastic (from the Greek phrazo, meaning “I tell” or “I counsel”) is the content common to the command “Shut the door” and the statement “The door is shut,” namely the door’s being shut, which can be stated or commanded. The tropic (from the Greek tropos, meaning “mood”) is the mood indicator, distinguishing indicative from imperative and thus distinguishing statement from command. The neustic (from the Greek neuo, meaning “I nod assent”) is the sign of assent to the combination of phrastic and tropic. On Hare’s theory, sincerely assenting to a statement involves believing something, and sincerely assenting to a command (on the appropriate occasion, if it is within our power) involves doing something. If the phrastic refers to no identifiable state of affairs, both statement and command are meaningless. We get a valid practical inference (on the model of Aristotle’s practical syllogism) when we add a universal imperative sentence (the major 37

Quoting from Hesiod, LM, 140–5. Moral principles are also distinguished from prudential principles on the grounds that the proper class of comparison is not only acts affecting the agent’s own happiness, but acts which show “whether he is the sort of man to try to become like.” By the time of MT Hare replaced this criterion for distinguishing prescriptive moral and prescriptive non-moral value judgments with “overridingness,” already mentioned in passing at FR, 168–9. 38 Charles Stevenson told R. M. Hare that if he had been doing his theory over again, he would have put it in terms of universal prescriptions.

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premise) to an indicative minor premise, and derive a singular imperative. For example, “Take all the boxes to the station. This is one of the boxes. So take this to the station.” But there can be no valid inference to an imperative conclusion if the premises do not contain an imperative. Hare takes Hume to have shown that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is,” and that this dismantles almost all previous moral theories, except those of Aristotle and Kant “if studied in the right way.”39 The fundamental distinction here is between prescriptive and descriptive meaning. An utterance is prescriptive if it entails an imperative, descriptive if its meaning is given by the factual conditions for its correct application, for example, “the door is shut” by the door’s being shut. Hare assumes, like Hume, that facts do not motivate us if we merely recognize them or believe them but only if we have an attraction or aversion to which these facts connect. This denies the Platonic position that there could be a fact about something being good, or imitating the form of the good that motivates us when we recognize it or perceive it.40 But Hare accepts that evaluative meaning pervades our language, so that it is hard to find pure, value-free premises to serve as minor premises in practical inference. The problem is that there are often agreed-upon standards for evaluation within a community – for example, the standard that a good knife is sharp. The claim that a knife is sharp is a factual claim, in Hare’s sense, if it means that the knife cuts meat quickly and if we have a test for this that is not itself evaluative. If so, then the claim

39

The attribution to Hume is dubious. See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 36 ff. The attribution to Aristotle relies primarily on NE 1094a32-b13, 1143a8–11, and 1147a1b19. The attribution to Kant requires that Kant not be a theist. See R. M. Hare, Sorting Out Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, 27, “God, whom Kant would have liked to believe in.” 40 Hare chides Aristotle for careless language about the “perception” of value, LM, 54. For my own views see Hare, God’s Call, 1–48, and “Prescriptive Realism,” in Realism and Religion, ed. Andrew Moore and Michael Scott, Ashgate, 2006. I argue that there is no non-questionbegging way to rule out moral facts, and that there is no inconsistency between believing in moral facts and the view that value judgments have the function of expressing the will.

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is factual and has descriptive meaning. But we can also say “the knife is sharp” to commend the knife, using sharpness as a criterion of merit, and so of commendation. If I use the sharpness of the knife as a criterion for commending the knife, as most people do, I am endorsing this standard of the community to which I belong. This endorsement Hare calls “a decision of principle.” He thinks all decisions are to some extent decisions of principle except those that are completely arbitrary. The principle here is that knives are good when they are sharp, and my decision is to endorse this principle in commending the knife. Hare’s consequentialism is apparent in his defense of the necessity of principles for evaluation. Suppose I am deciding whether to sack a lazy employee, knowing it will cause financial distress to his family. “It is the effects which determine what I should be doing; it is between the two sets of effects that I am deciding. The whole point about a decision is that it makes a difference to what happens; and this difference is the difference between the effects of deciding one way, and the effects of deciding the other.” (LM, 56–7) Unless a decision is arbitrary, it must be grounded on some effects being more important than others. And the choice of one set over another (e.g. the efficiency of the firm over the well-being of the family) is a decision of principle. Even a clairvoyant observer, who could see all future effects, would have to decide on principles, and we limited humans need principles even more because we cannot work out from scratch each time which of the potentially infinite effects of our actions we should use as criteria for our decisions.41 We need to learn how to choose, and learning can only be done through principles. In all three of his major books, Hare uses the example of teaching someone how to drive. This can be done either by establishing relevant ends in advance, e.g. avoiding collision, and then learning what practices are conducive to those ends or by learning simple rules of thumb and coming to understand the ends later.42 “If I had to teach my twoyear old son to drive, I should have to adopt the same methods as I now adopt for teaching him to refrain from interfering with the controls when I am driving myself.” It is a principle that is learnt either way. 41

This figure becomes the archangel in MT. Hare worries about the connotations of the phrase “rules of thumb” at MT, 38.

42

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Hare is sometimes criticized for making value judgment arbitrary, because he says it rests on a decision.43 But his view is that a decision is not arbitrary if it is a decision of principle. If someone asks, “Why should I do that?” we will reply by saying that the effects are of a certain type. If pressed further as to why one should prefer effects of that type, we will (at the limit) have to give a complete specification of the way of life of which that type of effect is a part (LM, 69). Such a specification is impracticable, “but the nearest attempts are those given by the great religions, especially those which can point to historical persons who carried out the way of life in practice.” If we are pressed yet again, “Why should I live like that?” there is no answer, because everything that could go into an answer has already been said. A person finally just decides. But this does not make her decision arbitrary, any more than a complete description of the universe is unfounded, because no further fact could be called upon in corroboration of it.44 Hare is responding to the changed situation in Britain after the war, and he explicitly compares the war in this respect to the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece and the effect it had on moral life in the Greek city-states. Suppose one generation has become settled in its evaluative practices, which have become so far second nature that they seem to constitute the meanings of the moral words. If the next generation finds its situation radically changed (as the British did in 1945) and if it has been taught that the correct use of the language of morals is just the application of the old criteria, it may abandon moral language as inadequate to its experience. What is needed is the separation of meaning from criteria. The new generation can then use the words like “good” and “right” with the same prescriptive meaning as before but decide upon new criteria for application. If these words have come to include descriptive meaning in addition to their prescriptive meaning this descriptive meaning can (at least in principle) be separated out and rejected. For example, “if two Indian Army majors of the old school had been talking about a 43

For example, Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 19–21. 44 The emphasis here on decision, even on ungrounded decision, resembles Sartre’s account (summarized at the end of Chapter 3) of the young Frenchman deciding whether to join the resistance – except for the role that Hare gives to religion.

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new arrival in the Mess, and one of them had said ‘He’s an awfully good man’, we would have guessed that the subaltern referred to played polo, stuck pigs with élan, and was not on familiar terms with educated Indians.” (LM, 146) But this ossification of the phrase “good man” did not in fact prevent the Indian Army from changing its criteria for who counted as good men. Hare reintroduces into twentieth-century philosophy the medieval term “supervene” to describe the relation between prescriptive meaning and descriptive criteria.45 The term has become pervasive in other areas of philosophy. Hare’s claim is that the goodness of a thing is supervenient or consequent on the thing’s descriptive properties. Once we say that a strawberry (which is sweet, juicy, firm, red, and large) is good, we are committed to saying that any other strawberry that shares just those properties is good as well; but saying that a strawberry is good does not yet (before a decision about criteria) entail that it is sweet or juicy or firm or red or large. This relation of supervenience accounts for what Moore got right with his “open question argument.” We want to commend things that have the descriptive properties on which goodness supervenes. If we simply identify the goodness with the descriptive properties (as reductive definitions do), then if we say the juicy strawberry is good we are simply repeating ourselves. Although many evaluative terms have descriptive meaning as well as prescriptive meaning, Hare thinks prescriptive meaning is primary for a term like “good.” For terms like “tidy” or “industrious” (sometimes called “thick” terms in the later literature) he agrees that descriptive meaning may be primary. A sign of this is that we have no difficulty saying that someone is “too tidy.” The general principle is the more fixed or accepted a set of criteria become, the more descriptive information is conveyed by the corresponding value term. But it does not follow that prescriptive and descriptive force are inversely proportional. Hare gives the example of “good sewage effluent,” where the criteria are perfectly clear and the evaluative force is 45

In R. M. Hare, Objective Prescriptions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999, 77, he acknowledged that Scotus had used the term for a similar concept. See also W. D. Ross, The Right and The Good, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930, 121–3, where he identifies goodness and beauty as “consequential” attributes (as opposed to “constitutive” attributes, like yellow), and remarks “if A is beautiful, (something else) if exactly like it must be beautiful too.”

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fully maintained. He used to have on his wall a diagram from a farming journal, labeled “a good pig,” which detailed the required joints and their proportions for the butcher’s trade. Sometimes, however, evaluative or prescriptive force can be entirely lost. This happens when a value term is used in an “inverted commas” sense to allude to the value-judgments of other people, and the standards they apply, as when Satan says, in Paradise Lost “Evil be thou my good.” Satan is using “evil” descriptively, to refer to what God proscribes, but “good” prescriptively, to express his own commendation. The supervenience of value means that all value judgments are at least implicitly universal. This is because the subvening base (the sweetness, juiciness, firmness, redness, and largeness of the strawberry) consists of universal properties, in other words properties that could be held by more than one object. The value judgment commending the strawberry thus commits the person making the judgment to commend any other thing that is like the strawberry in the relevant respects. What are the relevant respects? Just those properties on which the goodness supervenes. Hare does not use the term “universalizability” in The Language of Morals, but the idea is there.46 Value judgments, even if singular in form, like “Porky is a good pig,” imply the universal evaluation that anything is good that has the relevantly similar properties. This is obscured by the failure to distinguish between two different distinctions, not kept apart in Aristotle or Kant.47 The first is the distinction between “universal” (making no reference to individuals) and “singular” (making such reference).48 46

“Universalizability” is the title of a paper Hare published in 1955 and reprinted in R. M. Hare, Essays on the Moral Concepts, London: Macmillan, 1972. However, the fact that the term giving the subvening property is universal does not show that all the terms in a value judgment must be universalizable. See Hare, The Moral Gap, 150–4, where I distinguish the different term-positions in a moral judgment, and how they are affected by universalization. See Chapter 3 of the present book, footnote 61. 47 The distinction is not yet worked out in LM, but see FR, 38 ff. and MT, 41 ff. A. W. Price in his excellent biographical memoir says, “Hare’s clarity on the matter is his most important non-disputable contribution to philosophy,” A. W. Price, “Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919–2002,” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 124 (2004). 48 A singular term can be introduced by “like” (e.g. “singing like Caruso”) and the judgment still be universalizable, because some set of universal properties must determine what counts as “like Caruso.”

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The second is the distinction between “general” and “specific,” and this is a matter of degree. “Do not kill the innocent” is more specific than “Do not kill” but less specific than “Do not kill the innocent except in self-defense.” All three principles are wholly universal. Value judgments can be universal and highly specific, spelling out in thousands of sentences and in minute detail the relevant properties of a situation. Likewise, they can be singular and general, like the judgment that all Canadians are virtuous, which makes singular reference to Canada. Moral judgments, if they are prescriptive, are a species of value judgments, and so they too are implicitly universal. If I judge that the life of St Francis is morally better than mine, prescriptivity requires me to try to live more like him.49 Universality requires me to judge better than my life the life of anyone who is more like St Francis than I am in the relevant respects. The combination of these features produces a problem about moral ideals that Hare never solved to his own satisfaction. In The Language of Morals, he raises the question about people who think that it is better that some practice not take place anywhere in the world (LM,143). The problem is with people he later calls “fanatics.” Suppose a person thinks some practice is abominable, whether he knows it is occurring or not and whether the people engaged in the practice agree with him or not. Hare wanted to answer the question when, and if so, why there is something irrational about this kind of fanatic, but he never succeeded in the terms of his own theory. I will come back in the following sections to two unsuccessful attempts to answer this question. A moral judgment containing “ought,” like a moral judgment containing “good,” entails an imperative if the moral words are used evaluatively, according to Hare’s definition of “evaluatively.” “You ought to tell her” entails “Tell her.” But surely I can say, without contradiction, “You ought to tell her, but don’t.” Hare deals with this problem in various ways, some of them postponed to his next book. One point he makes is that an obligation is not the same as a feeling of obligation.50 Hare says, “A Japanese brought up in accordance with Bushido might say, ‘I have a strong feeling that I ought to 49

Hare modifies this claim at FR, 155. There will also be qualifications arising from whether it is harder for me to approximate this ideal than others I may also have. 50 Kant puts this point in terms of the internal empirical route (Hutcheson) and the external empirical route (Montaigne).

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torture this prisoner in order to extract information which will be to my Emperor’s advantage; but ought I really to do so?’ ” (LM, 166) The “ought” in a moral judgment might, in this way, refer to a feeling not yet endorsed (so that no neustic is attached). Or it might refer to a general social consensus of disapproval that the person making the judgment does not herself endorse. The first “ought” describes a psychological fact, and the second, a sociological fact. In neither case is “ought” being used evaluatively in Hare’s sense, and so “You ought to, but don’t” understood in either of these ways does not present a problem for his account. Hare also admits that sincere assent (or subscription) comes in degrees.51 But he thinks something has gone wrong when a person says, “I ought to, but I won’t.” It is not that she is misusing the logic of the word “ought,” since the term allows use without subscription. But there is a dissonance between the two parts of what she says – a dissonance we would not understand if we did not see that the case in which an imperative is entailed is the primary case. Perhaps, even in a single utterance, there could be a weakly commissive value term combined with an explicit imperative, more fully subscribed to, which has the function of bolstering commitment. Hare gives the example of Psalm 34: 14, which says, “Eschew evil and do good.” Is this instruction a tautology, with an assented-to imperative simply repeating what is already implicit in the adjective? Hare says not necessarily, because the adjective purports to express an endorsement of criteria that may not in fact be whole-heartedly endorsed, and the function of the imperative is then to “ram back in place” the endorsement (LM, 174). The Language of Morals ends with an “analytical model,” which artificially separates the phrastic from the other constituents of a moral utterance (e.g. “It was not right to joke about Jones so soon after his death,” or “it was not good . . . ,” or “you ought not to . . .”) and attempts to clarify the different relations of “good,” “ought,” and 51

LM, 169. This means that any analysis of the foregoing cases in terms of “inverted commas” will be misleading, because inverted commas are either there or not; the notation does not allow degrees. In the same way, talk about a “neustic” is misleading, because it suggests an operator that is either on or off, and not somewhere in the middle. This is one place where the language of “a logical study” is unfortunate. Hare concedes that our use of value terms is “Janus-like,” see my footnote 34 in this chapter, but even Janus had only two faces.

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“right” in ordinary language to this phrastic. The analytical model is designed to capture the force of the evaluative meaning in Hare’s sense, of these terms. He states, but does not further argue, that the descriptive meaning sufficiently explains our sense of the moral principle “already being there” before we prescribe it, insofar as we are acknowledging that the criteria are already agreed to.52

Freedom and Reason Hare’s second book was published in 1962, and it takes up several loose ends left by The Language of Morals. He named it Freedom and Reason because it is an examination of the consequences of combining two ideas in moral theory, “the freedom to form our own opinions about moral questions, even if that involves changing our language,” and the constraint that answering moral questions is “a rational activity” (FR, 4). These turn out to correlate with the two features of moral judgments that we met in The Language of Morals, that they are prescriptive and universalizable. We are not constrained in our moral judgments by the descriptive meaning of a moral term like “industrious,” because we are free to use the prescriptive meaning of “good” or “right” to pass a negative judgment on industry and commend, instead, the life of ease.53 But if I commend Joe’s life for being free of work and care, I am still committed to commending any other life that is similar in the relevant respects (the respects that led me to commend Joe’s life). This feature, namely universalizability, is foundational to any use of reason, moral or otherwise. This is just as true if I describe a strawberry as red; I am committed to calling red anything similar to the strawberry in the relevant respects. Freedom and Reason goes beyond The Language 52

LM, 195. But prescriptivism, if defined as the view that value judgment standardly has a prescriptive component, does not require this. A Kantian who thinks that the autonomous will has the property “of being a law to itself,” can say consistently that there is an action-guiding principle “already there” that the person making the judgment endorses, and in this way “makes a law for herself.” I argued in Chapter 3 that this was in fact Kant’s view. 53 This is the deepest sense in which Hare is, as he says, a “protestant,” see MT, 69. He is interested in the possibility of radical reform.

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of Morals, however, in proposing a method of moral reasoning, and this will be my focus in describing the book. Hare labels this kind of reasoning, “golden-rule argument.” He is restating the principle “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”54 He is also restating Kant’s principle that “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law,” if “willing” is understood as assenting to an imperative (FR, 34). The method starts with the notion of a “principle,” found already in The Language of Morals. We must guard, again, against confusing “universality” and “generality.” Principles have to be universal, but they do not have to be general. Sometimes, but not always, it is right to make a general rule into a “matter of principle.” Hare considers the case of torture: In cases which actually occur – as contrasted with those which are logically possible – I hold, having seen the sorts of things that happen, that the ill effects on society of this insidious evil are always such as far to counterbalance any good that might come of it, even if the most important consideration, the suffering of the victim, be left out of account. I have, therefore, no hesitation at all in saying that police officers, however desperate the circumstances, ought to make it a matter of principle never even to contemplate such methods. (FR, 44)

So the principle forbidding torture, although it has logically possible exceptions (Hare imagines a sadistic bacteriologist who has broadcast a lethal biological agent into the population and is the only one who knows an antidote), has no actual exceptions. Moreover, the process of considering exceptions is corrupting, and leads to the “ill effects” he mentions. So it is better to make the proscription “a matter of principle.” Even if principles are highly specific, however, and decided upon in light of a full consideration of the details of a particular case, they are still universal. This means that Hare’s method entails the denial of relativism. If something is wrong, it is wrong for 54

Luke 6: 31, in the King James translation. This verse is sometimes mistranslated as prescribing action towards others in a way that you would want others to act towards you, or as you wish others to act towards you. See MT, 96, FR, 108. But the Greek says “in a way that you do want [thelete].” The King James “would” is an old form of the indicative.

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anybody anywhere to do something that is in the relevant respects like this. The relevant respects are all the descriptive features on which the wrongness supervenes. It is true that there may not be another situation that is just like this one in all the relevant respects. And this may seem to deprive the method of its usefulness. But there is always at least one other situation that is relevantly similar, namely the hypothetical situation in which the parties to the actual situation have changed places. This is what makes the method a “golden rule” method. A trumpeter whose nocturnal practice sessions are disturbing her neighbor in their apartment complex, if she is to prescribe a principle that she could accept for any relevantly similar situation, has to consider the hypothetical situation in which she and her neighbor have changed places, and she has come to hate late-night trumpet-playing to the degree that her neighbor now hates it. Moral freedom, in Hare’s sense, requires that we can decide how to act. “Ought,” as in Kant’s doctrine, implies “can,” although the doctrine needs some qualification. It is true that it makes sense to say “I ought to go and see him, but I can’t, because I don’t know where he is” (FR, 52). This may be because when I say “I ought” I mean that people generally think one ought, or that I have a feeling of guilt or remorse about not seeing him. If so, I am stating, as The Language of Morals puts it, a sociological or a psychological fact, and not prescribing at all. More often, I may be prescribing for people in general, but making an exception for myself “where a corner of the net is, as it were, lifted to allow the speaker himself to escape.” Kant also discusses this kind of case in the Groundwork (4: 424). Even when I am prescribing for myself, Hare denies that there is an implication in the strict sense to my being able to do the action. The situation is rather that in cases where I am unable to do an action, the question of whether I ought to do the action does not arise.55 Hare mentions Aristotle’s example of a man who is blown onto shore by a gale. The question “Ought I sail to shore?” does not arise. Does the question arise if I am psychologically unable to do the action? Here we return to the problem of weakness of will, whose psychological aspect was left, in The Language of Morals, for subsequent treatment. Hare quotes two famous passages, one from Ovid 55

FR, 54. Hare says the relation is like that between “The King of France is wise” and “There is a King of France.” See P. F. Strawson, “On Referring,” Mind 59 (1950), 330 ff.

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and one from St Paul. Ovid’s poem describes the helplessness of Medea, unable to resist her desire for Jason, even though she knows the ills it will bring. St Paul writes, “The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will; and if what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent, but sin that has its lodging in me.” (Romans 7, New English Bible). Hare comments that “it is not in Medea’s or St Paul’s psychological power to act on the imperatives that are entailed by the moral judgements which they are making” (FR, 79). Frequently people object to Hare’s account on the grounds that weakness of the will is quite ordinary and does not usually involve being swept away by desire. Austin has an elegant footnote: I am very partial to ice-cream, and a bombe is served divided into segments corresponding one to one with the persons at High Table: I am tempted to help myself to two segments and do so, thus succumbing to temptation and even conceivably (but why necessarily?) going against my principles. But do I lose control of myself? Do I raven, do I snatch the morsels from the dish and wolf them down, impervious to the consternation of my colleagues? Not a bit of it. We often succumb to temptation with calm and even with finesse.56

As it stands, this does not work as an objection to Hare. He is talking about what he calls, following Kant, a “holy” or “angelic” moral language. The term “angelic” here, as in Moral Thinking where he talks about the “archangel,” is not quite appropriate. Kant uses the notion of a “holy” will (which he attributes only to God, and not to the angels) to describe a being that has no inclinations contrary to the moral law. Hare also explains that a holy will has no “selfish inclinations.” But angels and archangels do sometimes have such inclinations – that is how Lucifer and his angels fell from Heaven.57 So we should stick, as Kant does, to God. God is the model of perfect universal prescription. This is the kind of moral language, Hare says, that we aspire to, although we do not achieve it. Our merely human moral language contains all the slip-room we need to 56

Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” 2nd edn, 198. Hare discusses this case at MT, 57, and says that it is not a case of weakness, but of “taking a moral holiday.” 57 Hare concedes this at MT, 45.

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avoid the requirements of what Kant calls “pure practical reason.” Hare borrows Nowell-Smith’s term at this point, that the human “ought” is a “Janus-word,” with two aspects to its meaning, one of which can be emphasized to the neglect of the other (FR, 75). The two relevant aspects are not the prescriptive and descriptive meanings of moral words, for “angelic” moral language has both of these. Rather, the two aspects are that one looks towards full universal prescriptivity, and the other “looks in the direction that suits its user’s interests.” If we prescribe that we ought to get up in the morning, and fail to do so we can go on using the word “ought” in its second, “weak” aspect, which was one of its aspects all along. Some people make this switch with full self-knowledge; they are the hypocrites. Most of us, however, do not self-consciously choose this. Rather, “most of us find it impossibly hard, not being angels, to think in any other way.” So this is the impossibility Hare is thinking about: an impossibility for humans to be angels or, better, God, even though we have angelic or, better, godlike aspirations. We are stuck in a moral gap. He is not, despite the examples, talking about “ravening.” And in fact St Paul is not talking about this either; “I myself,” he says, “am subject to God’s law as a rational being, but, in my unspiritual nature, am a slave to the law of sin.” Being a slave to sin is quite compatible with calm and even with finesse. Hare goes on to refer to Paul’s invocation of divine assistance, which makes the humanly impossible possible.58 An objection can still be made. If we do not invoke divine assistance, and full universal prescriptivity is impossible for us, then we have what Kant called “Spener’s problem,” referring to the great pietist.59 How can we be under the law if we cannot fulfill it? Surely, the highest standard to which we can be accountable is one we are able to reach, and if we do not have God’s assistance, it is one we are able to reach by our own resources. This problem I have discussed elsewhere.60 58

Reinhold Niebuhr coins the phrase “an impossible possibility” in The Nature and Destiny of Man, New York; Scribners, 1948, and it is a phrase Hare liked and wanted me to use in The Moral Gap. 59 Kant, Conflict of the Faculties, 7: 54. 60 Hare, The Moral Gap, 38–68. Keith Wyma, in Crucible of Reason, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004, argues that Hare’s account in FR is inconsistent with the subsequent dichotomy in MT between critical

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The “golden-rule” method is most clearly seen in an example Hare adapts from Matthew 18: Person A owes money to person B, while B owes money to C, and it is the law that creditors may exact debts by putting their debtors into prison. If B says, “I ought to put A in prison, because he will not pay what he owe,” he must assent to the principle that anyone in his position should put such a debtor in prison. This, then, applies to C, since C is in the same position in the relevant respects. And if B says that C ought to put him in prison, the singular prescription follows: “Let C put me in prison.” If B is not ready to accept this singular prescription, however, the logic of the moral words prevents him accepting the prescription that he, B, ought to put A in prison. To get this argument to work we need four ingredients: the facts, the logic of the moral words, B’s inclination not to go to prison, and (especially in cases where the positions of the parties are not symmetrical) an ability to imagine relevant hypothetical situations in which roles are reversed. An Ideal Observer theory coincides with the “golden-rule” method if the Ideal Observer is not only impartial but sympathetic, as the Christian God is held to be.61 There are various ways that B can try to escape this argument. He can refuse to argue morally at all (but then he must be consistent in this refusal), or he can depart from either the prescriptivity or the universalizability of the moral words (but then he can be shown to depart from the aspirations of “our” language). But there is another escape route that is much harder to cut off. Hare’s response to this occupies about a third of the book. The route is to become the person Hare calls “the fanatic.” In order to understand the fanatic, we need to start with the distinction between interests and ideals. To have an interest is “for there to be something which one wants, or is likely in the future to want, or which is (or is likely to be) a means necessary or sufficient for the

and intuitive thinking. He cites St Augustine in Confessions VII and VIII as someone who belongs in neither category. But Hare allows (MT, 200) for saintly intuitive thinking, as a different subspecies of thinking, and might construe Augustine as reflecting about whether this is the proper subspecies for his present condition. 61 This is why R. B. Brandt, who initially endorsed an Ideal Observer theory, came to reject it; everyone assumed he was talking about God, and he was not.

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attainment of something which one wants (or is likely to want).”62 An ideal is something one thinks good independently of one’s own or others’ interests. A fan of a team wants the team to win, but this desire is not an ideal, because he only wants the team to win so long as he supports them. But a trumpeter who treats playing in tune as an ideal will prescribe that people should play in tune even if she loses her concern about it and no-one else cares about it either. This example concerns an aesthetic ideal rather than a moral one. But moral ideals are not hard to find. Someone who thinks it is degrading for a person to strip for paying customers or to have sex for money probably has an ideal of human dignity that is offended by such practices even if every party is getting what he or she wants. Retributive justice can provide such an ideal, or property rights, or marital fidelity. Someone who is choosing between becoming an army officer or a stock-broker may think the former way of life nobler than the latter, although he may think the contribution of each profession to people’s overall interests is the same.63 Ideals in this sense render golden-rule arguments ineffective, because these arguments are based on an appeal to universalized self-interest, and the person “who has whole-heartedly espoused such an ideal does not mind if people’s interests – even his own – are harmed in the pursuit of it” (FR, 105). Hare labels the hard-core Fascist an idealist in this sense, as someone who thinks something ought to be brought into existence (a pure society), whether or not anybody else wants it, even he himself if his tastes change. Hare does not think that universal prescriptivism can show that the fanatic is irrational, or abusing moral language. However, in this first attempt to deal with the problem, he suggests that once fanatics see the cost of their fanaticism clearly, there will turn out to be very few of them. The Nazi will have to be able to prescribe, if he discovers he has a Jewish grandparent, that he himself should be eliminated. This is logically possible, and there is at least one story of it actually occurring. But most people, Hare thinks, would back down 62

FR, 122. In MT the notion is refined further and somewhat altered. Something is “in someone’s interest” if it is “such as he would choose if he fulfilled the requirement of prudence” (MT, 191). I will discuss this in the following section. 63 FR, 148. All of these are examples where Hare thinks utilitarian arguments (from interests rather than ideals) can be suggested, but where the idealist is not relying on such arguments.

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if they saw this was the implication of their views.64 If we were omnipotent, we could say to the would-be fanatic, “We have arranged for there to be a special planet for people like you, in which you would be allowed to pursue your ideal, on condition that you played, in strict rotation, the roles of yourself and of all those affected by your policy, one by one” (FR, 199). Most people are muddled about what adherence to their ideals implies. The contribution of moral philosophy, Hare thinks, is to show that fanaticism has implications that very few people, even those with Nazi ideals, would accept. Setting ideals aside, we end up with a method close to utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill expressed utilitarianism in its classical form in terms of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Hare does not put his own theory in terms of “happiness” because of the indeterminacy of the concept. To judge someone “happy” requires a complicated mixture of one’s own evaluation and the other person’s. On the one hand, a person whose life we appraise highly would not be happy if she hated every minute of it. On the other hand, even if she is living in the way she prefers to live that does not seem sufficient. Perhaps people with certain kinds of mental defect are satisfied with their lives, but (Hare thinks) we are struck by “how much they are missing” and do not call them happy “in the fullest sense of the word” (FR, 127). We would not say that an opium addict is happy (really happy), Hare thinks, even if she always had enough opium. Utilitarianism did not have much success, Hare says, with the language of “happiness” precisely because of the different evaluations that different people bring to the judgment that a life is happy. So Hare proposes to replace “maximizing happiness” with “maximizing the satisfaction of interests,” realizing that the restrictive definition 64

Unfortunately, this treatment of ideals does not succeed in rescuing the theory. The trouble is that the theory needs to deal not just with fanatics who override interests completely, but with all preferences, which vary independently of interests in the defined sense. I will return to this difficulty in considering Hare’s attempted proof of utilitarianism in MT. Even if there are very few people who would give their ideals (whether personal or universal) the kind of precedence that the fanatical Nazi gives them, there are multitudes of people who give ideals some place in their moral thinking. A theory that does not assign a place to ideals leaves moral thinking radically indeterminate.

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of “interests” will prevent his theory from covering all cases of moral judgment, since it will not cover ideals. With this replacement in place we get straight to a limited utilitarianism as soon as we realize that we have to consider the interests of all parties affected by what we do. Hare has already argued that universalizability implies that everyone is entitled to equal consideration, in the sense that some difference in universal descriptive properties must be cited as the ground for any difference in moral judgment between two cases.65 In the case of A, B, and C, we considered only the three parties. But a judge, for example, should not be deterred by the thought that she would prefer not to go to prison, were she in the criminal’s position, and this is because she has to consider the interests of all those whom it is her job to represent. It is true that there are huge numbers of such people, and it is true that comparing the interests of different people is often very difficult. But Hare thinks that “we all do, in a rough and ready way, make use of such comparisons in arriving at our moral judgements”(FR, 120). Some disputes within utilitarianism are resolved by Hare’s analysis. For example, there is a dispute between “act-utilitarians,” who think we should evaluate each act in terms of whether it maximizes the satisfaction of interests or preferences, and “rule-utilitarians,” who think we should ask whether rules that prescribe types of actions maximize satisfaction if generally adopted. Hare’s analysis shows that even the evaluation of a single act is always under a universal description, and so the difference between the two forms of utilitarianism becomes a question of the degree of generality in the principles being considered. He says more about this when he distinguishes between “critical” and “intuitive” thinking in Moral 65

Rawls objected to this claim, since he held that utilitarianism does not respect the person (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, 27–32). A utilitarian can prescribe distribution constraints endorsed at the critical level in terms of acceptance utility (see FR, 120), but Rawls wanted such constraints built into the method of moral thinking itself. One implication of Hare’s view is that Kant is brought closer to utilitarianism than he is usually supposed to be, since the utilitarian is willing under universal law the maxim to bring about certain effects for certain reasons. But Kant’s view of moral worth is indifferent to actual consequences as opposed to intended consequences. See Hare, “Could Kant have been a Utilitarian?” reprinted in Sorting Out Ethics, 147–65.

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Thinking. On the question of whether we should give equal weight to all desires of the same intensity or privilege those that are “higher,” in the sense Mill talks about higher pleasures, Hare suggests that we can side with Bentham and provide for Mill’s higher pleasures in the theory of ideals (which is not covered by utilitarianism). But if Hare’s theory does not have a satisfactory account of ideals, this is not going to be much help. One ideal Hare explicitly embraces is the ideal of toleration, where this is a readiness to respect other people’s ideals as if they were one’s own (FR, 177). This does not mean agreeing with those ideals, or having diminished confidence in one’s own, but it does mean not interfering with other people’s pursuit of their ideals unless that pursuit interferes with still other people pursuing theirs. The liberal thus “keeps his ideals of the good man and of the good society separate.” The liberal may have a picture of what an excellent human life is like, and she is free to propagate her ideal for human life by all the means to which she has access, but not if these means interfere with the freedom of others to propagate their ideals. Liberalism is here described as an ideal, and is therefore not justified (as it is by Mill) by arguments from the principle of utility.

Moral Thinking Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (1981) is the last of Hare’s books that I will consider. The two themes I want to emphasize from this book are its discussion of different levels of moral thinking and its proof of utilitarianism. First, the levels. Hare distinguishes between what he calls the “intuitive” and “critical” levels. He approaches the distinction by considering cases of conflict between principles. For example, what should you do if you have promised your children to go for a picnic on the river, and then a philosopher and friend arrives from Australia and wants to be shown the Oxford colleges? One principle tells you to keep your promises and another tells you not to disappoint your friends and fellow philosophers. These principles conflict, not in themselves, but because, in this particular situation, you cannot comply with both of them. Commitment to a principle brings with it remorse, or at least compunction, when you fail to comply with it. Are you stuck with these feelings, whatever you do? Or might you feel something like regret (as you

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would feel if the picnic was cancelled by rain), but not remorse or compunction? After all, you cannot comply with both principles and therefore cannot be blamed for not doing so. But it seems to be the mark of a good person to feel more than regret when violating a principle of this kind. One solution would be to revise the intuitive principle you are overriding, so that it includes an exception clause: e.g. “Keep your promises except when the promises are to your children and keeping them means disappointing your friends and fellow-philosophers who have come from a long distance.” The trouble is you will very soon get to unmanageably long principles, when they are revised to include all the exceptions required by all the encountered conflicts. This would not be necessary, Hare says, if we could suppose that God had arranged that no complicated conflicts arise. Hare does have faith that the world is such as to make morality viable, and he calls this faith in Providence. But this is not faith that principles will not conflict, but “that God has, and we have to a much more limited degree, the means (rational moral thinking) wherewith to resolve at the critical level conflicts which arise at the intuitive.”66 A critical level of moral thinking is required, Hare thinks, not only because our intuitions conflict, but also because they are incomplete or sometimes (because of the way we have been brought up) just wrong. Our intuitions are incomplete,in that they will often not cover new situations in which we find ourselves. They will be wrong if we have grown up, for example, in a racist society in which we have learned to demean people of a different race. So, Hare argues, we need a level of moral thinking that is of unlimited specificity (so that length of principle does not matter), unconstrained in its operations by any content derived from a social consensus on criteria (so that we are free to condemn our upbringing and our society), and not subject to being itself overridden. A person who operated only at this level of moral thinking would have to have unlimited access to the facts, especially the facts about which outcomes would satisfy everyone’s preferences, and would have to have unlimited ability to counter any selfishness and weakness within herself. In the terms used in Hare’s previous books, such a person would combine 66

MT, 34. MT, 205 refers to “The Simple Believer” for discussion of the kind of faith morality requires. This essay is reprinted in R. M. Hare, Essays on Religion and Education, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, 1–36.

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clairvoyance and a holy will. In Moral Thinking Hare calls this person an “archangel.” But we have already seen that he also thinks of God in this role, and that God is a more appropriate exemplar than any archangel. A person who operated only at the level of intuitive thinking would be, in Hare’s term, a “prole” (after Orwell’s 1984). But no human being, Hare says, operates only at one level. He is not repeating the structure of Plato’s Republic, in which the class at the bottom, because of incapacity, has to rely on the wisdom of the Guardians. We all have characteristics of both archangel and prole, to limited and varying degrees. But none of us has the capacity to do critical thinking to the highest standard. Hare says, “If we do not think that men can do it, we shall have to invoke a Butlerian God to do it for us, and reveal the results through our conscience.” He goes on to ask how we would then be able to distinguish between the voice of God and the voices of our nursemaids (if we had them).67 How does the archangel think? Hare identifies two tasks she has. She has to decide what to do, situation by situation, and she also has to decide what intuitions or principles we should live by when we are not doing critical thinking. She accomplishes the first task by a preference-satisfaction version of act-utilitarianism, to which I will come shortly. She accomplishes the second task by asking about candidate principles whether, if they were generally adopted, people would be better off (this is “the general acceptance utility” of the principle). Hare understands this second idea (people being better off) in terms of people having their preferences satisfied. The second task therefore requires the archangel to look to what is likely in the actual world, not in other possible worlds. For example, suppose the archangel is considering whether we should wear seat belts when we are driving. It may happen, in rare cases, that someone not wearing a seat belt, knocked unconscious in an accident, is thrown by the 67

MT, 45–6. See Butler’s discussion of our ignorance in comparison with God in Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons, Charlottesville, VA: Ibis Publishing 1987, 175: “And, since there appears such a subordination and reference of the several parts to each other, as to constitute it properly one administration or government; we cannot have a thorough knowledge of any part, without knowing the whole.” On Hare’s doctrine, humans are incapable of critical thinking except by approximation, MT, 99. This generates what I have elsewhere called the problem of “the moral gap.” How can we hold ourselves accountable to a standard we are unable to reach?

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impact clear of a burning vehicle. In these cases, the drivers were better off not wearing a belt. But because these cases are rare, the archangel properly discounts them. Perhaps in some possible worlds, this sort of thing happens all the time, but not in ours, and this is what counts for general acceptance utility. We should therefore expect that, in these rare cases, the archangel will prescribe something at odds with the principles she prescribes for our lives as a whole. Hare’s defense of utilitarianism rests heavily on this point, and I will come back to it. So what authority do our intuitions retain? Sometimes, Hare says, we can be sure about our intuitive judgment in a particular case of conflict and we do not need to question it. He mentions the initial promise-breaking example, where you decide to take your Australian friend around the colleges and break your promise to your children (MT, 27, 50). Sometimes, thinking critically will lead you to modify a principle for the long term, because you see that there is a regularly needed qualification. Sometimes, you can legitimately decide to leave critical thinking about how to rank a set of principles until later; you might know that something is wrong or unresolved, but you are not sure what it is, and you do not have the time or the required impartiality or information to do the necessary critical thinking right away. So intuitions may often (in fact usually) determine what we do. But their authority is always provisional, for Hare, awaiting validation from the critical level.68 Having understood the two levels, we can now understand Hare’s claim that moral judgments are “overriding.” Clearly moral judgments can be overridden, on his theory, as intuitive judgments can be overridden at the critical level, or critical judgments can be overridden by self-interest in cases of weakness. But to treat a principle as overriding is “to let it always override other principles when they 68

In this way Hare’s method is different from Rawls’s method of “reflective equilibrium,” in which a person’s initial “sense of justice” and his or her theory are both allowed to correct each other, in the way a “sense of grammaticalness” and proposed rules of grammar can correct each other, without an in-principle preference for the latter. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 48–53. One difficulty in adjudicating this dispute is that Hare does not have a worked-out place in his theory for ideals, and this means that many of our initial intuitions (which derive from ideals) are not given a place in the theory either.

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conflict with it and, in the same way, let it override all other prescriptions.” (MT, 56)69 He talks about two types of moral judgment being treated as overriding: judgments at the critical level and judgments at the intuitive level that are endorsed at the critical level. Since “universalizable,” “prescriptive,” and “overriding” jointly define the kind of moral language Hare is talking about, he has to concede that if we treat an aesthetic judgment as overriding then we are treating it as moral, as (being evaluative) it is already universalizable and prescriptive. For example, if my wife has given me magenta cushions for a scarlet sofa, I might let the aesthetic principle that forbids the juxtaposition of those colors override the principle that forbids giving offence to the people I love. Then the aesthetic principle has become also a moral one. One more point about the levels is that Hare thinks there are at least three sub-levels of the intuitive level. There are principles one can prescribe for everyone, or almost everyone, for example, the prohibition on killing the innocent. There are principles binding on people in a certain role, for example on doctors. Finally, there are principles that one takes as binding on oneself, and on people like oneself, with which one does not expect other people to comply, even though the principles are universal in the sense of containing no ineliminable singular reference. For example, Hare says, “If I were very saintly like Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa, I might have much more exacting principles than in fact I have; and the same would apply in the case of conduct in the face of danger if I were more courageous than I am.”70 So Hare’s theory has something intermediate between the intuitive sub-level of common principles and the

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Hare says that an intuitive judgment that is overridden at the critical level is still prescriptive, but is not applied in a particular situation. He does not explain how this sense of “prescriptive” is consistent with the definition given at MT, 21. We will return to this in the final section of the next chapter. 70 MT, 200. The idea is not that I am trying to be like the archangel tout court, which might not make sense given how unlike archangels we are, but that I am trying to take the advice that the archangel would give for my situation including my dispositions, which may be less saintly than those of St Francis. See Michael Smith, “The Definition of ‘Moral,’” in Singer and His Critics, ed. Dale Jamieson, Oxford; Blackwell, 1999, 51–3.

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critical level, though Hare does not acknowledge anything intermediate between the intuitive level as a whole and the critical level. His examples of better lives, as in his earlier books, are religious ones, and his central term for the propulsion towards such a life is “vocation.” The principles I should adopt at the intuitive level include “principles proper to my vocation in a much more personal sense, akin to that which it has in theology. And for some these will be pretty stringent; but others would be foolish to aspire to these, because they will never bring it off.” Hare goes on to say that there are many more ways than one of being a saint, or even a moderately good man, and he commends Strawson’s defense (as he had at FR, 151 ff) of the diversity of ideals: One man (“the athlete”) thinks it good to wake up early and run a few miles every day while another man (“the devoted bread-winner”) thinks it good to stay in bed and closely study The Financial Times. According to the thesis of universalizability, we cannot say the life of one man is good and the life of another is not good if the two are the same in the relevant respects. But we can say that two different lives are both good. This means, though Hare does not say this, that archangels will agree about how we should live, and what intuitions we should adopt, only to the extent that they share the same ideals. I come now to the second main theme of Moral Thinking, namely the proof of utilitarianism. We can think of this as a proof that archangels, who are constrained only by facts and logic (facts about the preferences that will be satisfied by an action and the logical properties of the moral words) will inevitably use an act-utilitarian method of moral thinking. Hare’s strategy is to consider one class of effects that we are bound to consider relevant, if we are trying to do critical thinking, namely effects on our own and other people’s experiences, and on whether those experiences are such as we and they prefer.71 Preferences are necessarily relevant if moral judgment is prescriptive, because to prescribe is to express a preference and to have a preference is to accept a prescription. Hare begins with the prudential case and moves to the moral. I have preferences for my

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MT, 91. Hare is willing to include the experiences of animals other than humans in this class, but he does not discuss the implications of this inclusion. See “Why I am only a Demi-vegetarian,” in Singer and his Critics, 233–46.

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own life and, if I am rational (in the sense of “prudent”), I will have a dominant preference for the maximal satisfaction of my preferences now for my experience now and of my preferences later on for my experience later on.72 I will also have preferences now for my experience then, and these might be different from the preferences I will have then. For example, people may express an advance preference, in a living will, to be taken off life-support systems if a certain quality of life cannot be maintained. But those same people may express the preference, when on the life-support systems, to have their lives prolonged, even without that quality of life. Hare holds that prudence requires us to ignore now-for-then preferences, which are a kind of ideal. The person who then wants those preferences satisfied, overriding his then-for-then preferences, is an “auto-fanatic” (MT, 105). Hare defines “interest” in terms of what prudence requires. He thus ends up with a happiness version of preference-satisfaction, if we think of “the greatest happiness” as “the maximal satisfaction of now-for-now and then-for-then preferences.” The happiest people are those who most experience, at all times, what they then prefer to experience. A person will form preferences not only for her own situation, but conditionally for what should happen to her, should she find herself in someone else’s situation. Here we need a subtle distinction. These conditional preferences are not preferences she would have if she were in the other’s situation, but preferences she now has for the hypothetical situation in which she is in the other’s situation.73 Hare appeals to what Allan Gibbard calls “the conditional reflection prin72

One objection often raised is to the notion that we should maximize preference-satisfaction. Thus Robert M. Adams, in Finite and Infinite Goods, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 56, says that we should “reject, as insufficiently open-ended, the standard utilitarian assumptions that there is a best possible outcome, and hence a best possible way to act, in any situation.” But a utilitarian could talk more modestly of “sufficing” rather than maximizing, holding that enough preferences have to be satisfied, and then try to give an account of how much is enough. A second problem is that most of our preferences are now-for-then preferences, and in planning ahead (which is the major function of prudence) there is no way to avoid them. 73 See footnote 54 of this chapter about the formulation of the golden rule in this respect.

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ciple,” that “I cannot know the extent and quality of others’ suffering and, in general, motivations and preferences without having equal motivations with regard to what should happen to me, were I in their places, with their motivations and preferences.”74 For example, suppose I am listening to a children’s violin recital. I do not know what it is like for the person next to me who has perfect pitch unless I have as great an aversion to hearing the out-of-tune notes in the hypothetical situation where I am in her shoes as she has in her actual situation. To form a conditional preference for the hypothetical situation of being “in her shoes,” requires reflecting her actual preferences for her actual situation. The preferences are part of the shoes. This does not mean that we ever know perfectly, or even very fully, what it is like to be someone else. As we saw with Kant, we probably do not know our own deepest preferences, let alone those of others. But we approximate this knowledge, and in so doing, we try to approximate as far as humans can the condition of God, who “sees the heart.” “Archangels can do [this full representation and identification], and of course God . . . We human beings are not gifted with so much sensitivity or sympathy, and for that reason have to make do for the most part with intuitive thinking” (MT, 99). There is one more preliminary matter before we move from prudence to morality. To “identify” with another person, actually or hypothetically, requires identifying with her prescriptions, Hare says. Even to identify with my own future, I have to now prescribe that my then-for-then preferences be satisfied. Hare calls this “the prescriptivity of ‘I’.”75 This kind of identification may well be contingent and

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MT, 99. Allan Gibbard, “Hare’s Analysis of ‘Ought’ and its Implications,” in Hare and Critics, eds Douglas Seanor and N. Fotion, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 57–72. Hare initially proposed the title “Hare and Hounds,” but the publisher demurred. 75 The prescriptivity of “I” prevents an entailment (which would be embarrassing to Hare) from a “purely factual” premise about what I would prefer in another person’s situation to a prescriptive, though hypothetical, conclusion expressing what I now conditionally prefer. The premise is not “purely factual” if “I” is prescriptive. Putting this as A. W. Price does in his biographical memoir, the prescriptivity of “I” makes the conditional reflection principle to be consistent with the Humean thought that a belief cannot itself generate a preference.

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a matter of degree even for the case of personal identity across time. People seem to identify to different degrees with their futures.76 Certainly our identification with other people is a matter of degree. Hypothetical identification with someone, however, even though it is prescriptive, is not yet moral concern. I prescribe not that her preferences be satisfied but that my preferences be satisfied for the hypothetical situation in which I am “in her shoes.” Once we understand prudence we get to morality by removing any greater concern for our own prudential prescriptions than for the prudential prescriptions of others. Moral judgment requires this, because its “logic” does not permit me to refer to myself or to any other particular person occupying the roles in the situation I confront. I have to prescribe, if I am prescribing morally, for what should happen in that situation whoever is occupying those roles. So the archangel makes a moral judgment by identifying hypothetically with each of the affected parties in some situation, and then making those acquired hypothetical preferences her actual preferences for what should be done in that situation. If I am ideally rational and universalize my preferences I will want for another person whatever I want for myself should I be in his exact circumstance. The archangel’s preference all told (her overriding preference) about a situation constitutes a moral judgment when she prefers all told the same alternative for any position she might occupy. Hare thinks that this combination of premises (prescriptivity, overridingness, universalizability, and the conditional reflection principle) gives us preference-satisfaction utilitarianism. He thinks all archangels considering the facts and constrained by the logic of the moral words will reach the same conclusion about what should be done for any situation. It will be what maximizes the preference-satisfaction of all affected parties. Does his argument succeed? One problem is that Hare has confined the scope of the conditional reflection principle, and so of his proof of utilitarianism, to preferences that concern the intrinsic qualities of present experience (to 76

It is a different question whether other criteria for personal identity across time, e.g. continuity of body or memory, are matters of degree and are contingent. The sense of “ideal” is not exactly the same as that discussed in the previous section of this chapter, which was not defined with reference to the distinction between basic and non-basic preferences. I will return to this point.

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preferences now for experience now and preferences at a later time for experience at that later time). Call these “basic” preferences. The conditional reflection principle tells us that anyone who really understands what, for example, someone’s suffering is like will prefer not to undergo it, and prefer this as strongly as the person actually undergoing it. But this principle does not cover idiosyncratic preferences, such as the preference for an expensive funeral (assuming this is not something I then experience), the preference that my wife be faithful (whether I know about it or not), the preference that there not be any Jews (whether I know about them or not), and the preference that in the future, I develop my higher faculties (whether at that later time I prefer this or not). These preferences are idiosyncratic in the sense that someone might fully and vividly understand the circumstances in which a person has such a preference and not have a conditional preference exactly like it in strength and direction for the hypothetical case of being in that person’s precise circumstances. These idiosyncratic preferences are ideals, either personal (if they are ideals for oneself) or universal (if they are ideals for everyone).77 If I universalize my judgment without restriction to basic preferences, what sympathetic preferences will I come to have? I will have sympathetic preferences that echo all the basic preferences at full strength of all the other people affected plus their ideals. I may also have universal idiosyncratic preferences that would be the same for any position I might occupy. If there were no ideals, we would have a proof of preference-satisfaction utilitarianism that would cover morality as a whole. For if all preferences for a person’s own situation are basic they are all subject to conditional reflection, and thus for any circumstance the archangel might consider, her conditional preferences will simply echo the basic preferences of the person whose circumstance it is. This means that, by the conditional reflection principle, archangels will sympathetically echo these preferences at full strength for the actual situation. Their preferences all told, then, will be the resultant of their own basic preferences and the basic preferences of everyone else. If we allow ideals, however, the conditional reflection principle does not apply. Suppose Cheops has a preference for an expensive funeral. If I am an archangel and I do not have the preference for an 77

I am following here Gibbard’s elegant argument in Hare and Critics.

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expensive funeral if I am in the situation of Cheops, even though Cheops has that preference for his own situation, that means I am not required by the conditional reflection principle to have the sympathetic preference that Cheops have a big funeral. Whether archangels will agree on what should be done about Cheops’s funeral depends on whether they share the same idiosyncratic preferences (either personal or universal). We cannot get from the combination of universalizability, prescriptivity, overridingness, and the conditional reflection principle to a preference-satisfaction utilitarianism that covers the whole of moral thinking. Hare’s strategy in Moral Thinking for dealing with preferences “for states of affairs which are not presently within the experience of the person having the preference” is to acknowledge that he cannot accommodate them within the theory: “I am inclined to think that we ought, but that I cannot at present do so. There is obviously unfinished business here.” (MT, 104).78 He then tries to show that this will not make much difference in practice. In the case of deathbed promises, for example, on the assumption that the promisee will not experience whether or not the promise is kept, it may look as though Hare’s account cannot cover her preference to have the promise kept. But on a two-level theory, we can say that the intuition that we should keep death-bed promises has a high general acceptance utility, because it enables people to trust others with their dying wishes. Hare thinks he can rely on a similar, “longer way” to curtail the threat that the fanatic presents to universal prescriptivism. Suppose a fanatic has a preference, like that of a doctor who wants to save her patient’s life at any cost in suffering to the patient. If this preference is great enough to outweigh the patient’s preference to die, even given the universality requirement, the conditional reflection principle, and full representation of the preferences of the patient, then the utilitarian will agree that it should be satisfied. Such a situation is logically possible but extremely unlikely, in Hare’s view. For the usual case, the doctor’s preference will not be that strong. The archangel will therefore prescribe the intuition for general acceptance that patients’ wishes should be respected. For neither sit78

Hare uses the phrase “external preferences,” from R. M. Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, 234. But Dworkin’s phrase refers to all preferences for how things should go for other people.

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uation, however – neither where the doctor has the extraordinarily strong preference nor where she does not – is there any conflict with utilitarianism. And Hare has one more thing to say about the unusual case: the doctor can usually change her preference, or at least its strength, and therefore she should do so. But does rationality (“logic and the facts”) require the doctor to change her preference, if what she has is a universal ideal? Consider again the Nazi who prefers that there be no Jews, and is willing to hand himself over if he discovers he has a Jewish grandmother. He can form a conditional preference for the case in which he is in the situation of each of the Jews who would be killed, and, in each case, his universal ideal can be stronger than the preference for life (as it is in his own case). His preference overall (his moral judgment) will then be that they should die. If he can change this preference does it follow that he is rationally required to do so? We need some criterion from the theory to tell us which universal ideals should change and which should not, for we do not want the result that pig-headed people always get what they want because they change their preferences less easily.79 Hare concedes in Hare and Critics that “the longer way” does not succeed: “When I wrote Moral Thinking I thought that such a longer way might be found, and it still may.”80 But there is nowhere to be found, in his writings after Hare and Critics, any statement of a different and more satisfactory longer way. There is an additional difficulty. Ideals are pervasive in ordinary moral thought and practice. In Freedom and Reason, Hare welcomed the diversity of ideals: “One man has the ideals of an ascetic and another those of a bon vivant. Is it at all likely that moral arguments between them will be such as to compel one of them to adopt the other’s point of view?”81 The “ideals” here are not exactly like Cheops’s ideal of an expensive funeral, because the ascetic and the bon vivant experience the results of their respective discipline and indulgence. But they are “now-for-then” preferences. An ascetic wants now to maintain ascetic preferences later, and if he 79

I discuss this difficulty further in Hare, The Moral Gap, 118–28, and in the final chapter of the present book. 80 Seanor and Fotion, Hare and Critics, 233–4. 81 FR, 151. See FR, 154, “For our moral language is neutral as between ideals; and so therefore, is the philosophy which seeks to give an account of it.”

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deteriorates and becomes what he now calls self-indulgent he does not now want the resulting preferences to be satisfied. So ideals like this are idiosyncratic preferences, and we are not required by Hare’s system to conditionally reflect them. Suppose the ascetic is an athlete and runs miles before breakfast. She may look at her self-indulgent friend with sadness. She is not necessarily thinking that he would have more of his preferences satisfied if he adopted her life-style – if she is honest, she may admit that she simply does not know, or that the net comparison might be about the same. She still thinks, though, that her friend would have a more admirable life. Consider also how different people are in their tolerance of risk, or in how much they are willing to re-examine past decisions, or how private they are in opening their lives to others. All of these “ideals” have universal as well as personal forms, and all seem to be “idiosyncratic” in the relevant sense. My point is to illustrate how large a part of moral thinking is left uncovered by the theory. Indeed, morality itself is a universal ideal if the moral agent prefers that she herself and everyone else live morally whether she continues to have that preference or not. The preference to approximate the archangel’s thinking is a universal idiosyncratic preference. I want to deal with two more matters before leaving Moral Thinking. The first is Hare’s attempt to dismantle the usual objections to utilitarianism, using his doctrine of the two levels. The second is his argument about why we should be moral. There is a familiar stock of arguments against utilitarianism, of which I will mention four. The first imagines a man without dependents coming into the emergency room of the hospital. He has a blood type exactly matching that of four current patients who desperately need a kidney, a heart, lungs, and a liver, respectively. Should not the utilitarian prescribe that the man be killed and his organs divided? No, says Hare, because at the critical level, the archangel will prescribe that we should live at the intuitive level by a prohibition on such policy, because of the importance to our lives of the ability to trust our physicians. The second case is that of so-called “special relations.” If you can save from a burning plane either your son or a surgeon who will then save the lives of many of the other passengers, should not the utilitarian prescribe that you save the surgeon? No, says Hare, because “mother” and “son” are universal terms that can figure in a moral judgment at the intuitive level that mothers should prefer their sons’ lives. The archangel will endorse this intuition because of its

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general acceptance utility, and will also prescribe that we should stick at the intuitive level in crises of this sort.82 A third kind of case involves evil desires, like those of the spectators in Roman arenas who wanted to see the gladiators torn to pieces by animals. Should not the preference-satisfaction utilitarian prescribe that those thousands of desires prevail? Hare denies it. A person who has “been brought up successfully by thoughtful utilitarians” will have the intuition that these sorts of desires should not be satisfied (MT, 141). The archangel will prescribe that this intuition should prevail, and that the Romans should go to chariot races instead. It is important for this point that Hare’s theory is not a pleasure-based utilitarianism. If someone invented a pleasure machine (or the drug “soma”) that could give continuous pleasure without anyone doing anything at all, we would still, Hare thinks, have a preference not to live that way, and the utilitarian could therefore prescribe a life of activity. But, as I have been arguing, the utilitarian will need for this purpose a way to distinguish ideals (like the active life) that should be followed, and those that should not. The fourth objection Hare considers is that utilitarianism cannot give a satisfactory account of rights or justice. He proceeds by first separating off what he calls “the right to equal concern and respect” or “formal justice.” He thinks this is protected by the requirement of universalizability. Then questions about substantive equality can be addressed in terms of what an archangel would prescribe who understood about diminishing marginal utility (millionaires gets less preference-satisfaction per dollar), about the resentment and envy caused by inequality, and on the other hand about the effects of differential income in

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Bernard Williams objected that a parent who reasoned that everyone is better off if parents give preference to their own children would have “one thought too many,” in “Persons, Character and Morality,” Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 18. But Hare’s point is that the mother should not think about general acceptance utility, but only about her son. He denied that the “cool hour” justification of special relations corrupts them. Søren Kiekegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), which Hare read and liked, has a good discussion of the “double” character (both immediate and reflective) of ethical experience.

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producing incentives to work. Could even slavery be just if enough people preferred it? Hare remarks that he himself was a kind of slave in the war and knows from personal experience the miseries it caused. He thinks that a strong case against the institution can be made from general acceptance utility. But he still says the objection to slavery should not be built into the method of moral thinking itself (because then the supporter of slavery will reject the method), but should be a consequence of the application of a method (universal prescriptivism) that both opponents and supporters have a good chance of accepting. From the beginning of his career, Hare stressed (as he does in the preface to Moral Thinking) that if we do not find a way to talk about practical issues “rationally and with hope of agreement, violence will finally engulf the world.” Finally, Hare addresses the question of why we should be moral. An amoralist who refuses to make moral judgments cannot, Hare concedes, be shown by universal prescriptivism to be irrational. Such a person may even use moral words, as long as she does so in the way a skeptic uses the word “witch” to say that there aren’t any. Hare’s main concern, though, is whether we should bring up our children to be moral. He thinks he can show that a parent would do so who had the interests of his child at heart. This is an argument for morality from prudence, and therefore will not be satisfying, Hare concedes, to someone who values morality for its own sake. But it is the best Hare thinks he can do. He concedes also that it is not inevitably in our interest to do what morality requires. Sometimes morality requires very great sacrifices (even death). But, in the world as it is (which does not contain, for example, rings that make us invisible, as Glaucon imagines in Plato’s Republic), it seems that, on the whole, people who are trying to be morally good are happier.83 This is not an accident. Hare suggests that the human race tries to make the world that way because we want people to be morally good. Why should we not simply fake goodness, though, and do what is to our own advantage when we can get away with it? Hare responds, first,

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Hare does not present any evidence for this. It may be that without theistic assumptions the truth is more murky, that the conjunction of virtue and happiness depends more on circumstances than Hare allows, and that even in the best circumstances only a disposition to partial compliance is prudentially justified.

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that it is very difficult to pull the wool over other people’s eyes in this way and, second, that the happiest people not only try to be good, but have the disposition to feel badly when they fail. This gives them an additional incentive, namely to avoid this feeling of guilt. Hare’s view is that it is very difficult (perhaps impossible) to inculcate the disposition to follow the moral principles to the extent that will keep us in good standing with society without inculcating the disposition to feel badly when we fail. These are all empirical claims and open to question. Hare ends with a claim that is not empirical, about the conditions of possibility for the moral life. We have to assume that the world is the kind of place in which it is worthwhile trying to be morally good. In his article, “The Simple Believer” Hare calls this “a faith in Providence.”84 At the close of Moral Thinking, Hare puts it this way: If morality is to be a viable enterprise, [we have] to believe that if we adopt moral purposes and principles we stand a reasonable chance of carrying them out and not perishing uselessly in the process. And I myself would bring up any children that I had charge of accordingly. This is the secular equivalent (or not perhaps so secular) of seeing that they are, as the Marriage Service puts it, “christianly and virtuously brought up.” (MT, 205)

Peter Singer Hare had many famous students, and I will close by describing briefly the work of a philosopher who has acknowledged his debt to universal prescriptivism but who has also diverged in certain key respects. Singer’s work in applied ethics has become very well known, and I have not discussed the applied part of Hare’s project, which included writing on political and military ethics, bio-medical ethics, moral education, and town planning. Hare was a pioneer in this mode of theorizing, and took it ill when people complained about Oxford philosophy being in an “ivory tower.” Singer’s work has been similarly wide-ranging. But I am going to talk about the ethical 84

Essays on Religion and Education, 23. This article is a re-statement of his earlier contribution to the so-called “University Discussion.” “An Essay in Monism” calls this, “harmony with the universe.”

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theory he applies, and the effect on this theory of his initial choice “to treat ethics as entirely independent of religion.”85 One key respect in which Singer diverges from Hare is in his treatment of ideals. His discussion comes most conveniently for my purposes in his contribution to Hare and Critics.86 I will proceed by describing, first, where I think he misunderstands Hare and then by pointing out the implications of his position on ideals for the rest of his theory. Singer takes Hare to be committed to the claim that rival ideals are simply preferences to be weighed against the preferences of others in order to determine what maximizes preference satisfaction. Singer thinks Hare is committed to this because he is committed to there being no objectively valid moral ideals in one sense of that phrase, namely that there are no moral facts independently of prescriptions that anybody makes about the descriptive facts on which moral properties supervene. But what Singer has done in effect, is to close the question about ideals that Hare deliberately left open. I am not denying that Hare thinks of ideals as preferences, but he thinks of them as a particular kind of preference, and this distinction between kinds of preferences is one that Singer ignores.87 What Hare says is that he would like to have a comprehensive theory of preferences that could accommodate ideals, but he does not yet have one. If morality is restricted to universalized prudence, and prudence is defined to exclude ideals, morality does not cover ideals. Hare’s utilitarianism is thus incomplete. By his own acknowledgment, it is not a theory covering the whole of moral thinking. Singer’s utilitarianism, on the other hand, is advertised as complete. This is a major difference between them. It belongs with Singer’s project of excluding religion because Hare’s central examples of the ideals he endorses are the lives of St Francis, Albert Schweitzer, and Mother Teresa, and, like Kant, “the holy one of the gospels.” Hare’s theory is in this respect structurally like Aristotle’s. The theory starts

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Singer, Practical Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 3. 86 Singer, “Reasoning towards Utilitarianism,” in Hare and Critics, 147–59. 87 John C. Harsanyi, by contrast, explicitly considers and then excludes external preferences from the utilitarian social-utility function, in “Problems with Act-Utilitarianism and Malevolent Preferences,” in Hare and Critics, 89–99.

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off hard-headed (with Aristotle, in terms of happiness as a life of action; with Hare, in terms of morality as universalized prudence). Their religion (whose power both felt from their youth onwards) is elevated to the level of ideals and superstructure. The transition between the two is never given a satisfactory articulation. I am not saying Hare thought that all ideals are religious or admirable – he certainly did not; he calls Nazism an ideal of racial purity – but he lived his own life and he tried to teach his children to live by a set of ideals that he inherited from the Christian tradition. The effect on Singer’s theory of the rejection of ideals is to make it harder for him to find a place for what he calls “meaning.” To explain this, I need to go back to Mill and Sidgwick and their attempts to show why we should lead a morally good life. Mill, in his System of Logic, describes three “departments” of what he calls the “Art of Life,” namely “Morality,” “Prudence” or “Policy,” and “Aesthetics.” He then asks about the relation within practical reason between the first and the second. Mill is sure that there is a single principle to govern practical reason and that it is the principle of Utility. But what if the principle of Utility requires more sacrifice than self-interest allows? Mill’s answer is that, if I believe my interests matter more than those of others, I am making a mathematical mistake for “the truths of arithmetic are applicable to the valuation of happiness, as of other measurable quantities.”88 But this assumes the impartial point of view in which one person’s happiness counts the same as any other’s. If I am to adopt this point of view, however, I need reassurance that my interests and the interests of the whole coincide. This is the function of religious hope, which Mill promoted in Three Essays on Religion on the grounds that it would help us feel our lives to be worthwhile and feel more strongly the value of others. Sidgwick, as I described earlier, concedes that “the inseparable connection between Utilitarian duty and the greatest happiness of the individual who conforms to it cannot be satisfactorily demonstrated on empirical grounds.”89 He ends by going back to the history of 88

Utilitarianism, 5:36. See Roger Crisp, Mill on Utilitarianism, London: Routledge, 1997, 79–81. Crisp points out that Mill’s target in this book was not egoists but intuitionists, and he was not trying to convince egoists to be morally good. See also Crisp, “Teachers in an Age of Transition,” in Singer and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 85–102. 89 Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 7th edn, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981, 503.

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utilitarianism before Bentham, to the theistic positions of William Paley and others who thought that God acts for the universal good, commands us to do the same, and brings about the consistency of our happiness with our duty.90 This hypothesis produces a reconciliation of duty and self-interest and thus avoids “a fundamental contradiction in one chief department of our thought.”91 I have already quoted Hare’s remarks about the blik that “people like Hitler come to a bad end.” He says elsewhere, And I must confess that faith in the divine providence has always seemed to me to be one of the central features of the Christian religion, and one to which it is possible to cling even when much else is in doubt. The faith that all shall be well is matched by a feeling of thankfulness that all is well.92

What is there in Singer corresponding to this tradition of moral faith that I have just quoted from the utilitarian tradition? When Singer considers why we should be moral he too starts from selfinterest, and suggests that a meaningful life (and so a happy life) requires “getting out into the world and doing something worthwhile,” which involves participation in “transcendent causes” such as football clubs.93 But within the context of a life involved in such projects, we will inevitably encounter a need to justify what we do. This need for justification sets us on “the escalator of reason,” on which we are likely to find our preferences changing in the direction of impartiality. We will find that “the more we reflect on our commitment to a football club, a corporation, or any sectional interest, the less point we . . . see in it. In contrast, no amount of reflection will show a commitment to an ethical life to be trivial 90

Ibid., 504, compared with 121. Ibid., 508. Sidgwick is careful to say that this does not entitle us to believe in such a God until we have shown that we are in general justified in believing something “which is indispensable to the systematic coherence of our beliefs.” 92 Hare, Essays on Religion and Education, 23. He is quoting in the last sentence from Julian of Norwich. 93 Peter Singer, How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self Interest, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995, 207, 218. See also Crisp in “Teachers in an Age of Transition,” 87. 91

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or pointless. This is probably the most important claim in this book.” Singer is not arguing that reason or rationality requires moving, on the escalator, up to impartiality. “Pure egoism could be rationally adopted by everyone.”94 But he does suggest that there is a kind of arbitrariness in stopping the process of reflection anywhere short of the recognition of all sentient life as having a claim on us. “Only the boundary of sentience – the point beyond which there simply are no more preferences to be taken into account – seems to avoid this kind of arbitrariness.”95 Suppose we confront this position with the possibility Sidgwick worried about, the possibility of conflict between self-interest and morality, and suppose we grant (as Singer does) Sidgwick’s denial that we can appeal to some neutral notion of reason to adjudicate such a conflict. Then, even if there is a kind of arbitrariness in denying (say) the claim of sentient life other than human, there is no necessary irrationality in a priority ranking of human preferences, or the preferences of one’s group, or even one’s own individual preferences, where not all the relevant preferences can be satisfied together. If we could have the faith that there was a convergence between self-interest and morality, this would avoid the problem. Sidgwick and Kant suggest theism for this purpose. Singer makes his position more vulnerable by denying Kant’s view that doing what duty requires is good in itself. For Kant, the moral life is an ideal, in the sense that a morally good person has the preference to go on living a morally good life whether she continues to prefer this or not. For Singer, the trouble is that most people do not have the kind of preferences necessary to sustain the commitment that morality requires. Singer makes this vivid by setting the demand of morality so high. On his view, if they are going to live morally good lives, most people in the richer parts of the world have to make a radical sacrifice in their standard of living and in their use of other animals. Singer himself has conspicuously tried to live such a life. As things are, the demands of morality on his conception and those of self-interest do not coincide. People living in richer parts of the world may have some desire to justify themselves impartially, in the way 94

Singer, Practical Ethics, 319. Here Singer rejects the argument “associated with Kant” that ethics is founded on the nature of reason. I earlier denied that this is Kant’s argument. 95 Singer, “Reasoning towards Utilitarianism,” 157.

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Singer suggests, but they have stronger desires to go on living the way they do. The best hope for changing this situation is the cultivation of ideals that, unlike our loyalties to football clubs, we do not hold hostage to our continued preference for them. These ideals have the capacity to give life the kind of meaning that can sustain self-sacrifice. Religion has been a powerful vehicle for such ideals both within the utilitarian tradition and outside it. Singer wants nothing to do with it. This is no doubt because religion has also been the source of much misery. But if we consider the twentieth century, and try to calculate how much misery was caused by the world’s great religions on the one hand, and a-religious totalitarianism on the other, the balance is fairly clear. Surely, the reasonable conclusion is that we are prone to great evil, whether in the name of religion or not. This was Kant’s position about radical evil. He recognized the tendency of “ecclesiastical faith” to become “dictatorial,” but he also recognized the need for religion to sustain the moral life. He therefore ended Religion with the remark, “The right way to advance is not from grace to virtue but rather from virtue to grace.”96 He was revolted by people who used religion as an excuse not to do their duty, but he did not therefore reject the assistance that religious faith could provide in making sense of and supporting the moral life.

96

Religion, 6: 202.

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Chapter 5

COMBINING THE THEORIES

The Goal of the Chapter In this final, briefer chapter I will give a model of a theistic ethical theory that combines some of the features of the four main types of theory I have described in the previous chapters. I am not claiming that this is the only combination that works. My model draws, for example, on Christian theology, and there are many other theologies that combine the features discussed. Moreover, Christianity itself allows for manifold different combinations. The particular model I will give is self-consciously a retrieval of parts of previous theories, rather than an attempt to work out a theory from scratch. I am starting from the opinions of the many and the wise. The purpose of ending the book with a model that combines features in this way is to defend the claim that the types of theory I have discussed can be combined more easily when the original theistic premises are retained. Those who are persuaded that there is no God are not going to be persuaded by such a model to change their minds. But there may be utility, even for those who have no interest in bringing God back into ethical theory, in seeing how a theist might make such a combination. To work out the details of the model requires more space than this chapter provides, and I am in the process of writing the second volume of a trilogy that attempts to do this. The Moral Gap dealt with the implications for ethical theory of the doctrine of the second person of the Trinity, in particular the doctrines of atonement and justification. The second volume will be about the

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work of the first person of the Trinity, in particular the doctrines of creation and divine command; if I live long enough, the third volume will be about the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification. The present chapter is a trial run at an overall theory, and will leave much unfinished business. I gave a less formal version in Why Bother Being Good? but could not, in that context, make use of the historical narrative I have presented in the present book.1 I said in the Introduction that when the theistic premises are deleted, the theories of the various types come into tension with each other. I speculated that this was because when they were still attached to God, they might emphasize one aspect of God or God’s relation to us, but the other aspects were still present (though subordinated). When the theories discard the connection to God, they tend to look for human equivalents to do roughly the same work. This has resulted in theories that conflict with each other because the combination of aspects requires reference to a being that is not merely human, as the original versions of each theory proposed. That is a programmatic statement, and I will flesh it out in what follows. The chapter will have three sections after this one (on virtue theory, command theory, and consequentialism). I will suggest that what is drawing us and our desires is God, what is constraining us is God’s command, and what is coordinating the various ends of the members of the kingdom of ends is God’s impartial benevolence. In the preceding chapters I distinguished four types of theory, and I will now return to the more usual threefold division. It was important to separate Scotus and Kant because their theories are in significant ways incompatible with each other, and because of the intrinsic importance of the ideas that Scotus introduced. So as not to lose the differences, I will start by noting the following significant incompatibilities. Kant does not have the view I attributed to Scotus of the contingency of the second table of the law, or of the possibility of dispensation from it. Neither does Kant have the description of our final state as co-lovers. His translated account (within the boundaries of mere reason) allows only for a description in terms of moral progress towards holiness. In Scotus, our final end is not merely a generic, but a particular happiness, which is therefore a 1

John Hare, Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral Life, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002.

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particular way of loving God. When we love the neighbor, we love the neighbor’s particular way of loving God, even if this is not yet actual. None of this emphasis on particularity can be found in Kant, who stresses, instead, the universality of Reason’s prescriptions to us. On the other hand, Scotus does not have the emphasis that Kant has on the dignity of each human being. Scotus’s political theory is still, roughly speaking, feudal, and Kant’s (while maintaining a distance between morals and politics) is notably egalitarian by contrast. Finally, there is a key difference between the two: that Scotus does not feel the need to undertake a translation project of the kind that Kant carries out in Religion. This means that the parallels will often be between Kant’s untranslated version and Scotus, and since Kant does not usually articulate the untranslated version, drawing the parallel will often be speculative. Having listed these differences, however, we can then note that both say that we have to recognize our obligations as God’s commands to us. In the rest of the chapter I will focus on this common feature of obedience to command, when I suggest combinations of features of moral agency emphasized by the various types of ethical theory.

Virtue Theory I will start with virtue theory. In the ancient Greek model, which I discussed primarily in connection with Aristotle, God functioned as a magnet, drawing us towards god-like activity (in particular the contemplation of God), which is our chief good. The feature of God that is most relevant here is God’s goodness or beauty. This kind of account is not confined to ancient Greece. For a Christian version, using the non-Greek notion of “sin,” we might compare Ralph Cudworth’s sermon preached before the House of Commons at Westminster in 1647. Cudworth was one of the so-called Cambridge Platonists, perhaps the most systematic of them. He says, Sin is the only thing in the world that is contrary to God. God is light, and that is darkness. God is beauty, and that is ugliness and deformity. God, who is infinite Goodness, cannot but hate sin, which is purely evil . . . The great design of God in the gospel is to clear up this mist of sin and corruption which we are here surrounded with, and to

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bring up his creatures out of the shadow of death to the region of light.2

The model of a theistic ethics I am presenting in this chapter accepts this basic idea that God is the ultimate good that is drawing us towards itself. But it is tempting to be too restrictive here in the relation that is envisaged between God and human beings. Aristotle complained about Plato’s view that everything that we experience as good is good by imitating or participating in the Form of the Good. A similar complaint is justified about R. M. Adams’s account of the good, where “resemblance” is supposed to be the single, constitutive relation between the intrinsically good things we experience in our lives and the good, which is God.3 Aristotle’s point was that good things are too different from each other, even in their goodness, for this relation to one thing to explain them all. Consider a good cup of tea and a good game of basketball. Aristotle’s own answer was to point to a similar relation that all good things have to the type to which they belong, so that a good cup of tea does well what cups of tea are for, and a good game of basketball does well what games of basketball are for, even though there may be no descriptive characteristic that the good cup of tea and the good game of basketball have in common that makes each one of them good. Aristotle may be right about artifacts, but I doubt that his account works for everything we call good. Beauty is good, for example, and pleasure is good, but it is hard to see that either of them is good because it fulfils the function of some type to which it belongs. Adams replies to the difficulty about the variety of goodness, by saying that excellence in cooking can resemble God, even though God does not cook, because it resembles God’s creativity, and that a gourmet dinner can resemble God, because the Psalmist says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”4 But the problem is that what makes the cooking and the 2

Ralph Cudworth, “A Sermon Preached Before The Honorable House Of Commons At Wetminster, March 31, 1647”, in Cambridge Platonist Spirituality, ed. Charles Taliaferro and Alison J. Teply, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004, 81. 3 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods. Some material in this section is abbreviated from my article “Prescriptive Realism.” 4 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 30, quoting Psalm 34: 8. He adds that we can think about dinners as sacramental, in a wide sense.

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dinner good ought to be something more specific than general creativity, and less metaphorical than the good “flavor” of God in religious experience. There is a second difficulty with taking resemblance as the unique relation between God and other good things. This relation seems too static. Our experience of goodness is an experience of being drawn towards God, not simply of seeing something that is like God. This sense of motion is not inconsistent with what Adams says, since he also makes use of Plato’s account of eros (love). But the emphasis is different if we think of the good as primarily what draws us rather than as what resembles some exemplar, and I will try to show that this emphasis will help us with the first difficulty I mentioned. Let us say that the good is what draws us and what deserves to draw us, other things being equal. We need to add “and deserves to draw us,” unless we are willing to take the alternative position that everything that draws us is good. This alternative is a possible line to take, even about examples like sadistic pleasure, if we can sort out the good in each case that is drawing us, but is ranked wrongly (for example, ranking our own pleasure over the evil of causing pain to another). I discussed this in Chapter 1. It is not the line I am going to take, and instead I will add the second clause. This has its own difficulty, however, that the term “deserves” is already evaluative, so that it looks as though the second clause has to presuppose an account of the good, at the same time as modifying such an account. But this should worry us only if we insist that a successful account of goodness has to be in non-evaluative terms. If G. E. Moore and R. M. Hare are right, this cannot be done. G. E. Moore says that any attempt to give such a definition commits what he calls “the naturalistic fallacy.” R. M. Hare explains that evaluative judgments are irreducibly prescriptive, which is to say that to make the judgment in a “full-blooded” sense is to express some attitude of desire or will. Any full account of a normative term will therefore have to include a prescriptive component, and “deserves” is just this. I have added the phrase “other things being equal,” because I want to allow the possibility that some things may be good, but less good than other things that are inconsistent with them. This means that the first things will not deserve to draw us when the whole picture is considered, but still deserve to draw us, other things being equal. I will return to this point in the final section of this chapter.

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We can get a better and less restrictive (or monistic) account of the good by attending to Scotus. Scotus prefers, as his term for our present moral status, the term “pilgrims” (viatores). We are, as Peter Singer puts it, journeying on life’s uncertain voyage.5 The journey we are on is a journey towards our final good, which Scotus takes to be that we become “co-lovers” of God (condiligentes), entering into the love that the three persons of the Trinity have for each other. The chief condition for our reaching this good is that we achieve the right ranking of two affections, the affection for justice (affectio justitiae) and the affection for advantage (affectio commodi).6 The second of these is a love of what is good for us (especially our own happiness and perfection), with essential reference to us, and the first of these is a love of what is good in itself, independently of its relation to us. The primary object of the affection for justice is God. We cannot achieve the right ranking of these two affections without God’s assistance. Aristotelian virtues are all self-referencing, drawing us because they lead to our perfection or completeness. But if Scotus is right, charity draws us, because of the goodness of its object, independently of its object’s relation to us. All of this is highly abstract. To explain what it means that the good is what draws us to God, I will give five examples of different kinds of things that draw us in different ways, relating each one to virtue. The first kind of thing is what resembles God, and this fits Adams’s account well. For example, if we see a person who is faithful to her covenant relations with other people, we can see that she resembles God’s faithfulness to us, and the unchanging love that the persons of the Trinity have for each other. This is the character of God’s love into which we enter by becoming co-lovers. I think it is a common experience that when we meet a person like this we experience a sense of being drawn to something larger than just that person. A non-theist can say that we are being drawn to some abstract value like faithfulness, but a theist will say that we are being drawn to God who is faithful, and she will suppose that God uses and is delighted by such human imitators of divine virtues. So here is one

5

Peter Singer, “Life’s Uncertain Voyage,” in Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J. J. C. Smart, ed. Philip Pettit, Richard Sylvan, and Jean Norman, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, 154–72. 6 Ord. II, dist. 6, q.2.

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kind of virtue on a theist account, namely states of character that are like the character of God. This is the kind of account that leads Aristotle to say that theoretical wisdom is the highest virtue, because it resembles God more than any other. A second kind of case is one in which we are drawn by something that does not resemble God, or at least resembles God too generally for the resemblance to be a good account of the goodness of what is drawing us. For example, we see firefighters go up into a burning skyscraper and we admire their bravery. But it does not make sense to say that God is brave, because God is not in our situation in the relevant respects. It does not make much sense, either, to say that bravery is a virtue that God would have if God were in our situation.7 The bravery is, to be sure, a form of benevolence, since the firefighters intend the benefit of the people they rescue; and it does make sense to talk of God’s benevolence. But the bravery is good more specifically, not merely good qua benevolence or love. It is better to say that bravery is a purely human virtue. Someone might object that God can be brave in the sense of taking risks. Perhaps creation was a risk, especially the creation of human beings, ending up (on the Christian account) with Christ’s death on our behalf. There is much hard theology here about God’s knowledge, and I am not going to try to enter into it. On any Aristotelian account of courage, it involves feeling the right amount of fear, and it is odd to think of God as experiencing fear of any kind, even if God does take risks. If bravery is not good by imitating God, what is the relation to God’s goodness? Perhaps bravery is necessary if we humans are to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves, given the way things are in the world.8

7

This is a difficulty for Linda Zagzebski’s position in Divine Motivation Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 226. She thinks that appealing to the Incarnation helps, but on most views of the Incarnation this tells us what a truly good human fears, not what God would fear if God were human. 8 Peter Geach, after quoting R. M. Hare as saying that courage “is a human excellence whose utilitarian basis is vestigial,” thinks he refutes him by saying, “the ordinary course of the world, even in times of peace, is so ordered that men regularly need some courage, and some men sometimes need very great courage; courage to endure, courage to face the worst,” Peter Geach, The Virtues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977,

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A third case is what we might call “created integrity,” and things that have this character appropriately draw us to God because we are grateful to God for them.9 We can see in some things the goodness of how they were created to be, and we see in them God’s creative act. This is not the same as admiring something because it resembles God. It is not in general true that we admire an artist for her work because it resembles her. Perhaps we admire, in a good cup of tea, the essence of tea, and we are drawn in gratitude to God, not because the tea resembles God, but because God made it. As far as I can see, gratitude to the creator for created integrity is not affected significantly by believing in evolution, for theistic evolutionists see evolution as God’s vehicle and instrument.10 Are there virtues that belong in this category? Yes, if there are human features that are admirable, but not just because of a high degree of resemblance to God. Consider the ability that some people have to tell a good joke at just the right time, to just the right audience. Does God tell jokes? There are certainly funny things in the Bible.11 But the present point is that the beauty of the moments where people release themselves into laughter together is partly due to the fragility of these moments. It seems wrong to say, like the Platonists, that their value resides in resembling something eternal. It is better to think of this beauty as something both distinctively human and easily lost, and we can be 153. But Hare is talking in this passage only about the kind of courage that is involved in facing the kind of physical danger that many people no longer have to face (in developed countries at peace, for example, or even in war where there is no physical contact). He is not talking about people who do still face physical danger (as he did), or about other kinds of danger that most people do still face. In any case, his point is that even this particular kind of courage is still admired as an ideal, and he is raising no objection to it, merely distinguishing it from moral considerations based on interests (Hare, Freedom and Reason, 149–51). 9 Gratitude is not the only emotion relevant to created integrity. Awe and reverence are different, and different from each other. See Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in aid of Moral Psychology, 268–70. 10 See Richard Swinburne. “The Argument from Design,” Philosophy, 43 (1968), 199–212. 11 E.g. Genesis 27: 16, II Kings 5: 11–12. There is often tragedy lurking in the background in such stories, but that is also true about funny stories that have no reference to God.

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grateful to God for making us the sort of beings who can enjoy ourselves this way.12 A fourth case is that of our being drawn by our own happiness. The first three cases have all involved what Scotus calls the affection for justice. The fourth case is what he calls the affection for advantage. Putting it this way shows the overlap with a non-theist consequentialist account or a virtue account, like Aristotle’s, that ties virtue to happiness. There is nothing wrong, as Scotus sees it, with the affection for advantage, as long as it is ranked rightly. But if the ranking is wrong, as it was for Lucifer, the desire for our happiness no longer draws us towards God but away from God. If the ranking is right, our happiness and pleasure in this life are a foretaste of the happiness involved in being co-lovers with God. I think it is true to experience, at least to the experience of religious believers, that the sense of happiness here is always incomplete and points beyond itself to something better but, so to speak, in the same direction. That is why the happiest moments are also a kind of longing. There is a virtue of prudence that enables us to perceive correctly our own good and choose it. This will not encompass the whole of practical wisdom, if Scotus is right about the affection for justice. There is an interesting question, whether one could have prudence and not also have the ability to perceive and choose what is good in itself, independently of advantage. Perhaps the things that are good in themselves are also, by and large, the things that are good for us, and the ability to discern and choose the former is required by the ability to discern and choose the latter. But there is still a significant difference, certainly in theory, but I think even in experience, between the virtues that are limited by attachment to advantage and those that are not. Finally, there is the case of the so-called theological virtues, namely faith, hope, and love (or charity), which are (in the Scotist tradition) infused by God. Luther and Calvin were suspicious of any attempt to give us merit, even infused merit. But there is no reason I can see for someone who believes that God takes an active role in human life to deny that God can give us, what Kant called,

12

I am persuaded here by Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge, though she is not a theist, and she generalizes the point in a way I do not follow.

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“a positive increase of power.”13 Kant insisted that this did not mean we have empirical access to this assistance, or that we can “feel special works of grace,” because he wanted to avoid the impression that there is a spiritual elite, who can lord it over other believers because of their experience of these feelings.14 But perhaps the total denial of the experience of the presence of God is more draconian than is needed to avoid this danger. It is not clear whether we should say, like Ralph Cudworth, that this increase of power is a part of the divine life that is communicated to us, or just that this is a special example of the first kind of case (where the goodness is resemblance to God), but one where the gift is more complete before our appropriation of it.15 Perhaps it will be helpful to propose an analogy for the five different kinds of relation our virtues have to the goodness of God. A person who is only moderately good at the piano may be invited to play duets with an expert. He may find that he is able to play much better than he ever thought he could, because she draws abilities out of him by her own excellence. In part, he simply imitates her, perhaps her phrasing of key motifs in the piece. In part, though he will never play like her, he pushes through with bravura the passages that his fingers cannot in fact articulate. In part, his own unique musical taste shines through, even though imperfectly, and even this difference between them is stimulated in response to her playing. In part, he wants to impress her, and not to make a complete fool of himself. This motivates him independently of the music itself, so that his playing is never completely transparent but always mixed with concern for himself. Finally (though the analogy creaks here) she may communicate energy to him by a kind of osmosis or contagion. The third case is problematic, because we may feel that the result should be as though one person were playing, with four hands. But in the Scotist application of the analogy, our final state is a particular perfection, not a merging into God, and we get glimpses of what

13

Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 6: 44. Ibid., 6: 201, emphasis added. This is part of Kant’s opposition to pietism. 15 Calvin is allergic to what he calls “a gross mingling,” (Institutes III. 11. 5). Cudworth, by contrast, talks about “a baby Christ” being born in us (Cudworth, Sermon before the House of Commons). 14

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this might be like as we get to know ourselves better in relation to God. Suppose we drop the relation to God from the account of virtue. Then we will be left with a definition of the virtues that is either derived from human nature or socially constructed. These two are connected, in that we can say it is our nature to be open to social construction, and nature is not by itself sufficiently determinate to give us the set of virtues found in one culture as opposed to another.16 Even though I argued that Aristotle’s account was based around the attempt to be like God, there is much in his account that simply enshrines the culture, and in particular the power structures, of his time. The magnanimous man has “slow movements, a deep voice and calm speech.”17 I am not suggesting here that we can ever get completely outside the cultural influences that formed us, but the relation to God gives us a point of reference outside the culture, even if the way we understand both God and our relation to God is culturally specific. If there is a God who actively relates to us, the total enclosure within culture is broken through. If we remove this internal reference to God from the account of virtue, we lose the possibility of adjustment in two different directions, counteracting two different temptations. One temptation is to be too immersed in one’s culture. To counteract this, if a culture identifies God as the ultimate object of allegiance, then that culture includes reference to someone who judges the culture from outside it. In this way, the civil rights movement could connect with their oppressors, by referring to the Exodus narrative as one that already held authority for their oppressors, even though they were behaving like the Egyptians. On the other hand, there is also the temptation of too little attachment. Some people try to float too free of community, as though they could pluck themselves up by their roots. For such people, if they are theists, even if by temperament they incline to believe God is calling them out (like Abraham), their God can put them back in community for the sake of the mutual support and encouragement that community provides.18 The accusation is made against virtue theories that they emphasize the group at the expense of the individual, since virtues are 16 17 18

Arnhart makes this point, Darwinian Natural Right, 36–44. NE IV, 3, 1125a12. Hebrews 11: 9.

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almost always defined by social practice. This was one of Sidgwick’s objections to what he called “intuitionism.” One example in which this accusation seems justified is the type of evolutionary ethics that views morality as an instrument of social cohesion, enhancing the survival prospects of groups in their competition with each other. This gives us a defective morality in two ways. It asks the individual to sacrifice herself unduly for the sake of the group, and it does not ask the group to sacrifice itself for other groups or for the dignity of the human being within the group. Thus Arnhart regards the Good Samaritan story as portraying a “utopian” ideal, and endorses what he takes to be the ancient Hebrew conception of the neighbor as limited to the other members of one’s own community.19 If we think of the virtues as drawing us to God, and we think of God as caring equally for all human beings, this danger of tribalism is reduced.

Command Theory The components of morality that focus around “right” and “obligation” are naturally linked, as by both Scotus and Kant, to command. I said that for Plato and Aristotle, God functioned centrally as a magnet, drawing us towards the good, whereas in Jewish and Christian and Muslim accounts of the relation between religion and morality God functions centrally as giving us commands. As I said in Chapter 2, this does not mean there is no notion of moral constraint in Greek philosophy, and no notion of moral attraction in the three great monotheistic religions. The picture of the relation between morality and religion that I am giving in this chapter connects “the good” and “the right” in a particular way, and I will come back to it later in this section. Since the middle of the twentieth century, there have been several voices within analytic philosophy saying that we need to revise our understanding of the moral law or moral obligation, because it makes sense only against the background of a theistic world-view that “we” have lost. Elizabeth Anscombe (herself a Christian) made this point about moral law in her famous article “Modern Moral Philosophy” in 1958, saying that the contemporary situation in which we have lost the conception of God giving us the law, is “the 19

Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right 146 and 260.

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interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one.”20 She argued that a conception of autonomy according to which we give ourselves this law does not make sense. John Mackie said in 1977 that the idea of objective prescriptivity (the idea of features in the world that we did not put there, that have “to-be-doneness” built into them) made sense when people believed in a divine lawgiver, who both existed independently of us and gave us authoritative commands; but now that this belief has faded out, the idea of objective prescriptivity deserves to fade out with it.21 Bernard Williams, in 1985, discussed what he called “the morality system,” and said that those who accept it need to say how there can be a moral law at all. “The law of God applied because God applied it.”22 But without God, the morality system is a philosophical mistake: “Its philosophical errors are only the most abstract expressions of a deeply rooted and still powerful misconception of life.” Finally, also in 1985, Richard Taylor said, “the concept of moral obligation is unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.”23 I think we should accept the point that there is a deep, historicallybased, resonance between obligation or moral law and the notion of being commanded by God. The conclusion that we should therefore drop or modify our moral notions depends on the premise that “we” can no longer believe in a God who commands us. The goal of this book and this chapter is not to argue that God exists. A more modest point is sufficient here. The secularization hypothesis, which lies behind all four quotations, has not been borne out by what has actually happened. It is true that, in certain parts of Europe, the institutional Church is in decline. But it is not yet clear what this means for how people conceive their relation to the divine. And in any case, the projection of this situation onto the rest of the world is a mistake. There is no indication that increasing levels of education in the world 20

“Modern Moral Philosophy,” reprinted in G. E. M. Anscombe, Ethics, Religion, and Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. 21 J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, 40. 22 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, 191–6. 23 Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith and Reason, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1985, 83–4.

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as a whole are leading to the reduced importance of religion in people’s lives. R. M. Adams makes the argument that our notion of obligation or duty makes most sense against the background of a belief that we are under obligation to some person or persons, and argues that God is the most appropriate person for such a role, in regards to moral obligation. He starts from J. S. Mill’s observation there are other things . . . which we wish that people should do, which we like or admire them for doing, perhaps dislike or despise them for not doing, but yet admit that they are not bound to do; it is not a case of moral obligation; we do not blame them, that is, we do not think that they are proper objects of punishment.24

Allan Gibbard similarly says that an agent’s act is morally wrong if it is appropriate for the agent to be blamed, and “to say that he would be to blame is to say that it would be rational for him to feel guilty and for others to resent him.”25 Adams sees moral obligations as public, in the sense that to say that a certain type of conduct is morally wrong implies that it ought in general to be publicly discouraged as wrong. To commit a wrong is thus to alienate oneself from other people, or to strain one’s relations with them, and one’s sense of guilt (if accurate) is a sense of this alienation. “Typically there is someone who is, or might be, understandably angry with me . . . The view that in such a case the guilt consists largely in an alienation produced by the wrong act is supported by the fact that the ending of the alienation ends the guilt.”26 I may do something that is simply contrary to some principle that I believe in, but which does not harm anyone else (perhaps I violate my diet), and in such a case, Adams says, I appropriately feel shame but not guilt.27 Tying moral obligation to relations to another person or other people in this way

24

Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 5, para. 14. Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, 45ff., emphasis added. 26 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 239. 27 It may be that shame is also best understood in terms of the reactions of at least possible others. See Hare, The Moral Gap, 183–5. 25

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allows us to see how complying with an obligation is an expression of valuing and respecting those relations. Not just any social relations will constitute a morally valid obligation, however, but only relations that we are right to value. If some group is systematically exploiting a second group, the demands made by the first group will not constitute obligations for the second. But here we get to the move that takes Adams to a divine command theory. Actual societies are all corrupted in one way or another, especially in the power relations that obtain within them.28 Someone who believes in God has a fitting source of the demand that constitutes obligation, because she can believe God to be genuinely and impartially concerned for the well-being of all God’s creatures. God’s impartial benevolence grounds the believer’s trust that what God commands is consistent with enough of what she antecedently thinks is good (though she can concede that her views of what is good may be inadequate). Adams thus has a reply to the objection (derived from Socrates’s objection to Euthyphro) that a divine command theory allows God to command anything at all, even the torture of babies, and that the theory requires obedience to such a command. Adams replies that his divine command theory is a theory of the right, not of the good (which is constituted for him by resemblance to God, not by God’s command). It is not circular to make God’s goodness a condition of God’s commands generating obligation. Adams can also say that it is not a mere tautology to say that God is good, since we have “the background of many substantive beliefs about what properties are excellences that must be reflected somehow in the character of any being that is the standard of excellence.”29 28

Adams thinks that only actual demands constitute obligations, not the demands that some person or group might make under counterfactual conditions (for example, if they belonged to Kant’s ethical commonwealth). Adams has two reasons for this; he has metaphysical doubts about the counterfactuals, and he thinks that even if the counterfactuals were true, they would not be sufficient to produce strong enough motivation to account for the sense of obligation. But Kant could reply to the second point that he does feel such motivation, and that in any case the strength of actual motivation does not determine whether or not an obligation exists (subjective necessity does not determine objective necessity). 29 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 253.

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We can now give a rough answer to the question about the relation of “the good” and “the right.” The theory I am advancing supposes that we have a conception of what is good, as what draws us and deserves to draw us, other things being equal. So much can be common to the theist and the non-theist. The theist can add that finally it is God who should draw us in this way. The right, as what God commands, is not the source of the good (not prior in that sense). But the right has veto power, priority in this different sense. This is because God can see how the infinite number of possible good things for the creation coheres in an actual overall good, and can see what routes are fitting for us to take if we are to act in a way that allows this overall good to happen. If Scotus is right, the route is not necessary in the sense that God could prescribe only one such route. But if we accept that God cares equally for the unique value of each person, and loves each part of the creation according to its value, then it is reasonable to trust that God’s command gives us a route towards the well-being of the whole creation, which we would not achieve just by pursuing the good things that attract us individually. I have not said anything yet about how we could know what God commands, but I will come to this at the end of the section. Here is an analogy. When we drive, we have a certain destination towards which we are heading, and a certain time of arrival in mind, which together require a certain speed, and so do all the other drivers on the road. The traffic laws are not the source of our ends, but they deserve to have veto power over our actual driving, because they enable us to coordinate these ends, without doing each other harm. God’s commands serve the same kind of coordination function. Kant puts this point by talking of God’s executive powers as sovereign. If we remove the theological premises from a command theory, we will be left with either society as the source of the command or ourselves as individuals. The problem with social groups for this role is that, as mentioned earlier, they are all corrupt. They are not the right kind of entities to be given this sort of authority. Do we have the right kind of authority as individuals to give ourselves commands that will constitute moral law or obligation? Anscombe, as I mentioned, denied this. She was a student of Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein mounted an attack in Philosophical Investigations on the notion of a private language. The details of the argument need not concern us, but the central point is that the rules of language are normative, and there has to be a way of telling when we go wrong

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with respect to them. Wittgenstein thought that if I set up a rule merely by my preference, I may prefer differently the next time round, and there is no such thing here as “getting it wrong.” The argument, if it works, applies to norms in general and not just linguistic norms. There are other difficulties with locating authority in individual choice. We have seen two attempts in previous chapters, Sartre’s in Chapter 2 and Korsgaard’s in Chapter 3. It is worth revisiting these attempts in order to illustrate the problems with self-command as a basis for ethics. Sartre started by acknowledging that according to his theory, we humans inevitably attempt to replace divine choice (which does not exist) by individual human choice, and we are doomed to fail. We are thus stuck, on his theory, in a futile bind that we cannot escape. Sartre wanted to acknowledge the Kantian point that when we choose monogamy, for example, we are choosing monogamy for everyone. This too, he thought, was an attempt to be God, for God is supposed to create in God’s own image. But unlike Kant, Sartre wanted to concede that the aspiration towards universality of this kind is a pathology, though a pathology that we cannot get rid of. It is surely plausible to construe Sartre’s situation as the natural result of trying to operate a conceptual system without the premises that make sense of the system. He was right that individual human choice does not have the right kind of authority to replace divine choice, and that the attempt to live as if it did is bound to result in incoherence. Sartre did not see this as a serious objection, because he thought the desire for the kind of coherence that God gives to the moral life was itself pathological. Korsgaard is stuck with the problem of the Mafioso. If, as she thinks, obligation is created by our endorsement of what she calls “a practical identity,” then the Mafioso has an obligation to carry out the killings that his practical identity requires. Korsgaard does not deny this, though she thinks that if he reflects further, he will see that he has a higher obligation to refrain from the killings. But, as I argued in Chapter 3, there is nothing about the nature of reflection that requires such a conclusion. It is interesting to look at her “very concise history of western metaphysics 387 bc to 1887 ad” (from Plato’s Phaedo to Nietzsche’s Genealogy).30 She concedes that

30

Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 1–5.

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obligation began to play a greater role in moral thought in the Christian era than it had for the Greeks, because “then we turned our attention to the problem of fallen humanity, and we saw that the fallen human being is a reluctant, recalcitrant, resistant matter.” She then urges that we hang on to obligation, even though she agrees with Nietzsche about the death of God. We cannot go back to Plato and Aristotle, she thinks, because of the revolution that has made us see that reality is no longer first and foremost form, but “something which resists reason and value, something which is recalcitrant to form.” Form, therefore, has to be imposed on the world, and this is the work of obligation, and she appeals to Kant as the one who “completed the revolution, when he said that reason – which is form – isn’t in the world, but is something that we impose upon it.” But now we can ask her, if she accepts that reality resists reason and value, why she does not accept that our reflection is implicated in this reality. How is it that we escape? If we do not, then while we may construct a different notion of reflection or reason that is uncontaminated, it will not be our ordinary one. The normative question will simply re-emerge as a question about why we should do this new kind of reflection. Korsgaard’s appeal to Kant is a mistake, as I tried to show in Chapter 3. Kant did propose that we are both makers of the law and are subject to the law. That is what he meant by “autonomy.” But the sense in which we make the law is not that we create the law, but that we make the law our law. We cannot create the law, because it is necessary (just as the triangle necessarily has three angles, he says). Even God does not create the law (Kant is here unlike Scotus on the contingency of the second table). But we have to make God our God, or submit ourselves to God, and in the same way we have to submit ourselves to the law. I will end this section of the chapter by returning to three objections to a divine command theory of obligation that I mentioned briefly in Chapter 2. The first is the objection from autonomy and connects directly with what I have just said about Kant. The second objection is that divine command theory makes the moral law arbitrary, and I referred to this in connection with R. M. Adams’s response to the Euthyphro dilemma. The third objection is from pluralism, that moral law needs to be binding on everyone, not just on those who believe in God.

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The objection from autonomy has been powerfully presented by Patrick Nowell-Smith.31 His central thesis is that religious morality is infantile, since it treats morality as “an affair of being commanded to behave in certain ways by some person who has a right to issue such commands,” and this is the characteristic way young children relate to their parents. Nowell-Smith contrasts what he calls the “Greek” view, which is that rules are made to be broken, when keeping them no longer produces “the good life,” and the “Hebrew” view that holds rules to be absolutely binding, no matter what the consequences. He thinks utilitarianism is a Greek view, in terms of this distinction, and that deontological views (with categorical imperatives) are Hebrew. He appeals to Piaget’s theory of moral development, in which children pass through a pre-moral stage, and then two successive moral stages that involve a basic change in their understanding of moral rules: a “morality of constraint” (where the rules are unchangeable) and a “morality of cooperation” (where they can be modified by mutual agreement). The first of these is “heteronomous,” according to Piaget, since the rules are regarded as coming from outside. Nowell-Smith thinks that Christians have got “fixated” at this stage, or at least that the “divine command” feature of their morality is fixated (“[When] Freud says of someone that he is fixated at the oral stage of sexuality he does not mean that he still sucks his thumb; he means rather that some of his characteristic attitudes and behavior patterns can be seen as an adult substitute for thumb sucking”). It is useful to confront this attack with the point Korsgaard makes about the student who takes a logic course because it is required by the department.32 I will then return to what Kant says about heteronomy and God’s commands. It might seem that the student acts more autonomously if she takes the course because she 31

Patrick Nowell-Smith, “Morality: Religious and Secular.” Nowell-Smith was one of three examiners, together with Gilbert Ryle and H. J. Paton, of R. M. Hare’s submission for the T. H. Green prize, part of which became The Language of Morals. The use of the term “infantile” is odd, given that infants do not really follow commands at all. The use of the term “heteronomous” in this passage is also odd, given that he is criticizing categorical imperatives. Perhaps it is supposed to be a joke. 32 Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 25ff. and 105–7.

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independently sees its merit. But, Korsgaard says, she acts autonomously out of her practical identity as a student only if she places the right to make and enforce some of the decisions about what she will study in the hands of her teachers. In the same way a citizen does not pay her taxes as a citizen because she approves of the way the government is proposing to use them. So the question is whether there is a God who relates to us in an analogous way. If there is, there is nothing heteronomous about submitting freely as a believer to the commands of such a being, or, as Scotus puts it, repeating in our will God’s will for our willing. This is part of what it means to make God our God. Kant’s description of heteronomy in the Groundwork is often misunderstood on this point.33 As I suggested in Chapter 3, Kant’s target is the view of Crusius that we have “a natural drive to recognize a divine moral law,” which is a third drive independent of both our drive to increase our own appropriate perfection and our disinterested or impartial drive for perfection, from which comes the general desire to help others. Kant accepts, throughout his published work, the view that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands, but that we have to be willing also to make these commands our own law. Now we can return to the point about infantilism. Kant’s emphasis is that mature persistence in the moral life requires hope of a certain kind, which we can sum up as hope in Providence. Mill made much the same point, as I described in Chapter 4. We need to be able to think of our moral willing as harmonious with the ultimate order behind the universe, which is directing us towards the highest good. This is like Korsgaard’s student persevering in her studies in the hope that the degree she gets will be worth getting, because she will have been taught what is worth learning and she will get a job. This kind of hope, on the smaller and the larger scale, takes self-discipline, especially when it is not clearly supported by the empirical evidence. Hope is consistent with complaining, on the smaller scale to the 33

One example of such misunderstanding is R. M. Hare’s statement, in “The Simple Believer” (Hare, Religion and Education, 30), “Ever since Kant, it has been possible for people to insist on the autonomy of morals – its independence of human or divine authority. Indeed, it has been necessary, if they were to think morally, in the sense in which that word is now generally understood.”

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department and on the larger scale to God; but if it is lost altogether, it makes the position of the student or the moral agent, in Kant’s phrase, “rationally unstable.”34 On this picture, God does intend us to own our commitment to the moral life, so that it is not merely secondhand. But if this owning is detached from belief in God, and if it has to create the obligation, rather than simply submitting to it, then it has to do more work than it is equipped to do. The second objection that is frequently made to divine command theory is that it makes morality arbitrary, since torturing babies would then be right if God were to command it. I mentioned this objection in connection with Plato’s Euthyphro and Adams’s response, and I will not say much about it here. I think Adams is successful in mounting a non-circular defense of the Kantian and Lockean position that God’s goodness (or practical love) is presupposed by our taking a divine command as constituting an obligation. Agreeing with Adams here does not imply agreement with his treatment of the story of the binding of Isaac, where Adams takes it that Abraham was not in fact commanded by God to kill his son, and should have rejected the thought as soon as it arose. A divine command theorist owes some account of this fearsome story, but I have space to do this only cursorily. The author of Hebrews takes it that Abraham believed his son would come back to life (and Scotus follows this).35 Perhaps a supplementary suggestion (not inconsistent with this) is that Abraham already thought he should be willing to make this sacrifice (because it was in line with surrounding culture), and God showed him the evil of this by telling him to go ahead, taking him to the very brink, and then forbidding it. We also are likely to have all sorts of misconceptions of God (from our own surrounding cultures) and perhaps we sometimes cannot see the evil of our conceptions until we are face-to-face personally with the suffering they cause. This suggestion has its own difficulties, and I will discuss just one of them. On the picture I have given, God did not will that Abraham should kill Isaac, but God did allow Abraham to believe that God was commanding him to kill Isaac. The model is a divine command theory, and not a divine will theory, since it holds 34

The Psalms are full of such complaints, e.g. Psalm 42: 9–11. For Kant’s phrase, see Volckmann’s notes on Kant’s Lectures on Natural Theology, 28: 1151. 35 Hebrews 11: 19.

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that our obligations are generated by what God commands, not by what God wills, if there should be a divergence.36 If we had grounds for thinking that God would never command us to do something that God did not will for us to do, then the picture I have proposed would be ruled out. But I do not see that we have such grounds, and it is not hard to think of human cases (of parenting, for example) where such a strategy might be a justifiable way of teaching an important lesson. The epistemology of obedience to divine command requires some discussion. What kind of access do we have to those commands? Revelation is one such access, and can be distinguished (as it is by Kant) into the revelation that is historically and geographically limited (for example in Sacred Scripture, but also revelation from God to individuals through the “inner testimony” of the Holy Spirit, though Kant was nervous about this) and revelation that is general to all human beings. There might also be revelation of an intermediate category, i.e. to all human beings unless they are prevented in one way or another. If the question is how we have access to whether some revelation is general to all human beings, the answer is either empirical (e.g. we have checked for “human universals” by elaborate cross-cultural studies, or discovered some link with the human genome), or conceptual (we deduce the claim from some conception of human nature). Conscience is another form of access, or (in some theories) it is the human capacity that serves as the vehicle for general revelation about obligation. A worked-out theory of conscience would need to specify whether it operates by some kind of divine illumination, or by our doing ethical thinking, or some combination of the two. A third possibility is the work of the Holy Spirit, or some other divine agency, through the progress of history. To combine this with the third variety of revelation, we could hold that history results in the gradual removal of the impediments that prevent our receiving the revelation. This would be a form of the belief in progress. Alternatively, we could hold, like Heidegger in his late work, that each new revelation in history produces the obscuring of a previous revelation, so that there is development but not progress. Finally, we might propose that revelation is given not to 36

See Mark Murphy, “Divine Command, Divine Will, and Moral Obligation,” Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998), 3–27. See also Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 258ff.

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individuals (in conscience) but to communities, so that the access to God’s commands is to be found through other people collectively, within one’s community and within the traditions of that community. Or perhaps there is a mixture of revelation to individuals and to communities, so that each can serve as a partial corrective of the other. What kind of epistemology is presupposed in the model I am giving in this chapter? I will make four points. First, there must be a receptor for the “magnetic force” of the good, by analogy to the iron of the rings that are attracted to the magnet. G. E. Moore called such a receptor “intuition.”37 But there is no need to postulate a single faculty that both tracks and is drawn to the good, and the suggestion of a single faculty has been responsible for some standard objections. Second, there must be enough general revelation of what is good that we can say, with Adams, that we have the background of many substantive beliefs about the good, independent of special revelation about God and God’s goodness, so that we can make the non-trivial judgment that God is good. Theologically speaking, we can add that there must be enough general revelation so that those outside the scope of special revelation can be held accountable. But, third, this general revelation is defective, as I tried to show in the first chapter, when considering both Aristotle and Arnhart. They agree in proposing a morality of self-preference (even if extended to the preference for our own polis) and they derive this from a particular reading of “natural inclination,” understood either in terms of our usual preference-orderings or in terms of evolutionary pressures towards survival and reproduction. On the model I am proposing, they are right about the inclinations we are born with. The Good Samaritan is not natural, in this sense of “natural.” So, finally, if we ask how much general revelation is enough for accountability, given the defect just mentioned, it is hard to know the answer. Fortunately, we humans are not the judges of this. A third objection to a divine command theory of obligation is the objection from pluralism. How can it be right to say that goodness is what draws us to God and obligation is generated by God’s command, when we live in a world in which people are trying to lead moral lives 37

Robert Audi gives a sustained defense of “Kantian Intuitionism” in Robert Audi, Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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with all sorts of different beliefs about the divine, some of them inconsistent with the ideas about God in the model, or indeed with the idea that there is a god or gods at all? This is true not just about the world as a whole but about most countries in the world – they are divided internally by a plurality of different religious or areligious views. One response to this objection is to reject what G. E. Moore said about the meaning of evaluative terms. Moore thought that if “right” did not mean the same as “commanded by God,” then being right and being commanded by God must be different properties. But this connection between meaning and property has been challenged in recent philosophy. For example, “water” may not mean the same as “H2O” (Webster defines two senses of “water,” the first of which is an odorless, colorless liquid etc., and the second is the chemical definition); but the property of being water and the property of being H2O may be the same. We can say the same about “right” and “commanded by God” or “good” and “drawing us to God,” that the two items in each pair do not mean the same but the second of each pair tells us what constitutes the property referred to by both. People who do not believe in God may be able to make perfectly good sense in their use of the words, and discuss what is good and right with religious believers without talking past each other, even if the position I have taken about the properties is correct. In the same way people could make perfectly good sense in their use of the term “water” without knowing the chemical constitution, and could discuss water with people who did not know the chemistry, without talking past each other. This answer is not likely to satisfy the pluralist. John Rawls, for example, thought it important, in A Theory of Justice (1971), that substantive conceptions of the good life were left behind in moving to the “original position,” because he was attempting to provide an account of justice that people with competing visions of the good could agree to in a pluralist society. He included religions under this prohibition. In Political Liberalism (1993) he conceded that the procedure of the original position was itself ideologically constrained, and he moved to the idea of an overlapping consensus. But even here, Rawls wanted to insist that adherents of the competing visions of the good leave their particular conceptions behind in public discourse and justify the policies they endorsed on grounds that were publicly accessible. He described this as the citizen’s duty of civility. From the time of the religious wars in Europe, there has been the

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ideal of a moral discourse based on reason and not religion, in order to avoid the hatred and bloodshed that religion seems to bring with it. But the response to Rawls on this point has been telling.38 It seems false that we can respect persons and at the same time tell them to leave their fundamental commitments behind in public discourse, and it seems false also that some purely rational component can be separated off from these competing substantive conceptions of the good. It is true that religious commitment can produce the deliberate targeting of civilians in a skyscraper. But the history of the twentieth century, the bloodiest century of our history, is that non-religious totalitarian regimes have at least as much blood on their hands. As I said in discussing Singer, the truth is that people under the Evil Maxim (in Kant’s term) will use any available ideology for their purposes. Progress towards civility is more likely if Muslims, Christians, and Jews, (and Buddhists and Hindus) are encouraged to enter “the public square” with their commitments explicit, and see how much common ethical ground there in fact is. This writer has done some of this discussion, and found the common ground surprisingly extensive, though sometimes common language disguises significant differences. Progress seems more likely in this way than by trying to construct a neutral philosophical ground that perhaps nobody actually accepts.

Consequentialism Consequentialism is the theory that we should evaluate the rightness and wrongness of actions by the goodness and badness of their consequences. Again, I want to suggest that a theistic variant of this has merit, and that the theory becomes more problematic when the theistic premises are removed. One way to put the first of these two points is that God is a kind of consequentialist. Saying this will not endear me to some of my natural allies in the project of this book, but perhaps it will be less offensive after I explain what I mean. God has a route for each one of us towards the final good for each of us, which is a particular kind of union with God (a way of loving God

38

There is a good collection of papers in Terence Cuneo, ed. Religion in the Liberal Polity, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2005.

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unique to each person). This route will require loving a subset of the infinite number of good things that draw humans to God, and will also require rejecting a different subset. This is true both for the common route for humans (if there is one) and the particular route for each of us.39 Theism helps with the problem of seeing how the routes for each person could be coordinated in such a way that they reach to the final good of the whole of creation, or (in theological language) the Kingdom of God. God’s choice of a route for each of us is consequentialist in that it leads to a good destination, though it can take us through things that are good in any of the five ways I distinguished in the second section of this chapter. The route is not, however, through the maximization of preference-satisfaction tout court. That is why God is a kind of consequentialist, and not, for example, Singer’s kind. God does not, on the model I am proposing, aim at maximizing the satisfaction of our preferences (let alone our “basic” preferences).40 There are two main reasons for this. First, our preferences are not reliable indicators of the good. In terms of the definition I gave, the good is what draws us and deserves to draw us; but not everything we prefer deserves to draw us. Second, the notion of maximization is troublesome here. I discussed this briefly in Chapter 1, in relation to the question whether Aristotle’s chief good has to contain the best possible number of scoops of ice cream. It is not clear that this notion of a maximum makes sense. But God’s choice is consequentialist in that God is not constrained by absolute or necessary rules in prescribing it. God selects a route that fits human beings, but there is no 39

There is an illuminating combination of stories in this regard in Luke 8, where Jesus requires Jairus and the woman with the hemorrhage to face opposite temptations or characteristic weaknesses, and get through them to the good that will satisfy them on the other side of the trial. Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, has to wait while his daughter is dying and Jesus cares for the unnamed woman. The woman has to reveal herself and her shame to the whole crowd. Authority and privacy are both goods, but (we can surmise) each of these two people had a disproportionate or inordinate ranking of one of them. 40 In Chapter 4 I defined a “basic” preference as a preference about one’s own current experience. Ideals include a person’s now-for-then preferences for herself, but also her preferences about what should be the case for everyone, whether she experiences it or not.

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reason to think there is only one possible such route that God can select. Moreover, we can suppose that God has different routes for each person, reflecting the particular weaknesses each of us has to overcome, the particular kinds of excellence each of us can achieve, and the particular ways each of us can help others because of the particular kinds of people we and they are. We can conceive the preference to follow the route God has prescribed as a kind of ideal. Undifferentiated preference-satisfaction does not leave the proper space for ideals.41 Ideals are a person’s preferences for what should happen independently of her experience at the time of the preference, and independently of whether she continues to have the preference. She might have the ideal of faithfulness in marriage, for example, and this would require her to prefer that she and her spouse be faithful, even if her spouse could be unfaithful without her detecting any difference. Belief in God gives us a good ideal to follow. But before I argue this, I want to show that we need ideals, and an undifferentiated preference satisfaction model will not work. I want to examine two non-theistic pictures of how we might evaluate ideals. And I want to discuss whether some of our obligations, on a theistic model, will be absolute. Charles Taylor distinguishes what he calls “strongly-valued” goods and mere preferences, such as the desire, which may be extremely intense, to vomit when nauseated.42 A preference may be very intense, but not have the right sort of comprehensiveness to allow it to shape a life into what he calls a “self.” I have tried to make a similar point in terms of what I call “centrality.”43 I distinguished between what I called “Tiggers” and “Eeyores.” Tiggers have very intense preferences, but they are not unified into a coherent pattern. Many adolescents are like this, in contrast to 50-year-old people whose preferences have become less intense individually, but fit each other better. The principle that we should simply maximize preference-satisfaction, weighted for intensity, gives precedence to people who tend to have intense desires. Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias recommends the principle that “a man who is going to lead a full life must allow his desires to become as mighty as may be and never 41

Hare, Moral Thinking, 101ff. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989, Chapter 2. 43 Hare, The Moral Gap, Chapter 5. 42

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repress them.”44 Some of those who live by very intense desires have no doubt encouraged this intensity in themselves as a result of implicitly recognizing the point that it will give them some kind of claim over others, requiring the others to submit to them. The principle encourages the development of the kind of person who makes life less happy for other people. We might think that we could give weight to centrality on an undifferentiated preference-satisfaction model because central preferences have purchase on other preferences within a person’s life, so that the cumulative force is greater than the central preference by itself. One way to spell out this notion of “purchase” is to appeal to the difference between first-order desires and second-order desires, which are desires about desires.45 A courageous person, in Aristotle’s sense, has a second-order desire to have the first-order desire to stay in the battle and not run away. The frustration of the first-order desire will carry with it the frustration of the second-order desire. In this way, we might give precedence to Eeyores, because even though their individual desires are less strong, more damage is done to the whole structure of their desires by the frustration of each desire singly. But suppose I could, by waving a magic wand, accommodate all the desires of the adolescent, or all the desire of the 50-year-old for some afternoon, I should often prefer the adolescent even given this point about purchase. Consider some aversion, such as being bored at a children’s piano recital. The adolescent feels he is going to die if he has to stay in the room a moment longer. The 50-year-old reflects that she gave the same kind of pain when she was a child, and minded it less when her own children were on stage. She takes herself a little less seriously. She has the second-order desire not to give much weight to any first-order desire without reflection, and has come to see that there are many alternative ways to get to what she cares about the most. This means that the very connectedness that provided the prospect of giving weight to centrality, within the undifferentiated preference-satisfaction model, itself favors Tiggers. 44

Plato, Gorgias 492a. See Harry Frankfurt’s account in “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy, 68: 5–20, and his later revision in “Identification and Wholeheartedness” in The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1988, 159–76. There will be third-order desires, but not, in practice, an infinite regress.

45

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Perhaps there are contingent features that result in adolescents not maximizing desire-satisfaction and aversion-avoidance if they get what they want, because their desires are so contradictory that the satisfaction cancels out, or because the desires would, if satisfied, lead to too much distress for other people. But the point about unfair precedence for Tiggers remains. There are too many different ways of having desires about desires. We need some way to distinguish what I call “identifying” with a desire from merely “acknowledging” it, or, on the other hand, “endorsing” it. Desires, like people, can have power over us without having authority over us, and “purchase” can be a measure simply of power. Some desires are simply alien intruders; others (which we “acknowledge”) are part of a familiar pattern in our lives but a pattern we would rather be without; others (with which we “identify”) are the reverse side of a single pattern that also produces desires we are glad to have (consider the ability to concentrate and the tendency to ignore the needs of people around us); and, finally, others we wholeheartedly endorse. What is this endorsement? If we can properly give special weight to endorsed preferences, endorsement will have to meet various cognitive conditions. If it is going to be able to “shape” a life, it will have to appeal to something like a picture of how one’s life should be. The picture does not have to be articulated or explicit or all-embracing (probably for most people it is none of these), but it does have to be sufficiently comprehensive to embrace one subset of goods that will shape a life in one direction and exclude another subset that will shape the life in a different direction. I realize that it will take significant philosophical work to specify what counts as “shaping a life” in this way. These pictures will very often be ideals, and R. M. Hare gives the life of St Francis as an example. Let us say that a person’s central preferences are those to which she regularly appeals in endorsement and that give a determinate character to the decisions she makes over large parts of her life. Suppose we can specify what “endorsing” means, still we will not have an account of which preferences, our own and others’, we should try to satisfy. The difficulty now is that there are too many comprehensive pictures of how a life should be, all of which allow a person to “endorse” some preferences and refuse to endorse others, but not all of which we should honor. The Nazi can endorse the preference for a Jew-free, disabled-free, Gypsy-free, and homosexual-free world, and the rabid social Darwinist can endorse the preference for

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the rule of the strong and the oppression of the weak. Even if we can identify ideals, so as to give them special weight in deliberation, we need a way to distinguish the ideals we should honor in this way. I will first discuss two non-theistic attempts to do this: Griffin’s “objective list” utilitarianism and Susan Wolf ’s so-called “Reason view.” James Griffin’s Well-Being is an example of the first of these.46 He sets up a “common profile” of normal human desires, which not only lists five items but ranks them. The list includes autonomy, deep personal relations, accomplishment, enjoyment, and understanding. Any ideal would be ruled out, on this theory, if it did not conform to this list of goods and its hierarchy. What strikes the theist reader is the absence of any mention of religious values and any mention of community.47 Once communal and religious values are introduced, the possibility of conflict within the list is increased. But the main objection to this, as to deductivist natural law theory, is that the list is too benign. Actual human beings tend to prefer power and prestige to other goods, as Aristotle reflects in his account of human flourishing. Aristotle is not wrong to describe us this way, but wrong to deduce from this description that we should live this way. Even if, with deductivist natural law theory, we include religious and communal values, we will be left deducing norms from actual human lives and hence from actual preference-ordering tendencies.48 Power

46

James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 47 Griffin replies, on the topic of religious values, that he is concerned with giving a “prudential” list that he then universalizes, and religious values are not prudential; but religious values do not appear in his list of moral values either, and the result is that they get no place in the theory. The closest he gets to communal values is “fraternity,” but he defines this as a “free” relation, and does not consider relations that one is born into and does not choose. 48 It is disputed whether Thomas Aquinas was a deductivist in this sense. It is a different project to give a deduction of the ethical norms from an account of our nature that is already ethically normed. See Robert P. George, “Natural Law Ethics,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip P. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. It is also not clear whether Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory is deductivist. See M. Nussbaum, “In Defense of Universal Values,” Fifth Annual Hesburgh

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and prestige are both competitive goods, in the sense that one person can only have them if another person does not, or has less of them. Power is power over somebody else, and prestige is status above somebody else. As in Chapter 1, I am not arguing here that power and prestige are evil, but that they introduce competition by their nature, whereas the other items on the list do not (though “accomplishment” needs more scrutiny in this respect). We cannot, therefore, simply say that the ideals we should honor are those consistent with the realization by all people of the items on the objective list, if we expand the list to include the dominant ends that humans actually have, because humans actually have as some of their dominant ends what they want other humans not to have. Kant puts this by saying we are born with a propensity to evil, that is activated in the comparisons we make with others. We could try to remedy this by postulating an endorsing faculty that was not distorted by self-preference. We could call it “Reason” (the faculty that “tracks the True and the Good”), and say that we should satisfy a preference when Reason endorses it.49 If a student has a “blik” (in R. M. Hare’s term) that the dons (the faculty) are out to get him, and if this is the result of early abuse by a parent when he was a child, so that he is no longer able to form trusting relationships with people in positions of authority, then we might say he no longer operates with Reason. We might judge that his value faculties Lecture on Ethics and Public Policy, Notre Dame, 1999, where she says both, “The argument begins from ethical premises and derives ethical conclusions from these alone,” (p. 43) (ruling out the capability for cruelty from the premises) and “Rights language indicates that we draw strong normative conclusions from the fact of the basic capabilities” (p. 57, emphasis added). Non-deductivist natural law theory needs an account of how we know the basic moral principles without deducing them, and, if they are supposed to be “self-evident,” a justification of this. See also Chapter 1, “In Defense of Universal Values,” in Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 49 I am following here a suggestion by Susan Wolf in Freedom within Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 53. She defines “Reason” as “whatever faculty or set of faculties are (sic) most likely to lead us to form true beliefs and good values.” Her primary interest is determining when we can hold persons accountable or say that they “deeply own” their preferences.

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have been irreparably damaged, and so we do not have to honor his preferences, even if he endorses them, because we have been able to diagnose this damage. But this proposal exaggerates the natural capacities of ordinary, non-damaged people. We do not have the capacity to be cognizant of every reason for and against an action. Even if the standard is revised downwards, so that we are required merely to recognize and appreciate a set of reasons sufficient to show which action or choice would be right, this standard is still too high. I will give an argument for this, based on the work of Thomas Carson, after discussing the question of moral absolutes. For now, I will simply give a couple of examples. To what extent does the ordinary, eighteenth-century slaveholder, who has grown up in a culture that takes slavery for granted, have the capacity to entertain seriously the reasons that show the immorality of the institution? There have to be changes at the level of the culture before most people can see beyond what they are used to.50 To what extent do most people in the richer countries today have the capacity to see the reasons that show (for a Kantian morality, which requires sharing the ends of those affected by our choices) the immorality of their standard of living? The trouble with the proposal to postulate a non-corrupt endorsing faculty is that the reason we actually operate with, the faculty or faculties that lead us to form our beliefs and values, do not reliably track the True and the Good. It is possible, certainly, to posit a faculty with an honorific initial capital letter, Reason, which is reliable. But then our access to Reason is tentative at best. If God’s commands constitute our obligations, in what sense are they absolute? I suggested that God selects some goods whose pursuit is required for the divinely-chosen route that will lead to the overall good of creation. We can distinguish the requirements as universal and particular; that is to say, some are requirements for everybody and some are requirements for one person alone. This corresponds to the Scotist distinction between the happiness that is the same for all human beings and the particular happiness of each individual. Since the individual essence is a perfection of the human essence, on this picture, we are not permitted to pursue a person’s particular happiness in a way that is at odds with the pursuit of her 50

It is instructive that even Kant, who surely understood about the dignity of every human being, could argue that a man can lose the dignity of a citizen by crime, and properly become a slave, “a mere tool of another’s choice,” Metaphysics of Morals 6: 330.

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happiness as a human being. Are there any constraints that God imposes upon all human beings, just in so far as they are human beings? The Natural Law tradition, of which Scotus is a part, holds that there are, and so does Kant. For example, there is the command not to lie. Suppose there are commands from God to humans as human, the question remains whether the constraints imposed by these commands are absolute. This question in turn needs to be distinguished into the question whether it is possible that God can command an individual to do something contrary to these commands to humans as human, and whether it is permissible for individuals to work out for themselves that something contrary to these commands is required. The model I am proposing accepts from Scotus that God can give “dispensations,” that is to say that God can command individuals to act in a way contrary to the commands God gives to humans as human. This is because, on the Scotist view, there is no necessary connection between these commands and human nature, although they fit human nature very well. God is a kind of consequentialist, I said. But it does not follow from this that it is permissible for us to work out on our own whether there is such a dispensation in our individual cases. Could the voice of conscience tell us that we were in a situation in which the right thing to do was to tell a lie? To answer this would require a worked-out theory of conscience, which I am not able to provide. For the purposes of the model, I will say that even though there are situations in which the least morally bad thing to do is to lie, this does not mean that lying in these situations is right or commanded by God.51 Sometimes we may have to do 51

How do we know lying is the least bad thing to do here? It is not because there is an absolute priority of lifesaving to truth-telling, and it is not because we simply calculate the balance of preference-satisfaction. It is reasonable to think that usually, when one person’s life is threatened by another, the route God chooses to their final end (to the unique kind of loving God to which each is called) is through longer life on the earth, and that this is more fundamental to sharing the ends of the various parties than telling the truth to someone who (in Kant’s phrase) “has no right to demand it of me,” Lectures 27: 447 (Kant’s example is a thief who will use the truth I tell him to steal from me). I realize that there is much philosophical work needed to justify this judgment. Roger Sullivan has a good discussion of Kant’s famous “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives,” in Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory, 173–9.

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what is the least bad thing, but that does not make it a good thing, a thing that deserves to draw us, other things being equal. The standard case for considering this question is the Dutch householder hiding a Jew in her attic, during the Nazi occupation of her country. When an officer comes to the door and asks if she is hiding any Jews, what should she do? Some defenders of absolute principles claim that God would never allow us to be in a situation in which lying was the least bad thing, and that God would always provide another alternative.52 I do not myself remember being in a situation in which lying seemed the least morally bad thing. But other people describe being in such situations, and the claim that there was an alternative to lying in the Dutch case that permitted saving the Jew seems implausible. The model is therefore committed to the existence of “tragic” situations brought about by human evil, in which there is nothing right to do, and every course of action requires confession, but one of the options is nonetheless the least bad of the available alternatives. Telling the truth to someone who asks about the occupants of our house is good, (drawing us and deserving to draw us, other things being equal) but not right in this situation, because in this situation other things are not equal. To say that confession is required is not simply to say that a good person’s character is set, so that she will inevitably feel regret or compunction or even remorse when the least bad thing to do goes against her established principles. Rather, when she confesses, she is being sensitive to the actual moral character of what she is doing when she lies.53 In a similar example, 52

See I Corinthians 10: 13, “No temptation has seized you except what is common to human beings. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” But the context in the chapter is temptation to do something to one’s own advantage, and the application to the present case is unclear. 53 Putting this difficulty philosophically, the position about tragedy I have taken requires a qualification to the prescriptivist principle that “X is wrong” entails the imperative “Do not do X.” (R. M. Hare also allows this for the similar, but not identical, case in which an intuitive principle remains prescriptive, but is overridden at the critical level in a particular situation, and so is not applied (MT, 59). See Chapter 4, footnote 69. Putting the difficulty theologically, the person who lies is breaking God’s command but perhaps (given the situation) in the hope of mercy.

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bishops in the early Christian centuries required soldiers who had killed, even in a just war, to abstain for a while from Communion on their return. Now we can come to the argument from Thomas Carson that we need a conception of a divine being as a standard, if we are going to provide an adequate account of moral endorsement.54 When faced with the point about our tentative access to Reason, discussed above, it is tempting to reply that we can still operate with the standard of what we would endorse if we were fully informed, and this does not require reference, even hypothetically, to what some divine being endorses. But this reply fails, and we can see this by looking at four difficulties in the way of conceiving what it would be like for us to be fully informed.55 One problem is about the sheer scope of the information, given our finite intellects. Even if we reduce the standard, as above, to what would be sufficient to show an act wrong or right, this is still a hugely demanding goal.56 What would count as sufficient information, and how would we know that we had it? Surely sufficiency appeals to the notion of an ideal amount, of which the sufficient amount is a subset. No doubt a person can make a good decision about whether to buy a used car, for example, without being omniscient. But if the question is, “What is the ideal position to be in when making such a decision?” the answer seems inevitably to be, “the position God is in, if there is a God.” One way to see this is to compare making a decision in two different positions. In the first position, we consider what we would prefer if we had all the information that was in fact available to us. In the second position, we consider what we would prefer if we had full information. Since it is possible that there is important information that is now unavailable 54

Thomas Carson, Value and the Good Life, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2000. Carson argues against moral realism, and so I will not be accepting the book in its totality. But I want to use his argument in favor of what he calls “the divine-preference theory of rationality.” 55 I am giving an abbreviated version of my treatment of this question in Hare, Why Bother Being Good? 154–72. 56 We could try to define this as discarding irrelevant information, roughly information that would not change the outcome of the decision for a person of practical wisdom, but only if we already had the notion of practical rationality, which is just what is in question here. See Carson, Value and the Good Life, 234–6.

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to us, most of us would prefer the second position to the first. But full information is available only to God, if there is a God. A second difficulty in the case of the car purchase is that part of the relevant information is about the reliability of the secondhand car salesman (not just the reliability of the car). This requires seeing into peoples’ hearts, which we are not able to do, though God can. No doubt some humans are better than others at assessing character. But none of us is very good, even at seeing our own fundamental motivations. Moreover we would be harmed by the kind of knowledge this would give us. Life would be intolerable if we knew all the time what people were thinking about us. A third difficulty is that human minds are affected by the order in which information is presented to them, and by how it is framed. Patients who are told that an operation has a 70 percent chance of success are more likely to go ahead with it than if they are told it has a 30 percent chance of failure. If we are considering open-heart surgery, it makes a difference to us whether the operation is described to us in medical jargon, like “incision,” “suture,” “clot,” and “hemorrhage,” or in lay terms, like “slice,” “sew,” “gob,” and “gush.”57 How much vividness is consistent with emotional equanimity, in making such a decision? These sorts of cases show in different ways that the human mind is not set up to achieve the ideal that we nonetheless try to approximate in making our decisions. The most telling difficulty is a fourth one. For humans, acquiring information has a cost, not merely the time to consult a buyer’s guide, for example, but what economists call “opportunity cost,” i.e. the sacrifice of good things that we would otherwise be obtaining. Again, this is a limitation built into the human condition, but we have the ideal of a position that is not limited in this way, and this ideal makes intelligible our efforts to get as close as we reasonably can. Finally, we need to add the limits to our impartiality. This is again partly a matter of limited information. To treat other people as having equal value with ourselves requires sharing their morally permitted ends (or purposes), making those ends our own. This was Kant’s interpretation of the categorical imperative in one of its 57

See J. David Velleman, “Brandt’s Definition of ‘Good,’ ” Philosophical Review 97 (1988).

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formulations. But we often do not know what those ends are, so we cannot share them. In fact, the situation is worse than this. Not only do we not know what those ends are, but we impute ends to other people, assuming them to be either like ourselves or like some stereotype we have in our minds. If I tend toward an exaggerated desire for personal privacy, I will tend to assume that the person I see sitting at a table in the lunchroom by himself does not want to be disturbed; I will choose another table that is empty. On the other hand, if I am unusually gregarious, I will tend to interpret the signs he gives as meaning that he wants company, and sit down at the table beside him. The person himself may have behaved in an identically neutral way both times, neither encouraging more contact nor discouraging it; however, I project my own desires onto him as though he were a mirror, reflecting me to myself. A stereotype works in a different way, projecting a stock picture onto a person. But the only person who knows the heart is God, if there is a God. Suppose, however, that I do have a rough idea of another person’s purposes, there is still the difficulty that Kant’s formulation requires me to give them the same importance as my own. How much weight am I allowed to give my own preferences? I know them better, presumably, than I know the preferences of others, and I am probably better at securing their satisfaction, at least within a certain range. But it is doubtful that we are capable of reducing the greater weight we give to our own preferences to these two advantages we have, of greater access and greater ability to satisfy. The position we imagine as ideal is one in which all the people involved, including ourselves, are loved the same. But that is not a position we in fact occupy. It is the position God occupies, if there is a God. In all these ways, then, we require the notion of God in order to make sense of the appropriate standard we imagine for moral endorsement. I have been defending, in effect, R. M. Hare’s use of a benevolent God as a model, or ideal, that we try to approximate in our moral thinking. But I want to return at the end of this chapter to the idea that if we are going to persevere in the moral life, reason requires that we believe there is a reasonably good chance of attaining the ends we pursue, consistently with each other. This consistency puts constraints not merely on what we imagine, but also on what we believe to exist. We have to believe there is a reasonably good chance not only for the ends we pursue for ourselves, but for the ends

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we take on from others; we have to believe that there is a reasonably good chance of their being achieved, consistently with each other and with our own ends. I do not mean that our desires or wishes have to be consistent, if we are to persevere in the moral life. When buying the secondhand car, we can desire and wish for a combination of features that we know perfectly well we are not going to find. Consistency of desire may be a goal, and is more closely achieved by the 50-year-old in my previous example than by the adolescent, but it is not a precondition. On the other hand trying to get something, for ourselves or others, requires believing that it is at least possible to get it (though not necessarily by our own devices). Bringing in God’s assistance here may seem to remove any limit other than mere logical consistency on what we could believe possible, given God’s omnipotence. Could we not try to jump to the moon, believing it possible by God’s assistance? But there is still a limit if we confine ourselves to the assistance we believe God is in fact offering, since God offers to assist with living a good life, but does not offer to assist with jumping to the moon. We can put the same point about consistency negatively. Suppose there were a demon who produced evil whenever we tried by our actions to produce good (as Descartes in the Meditations imagines a demon who makes our beliefs false whenever we aim at truth). We would stop trying to produce good. This point applies not just to the belief that it is possible to achieve the good, but that there is a reasonable chance of it. Suppose the demon interfered half the time. In the case Descartes imagines, suppose half the time we ended up believing something false, though we never knew when; we would stop trusting our epistemic faculties. I do not claim to know where the cut-off point is for a “reasonably good chance.” There are some good things that are comparatively isolated from a larger pattern of values. Nietzsche, for example, enjoyed a cup of cocoa every morning. Even this could be disrupted by the demon, if he were to appear in the guise of a boring metaphysician every day at the time of the cocoa, and refuse to go away before being granted twenty minutes of conversation. To construct a life worth living even out of these small goods requires believing that the world is hospitable to the attempt. But these comparatively isolated goods probably do not have the power to sustain a person’s interest in life, though this is an empirical question. Kierkegaard presents in Either/Or the paradox of the aesthete’s life. Johannes the Seducer, in that work, imagines himself as a lookout at the top of a ship’s

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mast when waves are crashing on the deck below.58 The ship is a metaphor for his own life, and the sight of the deck from above is interesting from a purely contemplative point of view. The pilot of the ship, on the other hand, has to make decisions about how to face the storm. The paradox is that the aesthete cannot sustain his interest without engagement. The very things that make life interesting are the things that are larger than he is and that require commitment, especially commitment to other people. The aesthete wants to be disengaged, or detached, enjoying his aesthetic pleasures one at a time, without any larger narrative that makes sense of them. Kierkegaard’s point is that such a life is, in the end, merely boring. The ethical life (on Kant’s picture of the categorical imperative) requires commitment to sharing the ends of those affected by our decisions. But now if we consider the larger sphere in which we live our lives, we affect thousands of people and they in turn affect us, when we drive or shop or teach. The ethical life requires us to believe that there is a reasonably good chance of achieving our purposes consistently with them achieving theirs (Kant adds the proviso that their purposes are not morally forbidden). The world might be the sort of place in which some can be happy only if most are not. We have to believe the world is not like this, if we want a coherent picture, and if we are committed to a Kantian picture of humans as ends in themselves. But this presents a massive coordination problem. What could justify believing that there is a reasonably good chance of such an eventual harmony of purposes? Kant puts this in terms of what he calls “the highest good,” the union of happiness and virtue. As I presented his argument (in Chapter 3) he thinks we are required by “the fact of reason” (the fact that we are under the moral law) to believe that the virtue of all is consistent with the happiness of all in the long run. If we supplement this point with the Scotist view of the particular happiness to which each of us is called, this means that we have to be able to believe that there is a route for each of us to follow that will result in all these particular happinesses being consistently achieved together. This is hard to believe, given the conflict we continually experience between what is good for one person and what is good for another. We get what Kant calls an antinomy, or apparent contradiction. The question here is a moral 58

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, 325.

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version of the question about the order of the cosmos as a whole. Cosmos is a Greek word that can be translated “harmony.” The problem is that there is so much physical evidence of forces that make the existence and survival of this cosmos hard to explain. Some people will answer, “Well it just is, and we do not need an explanation.” In the same way, some people will say that the moral order just is. But we see forces in the individual and in society leading away from harmony. Christian theology calls them collectively “sin.” We need some account of what could counter these forces and harness the good in us toward a union of happiness and virtue. The Kantian solution to antinomies of this kind is to appeal to “the supersensible” or divine agency. R. M. Hare proposed Providence. Both views are consistent with our experience of tragedy (though neither Kant nor R. M. Hare spoke of tragedy in this way). I suggested earlier that there is enough evil in the world so that sometimes we have only a choice of bad options. Certainly peoples’ purposes are often not conjointly achievable, if, for example, one group wants to kill as many as possible of another. Why, if there is a God, such situations should be allowed to occur, is a fundamental question requiring the theist’s response.59 But belief in Providence is belief that such tragedy is not all there is, that we can reasonably hope that the good is more fundamental than the evil and will in the end prevail. R. M. Hare calls this “the faith that all shall be well,” quoting from Julian of Norwich. J. S. Mill talked about the need for hope, to counter the sense of “not worth-while.” The argument I have been making is that this belief in Providence is rationally presupposed by the project of trying to live the moral life. If this is right, we can ask what features of the agency of this Providence are presupposed. The theist will argue that they are the two features described in Carson’s divine preference model of practical rationality, namely impartial benevolence and complete information, together with what Kant called “unlimited resources 59

In the case of genocidal ideals, we can assume they do not pass the test of the Kantian proviso. If we accept that we have freedom of the will, and that God gives this to us because God wants free co-lovers, we can say that God cannot give us this without allowing us to adopt evil maxims. There is a large literature on this topic. I have written about it myself, in Hare, “The Problem of Evil,” in Evidence for Faith, eds Louis D. Whitworth and John Warwick Montgomery, Dallas: Probe Books, 1991, 231–52. For a recent treatment, see Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory, 304–38.

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adequate to [the sovereign’s] will.”60 But there may be, for all I have said in this book, atheist positions that can do the same work. They will not be the four particular atheist positions I have described, but perhaps there are other, better ones. I have tried to give a model of a theistic theory that combines some of the merits of the three or four types of ethical theory I have distinguished. In the process, I have made pronouncements on many controversial issues without making a sustained defense of the positions I have taken. I will have succeeded, nonetheless, if a coherent picture has emerged of how this combination might work.

60

Groundwork 4: 434.

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INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Genesis

6: 5 22: 1–19 27: 16

80 98, 101, 269–70 256

Exodus

1: 19–21 3: 14 11: 2 12: 35 19: 5–6 32: 32

98 118 98 98 80 92

Leviticus

19: 18

79

Deuteronomy

6: 5

79

Joshua

6: 17

98

II Kings

5: 11–12

256

Psalms

16: 4 34: 14 42: 9–11 75: 3

62 218 269 208

Proverbs

8: 27–36

81

Hosea

1: 2

98

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302

index of biblical references

Matthew

10: 7–19 16: 18 18: 21–35 25: 21 27: 45

85 113 224 144 92

Mark

12: 29–31 12: 41–4

79 77

Luke

6: 31 8: 40–56 9: 23–4 20: 47 21: 4–6

220 274 78 78 77–8

John

1: 1, 14

83

Romans

7: 15–17 9: 3

172, 222–3 92

I Corinthians

10: 13 15: 28

282 186

Hebrews

11: 9 11: 19

259 101, 269

James

1: 25 2: 12

204 204

Revelation

2: 17 22: 5

113 169

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GENERAL INDEX

Notes: “n” after a page reference indicates a note on that page. In this index I have used the same categories under each of my four main authors, so as to enable comparison between them, and also as entries in their own right (without duplicating the references to the main authors), so as to extend this comparison to the introductory sections of the first four chapters and to the final chapter.

Abraham 80, 98, 101–2, 259, 269–70 Adams, R. M. 99n, 100n, 154n, 234n, 252–4, 262–3, 269 Aeschylus 29n, 63n Albee, E. 189n Ambrose 82 Ameriks, K. 137n, 179n Anaximander 63 Anaximenes 12 Anscombe, G. E. M. 260, 264 Anselm 83–4, 91–2, 93n Aquinas 83–7, 89, 91, 94, 99, 178, 278n arbitrariness 99, 142, 213–14, 247, 263, 269–71 Archytas of Tarentum 10 Aristotle 1–4, 7–72, 77–8, 81, 124, 127, 178, 244–5,

254–5, 257, 271, 274, 276, 278 action 18, 34–43, 47–51 ends (teleology) 36–7, 44–5, 57–8 freedom 54, 56–7, 93 God 15–20, 25–34, 36, 38, 46–9, 54–5, 56, 58–65 good 20–5, 37–41, 252 happiness 20, 30–4, 41–2, 44, 55 love 15, 55–6, 60 motivation 41–2, 43–6, 57–8 nature (natural law) 23–4, 44–5, 57, 66–7, 76 reason 27, 36, 38, 48, 53, 57–8 society 16, 27, 43, 62 theology 25–7, 32, 61–2

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Aristotle (cont’d) virtue 11, 13, 28, 30, 45, 51–65, 106 Arnhart, L. 3, 19, 65–72, 106, 115, 259, 260, 271 Audi, R. 271n Augustine 57n, 82–4, 86, 111, 124, 128, 167, 224n Austin, J. 60n, 197–9, 222 autonomy 99–100, 153, 176, 182–3, 261, 266–9, 278 Averroes 84, 122 Avicenna 84 Ayer, A. J. 196–7, 207 Baumgarten, A. G. 139, 145, 171, 174 Beck, L. W. 66, 153n Bentham, J. 189, 191, 228 Berkeley, G. 133 Biel. G. 126–7 Bodéüs, R. 15n Bonaventure 83–5, 88, 124 Bradley. F. H. 189 Brandt, R. B. 224n Broad, C. D. 1–2, 193 Broadie, S. 20n, 25n, 43n, 57n Brower, J. 84n Butler, J. 1, 230 Calvin, J. 128–9, 134, 257, 258n Camus, A. 119, 124 Carnap, R. 196 Carson, T. 283–5 Cicero 82, 151 Cohen, G. A. 180–1 Coleridge, S. T. 191 conscience 132, 153–4, 230, 270, 281 contemplation (theory) 10, 14–20, 46–51, 88–90, 123, 131, 160–2, 168–9, 255, 287 Copleston, F. 104n

Couenhoven, J. 83n courage 17–18, 51, 53, 58–9, 106, 110, 171–2, 232, 255–6, 276 Crisp, R. 13n, 245n Cross, R. 103n Crusius, C. A. 130, 131–2, 140, 142, 151–5, 268 Cudworth, R. 251–52, 258 Dahl, N. 60n Dahl, R. 40n Darwin, C. 67–8 Descartes, R. 129, 173, 286 Dewey, J. 197 Dirlmeier, F. 65n Dostoyevsky, F. 115 Edwards, J. 92 Emerson, R. W. 205 ends (teleology) 116, 197, 250, 264, 284–6 Epicurus 12, 142, 151 Erasmus, D. 125, 167 Euripides 29 Euthyphro 10, 63, 263 evolution 67–72, 256 Feuerbach, L. A. 187 Fichte, J. G. 185 Ficino, M. 9, 123–4 Finnis, J. 212n Flew, A. 208 Francis of Assisi 84–5, 98, 217, 232n, 277 Francke, A. H. 131, 132 Frankfurt, H. 276n freedom 4, 117, 120, 125, 127, 132, 186 friendship 43, 55–6, 91, 109–10, 131, 228–9 Freud, S. 267 Furth, M. 21n

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general index Gauthier, R.-A. 36n, 57n Geach, P. 255n generosity 51–2, 77–8, 106, 109 George, R. P. 278n Gibbard, A. 234–40, 262 Gilligan, C. 70 God as lover 3, 77–9, 81, 90, 99, 105, 108, 111 as magnet 3, 15, 60–1, 63–5, 81, 251–3, 260, 264, 271 as model 3, 222–4, 229–31, 235, 241–2, 283–5 as sovereign 3, 80–1, 152–3, 155–6, 163, 264, 274–5 as Trinity 75–7, 79, 90, 128, 207, 249–50, 254 divine command, see morality good 8–11, 81, 125, 193–5, 252–9, 263, 278, 282 Grabill, S. J. 129n Green, T. H. 189, 200, 267n Greene, T. M. 135 Gregory of Nazianzus 25n Griffin, J. 278–79 happiness 78, 86, 130, 133, 191–2, 280–1, 287–8 Hare, J. E. 21n, 54n, 65n, 104n, 128n, 136n, 149n, 158n, 176n, 178n, 212n, 223n, 239n, 250, 262n, 275, 288n Hare, R. M. 1–4, 50n, 146, 180, 182, 184–248, 277, 279, 282n, 285, 288 action 203–5, 210–12, 221, 233–4 Aristotle 211–12, 221, 244–5 ends (teleology) 213, 227, 233–5 freedom 205, 219, 221 God 202, 205–7, 208, 213–14, 222–4, 229–30, 235, 243–4

305

good 204, 214–16, 242–3 happiness 226–7, 234, 242–3 ideals 217, 224–6, 228, 233, 237–40, 245 Kant 203, 207, 212, 220, 221, 222, 223, 235 love 205, 232, 240 motivation 235, 242–3 nature (natural law) 206, 209 prescriptivism 203–4, 209–18, 221–3, 233, 253 obligation 205, 212, 217–18, 220–1, 223–4 reason 211, 219, 234, 236, 239 Scotus 201n, 202n, 204n, 215n society 205, 213, 217–18, 229, 243 theology 233 universality 209–10, 216–17, 220–21, 224, 236–8, 240 utilitarianism 204–5, 226–8, 233–42 Harrison, J. 69n Harsanyi, J. C. 244n Hegel, G. W. F. 117, 146, 184–6 Heidegger, M. 115, 270 Heraclitus 12, 62, 201 Herodotus 29n, 190 Hesiod 12, 29n, 211n Homer 12, 13, 29n, 31, 54, 63 honor 11, 27–31, 62–3, 143, 278–9 Hopkins, G. M. 113–14 Hume, D. 1, 68, 133–4, 136–8, 159, 189, 212, 235n Hutcheson, F. 133, 140, 151, 173, 175, 190, 217n Hutchinson, D. S. 14n immortality 11, 19, 38n, 77, 86, 92, 160–1, 191, 207

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Ingham, M. E. 97n, 108n intuition 58, 83, 161, 168, 193–5, 228–33, 235, 240–1, 260, 271 Inwagen, P. van 23n Jaeger, W. 14n Jerome 81–2 Joachim, H. H. 47n Johnson, M. R. 14n Jolif, J. Y. 36n, 57n Julian of Norwich 246n, 288 justice 17–18, 68–9, 91, 93, 104–5, 160, 205, 227, 231n, 241–3, 272 Kant, I. 1–4, 11n. 66, 86n, 122–83, 184–8, 198, 244, 247–8, 250–1, 257–8, 263–6, 268, 273, 279, 281, 284 action 146–9, 157–9, 161–5, 168, 171–3 Aristotle 146, 151, 155, 157, 161, 171, 174–5 categorical imperative 140–2, 145–6 ends (teleology) 140, 149–51, 164–5, 175 freedom 158, 161, 163–4 happiness 138, 140, 156–7, 166–8 God 135–6, 142–5, 151–6, 159, 165–6, 170 good 142–3, 156–9, 166–7 love 154n, 173 motivation 143–4, 154–5, 172–4 nature (natural law) 138, 147, 168, 175 obligation 142–3, 173, 177 reason 136–7, 140, 148–9, 165, 169–70

Scotus 146, 149, 154, 157, 161, 171, 250–1 society 140, 170 theology 135–6, 166 universality 141–2, 146–9 virtue 156–9, 171–2, 175, 248 Kenny, A. 17n, 32n, 57n, 65n Kent, B. 109n Keyt, D. 44n, 47n Kierkegaard, S. 187–8, 241n, 286–7 Knutzen, M. 130 Korsgaard, C. 3, 40n, 147n, 176–83, 265–6, 267–8 Kraut, R. 47n Kuehn, M. 130n Lear, J. 69n Leibniz, G. von 66, 129–30, 131, 138, 151 Lorenzetti, A. 104–5 Louden, R. 171n, 174n love 4, 83, 126, 253, 257, 273–4 Luther, M. 87, 125–6, 127–8, 131, 151, 164, 167, 170, 172, 185, 257 lying 80, 98, 140–1, 146–8, 150, 281–2 MacDonald, S. 86n MacIntyre, A. 106, 146, 208n, 214n Mackie, J. 182, 195, 261 magnanimity 28, 35, 86, 259 Maimonides 84 Major, J. 88, 128 Manetti, G. 123n Marx, Karl 187 matter and form 22–4, 96, 107, 155, 164–5, 202, 266 McDowell, J. 106n

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general index Melanchthon, P. 125 Milbank, J. 106n Mill, J. S. 190–2, 226, 228, 245, 262, 268, 288 Milton, J. 37n, 205, 216 Mitchell, B. 208 Montaigne, M. E. de 139, 217n Moore, G. E. 189, 193–5, 209, 215, 253, 271–2 morality consequentialism 1, 133, 146, 165, 189–93, 199, 233–3, 274–89 divine command theory 79–80, 97–104, 127–8, 151–6, 194, 195–6 duty 1, 119, 130–1, 142, 144–5, 162–3, 171, 173 virtue 1, 51–65, 77, 83, 86, 121, 192, 251–60, 287–8 motivation 131, 133, 176–9, 190, 242–3, 245–6 Muller, R. 129n Murphy, M. 270n Nagel, T. 181n nature (natural law) 86, 97–8, 116, 124–5, 127, 129, 130, 270–1, 278, 288 Newton, I. 175 Niebuhr, Reinhold 223n Nietzsche, F. 177, 188–9, 265–6, 286 Nowell-Smith, P. 100n, 200, 223, 267 Nussbaum, M. 19, 32n, 257n, 278n Oberman, H. 126n obligation 80–1, 125, 132, 143, 152, 176, 180–1, 192, 251, 261–3, 265–71, 280–3 Ockham 126

307

Origen 82 Orwell, G. 230 Ovid 221–2 Paley, W. 189, 193, 246 Parmenides 12, 117–18 Paton, H. J. 200, 207 Peter (Lombard) 9, 88, 111 Petrarch 122–3 Piaget, J. 267 Plato 7–20, 64–5, 85, 124, 178, 190, 194, 212, 230, 242, 253, 256, 265–6, 269, 275 pleasure 16, 38–40, 60, 94, 130, 133, 172–4, 189–92, 228, 241 Plotinus 82, 124 pluralism 100–1, 271–3 Pope, A. 27n Price, A. W. 216n, 235n Protagoras 12 Prudence 108, 140, 144, 211n, 225n, 234, 242, 244–5, 257 Pythagoras 8, 10–11, 16, 47 Raphael 4, 7–12, 75–87 Rawls, J. 177, 227n, 231n, 272–3 reason 9, 12, 85, 117, 126, 134, 180, 245, 247, 279–80, 283, 288 Reinhold, Karl 137n Roberts, R. 256n Robinson, R. 59n Ross, W. D. 21n, 42n, 215n Rousseau, J.- J. 129, 170 Russell, B. 66, 195–7 Ryle, G. 200 Sartre, J.-P. 3, 115–21, 138n, 186n, 202n, 214n, 265 Scanlon, T. M. 210n

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Scotus 1–4, 65, 75–121, 123, 125–8, 131–3, 250–1, 254, 257–8, 266, 268–9, 281, 287 action 88–91, 95–7, 101–4, 109–10 Aristotle 89–91, 94, 101, 104–6, 109–10, 112, 117 ends (teleology) 89, 106–8, 254 freedom 93–7, 111 God 75–121 good 91–2, 95, 103–4 happiness 90–2, 113 love 89–90, 97–8, 108–11, 113–14, 254 motivation 91–7 nature (natural law) 97–8, 107–8, 112, 116 obligation 100–1, 103–4 reason 94, 103, 117 theology 88–91 universality 111–15 virtue 88, 105–11 voluntarism 89–90, 97–9, 101–4 Schneewind, J. B. 125n, 132n, 177 Shakespeare, W. 33, 124 Sidgwick, H. 1, 192–3, 245–7, 260 sin 59, 79–80, 110, 128, 209, 251–2, 266, 288 Singer, P. 3, 184n, 242–8, 254, 274 slavery 19, 54, 71–2, 189, 242, 280 Smith, M. 232n society 78n, 85, 129, 186–7, 259, 263–4 Socrates 10–11, 13, 25, 62–3, 185, 263 Sophocles 29n

Spener, P. J. 131, 223 Speusippus 13–14 Stevenson, C. 197, 207, 211n Stoeffler, F. E. 131n Strauss, D. F. 187 Strawson, P. F. 221n, 233 Suarez 124–5, 144 Sullivan, R. J. 141n, 281n supervenience 103–4, 215, 221 Swinburne, R. 256n Taylor, C. 129n, 275 Taylor, R. 261 Thales 12 theft 37–8, 98–9, 116, 129 theology 1, 79, 82, 129, 249 tragedy 62, 70–1, 188, 202, 282–3 Trollope, J. 53n universality 10–11, 126, 265, 280–1 Vaughan, H. 206 Velleman, J. D. 284n virtue, see morality Viterbo, E. da 8–10, 19, 123–4 weakness 58–60, 94, 221–3, 231, 275 Westphal, M. 163n Whitehead, A. N. 195, 201 Wilberforce, W. 71 will 1, 57–8, 80, 83, 89–90, 91–7, 113, 120, 167–8, 174–5, 203, 220 Williams, B. 241n, 261 Williams, T. 105n Wittgenstein, L. 178, 196, 198, 209–10, 264–5 Wolf, S. 181n, 278–80 Wolff, C. 130–1, 139, 145, 171

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general index Wolter, A. 95 Wolterstorff, N. 168n woman 19, 54, 69–71, 118, 149n Wood, A. 146n, 169n Wordsworth, W. 191 Wyma, K. 223n

Xenophanes 12, 63 Young, J. Z. 23 Zagzebski, L. 255n, 288n Zeno of Citium 39, 142

309