Truth and Faith in Ethics

Contents 1. Truth and Faith in Ethics: Editorial Introduction 2. Faith in Reason: The Unity of the Right, the Good and ...

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Contents 1. Truth and Faith in Ethics: Editorial Introduction 2. Faith in Reason: The Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life 3. Morality with and without God 4. Religion in Public Life 5. Public Reason in Bioethics 6. Contemporary Moral Philosophy and Happiness 7. Ethical Naturalism and the Challenge of Biology 8. Happiness, Virtue and Religious Commitments 9. For Cause or Comrade 10. Ethics, Philosophy and Love 11. Friendship, Poignancy and Paradox 12. In Defence of Villey on Objective Right 13. Natural Law 14. Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity Appendix. Is God necessary for Morality? An Exchange

TRUTH AND FAITH IN ETHICS Edited by Hayden Ramsay

IMPRINT ACADEMIC

Copyright © Imprint Academic, 2011 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion. Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic, Philosophy Documentation Center PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA Digital edition converted and distributed in 2011 by Andrews UK Limited www.andrewsuk.com Cover Photograph: St Salvator’s Quadrangle, St Andrews by Peter Adamson from the University of St Andrews collection

Contributors Hayden Ramsay Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Philosophy and Theology, University of Notre Dame, Australia Raimond Gaita Professor of Moral Philosophy, Kings College London, and Professor of Philosophy, Australian Catholic University. John Haldane Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of St Andrews, and Director, Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs Edward Howlett Spence Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Sturt University, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Canberra Jude Dougherty Dean Emeritus, School of Philosophy, Catholic University of America Anthony O’Hear Professor of Philosophy, Buckingham University, Director, Royal Institute of Philosophy, London. Nicholas Tonti-Filippini Associate Dean, John Paul II Institute, Melbourne Bernadette Tobin Reader in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University Director, the Plunkett Centre for Ethics, Sydney Richard Hamilton Senior Lecturer, Philosophy and Ethics, University of Notre Dame, Australia (Freemantle) Julia Annas Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona Nancy Sherman University Professor Philosophy, and Associate Kennedy Center, Georgetown University Christopher Cordner Sandra Lynch Associate Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame (Sydney) John Lamont Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Australia (Sydney) Robert George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; and Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University John Finnis Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy, University of Oxford, Biolchini Family Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame

Hayden Ramsay

Editorial Introduction In 2008 the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney Campus hosted a conference on Truth and Faith in Ethics. A number of key thinkers in the area were attracted to the city by the combination of a new university campus and the visit some weeks later by Pope Benedict XVI and a hundred thousand students to celebrate World Youth Day. The Conference invited reflection on what religious (and in particular, Catholic) faith contributes to ethics, and what it can learn from ethics. An unprecedented range of international and national philosophical ethicists contributed to the event, which also sought to engage the community through public debate, Q and A and media engagement. The resulting publication sets out a range of approaches to moral truth and truths, and to the relationship of faith to ethics. All thinkers have a positive view of the effect of faith upon ethics; most agree that faith has an intrinsic connection to sound ethical thought and not just an apologetic or preaching function. Some argue for this by looking at the role of God in ethics, others look at religion or revelation or at the contribution of historical religious thinkers or moralists. Meanwhile, those considering ethical truth in its own right in independence of faith, focus on natural law or virtue, dignity or elements of individual or communal happiness. The question of what difference, if any, God makes to morality was discussed by John Haldane and Rai Gaita in a lively public debate, hosted by Philip Adams and broadcast throughout Australia on Radio National’s Late Night Live.1 Philip Adams is well-known as a commentator and writer for his atheism and for the skepticism with which he discusses religion. Adams genial Chairing and the [1]

A lightly edited transcript of the broadcast is printed as an appendix to this collection of essays—see pp. 251–269 below.

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Truth and Faith in Ethics

sharp questions of audience members enhanced a debate which surprised many as the two debaters revealed much in common concerning value and meaning—though a clear difference over the existence of the deity. The quality of discussion was lifted by bypassing the often unimpressive ‘new atheism’ for deeper discussion of ‘truth and faith in ethics’. Edward Spence asks whether belief in God is necessary for morality. He thinks not, though he thinks such belief is compatible with the systems good secular ethics have devised. Spence explores Alan Gewirth’s views in particular and looks at forms of (non-religious) faith these imply. The answer to the question ‘why be moral?’ is that this is rational; but in answer to ‘why be rational?’ one can only respond with faith, ultimately love of the Good, however understood. The traditional view is presented by Jude Dougherty in the course of a historical reflection on moral truth. Morality is not possible without God, or at least a metaphysics and anthropology that point towards belief in God. Talk of God introduces religion. There are many religions, and many conceptions of religion; the question of philosophical and sociological identity criteria for religion is complex. The view that religion has a role to play in the secular state, albeit a very different role from that of a secular power, is the theme of Anthony O’Hear’s contribution. He develops a rich pluralism in which common restrictions are accepted to allow people to pursue their own philosophies of life, including religious traditions. The public role of religion is commended, but O’Hear believes that religion is at its core a private matter of believers’ relationships to God. O’Hear is generous towards aspects of religion and generally hopeful about consensus. In a rich paper on public reason in bioethics Nicholas Tonti-Filippini discusses how the understanding of difference can lead to consensus in policy-making and advisory bodies. Believers have a right to put forward their (reason-based) views for inclusion in public debate; but there is an obligation too to make decisions and to achieve from the morally acceptable outcomes on the table the best for the Church. Tonti-Filippini’s point is not that we should seek agreement by hiding difference, or that we should underscore difference and relegate consensus to secondary importance; rather, it is through others coming to understand and appreciate the difference that faith makes to believers that good decisions can be taken and policy advanced. Of course, this is not to downplay the contribution Catholic faith has made to ethics and bioethics. Bernadette Tobin critiques the

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reigning theory of preference utilitarianism in ethics, proposing reason-based (as opposed to faith-based) principles of the Judeo-Christian ethic as an alternative. She cites the teaching on hope of Pope Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi to explain why most Australians felt so good after the Australian Government’s apology to indigenous Australians for policies that have caused harm and unhappiness. Others today criticize the Christian ethic, some for moral reasons, others because of its supposed irrelevance in the light of new scientific, particularly biological discoveries. Richard Hamilton offers corrective here, arguing that followers of Aristotle and Aquinas in particular should take heart that modern versions of the theory of natural selection do not imply we have to give up on natural law views about animal life. Hamilton joins Alasdair MacIntyre in giving us a virtue ethics with important relationships to human biology. Virtue is of course one of the major forms of ethical reflection in discussion about ethical truth. The virtue tradition here is represented by two major thinkers, each taking the debate into less charted waters. Julia Annas explains how Aristotle on virtue and eudaimonia provides us with a naturalistic ethic that does not require God. She then explores how eudaimonism does sit with the religious (Jewish) faith of Philo. Through this examination she shows that an account of virtues constituting eudaimonia as specified by a religion is possible. The notion of commitment provides a way of linking truth and faith in ethics. The final ends of the virtuous come either from rational intuition, a naturalistic account of the flourishing of the person or a religious vision and teaching. The question of final ends emerges too in the contribution of Nancy Sherman. Her contribution considers the inner motivational battles of soldiers as they attempt to understand and appraise the causes for which they are sent to fight. Here, real-life moral participants struggle to assess the justice of military causes against their own understanding of just ends. Serious issues of personal integrity arise here; and where integrity is compromised there are dangers of taint, shame, betrayal and disillusion. Sherman reminds us truth in ethics matters to ordinary men and women; keeping faith with final ends matters if people are to develop self-respect and practise courage. Sherman is interested in first-person experience of warriors and this interest is focus of Christopher Cordner’s chapter. Cordner presents a Wittgenstein-like account of the absolute value of human beings ‘in his own voice’ (which by his wish we retain in this volume). He queries whether we might have benefited today if great

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ethical thinkers and agents of the past had avoided the language of philosophical speculation when communicating their views. Cordner discusses both Plato’s Gorgias and aspects of Christian thought within this context of discovering ethical truth without philosophical reflection as it is commonly understood. This leads to an extended discussion of the value of human beings and of the place of love, including divine love, in Western ethics. Cordner’s view, together with remarks by Gaita in the public debate, is an important reminder of what we could call first-person ethics—ethics that tries to downplay its own philosophical history the better to understand the value of human relationships. By comparison, Sandy Lynch finds much in the tradition of Western philosophy to explain and interpret human relationships. She is alive to the uncertainty and dangers in friendship but finds ethically informative here a range of philosophical thinkers and concepts. In particular, she does what Pope Benedict chose not to do in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est: she discusses St Thomas Aquinas’s De Caritate. Lynch argues that the fragilities of friendship can all be cured by reception of, and growth in, charity. Perhaps the key area in which truth and faith have come together in contemporary ethics is in the work of those holding a natural law theory of action and morality. Surprisingly, the in-roads made by such ‘new natural law’ theories to contemporary moral consciousness and debate have been limited. One exception is among those natural law adherents contributing towards human rights talk and argument. John Lamont examines Michel Villey’s establishment of a case for the Aristotelian concept of the objective right of persons over the late medieval concept of the subjective rights of individuals. This argument is of importance for the current debate on the foundational place of rights in political and legal systems. Robert George joins the debate with an explanation of how the new natural law theory regards human rights, as well as human dignity and religious faith. This practical reason-based account of natural law principles (as opposed to a natural law account that derives principles from metaphysical premises) justifies ascription and talk of human rights, but without the individualism and subjectivism that worried Villey. Rights matter, but like dignity, they are ways of talking about moral principles that enable reasonable participation and sharing of fundamental human goods, nothing more. George also discusses the relation of natural law principles to faith and the question of whether without faith in God we can reach objec-

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tive truths about rights and dignity. His answer is ‘yes’, but it is surely true that without revelation there are differences—in understanding and in motivation. Anyone might understand ‘love your neighbour’ but on the question of just who is my neighbor, without revelation we are mired in philosophical disputes. John Finnis believes that morality precedes faith: it is having a moral sense and sense of obligation that disposes us for the possibility of faith; and it is a positive moral view of religious prophets and teachers that leads us to find religious beliefs worthy. Thus revelation proposes universal truths but through particular events and choices to which individuals are already disposed to give a hearing. Finnis’s work on the inter-dependence of revelation and reason draws together much of the tradition of truth and faith in ethics. His contribution includes important critique of Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy, against which Finnis defends Plato and Christian tradition. Consistent with his views argued over many years Finnis gives fresh illustration that we can identify first principles of practical reason and do so in the ways proposed by new natural law theory. Contemporary academic ethics may stand back from engagement with new natural law, but Finnis does the job by engaging with Williams, Rawls and others in the defence of truth. In different ways we often feel that moral truth and faith are under attack in moral philosophy. This volume suggests, however, that just as in life, attempting to reflect on ethics without truth and faith is actually very difficult. Where utilitarian and pragmatic views are followed in the literature or applied in professional situations there comes a moment each day at which they are put aside. ‘For good utilitarian and pragmatic reasons’, replies the adherent. But in fact, though such external reasons for turning back to truth and faith may exist, this is surely not why we usually do so. People tend to turn to truth and faith because, like health and friends, they need them. If that is a weakness, it is a good one; for it is part of being human and impossible to extract from the ethical debate real human beings have about what matters to them. Thanks are due to Prof. John Haldane for his guidance and assistance with this publication, to the University of Notre Dame Australia and the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney for sponsoring the 2008 Conference on which this publication is based, to the Deputy Coordinator of that Conference Mrs Trish Egan and to Assistant Editor Matt Beard for his dedication and hard work.

Edward Howlett Spence

Faith in Reason The Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life

1. Introduction This chapter will address two key questions both of which are in keeping with the theme of this volume, namely, truth and faith in ethics. The first question, which relates to the role of truth in ethics, is whether a belief in a divine being such as God is necessary for human morality. The second question is whether faith has any part to play in ethics. For insofar as human reason or rationality is sufficient for establishing the legitimate authority of morality then faith it would seem has no direct role to play in ethics, at least not the central role traditionally assigned to it by different religions. The first part of this chapter, based on an Argument from the Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life will address the first question and seek to show that a belief in God is not necessary for morality. Although not necessary, a rational belief in God is nevertheless not inconsistent with a secular morality. Importantly, my concern will also be with the question of moral justification and not with that of moral compliance. That is to say, my enquiry will be concerned only with whether the authority of morality can be justified on secular grounds alone without the need of invoking the existence of a benevolent divinity that creates and sanctions that authority. Thus even if the authority of morality can be shown to be justified on secular grounds alone this in itself does not show that religion does not have an important role to play in encouraging and promoting social compliance with morality even if that morality is shown to be justified on the basis of non-religious grounds.

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The second part of the chapter will address the role of faith in ethics and seek to show that faith and reason are mutually supportive concepts and as such faith has an indeterminate but important role to play in ethics, including secular ethics.

2. Truth in Ethics: The Rational Authority of Morality The problem with basing morality on a religious belief in a benevolent God, one who commands us to be good, is that such a belief cannot be rationally justified without first justifying God’s existence. Since it has proven difficult if not impossible to prove God’s existence, basing morality on the existence of something that cannot be proven with any degree of certainty, and can therefore rationally be doubted, is not a secure foundation for morality. The problem of ascribing the foundation of morality to divine authority is illustrated by an argument in Plato’s dialogue the Euthryphro. Although in that dialogue the argument refers to piety and not morality, the argument can be adapted to refer equally to morality. The argument asks us to consider whether an act is moral because God commands it, or God commands the act because it is moral. If an act is moral just because God commands it, morality is the product of God’s will and that renders morality problematic. This is because morality becomes mysterious and arbitrary—it is whatever God commands. Insofar as God’s Will can be variable and changeable, so can morality. Hence, moral conduct becomes unpredictable and therefore impractical as a way of predicting and regulating human conduct1 on a day to day basis. If on the other hand, God commands an act because it is moral, morality seems to be independent of God’s Will. God himself can only recommend acts that are already moral on some independent criterion other than his own Will. But if this is the case, the authority of morality is independent of God’s authority and thus the existence of God is not required for the justification of morality. But if the existence of a benevolent God is not what underwrites morality’s authority, what else does? Can morality have its own independent secular authority?

[1]

We can, to be sure, assume that God’s Will is fixed and invariable but what possible reason or evidence could we adduce for such an assumption? Perhaps only the mere metaphysical postulate that if God is perfect His Will would not be changeable as this would admit of imperfection that goes against the metaphysical postulate that God is by nature perfect and unchangeable since perfection does not admit of change.

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The Rights of Agents: The Rationale for Alan Gewirth’s Argument for the Principle of Generic Consistency2 The answer to the above question is yes. Morality can have a secular authority based on reason alone. However, in order to be able to establish the legitimate secular authority of morality, one that does not require the support of a prior belief in God, a secular theory of morality must be able to address and answer the question ‘why be moral?’ For unless a convincing answer can be provided to this fundamental question of morality, known as the authoritative question of morality, the secular authority of morality cannot be established. Alan Gewirth, following in the tradition of rationalist ethics starting with Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and later the great modern philosopher, Immanuel Kant, has provided such an argument. His argument for the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) purports to show that we have prima facie rights to freedom and wellbeing and have to respect these rights on pain of self-contradiction. The argument locates morality not in any divine authority or human convention such as contractarian theories of morality but in our own human nature; specifically, the natural characteristic of the human capacity for purposive agency and action. It will be impractical for me to explain here Alan Gewirth’s argument for the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC) on which his derivation of rights to freedom and wellbeing is based, as this is well beyond the scope and limits of this chapter. I offer such a detailed defense in my Ethics Within Reason: A Neo-Gewirthian Approach (2006). I will, however, offer a brief summary of the rationale of the argument for the PGC, as well as a summary of my reconstruction of the argument around the concept of dignity, which is designed to show that although agents have only prima facie rights to freedom and wellbeing they hold those rights absolutely with respect to their personal dignity, which is also partly constituted by their membership of a particular cultural community. A person’s dignity is therefore constituted by a personal as well as a communal orientation. Gewirth’s main thesis is that every rational agent, in virtue of engaging in action, is logically committed to accept a supreme moral [2]

A full and detailed defense of the argument for the PGC against all the major objections raised against it by various philosophers can be found in: Edward Spence, Ethics Within Reason: A Neo-Gewirthian Approach, Lexington Books, Lanham (USA), 2006, Ch. 1–3; Deryck Beyleveld, The Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991 and Alan Gewirth, Reason & Morality, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978.

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principle, the Principle of Generic Consistency. The basis of his thesis is found in his doctrine that action has a normative structure, and because of this structure every rational agent, just in virtue of being an agent, is committed to certain necessary prudential and moral constraints. Gewirth undertakes to prove his claim that every agent, qua agent, is committed to certain prudential and moral constraints in virtue of the normative structure of action in three main stages. First, he undertakes to show that by virtue of engaging in voluntary and purposive action, every agent makes certain implicitly evaluative judgments about the goodness of their purposes, and hence about the necessary goodness of their freedom and wellbeing. Secondly, he undertakes to show that by virtue of the necessary goodness which an agent attaches to their freedom and wellbeing, the agent implicitly claims that they have natural rights to these, from within their own individual subjective perspective. At this stage of the argument, these rights being self-regarding are merely prudential. That is to say, that given that freedom and wellbeing are the necessary generic conditions of agency as such, an agent comes to realize from within their own internal subjective perspective that they have a prudential right to their freedom and wellbeing, these being the necessary means for the exercise of their agency in the fulfillment of their individual purposes. Thirdly, Gewirth undertakes to show that every agent must claim these rights in virtue of the sufficient reason that they are a purposive agent (PA) who has purposes they want to fulfill. Furthermore, every agent must accept that, since they have rights to their freedom and wellbeing for the sufficient reason that they are a PA, they are logically committed, on pain of self-contradiction, to also accept the rational generalization that all PAs have rights to freedom and wellbeing.3 The conclusion of Gewirth’s argument for the PGC is in fact a generalized statement for the PGC, namely, that all PAs have rights to their freedom and wellbeing just by virtue of being PAs. These rights are universal and objective everywhere and at all times without exception.

The Absolute Right to Personal Dignity: A Reconstruction of Gewirth’s Argument for the PGC My reconstruction of Gewirth’s argument for the PGC around the notion of dignity in my book Ethics Within Reason: A Neo-Gewirthian [3]

Gewirth, op. cit., pp. 28–128.

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Approach shows that an agent must not only claim rights to their freedom and wellbeing on the basis that these are the necessary conditions for all their purposive actions, but they must also claim rights to their freedom and wellbeing because these are the essential and fundamental constituents of their dignity as a person.4 In sum, an agent must consider that they have rights to their freedom and wellbeing not only because they are the sort of being who engages in voluntary and purposive action but also because they are the sort of being who needs dignity, that is to say, a being who is a person. We can now see that to some degree at least, a person has the generic rights to freedom and wellbeing in virtue of being a person irrespective of what they do or omit to do as an agent. For every person, no matter what they do or fail to do, needs their dignity. Because all persons need their dignity equally in virtue of being persons, each person will need a certain degree of freedom and wellbeing, in order to preserve and maintain a minimal degree of dignity so as to preserve and maintain their personhood. Thus, a criminal needs their dignity as a person as much as a law-abiding citizen. In this sense, they must both have sufficient freedom and wellbeing to allow them to preserve and maintain their dignity as persons. To the extent that a person has a right to have enough freedom and wellbeing in order to maintain their dignity, that right is absolute. The right to minimal freedom and wellbeing, sufficient for a person to preserve and maintain their dignity, cannot be removed without at the same time removing the very conditions necessary for an agent’s personhood. Personhood is the fundamental common denominator of our shared humanity. According to Gewirth: [A] right is absolute when it cannot be overridden in any circumstances, so that it can never be justifiably infringed and it must be fulfilled without any exceptions.5

The Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life Following the Gewirthian analysis of the normative structure of action and the necessary ethical commitments to which it gives rise, I will now offer a theoretical account of the good derived indirectly from the notion of rights, specifically the generic rights to freedom and wellbeing that all agents have, both individually and collec[4]

Spence, op. cit., pp. 159–213.

[5]

Gewirth, op. cit., p. 219.

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tively as a society, as a matter of rational necessity. This unified account of the right and the good is moreover required for offering a dialectical and objective framework for assessing the notion of a good life, more specifically, the essential conditions that must be present for a good life, defined in this chapter as a life capable of resulting or contributing to the attainment of self-fulfillment. I will refer to this model as the Model of the Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life (MURG).6 Although the PGC is a meta-ethical model of morality that describes what is right, it is also essential to provide a theoretical account of the other two components of this model, namely, the good and the good life. This is necessary in providing not only a secular theory of morality framed within the notion of rights based on the natural property of purposiveness but also a secular account of the notions of the good and the good life. Let us first begin with the good: insofar as the PGC requires all agents to act ethically or at least acknowledge that they ought to act ethically in respecting the rights to freedom and wellbeing of other agents including their own, and insofar as virtues of character such as the cardinal virtues of justice, courage, moderation and prudence, as well as the Humean moral sentiments, such as sympathy (positive) and remorse (negative), can be conceived as enabling dispositions that allow agents to act ethically in compliance with the PGC, especially under difficult circumstances, then the inculcation of those virtues and cultivation of those sentiments are also rationally required, at least prudentially. Secondly, a good life is one that is at least minimally capable of enabling a person to attain self-fulfillment, happiness or eudaimonia. For insofar as self-fulfilment, happiness or eudaimonia is the ultimate object in life as Aristotle claimed, it is difficult to conceive a life that was not at least capable of leading to self-fulfilment, as good— what would it be good for if it were incapable of realizing one’s ultimate objective in life? A good life in turn is capable of attaining self-fulfillment or eudaimonia if it at least accords with the minimal requirements of morality in accordance with the PGC. Those requirements can more successfully be complied through the inculcation of the virtues and the moral sentiments, in accordance with an indirect application of the PGC. That is, a good life capable of resulting or at least contributing to self-fulfillment is more likely to be realizable if one is good—that is, if one has a good character comprising both the moral virtues and moral sentiments. And by being good one [6]

See: Spence, op. cit.

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is also more likely to be righteous in complying with the requirements of the PGC by respecting the rights of other people including one’s own. In conclusion of this section, my Neo-Gewirthian model of the Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life provides a comprehensive secular account of morality that requires no external divine sanction or other authority other that the authority provided by reason itself. Thus the truth of ethics is based on our individual and collective capacity for rational purposive agency. This secular unified model of ethics is moreover neutral and open as to the origin of this capacity. That is to say, it is consistent with both a naturalistic as well as a theological explanation.

3. Faith in Ethics: The Quarrel between Reason and Faith I shall now address the second question that I raised in the introduction of this chapter, which was the question whether faith has any role to play in ethics. I shall address the question concerning the role of faith in ethics in terms of the traditional rivalry between reason and faith and their supposed incompatibility. I hope to show that this rivalry when properly understood is unwarranted. As such, faith, and in particular faith in reason has an important motivational and compliance role to play even in secular ethics, since reason is the basis of secular morality. The argument in brief is that even if reason is sufficient for providing objective justification for a secular morality it may not be sufficient in providing adequate motivation for compliance with its normative prescriptions unless people believed, trusted, and respected reason’s moral authority. In short, secular morality requires faith in reason. In this section of my presentation I will therefore examine what faith in reason amounts to. First, however, I will offer a very quick historical perspective on the traditional quarrel between reason and faith, in order to situate that rivalry within the context of modern philosophy. According to Martin Luther (1483–1546), ‘reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has’.7 Ever since those (in)famous words were uttered, faith has traditionally been pitted against reason. Like two indomitable combatants in a ring, reason and faith have been delivering body blows at each other in a relentless fight for the minds and souls of humanity. [7]

See Martin Luther, Table Talks, 1569.

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However historically concrete the division between reason and faith may appear, it is not clear or certain whether philosophically the dichotomy holds true. As it turns out, the struggle between the embattled twins might only be apparent and illusory. David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, thought that reason was a mere slave to passion,8 describing our belief in the very existence of the natural world as irrational and based ultimately on animal faith. He arrived at that startling conclusion through a series of impeccable logical moves based, of course, on reason. His skeptical point was that our belief in the existence of the external world could not be supported: either by deductive reason since a belief in the non-existence of the world involved no logical contradiction and neither by inductive reason based on empirical evidence since such evidence based on sense experience alone would involve going beyond what our senses actually describe. Moreover, the experience of mere sense data is also, at least rationally, compatible with the existence of a merely illusory world, a grant illusion, a mere mirage. This was also the conclusion arrived at previously by Rene Descartes, the 17th century’s foremost rationalist philosopher and founder of the scientific method of enquiry. Through a series of skeptical arguments in his Meditations, the most famous being that of the argument from the Deceitful Demon, he arrived at the impeccably rational conclusion that our belief in the reality of the external world could not be rationally supported with any degree of certainty if the mere logical possibility of a deceitful demon causing us to experience the reality of an external world through a grant deception, could not first be eliminated. Insofar as no other rational argument or empirical evidence can eliminate the logical possibility of the Deceitful Demon, our belief in the reality of the external world can not therefore be either rationally or empirically supported. He thought that ultimately belief in the external world could only be supported by a prior belief in God’s existence as empirical evidence based on sense perception was subject to radical skeptical doubt. Certainty could only be secured by the existence of a benevolent God who would not trick us about something as important as the existence of the natural world. Unfortunately, Descartes’ ingenious rational arguments, like those of Thomas Aquinas before him, failed to prove God’s existence. David Hume’s brilliant counter arguments in his Dialogues and Natural History of Religion demonstrated that the arguments for [8]

See: David Hume (1739) A Treatise of Human Nature, (2.3.3.4).

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God’s existence though ingenious were not sound and therefore not convincing. Of course, as Hume himself conceded, although the arguments for God’s existence are unconvincing and inconclusive, their failure does not prove the opposite, namely, God’s non-existence. At the end of the Dialogues, Hume remarks, that belief in God is ultimately a mystery:9 The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment appear, the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

Immanuel Kant, the great German rationalist and moral philosopher, himself a believer in the divine, who thought the sun shone out of Hume’s skeptical gaze,10 agreed. Proof of God’s existence is beyond the scope and power of reason. It remains to this day a beguiling challenge if not mystery. If these philosophers are right and neither the existence of the world nor that of God can be conclusively proven by reason, does it all come down to faith in the end? In a word, yes. But faith must itself be rational, it cannot be blind. Ultimately we must have faith in reason. This might strike us as a paradox. However, the paradox points us in the right direction. Faith and reason are twin siblings of the same parents: human nature and human need.11

4. The Three Conceptual Components of Faith in Reason Faith in reason has at least three components: an epistemological, an ethical, and a metaphysical component. Epistemologically we can have faith or trust in reason because of its proven veridical capacity to provide the most effective means for arriving at the truth. The success of science attests to reason’s maximal veridical capacity. Defining reason as the power or capacity of ascertaining and preserving truth, Alan Gewirth, employs what he calls the Purposive [9]

See: David Hume (1779) Dialogues and Natural History of Religion.

[10] See: Immanuel Kant (1781), Critique of Pure Reason. [11] I owe the suggestion for the phrase ‘human nature and human need’ to Philip Quatrio.

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Ranking Thesis (PRT) to demonstrate that reason is the best of human capacities. For insofar as reason is the best capacity for the purpose of discovering and preserving truth, and truth is essential for ascertaining what is best for each person to become in achieving self-fulfillment, then clearly reason is the best of human capacities with regard to that purpose. As Gewirth puts it, ‘such self-fulfillment will achieve the best that it is in one to become because it will be the veridically best part of oneself that guides such achievement … for by being the best veridical capacity [reason] … can help to ascertain what kind of person one should try to be, what kinds of aspirations one should have’.12 More importantly reason, as the best veridical capacity is, according to Gewirth, not merely theoretical or intellectual (as a means of discovering truth for its own sake) but practical too, in using truth for discovering the best means for making the best of oneself. Note, however, that our faith in reason is based on the proviso that we have for the purpose of practical living bracketed-off Descartes’ skeptical challenge. Unbeknown to us, our best science might be no more than a grand illusion caused by the Deceitful Demon in a Matrix-like scenario. Since we cannot rationally discount the logical possibility on which Descartes’ Deceitful Demon argument is based, and let us not forget that it is merely a logical possibility, one for which we have no empirical evidence for or against, we have no certainty concerning the existence of the natural world. At best, as W.V. Quine, the American philosopher has proposed, the existence of the external world is no more than a scientific hypothesis based on an inference to the best explanation.13 However, our belief in such an explanation, for all the tenacity with which we hold it, could be radically mistaken. As we saw earlier, David Hume thought that the tenacity of our belief in an external world might be no more than animal faith, supported by neither reason nor evidence. Ethically we can have faith in reason if we can determine on the basis of reason alone that there are certain inescapable ethical obligations that apply universally to everyone without exception. This, as I hope to have demonstrated in the previous section of this chapter, can be accomplished on the basis of Gewirth’s argument from the Principle of Generic Consistency as extended by my Neo[12] Gewirth, Self-fulfillment, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1998, pp. 75–76. [13] See: W.V.O Quine (1969) “Epistemology Naturalized”.

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Gewirthian model of the Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life. Metaphysically: Unlike the epistemological facet of reason that can allow us some justified beliefs in the external world (setting Cartesian radical doubt aside) the metaphysical dimension of reason is somewhat different. Reason’s epistemological and veridical success within science offers no answers about the ultimate meaning of life and the human condition, for that lies beyond the scope of scientific enquiry. Where then do we look for an answer? Ever since Plato posed the question ‘why be moral?’ under conditions of perfect injustice that allow one to merely appear just when one is not,14 philosophers have been trying to discover the answer to that question. Namely, whether reason could provide morality with its own rational authority; moreover, a secular authority that had no need to acquire its legitimacy from the prior proven existence of a benevolent God. For in the absence of rational belief in the existence of a benevolent God who commands us to be good and moral, or in the absence of any human conclusive or at least rationally persuasive reasons for why one should act morally towards others, radical moral skepticism or moral anarchism or nihilism or moral relativism, are all allowed full sway. For consider: if it was in your self-interest to always act immorally with total impunity, with no possibility of repercussions or punishment from others because you were able to act immorally whilst keeping your identity as moral transgressor hidden from others and moreover you were able to successfully dissemble and appear, contrary to the truth, a paragon of morality and justice (the conditions that Plato describes in the Republic through the Myth of Gyges as perfect injustice) then why would you not act immorally if no justified and adequate reasons to the contrary, other than fear of adverse repercussions from others, could be given? In an attempt to provide an answer to the question ‘why be moral’, contemporary rationalist philosophers like Alan Gewirth have provided, as we saw earlier, a convincing argument to demonstrate that morality can derive its own authority from reason alone. However, for the diehard skeptic the question arises again with ‘why be rational?’ Why not be irrational and immoral, especially if you are a nihilist who believes that the world is a chaotic and valueless vacuum. A collection of chance and haphazard physical events beyond our human control that have no reason or meaning for us other than allowing us to satisfy our own self-interested desires. If [14] Plato, Republic, Book III.

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you can act immorally under conditions of perfect injustice why not do so? For in the absence of God and the lack of any authority by reason that could have deterred you from doing so, what possible motivation would you have for abstaining from evil? Here reason reaches its ultimate limit. If it cannot justify its own metaphysical authority because that would be circular, to whom or to what can reason turn for an answer? Must it ultimately rely on faith for its authority? Plato, who first posed the troubling question about morality’s authority, comes up with a possible answer in his dialogue the Symposium. If ultimately belief in the authority of reason must itself be based on something beyond itself, can that be some type of faith? A faith, however, that is rational and not merely blind and thus warranted? Using Plato for direction, I want to suggest that if faith in reason is warranted it can ultimately be based on love, specifically Love of the Good. This love is not merely intellectual and abstract but experiential and present in the world. Although transcendent, for it is a love of something that for the most part is ineffable and lies beyond our commonsense and pedestrian understanding of the natural world, it is also immanent. It is immanent in the world through our ability to experience both the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of the Good through an appreciation of what for most of us seems valuable and beautiful when we reflect on the natural world around us. If Plato is right, and I believe he is, the gap between faith and reason, philosophy and religion, can be bridged, if at all, by love: a rational love of the Good: a love that ascends to the Good through the ladder of reason but must ultimately take a bold leap off the top of the ladder towards the Good, through having faith in the Good, either interpreted purely in naturalistic terms or divine terms or a bit of both. Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence, it has been said. Love, I say, is the triumph of rational faith in the ultimate goodness of the world over mere intelligence; for intelligence is at times also compatible with evil. Those who thought of and implemented the Holocaust were not unintelligent. One, of course, can doubt that such love of the good exists, or if it does exist that it is necessary or sufficient to provide us with faith in reason and in turn provide us with a reason in believing in the authority of morality. Could not love of the good be at best self-love, love of what is good for us as individuals, one that merely provides us with faith in instrumental reason (means-end reasoning) that at

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most supports our own self-directed and self-interested goals and plans? Is faith in a broader more inclusive notion of reason, one that can support morality, warranted? We are now faced with at least two main choices of belief: The first, is that one can believe that the world is overall a good and harmonious place on secular grounds alone supported by science’s ability in explaining the goodness of the world without the need to look beyond to hidden teleological causes such as a transcendent benevolent Being in the form of God or an all Rational and all Purposive Divine Nature as in the case of the Stoics. I will call this first choice of belief the Epicurean Choice. The second choice is that one can chose to believe that the overall Goodness of the World can not be fully explained by the natural sciences, at least not to the extent of one’s own reflective and contemplative experiences of the world, be they natural or spiritual. Under this second choice one may choose to believe on the basis of a genuine reflective and contemplative experience that the Goodness of the World can only be fully explained to oneself, and only to oneself, by a divine presence—one that is like the Platonic Good at once transcendent and immanent in the world. This second choice of belief has in turn at least two metaphysical variations: the one monistic the other dualistic. Under the former, the divine is wholly within Nature as in Stoic Pantheism and present within and throughout all the ontological entities within it, including humans, animals, trees and stones. I shall refer to this as the Stoic choice of belief. Under the dualist variety, the realm of the divine in the form of God the creator or the Platonic Forms is separate to the natural world, which is held to be inferior to that of the divine realm due to its corruptibility and temporality. Though less perfect than the divine realm, the natural world is also held to be good but to a lesser degree. I shall refer to this choice of belief as the Platonic Choice and it includes the religious belief of most monotheistic religions, amongst others; the Christian, Muslim and Judaic. I wish to now suggest that both types of belief are rational beliefs and as such both require faith in reason and not merely blind faith that, like blind trust, is irrational and not befitting of rational human beings. If I am right, all three types of choice of belief, the secular Epicurean choice, the secular-sacred Stoic choice and the divine Platonic choice are all equally rational given the epistemological constrains of Cartesian skepticism. For in the absence of total certainty with only inference from the phenomena to the best explanation as our rational

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guide, the metaphysical systems favored by each of those choices seem at least logically possible and no one less probable given radical Cartesian uncertainty. The choice of belief is thus ultimately left to our own individual conscience based on our own genuine reflective and contemplative experiences of the world. This could turn out to be, psychologically at least, a matter of temperament. The Epicureans were no less ethical in their lifestyle than the Stoics notwithstanding that their respective moral systems were underpinned by radically different metaphysical systems. However, in the case of the secular Epicurean, it seems problematic how their faith in reason and thus in morality can provide a satisfactory response to the challenge of perfect injustice. Would the Epicurean not be mad or foolish to maintain and preserve their virtue under favorable conditions of perfect injustice in a Universe which they believed was one of haphazard and random material causes with no rhyme or reason? What would be the point or the advantage for such commendable but vain moral heroism? By contrast, the metaphysical systems supporting the Stoic and Platonic choices seem at least to offer the promise of reward, namely, that a virtuous life renders us more attuned and in harmony with a pre-ordained sacred and divine higher reality of which we partake. Perhaps one could say to the contrary that the Epicurean is precisely more praiseworthy because their virtue has no rewarding metaphysical system of support.

5. Conclusion I have examined the three conceptual components of the idea of our faith in reason and the legitimacy of that idea and have argued that the secular authority of reason although epistemologically and ethically justified must itself ultimately be based on a metaphysical leap of faith grounded in some type of Love of the Good, be it Epicurean, Stoic or Platonic, including its religious monotheistic perspectives. This Love of the Good although compatible and certainly not inconsistent with a belief in the existence of a benevolent God or Divine Nature need not necessarily be expressed in terms of the divine. One may choose as in the case of the secular Epicurean, not to make that further metaphysical commitment. However, at the very minimum both the believer and non-believer in the divine are bound by their own rationality to an epistemological and ethical commitment to a further metaphysical belief in the Goodness of the World through the

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type of Platonic Love I discussed earlier, and such a metaphysical belief is based on faith. Such faith extends and transcends the epistemological limits of reason through a commitment of love of the good. Thus the epistemological, the ethical and the metaphysical components of the concept of reason come together and form an inter-related and inter-supporting nexus through the concept of love of the good. It is primarily for this reason that ethics must encompass not only rights, principles or rules but also theoretical and practical notions of the good in terms of a virtuous character and the good life in terms of eudaimonia or self-fulfillment as I have sought to demonstrate through my model of the Unity of the Right, the Good and the Good Life. For it is only through this more inclusive and broader notion of ethics, that we can account and explain the important role that faith plays in ethics through its theoretical reconciliation with reason. As Diotima, the mysterious woman from Mantinea tells Socrates in the Symposium, philosophy or reason that has wisdom in its sights is a lover: an intermediate between the human and the divine. Of course there is no guarantee that this is the best of all possible worlds and not, as Schopenhauer thought, the worst of all possible worlds, one that is evil and not good—one that is not worth the candle.15 Ultimately, one has to make a metaphysical and existential choice through rational faith: Given that there is no certainty, one has to choose on the basis of one’s deepest thoughts and feelings, whether the world is ruled by the Good, the Bad, a bit of both (as the Manicheans believed) or merely the disinterested divinities of Epicurus who live their blessed lives in blissful indifference to the cares and tribulations of humanity. Such divinities, like the ancient Olympian gods could not, however, have a claim or a hold on our commitment to them through love. Indifference only begets indifference. If love of the Good and a further optional metaphysical commitment of love of God are real as genuine and faithful experiences of people of rational good faith seem to attest that they are, then both Love of the Good and Love of God seem warranted by rational faith as justified by a prior warranted faith in reason. If, like the young Australian executed in Singapore for drug offences not so long ago, we faced the hangman alone and frightened what would we choose just before we faced certain death? We know the choice that Socrates, Seneca, Boethius and Jesus made. The [15] See: Arthur Schopenhauer (1818), The World as Will and Idea (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung).

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same rational and faithful choice is up to each one of us. It’s a choice we should be prepared to make on the basis of a rational faith. Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who choose and oppose. T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday, 1930

Jude P. Dougherty

Morality With and Without God Historically considered, Western morality, since the advent of Christianity, has been characterized by an acknowledgment of God’s existence, by the belief that union with God is the end of man, by the conviction that man is morally free in the sense that he is not totally controlled by his desires and passions or by social forces, and that he is possessed of a soul immaterial in nature which permits him to enjoy life in God. From the time of the Stoics until the l8th century, moral reflection, for the most part, took God and an immaterial order for granted. In the l8th century dramatic changes occurred. Hume freed morality from creed; Kant plucked it from its roots in natural theology. These deeds are well known, and there is no need to chronicle them here, but certain features of the moral theory of Hume and Kant are relevant to the present enquiry and may be briefly recalled. Perhaps one ought to begin with Hobbes, but it was Hume who drove home the point that religion and morality are distinct and even disparate in their respective bases and ultimate references, their motivations, and their consequences for human existence. Morality, says Hume, cannot afford to wait on the efforts of natural theology. Mankind must have some commonly available principles and grounds for moral judgment. Hume believed that as a matter of experience, a natural inclination to humanity and benevolence has a more constant and reliable effect on man’s conduct than even the most pompous view suggested by theological theories and systems. In this as in other matters, Kant was to accept too much from Hume. In his first Critique, Kant denies that our theoretical reason can provide evidence for the existence of God, freedom or immortality, but he is nevertheless convinced that these notions are required for

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morality. For Kant, it is axiomatic that moral law requires justice, defined as a measure of happiness in proportion to virtue. Because happiness may elude the virtuous in this life, Kant must posit the existence of God and a future life to ensure that virtue will be properly rewarded. He writes There is only one possible condition under which. . . there can be a God and a future world. I know with complete certainty that no one can be acquainted with any other conditions which lead to the same unity of ends under the moral law. Since therefore the moral precept is at the same time my maxim (reason prescribing that it should be so), I inevitably believe in the existence of God and in a future life, and I am certain that nothing can shake this belief, since my moral principles would thereby be themselves overthrown, and I cannot disdain them without becoming abhorrent in my own eye.

Kant will go on to say that even though no one can demonstrate the existence of God, one can still say, ‘I am morally certain.’ He admits, ‘My conviction is not logical, but is morally certain, and since it rests on subjective grounds, I must not even say “It is morally certain there is a God, etc.” I can only say, “I am morally certain”.’1 For many Jewish and Christian thinkers who come after Kant, the only genuine basis for morality is religion. This is true of theologians such as Brunner, Barth, Niebuhr and Bultmann, who hold that without belief in God, there is no ground or reason for being moral. Elizabeth Anscombe has similarly argued that only if we believe in God as a lawgiver can we come to believe that there is anything a man is categorically bound to do on pain of being a bad man.2 Anscombe maintains that the moral use of obligation statements makes no sense apart from a divine law conception of ethics. Anscombe’s judgment focuses an issue that must be faced by anyone who takes up the problem of moral obligation. When in the l8th century God was removed as a source of moral law, something happened to the notion of obligation. It required a different sort of grounding. Enter the notion of ‘social contract’ brought in to impose obligation and legitimate coercion by virtue of consent given to some hypothetical primitive state. Since the l8th century, the societal contract theory has been the prevailing one and perhaps the only modern rival for the doctrine that power proceeds from the barrel of a gun. The social [1]

Immanuel Kant trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Critique of Pure Reason, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1965, p. 650.

[2]

Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy, Vol. 33 (6), 1958.

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contract is the keystone of John Rawls’s celebrated examination of ‘justice.’3 Leaving modernity aside for the moment, my topic, ‘Morality with and without God,’ demands at least a cursory examination of some pre-Christian or pagan codes of morality. To begin with the Greeks, we note that classical civilization had its gods and took for granted an immaterial order. Every schoolboy knows the names of Greek and Roman gods. An immaterial order needed little defense in classical antiquity. Plato reasoned to a summum bonum, worthy of veneration; Aristotle reasoned to a selfthinking intellect, a first efficient cause, and an ultimate final cause. Cicero believed that the universe is governed by a divine plan and held that the mind or soul of each individual is a reflection, indeed, a part of the divine mind. I take Cicero (106–43 B.C.) to represent the noblest expression of the Roman mind, indeed of the Hellenistic mind, on the subject of the moral life. Cicero claimed no originality but thought of himself as transposing Greek ideas about public life, specifically those of Plato and Aristotle, into a Roman context. In the Discussions at Tusculum,4 drawing upon both the Stoics and the Peripatetics, and making use of Plato’s Gorgias, Phaedrus, Republic, and Laws, Cicero begins: ‘If, my son, we adopt moral goodness as our guide—in each and every one of its forms, it will follow automatically what our practical duties or obligations must be. . . . The next step is to go to the various kinds of obligations which have a direct bearing on people’s daily lives and needs.’ This is something that he does elsewhere in De officiis.5 In the Discussions at Tusculum, he examines the essentials for a happy life. In the first four books of that treatise he concludes that death is not to be feared, that pain is endurable, that sorrow can be alleviated, and that disturbances of the mind can be conquered. Book Five is given to the thesis that moral goodness by itself is sufficient to make one happy. But just suppose, on the other hand, that the good way of life lay at the mercy of a whole lot of unpredictable accidents, so that if appropriate accidents were not forthcoming this goodness would lack sufficient strength to maintain itself independently by its own account. If that were really so, all we could do to [3]

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1972.

[4]

Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. Michael Grant, Discussions at Tusculum in Cicero: On the Good Life, Penguin Books, London, 1971.

[5]

Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. Walter Miller, De officiis, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1913.


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achieve a happy life, it seems to me, would be merely to hope for the best and pray heaven that happiness might somehow come our way.6

‘The happy are the ones who are alarmed by no fears, anguished by no cravings, dissolved into no voluptuous languor by fatuous transports of delight.’7 But is there such a man ‘who is capable of regarding all the hazards and accidents of human life as endurable, a man who moreover is troubled neither by fear nor by distress nor by passion, a man whom all empty pleasures of whatever kind leave utterly cold—then if such a person exists, there is every reason why he should be happy.’8 The issue is not resolved by Cicero although one is left with the impression that in the absence of complete selfcontrol there may be degrees of happiness. In De officiis, Cicero discusses the nature of responsibility and obligation. Given that all mankind is one brotherhood, Cicero infers that we should not be indifferent to the happiness and well being of others. Recognition of brotherhood implies a tremendous social and communal obligation. From the very fact that every human being possesses a spark of the divinity, an essential and indissoluble bond is created with all his fellows. He must therefore treat them with respect and dignity. In fact we incur an obligation to the other, indeed, a responsibility for the other. Nature’s law, says Cicero, promotes and coincides with common interest. In De re publica III, 33, we find Cicero’s famous definition of natural law, ‘True law,’ he says ‘is right reason, consonant with nature, spread through all the people. It is constant and eternal; it summons to duty by its orders, it deters from crime by its prohibitions. … There will not be one law at Rome and another at Athens, one now and another later, but all nations at all times will be bound by this one eternal unchangeable law and the God will be one common master and general (so to speak) of all people. He is the author, expounder, and mover of the law.’9 Justice, Cicero finds, is the crowning glory of the virtues, and close akin to justice is charity, which may also be called ‘kindness’ or ‘gen-

[6]

Cicero, Discussions at Tusculum, op. cit., pp. 52–53.

[7]

Ibid., p. 61.

[8]

Ibid.

[9]

Marcus Tullius Cicero, trans. D.R. Shackelton Bailey, De re publica III, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977.

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erosity.’10 Like the law of nature, to which it is essential, justice is absolute, eternal, and immutable. He extends this concept even to punishment, ‘There are certain duties that we owe even to those who have wronged us; for there is a limit to retribution and to punishment.’11 It is no wonder that Petrarch could say of Cicero, ‘You could sometimes fancy that it is not a pagan philosopher but a Christian apostle who is speaking.’12 Turning to the Orient, we find that Confucianism represents a way of life that was followed by the Chinese people for well over 2,000 years. Although regarded by some people as a religion, it is non-theistic. Within its moral code there is no reference to God or to a teleological conception of nature.13 Ethical issues, for the Confucian, are not determined or formulated apart from the social setting in which they arise. One does not find in Confucian ethics any clear demarcation between moral rules and other sorts of rules. There are no rules that are functionally the equivalent of the Mosaic Decalogue. One finds rather in Confucian ethics a theory of virtue rather than a theory of obligation. The sage follows his desires and satisfies his emotions, but at the same time is restrained by a sense of propriety. That which is proper is that which is in accord with reason. The ‘reasonable’ is a product of experience, both personal experience and that of the community. Yet classical Confucian ethics contains no division among the rational, the emotional, and the appetitive tendencies of man, comparable to their distinction in Greek morality. Where difficult questions for ethical decisions arise in a particular setting, their solution is to be found in the individual’s sense of rightness. Whereas the exercise of the individual’s sense of rightness in normal cases may well be the simple application of a rule, in complex issues that judgment may be challenged by a fellow agent. In such cases the agent proposing a solution must be prepared to offer a reasoned justification for his proposed course of action. Confucius, like Plato, would have the ruler be a sage. Moral qualities, he maintained, are indispensable for leadership. To govern is to [10] Cicero, De officiis, I, op cit., p. 7. [11] Ibid., p. 9. [12] As quoted by Walter Miller in his introduction to Cicero: On Duties, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1913, p. xiv.; numerous reprintings. [13] For a brief overview of Confucian ethics, see Anthony S. Cua, ‘Confucianism: Ethics’, in A.S. Cua, Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, Routledge, New York, 2003, pp. 72–79.


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set things right, but he who would govern must first set himself right. He who would lead is the man who has cultivated, above all, the virtues of filial piety, magnanimity, loyalty, reciprocity, courage, and wisdom. Added to that list is the requirement that the superior man who would govern is one who loves his fellow man joyously from the innermost recesses of his heart. The superior man stands in awe of the ordinances of Heaven. He stands in awe of great men, and in awe of the ‘world of sages.’ A just ruler derives his authority from, and rules by, the Mandate of Heaven; a mandate conferred upon him by reason of his virtue and talent.14 It is said of Confucius that he prayed and fasted, that he attended sacrifices, and that he once even swore by ‘Heaven.’ Heaven is to be understood here, not simply as the regularities found in nature, as it is understood by a later disciple, Hsun-tzu,15 but as a cosmic-moral power. Obedience and trust in Heaven are said to have given Confucius courage in times of disappointment and physical danger and to have provided him with a sense of a Heavenly mission in a troubled time.16 The Way of Heaven, Confucius held, should serve as the model for the way among men. The ruler is something like a schoolmaster whose purpose is to help his charges become better men. Buddhism, like Confucianism, is sometimes regarded as a religion, even though there is no reference to God, to a transcendent reality or to personal immortality. Like most traditions, Buddhism is complex and to a significant degree heterogeneous. Buddhist ethics from the very beginning has been committed to a middle way between asceticism and hedonism but is perhaps best considered as asceticism. Gautama Buddha (b. about 563 BC) condemned all attempts to enquire into or to define the supreme good of life. Salvation is not to be found in theoretical speculation but in a strenuous moral endeavor which aims at the destruction of desire, the root of all suffering. The path to deliverance is the extinction of desire, a turning away from human life and the external order. It is such a path that leads to Nirvana, the eternal beatific silence. How sweet, he taught, would it be to be freed of all craving and of all passion? The [14] May Sim, in a valuable study of Aristotle and Confucius makes the point that Confucius’ defense of propriety by an appeal to nature or to the Mandate of Heaven is thin and inexplicable, May Sim, Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 3. [15] Cf. Antonio S. Cua, Ethical Argumentation: A Study in Hsun Tzu’s Moral Epistemology, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, l985. [16] Yi Pao Mei, ‘Confucianism’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, l973, pp. 1091–1099.

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path to such freedom is a life of virtue, the habitual choice of the mean. The ethical ideal thus becomes one of quietism and spiritual detachment. The wise man will take no part in the life of the state or in the business of human affairs. He will live in solitude, perhaps as a monk, conforming his spirit to the Absolute. Although the Buddhist commits himself to a certain way of life, on the whole Buddhism eschews mandatory dogmas and specific injunctions to which the adherent must conform. There are, nevertheless, traditional precepts that are to be observed. There are five precepts for the layman, precepts that prohibit killing, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct, lying, and the drinking of intoxicating liquor. There are an additional five precepts for monastic novices, i.e., not to eat during prohibitive hours, not to take part in festivals and amusements, not to use luxurious furniture and beds, not to accept money for oneself, and not to use garlands, perfumes, or ornaments. There is within the many strands of Buddhism a recognition of the obligatory nature of charity, of hospitality, and of love for every living thing. Thus the life of the fetus is to be protected, whereas Confucian ethics would permit its destruction in the early stages. Viewed from a Greek perspective, that is, from classical Western philosophy, one is inclined to see in Confucianism and Buddhism intimations of a natural law philosophy, even though both lack an ontological foundation. There is no doubt that the transition from either Buddhism or Confucianism to Christianity is relatively easy to make, in the sense that little has to be given up. Though both Confucianism and Buddhism are godless, the humanism characteristic of both is evident in their common admonition to self-restraint, charity and, in the case of Confucianism, its sense of propriety. We also find in both an appreciation of custom and tradition, and judged from a Christian perspective we have a sense of the fulfillment possible to both if only they were completed by the acceptance of divine revelation. Yet such ‘conversion’ or fulfillment rarely happens. Confucianism and Buddhism are not a prelude to Christianity in the same way as Hellenic philosophy. It cannot be said of the East something we say of the intellect of the West—namely, that ‘Christ came in the fullness of time when the intellect of the West was prepared to receive the truths of the Gospel.’ Although one is compelled to admire the humanism found in Confucian and Buddhist moral codes, neither can be thought of as an expression of natural law morality. Natural law is distinctively Greek in origin and cannot be


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affirmed except in the Western context which gave it birth. It is the distinctive features of the Greek mind that I will attend to in a moment. The Enlightenment, we know, challenged not only Christianity but the underpinnings of the moral philosophy characteristic of Aristotle and of those Stoics who followed his lead, notably by denying the reality of nature and human nature along with the principle of final causality or teleology in nature. Our topic compels us to ask: Is a systematic ethics possible without the implicit acknowledgment of those principles? Though he could not reason to either God or to personal immortality, Kant needed to posit both to ground his moral code. His ethics remains theistic, though it is not what we would call a natural law ethics. Affirmation of the intelligibility of nature, itself the product of intelligence, is the key to a natural law philosophy. In both Aristotle and Aquinas there is the common affirmation that things have natures that are indicative of tendencies that beg to be fulfilled. Aristotle, for example, maintained that from a consideration of what a thing is in its tendential aspects, one can determine what is suitable for it, in other words, its good. From a consideration of what man is, one can determine what ends he ought to pursue. For Aristotle, the supreme end of man is happiness, which consists primarily in intellectual activity, all other pursuits being subordinate or instrumental to that one. Aquinas adds principally that ultimate fulfillment consists in an eternal beatitude in which man’s intellectual and appetitive faculties will find complete satisfaction. For Aquinas, ultimate beatitude is possible even if temporal beatitude of the Aristotelian sort escapes one by reason of chance or the poverty of the human organism. This is the natural foundation for the theological virtue of hope. The foregoing conception of natural law rests upon two ontological pillars: one, the conviction that there are intelligible natural structures, and two, the conviction that the processes of nature are purposive—in the language of Aristotle, upon the principles of essence and finality. But do these principles exhaust the intellectual commitments necessary to support a natural law outlook? We come back to the question, ‘Is it possible to subscribe to a natural law basis for morality without first establishing the existence of God?’ The answer at first blush seems to be in the affirmative. We seem to find the rudiments of a natural law outlook in Confucian and Buddhist codes of conduct. Furthermore, in the West we find many who are agnostic with respect to the question of God’s existence and yet who

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agree that arbitrary will is not final, that civil law and conscience are to be measured against an independent scale.17 How do we account for this? The Confucian, the Buddhist, and the neo-pagan of the West have in common a humanistic ethic but one that is not supported by an acknowledgment of God’s existence or by a systematic philosophy of human nature. A difference between ancient moral codes associated with the East and those proclaimed in the contemporary West is this: Confucian and Buddhist moral codes were developed without any knowledge of Christ, whereas much of contemporary Western philosophy has known but has rejected Christ. Yet the moral outlook characteristic of Christianity has not been culturally eradicated and remains to a considerable extent, although unacknowledged, in Western secular philosophy. Dorothy Sayers made this point succinctly in her 1947, Oxford lecture, ‘The Lost Tools of Learning.’18 ‘The truth,’ she says is that for the last three hundred years or so we have been living on our educational capital. . . Right down to the nineteenth century, our public affairs were mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most part written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in places where the Scholastic curriculum with its emphasis on the Trivium and Quadrivium was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood. Just so, many people today who are atheist or agnostic in religion are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted that it never occurs to them to question it.

She then adds this cautionary note, ‘But one cannot live on capital forever.’ Accumulated capital or tradition obviously plays a large role in how a people conduct themselves. St. Thomas, in discussing the role of tradition, gives it almost the force of law. Within Confucianism tradition plays an all-important role. It represents the collective wisdom of a people as they confront their daily affairs. For Mao, to complete his socialist revolution, the Confucian tradition had to be eliminated. To that end, he was aided by an intellectual class, tutored by John Dewey, who held that the function of education is to [17] An absurd exception is to be found in a passage from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling supporting a woman’s right to abortion that declared: ‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe and the mystery of human life.’ Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833. [18] Available online at: www.cambridgestudycenter.com/articles/sayers1.htm.


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challenge rather than to perpetuate the inherited.19 Within the West we know full well what happens when a theistic-grounded morality is repudiated in favor of an outright materialism. We have only to recall the atrocities committed in the name of communism and national socialism. More recently, given the ascendancy of the materialist, secular outlook within the West, we find a renewed threat to Western civilization itself, as biblical and traditional moral standards have been called into question at all levels of society. The cultural effects of atheism cannot be denied. Absent an acknowledgment of God’s existence, worship and the things pertaining to worship have no basis, and the consequence of their being lost within a secular culture portends the loss of Western culture itself. No one can deny that the great achievements of Western art, i.e., in painting, architecture, music, and literature, have been motivated by a sense of the sacred. It is true that Kant’s abstract and moralistic interpretation of religion attaches little value to visible manifestations of piety and worship. His pietistic upbringing may have led him to deprecate the cultural effects of communal religious practice, a position that is consistent with his purely moral religion, but contemporary atheism has gone much further, insofar as it seeks to suppress all public manifestations of religion—that, in spite of the fact that European culture has thrived on, and can almost be defined by, its feasts and pageants in celebration of sacred events. By way of a concluding comment, it may be argued that a theistic natural law theory is best construed as a meta-ethic. Although a natural law outlook is purely philosophical, it opens one to religious testimony, testimony that may have some additional things to say about life’s goals, about happiness, and about the norms by which they ought to be pursued. An important feature is its empirical character, that is, its fidelity to evidence drawn from common experience and the sciences of man, insofar as that evidence bears on human fulfillment. Often when natural law is invoked, it is both presented and criticized as a set of normative propositions, which, because of their universality and necessity, in some fashion, transcend periods and cultures. It has that feature, to be sure, but it is best understood as a meta-ethic. It can easily be shown that natural law theory, in addition to its openness to the transcendent has a contribution to make on several fronts, notably as they are discussed in contemporary literature. In providing a theory about the determination of moral norms, [19] Cf. Zhixin Su, ‘A Critical Evaluation of John Dewey’s Influence on Education’, American Journal of Education, Vol. 103, May, l995.

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it speaks to topics such as ethical reasoning, the movement from descriptive to normative assertions, the extra-legal grounds for judicial decision, and the societal basis of law. Natural law when so understood is seen less as a code than as a metaphysics or philosophical anthropology that calls attention to certain time-transcending facts about human nature and society, facts that must be taken into account as the race grapples with ever more complex moral issues arising notably from the biological and natural sciences and the recent phenomenon of globalization. The ‘Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights,’ adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO, October 19, 2005, is perhaps the closest one can come to a transcultural declaration of moral objectives. Drafted by an international committee representing the major cultures of the globe, it deliberately eschews any reference to a divinely ordained moral order or even acknowledgement that there are ‘laws of nature.’ Laudably it promotes the value of human dignity, human rights, and fundamental human freedoms. It insists on honesty and the value of cooperation, dialogue, social responsibility, and the priority of the interest of the individual over that of the state. In the practice of medicine, it emphasizes the importance of consent to any medical intervention and speaks to the patient’s right of privacy. The list goes on, but what is missing is an ontological grounding of the principles assumed. Although it speaks of human dignity and human rights, their derivation is not addressed. Omitted, too, is any reference to an important setting of human life—the family—and of that which contributes to its stability. There is no recognition of the destructive force of practices such as adultery, divorce, contraception, abortion, and euthanasia. In fact nothing is condemned; only the laudable, by universal consent, is affirmed. The genius of the document is that it is bland enough for the atheist, the theist, the Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, or Confucian to sign onto. Clearly for the West, this ‘Declaration’ is no substitute for the Mosaic Decalogue. Furthermore, in substituting vague aspirations for tradition, it is, for example, less a guide than Confucianism. One is left with the unintended thought that morality is specific to a culture, with or without God.

Anthony O’Hear

Religion in Public Life The thesis to be developed in this paper is prescriptive. That is, as will become evident, it is based on a particular conception of the state and the political, and also of what religion ought to be. Having said that, the conclusion is one which has some basis in Christian history, as shall be demonstrated at the end, and it is intended to have some relevance to the current situation which obtains in Western democracies. This situation is taken to be one in which churches are the preserve of minorities, within societies which are predominantly secular and pluralist. This paper will suggest ways in which in this context religions(s) might relate to the wider society in general and to the political in particular. The title: ‘Religion in Public Life’, is really too broad, as will be shown. There are many religions and many ways they might connect with public life. Indeed the phrase ‘public life’ is itself very broad. It certainly will include the political, but there is or should be much more to the public realm than the political. That is to say, it is a deformation of public life if everything public is political. There are many areas of public life which should be seen as independent of politics, as producing a counter-balance to the political through the autonomous institutions spawned in and by those areas. These areas should include the law, the arts, sport, the military, education and much else besides, including, as will be argued here, religion. In the modern world much blurring of boundaries goes on between the political and the rest of public life. This is objectionable for all sorts of reasons which would have seemed obvious to nineteenth century thinkers such as J.S. Mill and should be obvious to us for different reasons, following our experience of twentieth century totalitarianism, totalitarianism being precisely the move on the part of the state to bring everything within its own control and direction.

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Although this paper presupposes a view of society in which there will be many areas of life autonomous of the state and outside the political; the state and politics are necessary and desirable even as providing a framework in which people can lead peaceful and orderly lives, taking responsibility for what is rightfully theirs, pursuing their own projects and seeking their own salvation. Action by the state through the political process is also necessary on occasion to remove obstacles to liberty and opportunity, and also to give some legal backing to what the society as a whole regards as the basic conditions necessary for living together as a society. Of course, putting things like that may be consistent either with a great deal of state activity and regulation or with very little, but my position is a pluralist one in which the state and politicians should exercise far more care than they normally do in taking on themselves what is better seen as the prerogative of individuals, of their families and of autonomous institutions and organisations. The view of politics and the political being purveyed here is thus pluralist in two directions. There should first be a plurality of sources of power and influence in a society. This is the autonomous institutions point. But then secondly it is pluralist in a more fundamental sense. While every person may want to defend a particular view of life as being the right one or the best (for all, even), this view argues that no one has such a comprehensive monopoly of wisdom as to have the right to impose that view on everyone else; this follows in part from a belief in human fallibility, which can be expressed in either secular or religious terms. So within what has just been referred to as the limits imposed by the very fact of a group of people living together, this view is that individuals should be free to follow and develop their own philosophies of life, including religious ones. What those limits to freedom might be will no doubt vary from one society and from one mentality to another, and even within the broadly liberal conception of society presupposed here there will at different times and in different societies be differing conceptions of the limits of the acceptable. Although, it should also be stressed at this point that within the very conception of a society which is in some sense liberal and pluralist there will be some very specific limitations on what people might be allowed to do, which will stem directly from a joint acceptance of the very pluralism this paper is advocating, and which is precisely what will allow groups and individuals to pursue their own higher level philosophies of life. In other words, there will have to be a degree of ‘live and let live’ on conten-

Religion in Public Life

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tious issues arising from competing philosophies of life, which would condemn and even legislate to prevent actions which conspire to undermine the liberties enjoyed by all. So, to take some specific examples, we should condemn the bombing of abortion clinics (even if we are fiercely opposed to abortion); we should ensure that novels and cartoons can be published without fear of reprisals, even though we find them offensive and some find them blasphemous; and we should be on our guard against creeping censorship through the implicit acceptance that some areas are off limits to academic enquiry. What follows will be taking the public to refer to those aspects of life which go on outside the privacy of the home and outside the inner sanctum of a person’s relationship with his or her God. Most of what will follow in this paper will be devoted to the clarification of how we might think about religion, and also to the drawing of important distinctions, which are too often glossed over in discussions of this sort. As will become apparent, while religion certainly has public aspects, it is important not to lose sight of the extent to which religion in the sense discussed here is at its heart private. What will be said in a positive sense here should commend itself to a broad swathe of Christians. If this turns out to be so, it will not be surprising, because what is said derives from a specific reading of the Christian tradition, and from attempts within that tradition to find a modus vivendi with the secular world. However it will not be too surprising if some modern Christians disagree with the conclusions, because there are trends within Christianity which seem to be misguided from a religious point of view, indeed as part of that very swallowing up of everything in the political which was criticised a couple of paragraphs ago. A core element of religion is the relationship between the believer and God; indeed it may well be the key element, at least in the type of religion discussed here. So what is said here will not apply to conceptions of religion, such as that proposed in at least part of the Old Testament, where the focus is on a chosen people rather than on saved individuals, and even less to that expounded by Durkheim in which, when primitive peoples worship their god, what they are actually worshipping is the tribe itself. Obviously in such essentially communal interpretations of religion there will be different accounts of religion and public life and also of the relationship between the individual believer and his God from the one developing here. With this clarification, we can say that what is ultimately at stake in reli-

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gion as suggested above is the care of the individual soul, the turning of the soul away from fantasy and towards reality, and in Christian (as in Platonic) terms the soul is understood as having a destiny which transcends this life. In Christian mythology Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, to be sure, but the kingdom was not of this world. It was hidden, like a mustard seed, and grew in the hearts and in the community of believers. Jesus’s kingdom was distinguished in this respect from the kingdoms and communities of this earth. It is not the project of this paper to comment in any detail on the notion of the Kingdom as it appears in the New Testament. This is a huge topic in its own right and it deserves commentary from an exegetical point of view, which cannot be provided here. It is, though, interesting to note that in the nineteenth century some famous exegetes followed a broadly Kantian approach: that the kingdom Jesus preached and inaugurated was in some sense an ideal ethical community (Kant’s kingdom of ends, perhaps) which might be realised on earth. In the twentieth century, by contrast, an apocalyptic view gained more favour: that the kingdom was something to be realised in a revelation at the end of time. There seems to be something of a consensus now that neither of these approaches is adequate to what Jesus and the New Testament actually taught. The kingdom of the New Testament was not a regime on earth at all, neither a Kantian kingdom of ends realising itself now or in the future, nor an end time apocalyptic utopia. It was rather an assertion of the way God, as a transcendent reality is acting in and through Christ and the Church, even now, to save his chosen people; but, it seems, with the emphasis on transcendent, real and within us to be sure, but, equally, not of this world. It is both now and not yet, but not of this world and never of this world. There are undoubtedly public and social aspects to the Gospel: that is, it matters to our own spiritual development how we treat other people, and we are to treat other people as we would treat Jesus himself (as we are told in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount). But this is primarily because of the sacred worth there is in each of us, individually, and as proven by God’s direct involvement in human history. Religion (from a Christian perspective) has all sorts of public implications in the sense that it imposes on us social duties, but these duties arise from the sacredness of each of us as individuals and from the individual transcendent destiny of each of us. It is because other people are sacred, individually, that we have duties toward them, and because I am sacred, individually, that I


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have responsibilities to myself and others. In this sense religion is not essentially social in a worldly sense, and should not be seen as attempting to produce a political settlement on earth. From the point of view of the believer it is essentially individualistic, not in the sense that it is selfish, but in the sense that it is primarily concerned with the worth and fate of each of us as individuals, and how each of us responds to God’s transcendent self-revelation breaking in on us from outside time. Each of us, as an individual, needs faith and repentance as the basis of the religious life. Each of us enters the world alone and leaves alone, and religion must focus on these moments of ultimate loneliness, particularly the last, as the point at which, pace John Donne, each man is very much an island, confronting in his nakedness his Maker. Religion is about the turning of the soul in preparation for this moment, and that is something each one of us has to do alone, even if it can be done only with the help of divine grace and from within a Christian community, and even if, once turned, one is helped by the community of the Church militant, journeying with that Church in the hope and expectation of ultimate membership of the Church triumphant. To turn now to public life in a more general sense, the ethic which largely underlies contemporary Western societies is, given a certain variability from one regime to another, that of liberal individualism. Some would see this philosophy as essentially secular; as arising in the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment. No doubt the prevailing political philosophy today tends to be a somewhat uneasy agglomeration of Enlightenment notions of human rights and of a broadly utilitarian approach to ethical and political questions. For all their differences both utilitarianism and human rights philosophies, by taking the individual (individual rights, individual pleasure and pain) as their starting point, feed naturally into the politics of liberal democracy, and in this politics the conflicting strains of both rights based philosophies and utilitarianism are very apparent. In their secular forms, anyway, both utilitarianism and theories of human rights will differ from religious views in making no appeal to any transcendent source of value or of any notion of the sacredness of the individual which cannot be analysed in terms purely of this world. By contrast, as with Socrates in his prison, the religious view of life which is developing here will see life as a journey through this life to a better world, provoked and borne up by intimations of transcendence on the way. While this view is not essentially communitarian, the individual on his or her pilgrimage through the secular world

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will need to be supported by communities in various ways. First there will need to be a religious community which transmits and develops the religious message, and supports the believer on the journey, but there will also need to be the secular community within which the religious quest takes place. It is here that we see an important role for the state or political authority, even from the religious point of view. For, according to the Western-liberal concept of politics which is relied on here, a key role of the state is to provide security for those who live within it. This, of course, means protection of life and property within and defence against threats from without. From the perspective of the religious life the state will be seen as necessary to provide a settled and secure order within which the religious life and community can flourish and develop. But there is also a potential tension between church and state, especially if the state is secular. The religious perspective, being transcendent and appealing to a divine and timeless authority, will also provide a yardstick by which other institutions, regimes and customs can be judged. Christ’s authority is not of this world, and because it is not of this world, but of a higher authority altogether, it stands in judgement over this world. In particular, it will judge the actions of the secular state unfavourably if these are seen as compromising or undermining the sacredness of the individual, if the state in any way seems to be seriously abusing individuals for its own ends. From the point of view of Christianity, it is never expedient that one man dies for the people. So is it ever expedient that one terrorist is tortured or sent back to where he is likely to be tortured? Is it ever expedient that an old person is quietly and gently disposed of, or a disabled foetus aborted, or embryos produced, manufactured indeed, for research? Obviously these areas will be of central importance to religious moralists, and may well bring them into disagreement with a prevailing public ethic of utilitarianism and the prevailing politics of administrative convenience. Conflict of this sort should not seem surprising, when one reflects just how demanding the idea of the sacredness of the individual is, nor should it be shocking that others find this ethic inconvenient. What would be more shocking would be a religious collapse in the face of contrary public opinion, or perhaps better, in the face of the convenient pragmatism so easily favoured by legislators and bureaucrats; though what, in a secular, pluralist state not collapsing might entail is not always easy to determine.


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As has already been suggested, it should not involve bombing abortion clinics even if one thinks abortion is wholly wrong, because living in a free society as well as affording all of us freedoms does, as part of its dispensation, impose restrictions on what individuals can do to others in their society, even for what might seem the best and morally most urgent of reasons. On the other hand, it is not at all clear what someone wholly opposed to embryo research on religious grounds should do if he or she were invited to go on the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority—admittedly unlikely, and liable to happen only through some oversight on the part of the appointers—but if it did happen, should it be seen by that individual as a chance to prevent some harm or rather as collusion in what should not be given any support or credibility at all? But this is a practical question, which does not impinge on the right and duty of the Church to speak out clearly against what it believes to be seriously wrong, though even here there might be disagreements about just how this speaking out should be pursued; one might think here of what strikes critics of the Catholic Church as pusillanimity or worse in Nazi Germany, but what might more reasonably be seen as a degree of prudence which did not actually comprise the Church’s underlying stance which had been very clearly set out in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (written, incidentally, by Pacelli before he became Pope). However, whatever one might think are the practical implications in specific cases, it is clear that a religious standpoint is one from which other values and decisions are judged. The religious citizen or subject will see rulers as themselves under a higher law. This higher law—maybe in the medieval sense natural law—is one to which we are all subject, whether in the political sense we are rulers or subjects. In this understanding the religious person will take issue with the Roman view of the state, that in which the emperor is the sole source of law and divinely endorsed, and also with legal positivism, in which there is no law other than that which is determined according to correct constitutional procedures. It would also stand aloof from the more sophisticated form of legal positivism of some contemporary American theorists of law, who want to judge actual decisions of the courts and actual legislation in terms of what they, the theorists, take to be those principles which can be seen as best explaining the rights and liberties enshrined in American and British law. From the point of view of a religious thinker, the spirit of these laws (assuming what is meant can be identified) is itself a human artefact,

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and may be found wanting from a timeless, transcendent perspective. This sense of being found wanting will only be increased when it emerges that the spirit in question, as discovered by the theorists, turns out to be precisely that of the contemporary secular progressivism which religious people often find lax on questions of fundamental human values. The sense that the religious community has values which are not necessarily identical with those of the secular power, and which in any case derive not from raisons d’etat but from a different source altogether, allows us to rule out from the religious point of view a number of possible relationships between religion and state. One, which we may call Kemalism (after Kemal Attaturk, the founder of the modern Turkey) would be where the Church (or mosque in this case) is allowed to exist, but where its role is conceived as being essentially to support the secular power. One may indeed have problems with fundamentalist Islam (to which the discussion will turn shortly), but one can hardly quarrel with devout Muslims who find Kemalism objectionable. If this is what living in a secular state is to mean, it is not surprising that religious people might reject secularism. Staying in that part of the world, consider also the Orthodox notion of the Turkokratia. This was a doctrine developed during the time of the Ottoman Empire, when it seemed to the Orthodox hierarchy that survival depended on what amounted to collusion with the Turkish authorities. Again, there may have been reasons for this; but one cannot help reflecting on the way in which the Orthodox hierarchies in communist days were prepared to collaborate with the authorities (even to the extent of endorsing Ceausescu in Roumania only days before his fall). All this may have been a legacy from the spirit of Turkokratia, and one which may by no means be extinct even after the fall of communism. But Kemalism and Turkokratia are by no means the only ways religions can be compromised in their dealings with the state. A more difficult example, and one which may in practice take us closer to home, might be the way the Catholic Church in general and, according to their enemies, the Jesuits in particular were, to put it bluntly, prepared to condone scandalous behaviour from Louis XIV and his court in order to give the Church an easy ride in France. Of course, it wasn’t put quite like that. The argument was that allowing the King concessions on sexual matters which would not be allowed to ordinary believers would be the means to the salvation of many thousands of those ordinary believers whose religious practice


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could thus be secured by maintaining the position of the Church in France. It has to be said this was ultimately a self-defeating practice even from the pragmatic point of view; for the Church, having compromised its sexual morality to suit the monarch, was then in a weak position when it came to commenting adversely on the pointless and utterly immoral wars which disfigured the later parts of Louis’s reign (ironically at a time when, once married to the formidable and formidably pious Mme de Maintenon, Louis actually began to behave far better in his personal life). But, this example aside, maybe it could be asked whether there is not a degree of Jesuiticalness in the behaviour of the Churches today in this country, in the sense of a too easy acceptance of the nostrums of secular morality. Observers quickly gain a sense that many church leaders are relativistic and flexible about moral matters, while those who stick to what they conceive of as timeless truths are made to seem obstinate and unfeeling. It is easy to understand and up to a point to sympathise with the tendency of religious people to seek accommodations with the secular world. After all, even within an institution claiming divine guidance, doctrine does develop, and not all insights from the secular realm are misguided, even from a religious point of view. There is always indeed the very real possibility that some of what religious people take as being divinely inspired is itself simply an aspect of contemporary and local practice. In fact there may be a far worse temptation for the religious person thinking about the relationship between the church and the world than engaging in casuistry or attempting to sympathise with or reach accommodations with the better and more humane elements of the secular world. It is what, on the face of it, seems to be the opposite position; instead of making religion consonant with the world, one tries to make the world in the image of religion by setting up some form of theocracy, in which the rules and practices of the public realm are themselves determined by religious edict. There have, of course, been theocracies in Christian history, notably the Geneva of John Calvin and the Mülhausen of Thomas Muntzer. There are also the attempts to set up Islamic states, run by religious authorities, such as those of the early caliphates and those in Iran today and Afghanistan under the Taliban; the very notion of the Dar-al-Islam, central to Islamic thought, envisages a pure society run on Koranic lines, in which there are no distinctions, except of administrative divisions of labour, between the religious, the legal and the political. During the Christian middle ages and for some

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time subsequently the Papacy itself was a secular ruler (though it is not clear to me that there was any very rigorous attempt there to set up a theologically inspired regime). The term theocracy will be used to refer to a political set-up in which the government is in the hands of religious leaders by virtue of their being religious leaders, who then attempt to impose a theologically inspired regime on the people. It would doubtless be said by its advocates that such a regime would be the best because its precepts and aims would be pure, unworldly and inspired by transcendent values and insights. To go back to the kingdom of the New Testament, could political means not achieve a society founded on the virtues of the New Testament and inspired by the spirit of the Beatitudes and of the Sermon on the Mount? In such a society people would be more just, more humane, more equal, more virtuous and more compassionate; oppression would be absent, and the people, freed by the nature of the regime from the pursuit of selfish ends, would do what was best from a timeless point of view, because, encouraged by the politico-cum-religious authorities, they would see that it was the best and because they felt happy in its pursuit. What is involved in theocracy as so defined has a striking resemblance to Plato’s Republic, ruled by philosopher kings in the interests of virtue and with an eye on the ideal world above. Theocracy, as we understand it here, would not, of course, involve the rigid class stratification we find in Plato, but even without that it would still suffer from many of the defects of Plato’s vision, with the best once more being the enemy of the good. Even if we are religious, we should be careful here, and we should be particularly careful not to be seduced by the perennial excuse offered by advocates of utopian visions from Plato himself onwards (assuming for the moment that Plato was actually arguing in favour of his republic): that when, as inevitably happens, a utopian project ends in tears and worse, the fault is not with the vision, but with a specific, flawed attempt to implement it. Thus, even though there were undoubtedly abuses in, say Calvin’s Geneva or in Khomeini’s Iran, these are incidental to the project itself, and would be avoided in a more perfect implementation of the vision. They will not be. The theocratic vision is itself fatally flawed, and flawed in the first instance for a good theological reason, that namely of original sin. Human beings are imperfect and so are human institutions, manned and used as they are by human beings. Experience has proved this fact to be universally the case even aside from the


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actual doctrine of original sin, and the point ought to be granted even by those who do not accept original sin in its theological sense. Even if an institution is founded in the name of faith or virtue, and enshrining within itself the highest principles and standards, it will not be immune from corruption. This point applies to Churches as well, as history amply demonstrates. Looking at history and considering the point about original sin, the wonder is not that the Catholic Church today, say, is imperfect in all sorts of ways; the wonder rather is that it has moved away from some of the really gross imperfections visible in the medieval church. In fact, leaving aside a theological belief in the divine guidance of the church, it may be possible to offer some sort of purely historical explanation for the morally improved state of the Catholic church now, compared to the fifteenth century, say, an explanation relevant to our general theme. For much of the medieval period the church was a powerful secular ruler as well as the religious authority, and monasteries and bishoprics were often politically powerful and rich in their own rights. As institutions of power they gave those heading them careers of immense wealth and prestige, and all that went with wealth and prestige. So the Church itself and its major institutions became prizes to be seized and fought over (much as the big state bureaucracies are in our own day). In being prizes to be seized and fought over, by men (and women) who were interested primarily in the prizes, they easily got diverted from their ostensible aims, and become run mainly for the benefit of those running them, as was seen with the Papal states (and as can be seen in some of our public services). In short, the medieval Papacy itself became an Italian princedom, in behaviour little different from the other states of central Italy, though actually having a bigger influence throughout Christendom than its neighbours owing to its universalist religious pretensions and its claims to a divine mandate and to the wealth which arose from the donations of the faithful. The Church, once a secular power, was potentially more dangerous than a merely secular state, precisely because of the divine authority it claimed for itself, and its consequent power and mission. It gave its adherents and leaders an extra tool, so to speak, in the furtherance their ambitions. And this extra power was sure to attract to its ranks people whose own ambitions were far from those of the Church in its pure state. To take another example, people are sometimes surprised that the Taliban and the Iranian theocracy, or perhaps more accurately, people acting in their name, indulge in great

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cruelty. They should not be; the power claimed by these theocracies in the name of Allah makes it inevitable that psychopaths of all sorts will be attracted to them, in much the same way that a communist system will reveal and release hundreds of little Lenins in every village and commune, and fascism a similar outgrowths of little Hitlers. Worst of all, once a Church has been subsumed into a theocracy, it will cease to perform the essentially critical role it has in society when it is clearly separate and independent. Theocracy far from being the greatest role for religion could play in our imperfect world is actually its greatest temptation. The point being made here may well have some foreshadowing in Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities. The city of God is not of this earth and will not be found in its pure form short of the Last Judgment. It may be feasibly identified with those currently en route for eternal glory, but in all actual human institutions, including the Church itself, there is an inextricable mingling of the elect and the reprobate, in other words, of the two cities. In this life, due particularly to the corruption of human nature after the Fall, there is need for a political state in order to establish the conditions of relative peace and security through which individuals should work out their salvation (or otherwise). But the state cannot actually legislate or coerce so as to promote the salvation of individuals, nor should we expect it to. More precisely, though, the position this paper is advocating can be found in Dante, and in the poet’s changing attitude to the Guelphs and the Ghibellines of his time. The Guelphs were the party in Italy (and Florence) who were broadly in favour of the Papacy and its power, while the Ghibellines favoured the establishment in Italy of rule by the Emperor. Dante, as a Florentine leader, was initially a Guelph, but it is fair to say that his experiences in Rome and Florence and then in exile convinced him that a politically powerful papacy would inevitably suffer from all the defects outlined above. Not for nothing are a number of Popes, including his arch-enemy and contemporary Pope Boniface VIII, consigned to hell, precisely because they used the Papacy and its power as if it were a secular princedom. But secular power, which is bound to corrupt the Church and compromise its mission if it is entwined with the Church, does have a positive role to play in stopping wars and in ameliorating discord and crime, and could do so under a wise and powerful sovereign. It was because Dante had hopes that Italy might fall under what he believed might be the beneficent rule of the putative Emperor Henry


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VII of Luxemburgh that he moved towards the Ghibelline cause after his exile from Florence. These hopes were dashed with Henry’s death, but Dante’s own experiences allowed him to develop in The Divine Comedy a picture of the clear separation of the roles of Church and State, the church being concerned with salvation (only) and the state with providing the conditions of peace and security which citizens (and the Church) all need in their journey through the world. Actually there was nothing very new in Dante’s political vision. Writing on the papal reforms instigated by Hildebrand (Gregory VII) in the 11th century, in which there was an attempt to sever the close relationships which then existed between church and state, the historian Reginald Lane Poole wrote (in 1884) ‘it is perfectly clear that if the church was to exercise that sway which all Christians agreed it ought to exercise over the consciences of men, it must be as free as possible from those ties which bound it to the secular state’.1 Further, as Gregory regarded civil government as a human institution deeply polluted by its sinful origin, there could be no preferred type of regime, such as monarchy for example (so much for the divine right of kings!). Indeed, ‘granted only the superiority of ecclesiastical power, there was no concession she (the Church) would not make in favour of popular rights’; and in the writings of Manegold of Lautenbach (a follower of Hildebrand) can be found as eloquent a statement of the theory of the social contract as any in the 17th or 18th century. To try to bring these reflections together in some sort of conclusion, it should be noted that this paper is the result of thinking about the relationship between religion and the public world, because of a degree of unease about what seemed to be an aggressively strident secularism, lambasting what is referred to as religious fundamentalism. One need only think of attacks on what are called faith schools, whether Christian or Muslim, and also of the British government’s use of charity and equality legislation to coral the activities of religious charities, such as adoption agencies, into its own vision of the good life. A few brief remarks will be made on each case in conclusion, so as to explore what seem to me to be the implications of what has been argued thus far. To take the question of faith schools first, at the most general level the question raised here is that of the responsibility for the education of children. Where does this primarily lie, in the hands of parents or [1]

Reginald Lane Poole, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning, Dover Publications, New York, 1960, pp 198–203.

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is it vested in the state? One could follow Mill2 in agreeing that the state has a duty to ensure that education actually takes place, while insisting, like Mill, that the responsibility for carrying out and directing that education ought to be that of the parents who have brought their children into the world. Like Mill one could argue, on broadly liberal grounds, that ‘a general State education (would be) a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another… (and that) in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it (would) establish a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body’.3 It would be inappropriate here to go into any detail on these matters, so it will simply be said that as the State has directed and regulated education more and more (particularly since it nationalised the curriculum and exams 20 years ago), what Mill says has been largely borne out in experience. The State clearly has no monopoly of wisdom (or even no wisdom at all) on educational knowledge, which is Mill’s point. And one could add to Mill’s refreshing pluralism here, the more specifically religious conviction (which I share) that children do not belong to the state or its agencies. It should also be said that if the State insists on funding education in such a way as to put private education out of the hands of the vast majority of the population, then it will have to countenance not just the existence of religious schools and schools of all kinds of other sorts. It will have to fund them too, if there is parental demand. After all, families of Catholics, Mormons, Muslims and Scientologists all pay taxes just as much as the families of agnostics, atheists and secularists. What, though, if some of these schools teach Islam or Creationism (whatever that means)? It should be asked simply ‘what if they do?’, and leave it at that, uncomfortable as it no doubt is to many. Just how deep does our liberal pluralism go? Of course, it is assumed here that there are limits to what is tolerable, given what was said earlier about mutual tolerance, so if a school was manifestly abusing children physically or psychologically as part of a supposed religious ritual, or urging its pupils to train as terrorists, then swift and firm action should be taken. But teaching that Islam is the only true religion and that ideally its remit should include the political, or that the world began a mere 10,000 years ago hardly fall into those categories. Do they in any uncontentious sense amount to abuse at all? Maybe they do, but rather than the state issu[2]

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), quoted from Mill’s Utilitarianism (edited by Mary Warnock), London, Collins/Fontana, 1962, pp 239–40.

[3]

Mill, On Liberty.


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ing lists of doctrines proscribed in all schools, it seems that it would be better just to accept that there may be at the margins a degree of irresolvable conflict here between religion and the prevailing ethos (which seems to hold not just that science is true, but also that the teaching of scientific truth as the only truth is so important as to trump all other considerations). Actually it may be that with mutual goodwill all sorts of reasonable compromises are possible in this area, and that they will in the main be made (after all, children of creationist parents will mostly do public exams in science, and there are plenty of Muslims prepared to live under the Dar-al-harb and to engage in its political processes). So the discomfort, which many may feel in the area of schooling, can in the main be ameliorated. But where compromises do not seem to be possible, a genuinely pluralist, liberal society ought to act permissively towards religious dissidents, just as religious people should act permissively towards the existence of abortion clinics. On the question of whether Christian adoption agencies should be forced to accept homosexual couples as prospective adopters, the situation seems to be clearer. The State simply seems to be abusing its power in forcing religious people either to act against their principles or not act at all, where what they want to do compromises no one’s freedom. After all homosexuals are not being barred from adopting through non-religious agencies, so if it is a question of equality, the State has already secured that. But the case actually sets a wider and worrying precedent, in that in it the State is using the law to enforce a code of ethics which is in itself contentious and goes too far beyond what was described at the beginning of this paper as reflecting any general consensus on what is required for us as a society to live together to be a justifiable case for legislation. This paper has defended a pluralist view of society and of political organisation, in which religion certainly has a role to play, but one distinct from that of the secular power or sovereign. Anticipations of this view can be found in the middle ages, as has just been seen, though of course neither Hildebrand nor Dante had their visions realised, or not for any length of time. What this paper has proposed stipulates a clear role for religion in public life, but a role different from that arising from some of the other religious positions that have been surveyed. It would, though, be fascinating to think that the limited, pluralist state of Western democracy, which is the perspective from which this paper was written, is itself in some ways a descendent of a powerful strain of medieval Christian thinking, that repre-

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sented by Hildebrand, Manegold and Dante, at least in the limited role that strain accords to religion in the political realm. Given this, and given the two contemporary examples just examined, it would not be entirely unfitting if in these post-religious days, religion itself becomes a guardian or advocate of the classical liberal state and of its proper limits.

Nicholas Tonti-Filippini

Public Reason in Bioethics Introduction Central to Christian ethics is a concept of human dignity founded on the imago dei, and informed by the incarnation and the teachings of Jesus Christ. The Church however has many voices: prophetic, academic/professional, humanistic and artistic.1 In the field of bioethics the proclamation of the Word of God and witness to the person and teachings of Christ are prophetic and essential, but not always the voice that a secular audience is prepared to hear. Bioethics, as a secular system of regulation of biomedical research and practice, demands a voice other than the prophetic. For a Christian, upholding the dignity of the human person within bioethics calls us to develop a language and reasoning that belongs to the secular rather than the religious world. This of course may be seen by some as a conflict with the vocation of a Christian. It also means buying into the debate represented by Benedict XVI’s comment as Cardinal Ratzinger that ‘reason has a wax nose’, the shape of reason is determined by theological convictions.2 In his 1996 address to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Current Situation of Faith and Theology’ Cardinal Ratzinger agrees with Karl Barth’s rejection of philosophy as the foundation of faith independent of faith, but rejects Barth’s claim that faith is a pure paradox that can only exist against reason and totally independent from it. He calls for a new dialogue between faith and philosophy. ‘Reason’, he said, ‘will not [1]

John W. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West, Harvard University Press, Oxford, 1004, p. 7.

[2]

Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI’, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2008, p. 5.

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be saved without the faith, but the faith without reason will not be human.’3 My own understanding of the role of philosophy reflects John Paul II’s comment: Every people has its own native and seminal wisdom which, as a true cultural treasure, tends to find voice and develop in forms which are genuinely philosophical. One example of this is the basic form of philosophical knowledge which is evident to this day in the postulates which inspire national and international legal systems in regulating the life of society. 4

The task of a national bioethics committee, such as the one on which I serve, is to seek to be a part of the project of developing and applying those values that can be truly considered a ‘cultural treasure’. In that respect I hope to be giving expression to the concluding word of Fides et Ratio to philosophers: They should be open to the impelling questions which arise from the word of God and they should be strong enough to shape their thought and discussion in response to that challenge. Let them always strive for truth, alert to the good which truth contains. Then they will be able to formulate the genuine ethics which humanity needs so urgently at this particular time. The Church follows the work of philosophers with interest and appreciation; and they should rest assured of her respect for the rightful autonomy of their discipline. I would want especially to encourage believers working in the philosophical field to illumine the range of human activity by the exercise of a reason which grows more penetrating and assured because of the support it receives from faith.

In that respect I do not see that there is a dichotomy between faith and reason, or between theology and philosophy. Philosophy would be foolish indeed if it willingly blinded itself to theology and to Scripture and resolved never to consider propositions that emerged from consideration of the nature of the Creator and the relationship between created and Creator. What is different about philosophy is that it resolves to test those propositions against reason and to seek justification, rather than accept them simply as a matter of faith. For a Christian, there is no difficulty in considering the teachings of [3]

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger An address to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Current Situation of Faith and Theology’, 1996, http://www. ourladyswarriors.org/dissent/ratzsitu596.htm Accessed 18th June 2008.

[4]

Pope John Paul II Fides et Ratio, 1998, n. 4.

Public Reason in Bioethics

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Christ, and in faith believing them to be true, but, because true, able to withstand the examination of reason. The danger for us as philosophers is to think that, because in a secular society we cannot expect that others share our faith, we must not introduce Christian notions, and if we do, they must be under some other guise. Such subterfuge is beneath dignity. It is better to go into a committee meeting known for one’s faith in Christ Jesus, but also for one’s willingness to listen to others and to explore concepts with a view to seeking truth that is broadly recognisable by others. In other words, one seeks, as a matter of mutual respect, common ground between one’s own unashamed and obviously Christian beliefs and the beliefs of others, and with a willingness to question and to explore together what is true and good. In his earlier critique of the Vatican document Gaudium et Spes, Ratzinger asserts that ‘… it seemed to many people, especially from German speaking countries, that there was not a radical enough rejection of a doctrine of man divided into philosophy and theology. They were convinced that fundamentally the text was still based on a schematic representation of nature and the supernatural viewed far too much as merely juxtaposed. To their mind it took as its starting point the fiction that it is possible to construct a rational philosophical picture of man intelligible to all and on which all men of goodwill can agree, the actual Christian doctrines being added to this as a sort of crowning conclusion.’5 He goes on to attribute this error to the Thomists: It can hardly be disputed that as a consequence of the division between philosophy and theology established by the Thomists, a juxtaposition has gradually been established which no longer appears adequate. There is, and must be, a human reason in faith, yet conversely, every human reason is conditioned by historical standpoint so that reason pure and simple does not exist. 6

It is worth noting in this respect his emphasis on historical standpoint and thus on culture and tradition is also a basis for much of Alasdair MacIntyre’s approach and the latter has drawn criticism on the grounds of relativism for it. My own experience in working within a secular environment towards an agreed policy on ethical matters is that each of us does [5]

Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Dignity of the Human Person’, in Herbert Vorgrimler (ed), Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vol V, Burns & Oates: London 1969, pp. 115-163.

[6]

Ibid.

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bring our own culture and tradition and that is likely to include theological traditions. What is spoken about, however, is not theology as such, but rather the search for a set of agreed and basic values upon which a coherent policy can be formulated. The reasons why we uphold a basic value is not so much discussed as accepted and what then emerges is a position that is both determined by individual culture, but also which transcends individual culture, because it is held in common across cultures and has been made subject to scrutiny and the need for justification on its own propositional terms. A philosopher thus has more to contribute to that discussion than a theologian precisely because as philosophers we are interested in exploring why a teaching is good for mankind and to justify it in human terms. As Christian philosophers we are informed by our faith but willing to see its propositions tested for their justification, knowing that what God wants for us is good for us because he loves us. In that respect, the response I wish to make to the claim that reason will not be saved without faith is to claim that independent of faith, goodness is a property that is recognizable even by those who are unfamiliar with the Scriptures. In public discussion in a context of participants who belong to a range of faiths and none, it is legitimate and worthwhile to adopt the role of mutually seeking to identify a common understanding of human goodness and what we call the Pauline principle with respect to not doing evil in order to achieve the good. In other words, faith is informative and not separate from our experience of the good, but it also appears to be a property which remains recognisable even by those of no apparent faith. Faiths are not to be excluded from that pursuit, for that would be both arrogant and bigoted, but the task is one of seeking to find that which is transcendent of individual faith, culture and tradition. At the level of discussing virtue, Aquinas himself accepted the division of virtues and saw the cardinal virtues as distinct from the religious virtues, holding that all virtues other than the theological are in us by nature, according to aptitude and inchoation, but not according to perfection. The theological virtues, he claims, are from without.7 From practical experience in consulting in ethics within the practice of psychiatry, I would claim that the cardinal virtues [7]

‘Sic ergo patet quod virtutes in nobis sunt a natura secundum aptitudinem et inchoationem, non autem secundum perfectionem: prater virtutes theologicas, quae sunt totaliter ab extrinseco’ St. Thomae Aquinatis, Summa Theologiae I-II, Marietti: Taurini/ Romae 1952, Q. 63, Art. I.


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transcend tradition and culture simply because to completely lack any one of them would be a form of mental illness. They are essential to living in community. The religious virtues however presuppose a God, but they are not without philosophical justification independently of faith in the person of Christ who so illuminates them by his personal witness and teaching. A challenge for us as philosophers is to try to understand the Trinitarian mystery and through it Trinitarian anthropology. I would argue with respect to the latter that such a philosophical understanding of the communion of persons of the Trinity, and through that understanding the nature of humanity as designed for communion, does provide a deeper understanding of marriage and human sexuality. In this respect I hold that John Paul II did not replace appeal to what is supposedly ‘against nature’, with a radically biblical doctrine of nuptiality, as some have claimed,8 but rather he has insisted on understanding sexuality in terms of the communion of persons that is our ultimate vocation and which finds expression in this life in the gifts of marriage and, by analogy, committed celibacy. In other words far from decrying the ‘against nature’ arguments, he has instead tried to develop the notion of what is a human nature, and that part of that nature is the vocation toward forming a communion of persons. The imago dei is not of a single person but of three persons in a community of persons. The task for philosophy is the task that he gave himself in The Acting Person, of understanding human nature in a vocationally relational way. This is far from rendering non-theological ethics redundant. It is important that these developments of an understanding of human nature are challenged and justified on philosophical terms. It is only by doing so, that the Scriptural understanding of the human person which is the basis of the John Paul II Wednesday audiences on Theology of the Body can gain credibility through its internal coherence and consistency in philosophical terms. When we are able to do that, we will then have a conceptual framework that can also be used in engagement with our society. The greatest distance between Catholic moral understanding and our Western culture occurs at the level of understanding nuptiality. There is an urgent need to try to bridge that gap with a philosophical analysis of human nature that gives substance and justification to

[8]

See for instance, Fergus Kerr, Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007, p. 179.

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giving oneself in love. We need a way of constructing a common ground with others. Critical analysis and evaluation as I was taught it at as a philosophy post-graduate was a process that one learned by which the worth of a philosophical work could be judged by the number of distinctions made and defended. This approach has had its detractors. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that contemporary philosophy has condemned itself to engaging in irresolvable or more precisely stagnating disputes by virtually making a virtue out of difference and of splintering of positions. He claims: Modern academic philosophy turns out by and large to provide means for a more accurate and informed definition of disagreement rather than for progress toward its resolution. Professors of philosophy who concern themselves with questions of justice and of practical rationality turn out to disagree with each other as sharply, as variously and, so it seems, as irremediably upon how such questions are to be answered as anyone else. 9

In my own experience on ethics committees and shaping policy, the much more important matter is not the fine points of disagreement and difference, but the development of agreement and consensus, for it is upon the latter that policy actually develops. In my own teaching I have come to recognize that an important skill for Bioethics graduates to learn is how to be able to analyse and evaluate toward a resolution, not to achieve more difference. An aspect I had noted about good graduate student essays is that they had picked up the need to consider a range of views, and to work with the different concepts within those differences, but their method often seemed to be little more than to work to a favoured conclusion by dismissing other views on the basis of identifying some or multiple errors in those positions. Bad student essays did not even get that far and tended to resemble sermons rather than analysis. My thought on the good student essays is that they have learned a skill, if it can be called that, which will not be particularly useful in policy-making. Instead of seeking resolution, they have learned to identify difference and then to adopt a view, like supporting a football team, and to support that view by decrying other views through seeking to identify error. This is not an approach that is likely to be [9]

Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1988, p. 3.


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effective on an ethics committee and would seem in fact to work against the idea of an ethics committee or policy-making being a process by which advice can be developed that is persuasive and broadly acceptable. The skill that they acquired was more suited to tyrants and dictators rather than to a rational democracy. The much more difficult skill that I think is not well taught is how to use that understanding of difference to work towards consensus. The reality of ethical discussion between people who have different higher order beliefs is that they develop neuralgia points at which their basic higher order beliefs or assumptions are challenged. The skill of seeking resolution is to find formulations of words that either avoid or are at least acceptable to the variety of higher order beliefs or assumptions. In that way one can indeed reach a consensus that can be supported from a variety of points of view. Thus there is an active process of analysis that can yield a constructive outcome through the knowledge that that analysis brings. The problem that I referred to in the student essays is that they more or less stopped at identifying difference and error, rather than moving on to seek solutions that were constructive. This might be seen as condoning relativism, a charge that has been levelled at Alasdair MacIntyre who also holds to respecting a person’s culture and tradition. The counter that I would make to a similar charge is that, working on an ethics committee, the task is a very practical one of identifying goodness and goodness is not the preserve of any one culture or tradition, but transcends differences between culture, tradition and religion. If the ‘autonomy as moral trump’ approach dominated, then ethics guidelines would be little more than guidelines for providing information, obtaining consent and appointing representatives for those who lack the capacity. But that is not my experience on government committees and in secular bioethics. In the task of developing ethical guidelines it is interesting that secular bioethics has had to call on notions that approximate to the Christian concepts of dignity and the language of moral imperatives. A moral language has developed to express ideas such as intrinsic evil and the Pauline principle, and, in Australia at least, there is an as yet unarticulated move away from both autonomy as a moral trump and utilitarian concepts and towards a theory of the good. This is most clearly expressed in the various ethical guidelines issued by the National Health and Medical Research Council, for which I will give account.

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The 1970s & ’80s ideas of replacing utilitarianism with principlism,10 and the latter’s emphasis on autonomy as a moral trump, has given way to ideas of professional integrity and a taxonomy of acts never to be undertaken. This is in part influenced by virtue ethics but also embodies a thick notion of the human person and the good of the human person. The teleology is lacking in any sense of an explicit final end of the human person, but to some extent the dialogue is pervaded by an implicit sense of the transcendent nature of humanity. This experience in secular bioethics regulation raises some pertinent practical questions about natural law reasoning and the internal debates about moral epistemology and whether human goods and the moral law are knowable or deducible in a sufficiently rich way as to give rise to an adequate ethic not based on the Word of God.

The NHMRC Experience The statutory functions of the Australian Health Ethics Committee, a principal committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council, include providing advice or national guidelines about ethical issues in human research and in health care. In fulfilling those tasks, the members of AHEC are conscious that there is often debate about ethics. The committee notes that ethics is sometimes said to be merely a matter of individual preference or cultural convention and responds that although ethical judgments may indeed express personal preferences, and may be connected in complicated ways with cultural conventions, AHEC regards ethics as a form of rational inquiry that concerns how we should live and what we should do. 11 The committee notes further that even the best way of reasoning about ethical issues is a matter of debate. For example, some people emphasise the moral undesirability of certain acts (such as deliberate deception) in and of themselves and the moral desirability of certain standards of conduct (such as integrity in one’s relationships with others) in and of themselves. Others emphasise the moral sig[10] See for instance the approach taken by T.L. Beauchamp and J.F. Childress in successive editions of their Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th ed., Oxford University Press, New York, 2001, though the latter edition has tended to move away from autonomy as the dominant value toward a virtue approach. [11] NHMRC, National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, Australian Government Canberra, 2007, pp. 11–13.


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nificance of anticipating the likely consequences of proposed acts (for example, the likely consequences for a woman who gestates a child for another woman).12 Similarly, some people emphasise the duties we owe to each other (for example, the duty to respect another’s personal autonomy). Others emphasise the moral claims we are entitled to make against each other (for example, a child’s moral entitlement to knowledge of his or her genetic parents). The Committee holds that all of these kinds of considerations matter, even if there can be reasonable disagreement among people about how they are to be balanced. In other words it does not seek to exclude contributions from the various views, but to seek answers to ethical questions based on considering responses from all perspectives. To some extent, that approach is required by the NHMRC Act by which AHEC is established.13 The NHMRC Act stipulates the diverse composition of AHEC and the necessity for public consultation in the development of guidelines. AHEC therefore understands that it is the will of the Parliament that AHEC seeks to prepare advice and guidelines that reflect and to some extent define the values of the Australian community. Accordingly, in developing ethical guidelines it is necessary for AHEC to ask what are the values at stake and what function do those values have in establishing an ethical basis for practice. A likely answer may be that we wish to preserve what Australians consider essential for the kind of life they (and their children and grand-children perhaps) wish to live as members of a community. Those values should be reflected in the way that medical research and practice develops. The values and principles of conduct in each context differ because the relationships between people and the responsibilities differ. What is expected of a medical clinician may be different from what is expected of a medical researcher and different again from what may be expected of a manufacturer of therapeutic products.

AHEC’s Values in Research The National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (NHMRC 2007) describes the relationship between researchers and research participants as the ground on which human research is con[12] Ibid. [13] Ibid.

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ducted. The Statement identifies the values of respect for human beings, research merit and integrity, justice and beneficence as helping to shape that relationship as one of trust, mutual responsibility and ethical equality. The Statement also acknowledges that while these values have a long history, there are other values that could inform human research such as altruism, contributing to societal or community goals and respect for cultural diversity, along with the values that inform Values and Ethics: Guidelines for Ethical Conduct in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research (NHMRC 2003): spirit and integrity, reciprocity, respect, equality, survival and protection, and responsibility. It is worth noting that the major value in the National Statement is respect for human beings which is a recognition of their intrinsic value. According to AHEC, respect also requires having due regard for the welfare, beliefs, perceptions, customs and cultural heritage, both individual and collective, of those involved in research. From this point of view it is most interesting that a notion of respect for human beings and their intrinsic value is taken as the priority in developing ethical guidelines. This concept is removed from the statements of autonomy and individualism that characterize much of the secular debate. AHEC goes on to claim that researchers and their institutions should respect the privacy, confidentiality and cultural sensitivities of the participants and, where relevant, of their communities. Any specific agreements made with the participants or the community should be fulfilled. The committee also doffs its cap to autonomy in asserting that respect for human beings involves giving due scope, throughout the research process, to the capacity of human beings to make their own decisions. Where participants are unable to make their own decisions or have diminished capacity to do so, respect for them involves empowering them where possible and providing for their protection as necessary.

AHEC’s Values in Organ and Tissue Transplantation In Australia, the donation of organs and tissues after death for transplantation relies on the values of altruism and solidarity that has formed the bases of a system of obtaining and using organs and tissue for transplantation. AHEC has recognized that the medical benefits of this approach to organ and tissue donation have provided a


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strong motivation for such a system and it is now part of Australia’s social capital. The NHMRC14 has held that organs and tissues for transplantation after death should be obtained in ways that: l

demonstrate respect for all aspects of human dignity, including the worth, welfare, rights, beliefs, perceptions, customs and cultural heritage of all involved;

l

respect the wishes, where known, of the deceased;

l

give precedence to the needs of the potential donor and the family over the interests of organ procurement;

l

as far as possible, protect recipients from harm; and

l

recognise the needs of all those directly involved, including the donor, recipient, families, carers, friends and health professionals.

In the context of a system based on altruism and solidarity, it has been possible to have a process of allocation according to just and transparent processes. The ethical issues in the donation of living organ and tissue donation principally involve concern for the donors: the autonomy and welfare of the donor takes precedence over the needs of the recipient to receive an organ or tissue. The systems in Australia, whether for the blood service, the bone marrow service, the eye bank or solid organ transplantation, have been based on altruism and solidarity and respect for human dignity, including the worth of the person and respect for their wishes.

AHEC and Care of People Who are Severely Brain Damaged Last week, as chairman of an NHMRC committee on the care of people in post-coma unresponsiveness (Vegetative State) or a minimally responsive state, I launched new national ethical guidelines.15 It is worth noting the guidelines in reference to the vexed issue of withdrawing nutrition and hydration state. 16

[14] Organ and Tissue Donation by Living Donors: Guidelines for Ethical Practice for Health Professionals, Endorsed 15 March, 2007; Organ and Tissue Donation after Death, for Transplantation: Guidelines for Ethical Practice by Health Professionals, Endorsed 15 March, 2007. [15] National Health and Medical Research Council, Ethical Guidelines for the Care of People in Post Coma Unresponsiveness (Vegetative State) or a Minimally Responsive State, Australian Government, Canberra, 2008, http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/publications/synopses/e81_82syn.htm [16] See: Appendix 1, p. 87 below.

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AHEC’s Moral Language One of the most interesting experiences of developing national guidelines for ethical conduct in medical practice and research is that AHEC has had to develop a policy about moral language. In the vagaries of committee process, a policy decision was made to use the words ‘ought’ and ‘must’. The latter was to express exceptionless norms and the latter a normative recommendation to which individual ethics committees might seek to justify permitting exceptions. This experience of seeing a morality expressed in a secular environment has been a most interesting one. The claim I make is that this is good activity, activity that seeks to identify and protect human beings from a viewpoint that listens to the different faiths, cultures and traditions within our society and seeks to reflect the committee’s perceptions for what needs to be protected in the conduct of human research and health care clinical practices in the light of values that are derived from the society but transcendent of the cultural and traditional differences. That process does call for reflection on what constitutes a secular society because there are those who want to assert something quite different, a society in which faith has no role in public life.

A Secular Society The judgement that we live in a secular society may reflect an historical aberration, a modern phenomenon, and largely an exclusively Western phenomenon, the recent judicial difficulties of Turkey’s ruling AK Party notwithstanding (but I will return to the subject of Turkey later). The philosopher Charles Taylor in his recent book A Secular Age17 suggests that a secular society may be one in which one can engage fully in politics without ever encountering God. Apart from some vestigial prayers on such an occasion as the opening of Parliament, now to be preceded by a welcome from the original owners of our land, (or an occasional speech from a member of minority religious party who became elected through the vagaries of the system for electing upper chambers and inter party dealing on preferences), Australian politics are basically secular according to Taylor’s characterisation. In another sense though, Australia is even more secular than our American counterpart. In 2005, only 40% of Australian marriages [17] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2007.


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took place in the presence of a Minister of religion.18 America, despite a rigorous separation of Church and State, is the Western society with the highest statistics for religious belief and practice. Religious practice in Australia is in decline. So a secular society may mean a society in which people are predominantly not religious by belief or practice. In that case, though constitutionally secular, one would not describe Turkey as secular; given the vast majority of the population is Muslim, with 95% declaring their belief in a God. 19 Taylor however identifies a third sense of secularism, by which he means to refer to the rise of the alternative of secularism as a form of belief. A society may be secular in the first sense of religion not being a part of public life, the so-called separation of Church and State. It may be secular in the second sense of declining religious belief and practice. Finally, it may be secular in the sense of secularism emerging as an alternative belief form. It seems to me that it is the latter that we are witnessing in Australia, and it appears as a very aggressive exclusionist form of secularism which views religious belief and practice with arrogant intolerance and dismissiveness. This kind of secularist belief is characterised by attempts to exclude contributions to public discussion on the basis of a kind of bigotry that classifies the contributions of persons who are religious in a nominalist way. A question that every intelligent participant in public debate faces is the question of how to conduct oneself in pluralist debate and what are legitimate personal ambitions for that participation. To expect to produce public policy to one’s liking would be an aspiration to demagoguery or tyranny. More than that, it would offend against basic ideals of freedom. Human persons do not live in isolation but in community. We do need a public morality, a set of values that underlies our public structures and institutions and guides our conduct. There are then basic norms that are required for persons to live together harmoniously. To that end, we each have a personal responsibility to seek to know the truth and to adhere to it. That pursuit of truth is best served by protecting each person from external coercion; from anything that [18] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Marriages Australia 2005, Document No. 3306.0.55.001 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/3306.0.55.001 Accessed 1st April 2008. [19] European Commission, ‘Social Values, Science and Technology’, Eurobarometer, 2005.

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would impinge upon his or her psychological freedom. The right to religious freedom ought not to be impeded, provided that just public order is protected. The search for truth is an inquiry that should be free and informed and developed by dialogue. Free moral discussion is thus a crucial part of that inquiry. Society also has the right to defend against possible abuses committed on the pretext of freedom of religion (e.g. genital mutilation of women). But governments should not be arbitrary or unfair in that respect. Government has responsibilities to safeguard the rights of all citizens and for the peaceful settlement of conflicts of rights. Peace comes about when people live together in ways that respect the dignity and rights of each. There is thus a need for a public morality, a set of norms that govern our relationships with each other based on the fundamental notion of equal respect for persons, our inherent dignity, and our inalienable rights. These notions constitute the basic components of the common good. Outside of these restraints and obligations of the common good, persons have freedom in full range. A legitimate aim of involvement in public debate is to seek to develop policies that give expression to equal respect for persons. There are many differences of opinion as to what constitutes respect for persons and indeed what is meant by human dignity. That discussion is fruitful and worthwhile, and the contributions of a plurality of approaches deepen and strengthen understanding. Open public debate thus serves important functions. The point is not to exclude considered perspectives from discussion, but to listen to each and to gain the insights that each brings. Bigotry is limiting and destructive of community precisely because it is an effort to isolate and exclude contributions from discussion. In recent times we have witnessed the extraordinary bigotry of exclusive secularism that has attempted to exclude religious perspectives from public discussion. American jurist Ronald Dworkin asserts the essentially religious content of respect for the intrinsic value of human life. He argues that State enforcement of responsibilities to protect the intrinsic value of human life would breach the First Amendment and the understanding that a state has no business prescribing what people should think about the ultimate value of human life, about why


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human life has intrinsic importance, and about how that value is respected or dishonoured in different circumstances. 20 This argument is linked in Australia to the Australian Constitution. Section 116 provides: The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

The meaning of section 116 was determined by the High Court of Australia in the famous ‘Defence of Government Schools’ (DOGS) case in 1981. C.J. Barwick: ‘the establishment of religion must be found to be the object of the making of the law. Further, because the whole expression is “for establishing any religion”, the law to satisfy the description must have that objective as its express and, as I think, single purpose.’21 The purpose of these provisions in the Australian Constitution is, then, to limit the role of the State, not to limit the role of the Church or any other religious grouping. Having come from a society where the King nationalised religion and made the Church a department of State under parliamentary control, persecuting and marginalising those whose religious opinions differed from those of the State, it is not surprising that the founders wanted a Constitution which would allow maximum freedom of religion. Where religion is concerned, it is the Church that needs protection from the hubris of politicians and not vice versa. The Church did not impose religion upon England. England imposed its views on the Church. 22 Moreover, the Australian Constitution does not exclude religious arguments, religious people, or the Churches from public debate. The opposite is true. People are not to have their religious freedom infringed by the state and are to be permitted to express their religious opinions in the public square. The Australian Constitution itself recognises the legitimacy of religion in the public square when, in its Preamble, it says that we, the Australian people, are ‘humbly [20] Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, Knopf, New York, 1993, p. 164. [21] Black v. The Commonwealth, (1981) HCA 2, (1981) 146 CLR 559 (2 February 1981), at pp.579, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/HCA/1981/2.html. [22] I am indebted to John Fleming in a chapter we co-authored entitled ‘Seeking a Consensus’ in John Fleming and Nicholas Tonti-Filippini (eds.), Common Ground? Seeking an Australian Consensus on Abortion and Sex Education, St Paul Publications, 2007, pp. 312–330

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relying on the blessings of Almighty God’. This is further supported by the custom of the Parliament to begin each day with prayer including the ‘Our Father’.23 Perhaps it is fairer to say that the Australian Constitution provides for the cooperation between Church and state, religion and state. Michael Hogan, Research Associate in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, put it this way: Australia does not have a legally entrenched principle, or even a vague set of conventions, of the separation of church and state. From the appointment of Rev. Samuel Marsden as one of the first magistrates in colonial New South Wales, to the adoption of explicit policies of state aid for denominational schools during the 1960s, to the two examples mentioned above, Australia has had a very consistent tradition of cooperation between church and state. ‘Separation of church and state’, along with ‘the separation of powers’ or ‘pleading the Fifth’, are phrases that we have learned from the US, and which merely serve to confuse once they are taken out of the context of the American Constitution.24

What Australia does have is a principle of state neutrality, or equal treatment, when dealing with churches. This principle dates back at least to Governor Bourke (if not to Macquarie) in colonial NSW, and extends all the way into contemporary Australia where government monies at all levels go quite happily to the churches so that they can run schools, hospitals, employment agencies, social welfare bureaux and even drug injecting rooms. This principle of neutrality is not entrenched in either the State or Federal Constitutions, and has no legal standing. (Constitutionally, State governments could still conceivably nominate an established church; only the Commonwealth is forbidden to do so by Section 116 of its Constitution!) Ultimately, the strength of the principle comes from the conventions hammered out in colonial Australia that saw English and Scottish established churches deprived of their priority in government funding. It survives into the twenty-first century because no major party could seriously contemplate abandoning it.25 The principle of state neutrality has coexisted in Australia with a strong secular tradition in politics. For most of our history most Aus-

[23] Ibid. [24] Ibid. [25] Ibid.


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tralians have been quite happy with the principle that governments should not favour one church over another.26 Notwithstanding the legal position, many politicians and others have behaved in a way that does not respect the Australian Constitution by demanding that bishops, priests, ministers, churches, and other religious bodies stop ‘meddling’ in politics. Such ad hominem attacks represent an egregious appeal to prejudice and unjust discrimination against certain people or institutions. It is also hypocritical in the strict sense because such advice is usually given by, but not expected to apply to, those whose religion is variously described as secular, ‘humanist’, atheistic, or agnostic. Examples of publicly expressed religious bigotry by significant members of the press, political establishment, and others abound. The views of Christians are associated with fundamentalism, that unenlightened and ignorantly dogmatic religion, which is impervious to science, reason, and compassion. Alex Mitchell, columnist for Sydney’s The Sun Herald, exemplified the crudest expression of anti-Catholic bigotry when accounting for the way in which NSW Senators voted against a private member’s bill to overturn the ban on therapeutic cloning in 2006. Senators Ursula Stephens and Steve Hutchins were described as coming ‘from the darkest recesses of the NSW right’, while Senators Bill Heffernan and Concetta FierravantiWells were ‘mediaevalists’ who ‘took their stand somewhere around the fifteenth century when the Spanish Inquisition was in full swing’.27 Senator Amanda Vanstone, in supporting therapeutic cloning, said ‘There are different views on when life begins, but no religion has the right to seek to have its view legislated.’ Never mind that Senator Vanstone then voted to have her own religious views legislated. Each politician was expected to vote, and Vanstone cast her vote according to her own opinion. But she was wrong to tell politicians of a different religious opinion to her own that they did not have the same right to seek to persuade the Parliament to a particular point of view. There is nothing in the Australian Constitution to justify the denial of equal rights to free speech on the basis of a person’s religious or other opinions. The Hon. Tony Abbott was constantly questioned about his objectivity and even his right to be able to hold the office of Minister for [26] Michael Hogan, ‘Separation of Church and State?’ (16 May 2001), [27] Alex Mitchell, ‘Faulkner Lone State ALP Senator to Back Cloning Legislation,’ The Sun Herald, 12 November 2006, p. 22.

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Health because he is a Catholic. This was a constant theme in the debate over the abortion drug RU-486. And the same line of questioning of his religious views continued in relation to the therapeutic cloning debate. Question: Do you get the feeling that every time you open your mouth on these issues of conscience or ethics people—your critics— impugn your motives because of your religious faith? Tony Abbott: I think that it’s noteworthy that no one was demanding that religion be kept out of politics when Bruce Baird, Barnaby Joyce, and Stephen Fielding opposed the Government’s immigration bill but, on this particular issue, there are enormous demands, including from prominent members of the Labor Party, that ‘religion’ be kept out of politics. Now, the truth is that I certainly haven’t injected religion into politics, and I don’t believe on the stem cell issue or the cloning issue anyone has injected religion into politics. The arguments that I’ve used, and other opponents of change in this area have used, are all based on human values. They’re not based on religious teaching. Question: But it’s a religious issue. Stem cells is a religious issue, and you could easily argue that case as well, couldn’t you? Tony Abbott: Well, I—my arguments are not based on religious teaching. They’re not based on Scripture; they’re not based on what the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Dalai Lama has said—they’re based on what I think are decent human values that can be apprehended by anyone, regardless of his or her religious views.28

Abbott exemplified the classical Catholic approach to debating moral issues in the public square when he insisted that he was arguing on the basis of agreed ‘human values’ (the wrongfulness of killing the innocent), and the scientific account of when human

[28] ‘Doorstop Interview–Herceptin listed on the PBS,’ 22 August 2006, http://www.health.gov.au/internet/ministers/publishing.nsf/Content/healt h-mediarel-yr2006-ta-abbsp220806.htm?OpenDocument&yr=2006&mth=8.


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life begins. He did not appeal to data which is the sole preserve of revelation. To make it clear that people should discount views contrary to those held by the elites, media outlets commonly describe dissenters as ‘devout Catholic’ or ‘fundamentalist’. We have yet to see anyone from the elites described as ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’. Which begs the question, ‘Why not?’ All human beings are influenced by their personal religious and philosophical commitments. Why is this only to be considered a problem for Christians? The attempt to define out of public debate contributors who come from selected religious viewpoints (but not others) exemplifies how deeply anti-religious and sectarian bigotry goes especially among those who would regard themselves as ‘enlightened’, even ‘educated’. When Christians, either as individuals or in company with others of similar mind, take part in public discussion, they do so simply as citizens expressing a view about the common good and the principles that are needed to protect the common good. They are behaving responsibly by taking their civic role seriously, provided of course that they conduct themselves properly within the norms of the Australian democratic system. This caveat also applies to those who replace intelligent argument and debate with ad hominem attacks which invite people to disregard fellow citizens on the basis of their religion. The view that human life is to be protected is implied by the simple idea of equal respect for persons. It is legitimate to argue about who is a person, but that is not essentially a religious debate, even if religious people may be inclined to be more sensitive to the need to protect those who are most vulnerable on the fringes of life. The Australian Constitution protects religious freedom, including freedom of association and of expression. The right to be involved in public debate is protected. It is manifestly unjust and extraordinarily bigoted to claim that religious people ought not to be permitted to contribute or that their contribution ought not to be considered. At the same time, contribution to public debate needs to be aware of the sensitivities of others. Public policy advances through seeking points of agreement and being careful to respect areas of disagreement. There is a role for what John Rawls29 calls ‘public reason’; this is a discussion that takes place on the basis of agreed fundamental principles. [29] John Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ in John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press, Oxford, 1999.

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However it is important that there is also continued discussion of those fundamental principles, as well as on the application of them, and it is appropriate in a pluralist society that all perspectives are brought to bear upon that discussion in a considered way. During last year’s phoney Federal election campaign, the journalist David Burchell wrote of (now Prime Minister) Kevin Rudd’s canny decision to present his political philosophy chiefly in terms of a personal sense of faith.30 This was seen as politically opportunistic rather than reflecting the reality of what Mr. Rudd called a basic congruence between the Christian ethic of respect for individual human dignity and freedom, and the social democratic tradition out of which his party has evolved. The journalist’s cynicism belies our common need to listen to, to search for, and to identify those core values that will make our communites great, whomever and how many espouse them, and from wherever those values might originate. The great traditions in every age and culture have tended to identify the very same core values. Our human need for a transcendent reality that is beyond the merely human ultimately outlasts every other alternative belief form both intellectually and emotionally. The task of seeking that reality is, I would argue from my experiences of doing so, a legitimate and worthwhile activity. As an approach it is not a case of ‘crowning’ as the former Cardinal Ratzinger would express it, but rather seeking to draw from the many traditions and cultures within our society, including those that are theological, perceptions of the human goods that are transcendent, and the need to protect them.

Appendix 1 (see page 62 above) A person in PCU [post-coma unresponsiveness] or MRS [minimally responsive state] may be affected by other conditions, or his or her condition may deteriorate. Complications may also develop in relation to delivering some elements of maintenance care. For example, tube feeding may cause aspiration and recurrent respiratory infection; or a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube (PEG) may cause excoriation or gut inflammation. People who are minimally responsive may show signs of discomfort.

[30] David Burchell ‘Rudd’s religion strikes a chord’ Australian January 6th 2007.


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The presumption ought to be in favour of continuing maintenance care. However, such complications may lead to some aspects of maintenance care being considered overly burdensome and they may be withdrawn after careful consultation and informing those involved about the reasons for withdrawal. The person’s previously expressed wishes are relevant to a judgement of the burdensomeness of a treatment, and should be considered. As with any decisions about the treatment of highly dependent patients, decisions about withholding or withdrawing treatment and the continuing provision of artificial nutrition and hydration should be informed by a consideration of the person’s best interests including what, if anything, is known about their wishes; and it should reflect the best contemporary standards of care for people who are highly dependent. The question is never whether the patient’s life is worthwhile, but whether a treatment is worthwhile.

Like all of the recent AHEC documents, these guidelines begin with a statement of ethical principles. In this document that statement contains the following. The provision of care is an expression of our fundamental humanity and connectedness, and our common sense of obligation to promote good and do no harm. Because of their total dependence on others, people in PCU or MRS are highly vulnerable and, as such, are owed a particular duty of care to promote their interests and protect them from exploitation, abuse and neglect. That duty is likely to extend over a long period of time. Decisions about the care of people in PCU or MRS should: (a) demonstrate respect for all aspects of human dignity, including the worth, welfare, rights, beliefs, perceptions, customs and cultural heritage of all involved; (b) respect, where these are known, the values, beliefs and previous wishes of the person in PCU or MRS; (c) recognise the needs of all those directly involved—including people in PCU or MRS, families, friends, health professionals, and other carers—to be: (i)

involved in decisions that affect them;

(ii) given accurate and timely information; (iii) realistically educated about the person’s situation, care and prospect; and

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Truth and Faith in Ethics (iv) assisted, when necessary, to deal with their own responses in their particular situations; (d) give due regard to justice, particularly in relation to the responsible use of resources. This includes ensuring so far as possible that there is: (i)

fair distribution of the benefits of or access to goods and services;

(ii) equality of opportunity; (iii) no unfair burden on any members of the community or on particular groups; and (iv) no abuse, neglect, exploitation or discrimination; (e) respect the basic rights of people in PCU or MRS, including: (i)

the right of individuals to be treated with respect;

(ii) the right of individuals to life, liberty, and security; (iii) the right of individuals to have their religious and cultural identity respected; (iv) the right of competent individuals to self-determination; (v)

the right to a standard of care related to individual needs;

(vi) the right of individuals to privacy and confidentiality; (vii) the recognition that human beings are social beings with social needs; (f) give due regard to the rights and duties of those who care for people in PCU and MRS, and the duties of the community both to people in PCU or MRS, and to their carers (family, professional and other); (g) respect the goals and the limits of medical treatment.

Bernadette Tobin

Contemporary Moral Philosophy and Happiness Some insights from the Judeo-Christian Tradition

I was invited to address two issues: first, what the Catholic moral tradition can learn from, and offer to, contemporary moral philosophy; second, the difference (if any) that faith makes to one’s conception of happiness. There are connections between these two topics. In what follows I shall begin by recalling the two kinds of principles (‘faith-based’ and ‘reason-based’) which make up the Catholic Christian tradition. I shall then criticize a dominant school of thought in contemporary bioethics, and argue that, in general, the resources for evaluating it can be found in the ‘reason-based’ principles at home in the Catholic-Christian tradition. I will then suggest that a distinctive insight into concerns that press themselves on anyone who thinks about how best to live is found in the ‘faith-based’ principles.

I First, the relations between faith and reason as they are understood in the Catholic tradition.1 In the Catholic tradition, a clear distinction is discernible between two kinds of propositions which together [1]

Maimonides, in setting out a philosophical explanation of the Torah’s Laws in his Guide to the Perplexed, makes the same point about the relations between faith and reason in the Jewish tradition. See J. Telushkin, Jewish Literacy, William Morrow, USA, 2001, p. 529.

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express the tradition: one kind which is not, or not entirely, accessible to natural human reason and another kind which is, entirely, accessible to natural human reason.2 The first includes a set of propositions about the nature of God and in particular the life and teaching of Christ. The second includes a set of propositions about the nature of a human being and in particular about the kinds of conduct that conduce to human well-being. Both kinds of proposition constitute claims about what is true. In the former case, their defence involves reference to texts taken to be the revealed word of God: in that sense, they are not entirely accessible to natural human reason. In the latter case, their defence involves reference to general principles of right conduct (about ‘human flourishing’ or ‘morality’ or ‘right conduct’ or—to use today’s term—‘human rights’) which are rationally accessible to anyone. Though the distinction is a traditional and familiar one, apt terms in which to describe it are hard to find. In one sense, both kinds of proposition are religious: they both belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition. In another sense, the first is religious and the second is not: the first involves reference to propositions about God, the second does not. They are sometimes contrasted as ‘revelation’ and ‘reason’, sometimes ‘faith’ and ‘reason’. For simplicity’s sake, I shall refer to them as ‘faith-based’ and ‘reason-based’. Several points about ‘reason-based principles’ as they are understood in the Catholic tradition. First, the general principles of right conduct which constitute their defence are expressions of the idea that human beings have a knowable rational nature. That is to say: as individuals and as societies we are able, as Aristotle pointed out, to grasp ‘the human good’, to work out better and worse ways of pursuing that good, and, to recognize that some ways of pursuing it are out of the question.3 These principles constitute an objectivist school of thought, itself an expression of the idea that moral beliefs and judgments are the product of our critical responsiveness to, and rational reflection on, our experience of what is worth our attention, care and respect, of what is worth desiring or doing or being. Objectivism in ethics implies a rejection of all forms of ethical skepticism: relativism, individual subjectiv[2]

John Finnis, ‘The Catholic Church and Public Policy Debates in Western Liberal Societies: The Basis and Limits of Intellectual Engagement’ in Luke Gormally (ed.), Issues for a Catholic Bioethics, The Linacre Centre, London, 1999.

[3]

Aristotle, Politics, 1253a15-40, Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, Random House, New York, 1941, pp. 1129-1130 ; Nicomachean Ethics, 1142b33-35 p. 1031; Nicomachean Ethics, 1107a10, p. 959.

Contemporary Moral Philosophy and Happiness

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ism, universal subjectivism, and post-modern anti-intellectualism: relativism (the idea that moral beliefs and judgments are merely social conventions, the product of a particular community’s history); individual subjectivism (the idea that moral beliefs and judgments are merely the expression of an individual’s feelings, attitudes, preferences); universal subjectivism (the idea that moral beliefs and judgments are merely the expression of the individual’s feelings, attitudes, desires or preferences which happen also to be universally-felt and shared); and post-modernism’s anti-intellectualism (the idea that bias and greed fatally undermine our ethical appraisals). Objectivism in ethics is the idea that moral beliefs have real foundations in rational human nature. Second, there are various versions of this school of thought which, at some level of analysis, yield different answers to the question: How do we decide what is objectively right or wrong, good or evil? Despite their differences, however, Platonic ethics, Aristotelian ethics, Thomistic ethics, Kantian ethics, modern natural law ethics all agree on the key idea, that human beings have a knowable rational nature, knowable needs and interests, and that once these are identified we can specify the items of human wellbeing and human diminishment—what is good for us and what harms us, what makes our lives go well and what makes them go badly. Thirdly, it does not follow from the idea that human beings have a knowable rational nature that the truth status of ‘reason-based’ propositions about that nature is easily accessible. In some cases it is, in others it is not. The reasons which are relevant to the ethical assessment of slavery, torture, killing non-combatants in the context of war, are easily accessible. The reasons which are relevant to the ethical assessment of many problems thrown up by the new reproductive technologies are not. Fourthly, it is one thing for something to be soundly judged on the basis of ‘rationally-grounded’ reasons to be unethical and quite another (though related) for it to be soundly judged on the basis of these reasons to constitute such a threat to peace and social order that it legitimately may be regulated or even prohibited by law. Unethical acts often do not threaten peace and social order. Fifthly, objectivist theories can be deployed in more or less convincing ways.4 Objectivism does not provide an alternative to think-

[4]

Steven Pinker recently claimed that an ethical objectivist used the concept of human dignity to condemn eating in public—in particular the ‘cat-like’ licking of

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ing deep and hard, in ways that are sensitive to context, culture and history. And, finally, objectivism does not justify dogmatism. The belief that there are objectively right answers does not entail the belief that everything is already nailed down. These features of objectivism are worth restating because the role of reason in the Judeo-Christian tradition continues to be misunderstood in contemporary bioethics. Let me give two illustrations. When, some years ago, the Australian Health Ethics Committee prohibited assisted reproductive technology clinics from offering sex-selection for non-medical reasons (so-called ‘family balancing’), some critics claimed that the reason for the prohibition had to be religious in the ‘faith-based’ sense (because several members of the Committee were Catholic Christians) even though the Committee explained its prohibition in terms rationally accessible to anyone: ‘The Australian Health Ethics Committee believes that admission to life should not be conditional upon a child being a particular sex.’5 The mistake was to treat any contribution to the formation of public policy which came from Catholic Christians (leave aside the fact that the majority of the Committee were either of no religious belief or of unknown religious belief!) as ‘religious’ in the sense that it was held not as a matter of reasoning but as a matter of accepting revelation. Again, when the Lockhart Committee recommended that key changes should be made to Australia’s Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002, that Committee said that it considered that ‘the higher the potential benefits of an activity, the greater the need for ethical objections to it to be, amongst other things, … widely accepted’ in order to prevent that activity.6 Community acceptability was the test of a proposal, ice-creams. If the criticism is accurate, it is hard not to agree that this amounts to nothing more than using the concept to condemn something that ‘just gives you the creeps!’ Steven Pinker, ‘Science and the Eternal Struggle with Dignity’, The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement, 28th May 2008, p. 33. [5]

‘Sex selection is an ethically controversial issue. The Australian Health Ethics Committee believes that admission to life should not be conditional upon a child being a particular sex. Therefore, pending further community discussion, sex selection (by whatever means) must not be undertaken except to reduce the risk of transmission of a serious genetic condition.’ National Health and Medical Research Council: Ethical Guidelines on the Use of Assisted Reproductive Technology in Clinical Practice and Research, September 2004: 11.1

[6]

J. Lockhart, Report of the Legislation Review Committee on the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002


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not its basis in reason. Thus did the Committee find a (Rawlsian) device for sidelining all public policy recommendations from religious institutions, whether they were of the ‘faith-based’ or ‘reasonbased’ kind: if their recommendations were not ‘widely accepted’, they simply did not count as ‘public reasons’. 7

II Contemporary moral philosophy has much to offer the Catholic moral tradition: Martha Nussbaum’s criticisms of utilitarianism in both ethical and political theory,8 Onora O’Neill on the inter-connections between emphasis on respect for autonomy and a loss of trust in medicine, science and technology,9 Julia Annas on the relevance of ancient ethical theory to questions about what an ethical theory is and should be.10 Here, however, I wish to focus on an unconvincing school of thought in contemporary moral philosophy, preference satisfaction consequentialism, and to argue that in general, the resources for meeting the inadequacies of this school can be found in the ‘reason-based’ principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition. A representative example of the ideas of this school of thought is found in Julian Savulescu’s 2005 address to the National Press Club in Canberra on the occasion of his being awarded the Annual Medal of the Australian Society for Medical Research.11 The title of his address was: ‘New science, enhancement of human beings, and the future of medicine’. In it, he acknowledged the value of the 20th century’s focus on the treatment and the prevention of disease but argued that, in addition to these very worthy goals, 21st century medicine—in particular, genetic medicine—should use science and medical technology not just to prevent and treat disease but also to enhance people themselves. He said: ‘I want to suggest to you that we should make happier, better people.’ (‘Lockhart Review’). Executive Summary; http://www.lockhartreview.com.au/index.html. [7]

John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, 225. See also Finnis, op. cit.

[8]

Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

[9]

Onora O’Neill. Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.

[10] Julia Annas. The morality of happiness, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. [11] Julian Savulescu, National Press Club National Australia Bank Address, Wednesday 8th June 2005: http://www.asmr.org.au/MRW/NPCTRSC05.pdf: accessed 1.12.08.

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He gave three arguments for his view—not just that it would be a good idea to enhance people but that we have a ‘moral imperative’ to do so—which I will paraphrase and comment on before examining the origins of these views in preference satisfaction consequentialism. The first argument: Choosing not to enhance someone is the same as harming that person. Dietary neglect that caused a child with a stunning intellect to be stunted and have only a normal intellect would be wrong and a form of parental neglect. Failing to institute some diet that would cause a normal child to have a stunning intellect results in exactly the same thing: a normal child who could have been much brighter. These are equally wrong. Substitute ‘biological intervention’ for ‘diet’ and you see that, if we have a reason to prevent our children from deteriorating, we also have a reason to improve them. Note how, on this view, the worth of parental conduct is to be assessed solely in terms of its consequences: the results of their action or inaction on the child’s fortunes. It matters not how that consequence is brought about: indirectly by diet, directly by cognitive enhancement. The idea that there are limits to the extent to which parents may legitimately shape their children’s futures is simply ignored. The second argument: We are all in favour of better education for our children. We train our children to be well-behaved, cooperative, intelligent, socially aware, empathetic. If we allow all these ‘environmental manipulations’, why should we not also allow direct biological manipulations? The environmental ones work by affecting our biology. So why not directly manipulate our biology towards goals we agree are good ones? Note how this argument runs together a wide variety of things— education, diet, training, genetic enhancement—under the term ‘environmental manipulations’. No distinction is recognized between parental efforts to shape children which respect the child’s knowable rational nature (and thus work with his or her distinctively rational capacities, development, functioning and fulfillment)—think of a loving and nurturing atmosphere in the home, stimulating education at school, warm and engaged forms of interpersonal cooperation, play,—and parental efforts which do not—


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think of the widespread use of drugs to address so-called ‘attention deficit disorder’ in young children.12 The third argument: We are already on the road to human enhancement, and so we have no logical reason to reject it. If we accept treatment and prevention of disease, which we do, we should accept enhancement. Health is not something intrinsically valuable: it is just something that enables us to do what we want in order to lead a worthwhile life. There is nothing intrinsically bad about disease, apart from its effects on how well our life goes. If that is so, then what matters is how good our lives are, how far we can achieve our goals. Do we need to know what makes for a good life? No, not precisely, because in knowing that there are ‘all-purpose goods’, goods that are good no matter what kind of life you want to live (such things as intelligence, memory, self-discipline, foresight, patience, a sense of humour, optimism,…) we know enough. In so far as our biology can affect our achievement of our goals, then we have reason to intervene to improve our biology. Here it is important to note that when he talks of the bad effect of sickness on ‘how well our life goes’, how health can affect how ‘good our life’ is, Savulescu means how ‘good our life seems to us’ whether we reflect on it or not.13 This makes it very clear that, according to Savulescu, what settles something’s status is the role it plays in people’s preferences. If some people value it, it is valuable (to them). If other do not value it, it is not valuable (to them). There are no objective and intrinsic values: all value is bestowed by human preferences. There is much here with which we can agree. There is nothing in principle wrong with influencing the transmission of hereditary factors to promote what is good and to eliminate what is injurious. And Savulescu acknowledges objections to the use of genetic technologies based on the unlikeliness of fair access and on the possibil[12] It is a commonplace of contemporary bioethics to claim that the only moral reservations there are about the genetic enhancement of human beings concern questions of equitable access, safety and individual liberty. See, for instance, J. Harris and S. Chan: Understanding the ethics of genetic enhancement, Gene Therapy, 2008, 15, 338–339. [13] If better evidence is needed to show that this thinking is informed by preference-satisfaction consequentialism, here is Savulescu in the same talk defending research which involves the cloning of human embryos: ‘Human embryos may have a special moral status, when they are part of a project, by a couple, to have a child. But when they are not part of a project to have a child, they have quite a different status. For that reason, we allow the destruction of embryos from IVF.’ Address to the National Press Club, op. cit.

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ity that genetic enhancement may be unsafe. However, because the whole idea of a ‘moral imperative’ to enhance people relies on preference-satisfaction consequentialism which itself is informed by a Humean account of human nature, his ‘moral imperative’ is unconvincing. Let me explain. The origins of today’s preference-satisfaction consequentialism are found in utilitarianism, the theory which says that the worth of any action lies in its usefulness (or ‘utility’) for human beings. What counts as useful? Happiness, said Bentham, by which he meant mere pleasure. And when he insisted that each person’s pleasure counted the same, he provided the theory with its most attractive feature: that one can assess alternative courses of action for their moral worth simply by doing the maths of the pleasure (a plus) or pain (a minus) imposed on those affected. Thus was moral mathematics born. 14 When Bentham’s early critics (such as Mill) complained about the reduction of all human happiness, all human ideals, to mere physical pleasure, and Mill for his part proposed that pleasures be divided into higher (the intellectual) and lower (the physical) and that the higher should always trump the lower, Mill’s utilitarian contemporaries objected that this would destroy the great attraction of the theory: its promise of mathematically-certain conclusions. In the twentieth century a different solution was proposed: replace physical pleasure with preference satisfaction, with ‘getting what you want’. If, for example, one person wants to win at competitive sports and another wants to eliminate poverty, then it will be perfectly obvious to all whether or to what extent a given policy delivers them the object of their desires. Thus did economists, and following them philosophers, come to advocate the greatest level of preference-satisfaction as the standard by which social policies were to be judged. And so we have the ‘democratization’ of morals, the idea that all desires are equal. They are not subject even to a self-reflective test. There are several significant differences between preference-satisfaction consequentialism and the ‘natural law’ school of thought found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Preference-satisfaction consequentialism embodies a form of universal subjectivism, whereas the ‘natural law’ school of thought is objectivist. In claiming that moral beliefs have real foundations in rational human nature, the latter implies, as noted earlier, a rejection of universal subjectivism, a rejection of the Humean idea that moral beliefs and judgments [14]

S. Buckle, ‘Understanding Utilitarianism’, Bioethics Outlook, Vol 16, No 3, 2005, p. 16. I rely on his account in the following two paragraphs.


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are merely the expression of an individual’s desires or preferences which happen to be universally-felt and shared. It also implies a rejection of Hume’s restriction of the role of human reason to a calculative task in the service of satisfying human desires or preferences which are not themselves open to rational assessment. Buckle is right to say that this ‘service tool’ or ‘instrumental’ view of reason amounts to a reinterpretation of human nature, a reinterpretation of the idea that the human being is a rational animal. Traditionally, this meant that a human being is a being who acts in the light of rationally-acquired knowledge of the world, including knowledge of objective goods (such as health). In the Humean re-interpretation, a human being is an animal like any other animal which calculates how to satisfy its desires: the only difference is that it has a greater capacity for figuring out how to get what it wants. This implies not only that there is no difference between human and animal life, but also that the idea that there is a distinctive dignity to human beings is unjustified. What makes Savulescu’s view that we have a moral imperative to attempt to enhance ourselves and our children unconvincing is that it is built on this Humean account of human nature. It relies on the idea that universal desires and preferences are basic in the sense that they are not open to rational evaluation and it treats reason as a service tool in the pursuit of those desires. On this view, there is no place for the idea that human reason can recognize a difference between enhancements that do not change the moral fundamentals of human life and those that do. Perhaps longevity would not change those fundamentals, though the miserable lives of Jonathan Swift’s immortal Struldbruggs should make us pause. But changing the objects of human striving and satisfaction, along the lines imagined in Brave New World, certainly would. This is the truth in the objections to scientists ‘playing God’, whether or not the objection is put in strictly theological terms: that is, it is the thought that there is something in the givenness of our lives that creates a limit, or ought to create a limit, on proposals for change or enhancement. A preference-satisfaction view cannot accommodate such evaluative thoughts: if people desire longevity, as they evidently do, then that is all there is to say. Morality requires us to use our calculative capacities, our reason, to try to satisfy that desire. I have criticized one version of preference satisfaction consequentialism and suggested that the resources for meeting the inadequacies of this school of thought can be found in that natural

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law school of thought, according to which our moral beliefs and judgments are the product of our critical responsiveness to, and rational reflection on, our experience of what is worth desiring or doing or being. A version of that school of thought makes up the ‘reason-based’ principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

III I come to the second question: does faith make a difference to one’s conception of happiness? A recent Australian event illustrates one way it which it does. On 12th February, 2008, Australia’s Prime Minister apologized for ‘laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss’ on those Australians who belonged to the ‘Stolen Generations’, their descendants and their families. He apologized for ‘the indignity and degradation’ inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture. He asked that the apology be received in the spirit in which it was offered, as part of the healing of the nation. And he expressed the resolve that a new page in the history of the country should be written, in which the injustices of the past would never be permitted to happen again, a future in which all Australians, whatever their origins, could be partners, with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter of their history. 15 Of course, the Apology was not without political controversy, not the least because it was the first act of a new government repudiating the settled policy of the long-popular previous government. And yet, there was something noteworthy in the way it was received. It seems that it was a hard-hearted Australian, or one whose party political allegiance determined how he or she reacted, who was not moved by the occasion: the words, the spirit which they were said, the spirit in which they were received. And many Australians were puzzled about having been so moved themselves and about the nation having been so moved, and about why so many more Australians were in favour of the apology the day after it was made than were the day before! The Pope’s recent encyclical on hope provides the resources for solving the puzzle. Pointing out that ‘hope’ and ‘faith’ are often interchangeable words in the Bible, Pope Benedict analyses faith as

[15] http://www.pm.gov.au/media/speech/2008/speech_0073.cfm: accessed 26th November 2008.


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though it were to be understood as hope: ‘hope-filled faith’.16 He follows Aquinas in explaining faith as a stable disposition of the spirit through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. Through faith, what we hope for becomes present in us ‘in embryo’. ‘… [Faith] draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet’’. … The fact that this future exists changes the present: the present is touched by the future reality, and thus things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.’17 The Christian message is not only ‘informative’ but ‘performative’: the one who hopes lives differently. 18 In what does this hope consist? Benedict accepts that the formal answer, ‘redemption’, conveys little both to those of a secular cast of mind and to Christians who have grown accustomed to it. He points to the paradox that, though Christian parents ask for ‘eternal life’ for children at baptism, they would not want them to go on living indefinitely, for they would find ‘interminable’ life monotonous, unbearable, ultimately a curse.19 He then sets out a wonderfully instructive ‘history of ideas’ to explain how hope-filled faith was, in the wake of the Enlightenment, displaced to the level of the purely private and other-worldy, a displacement that entailed a ‘flight from responsibility for the whole’.20 And he recommends the Letter to the Hebrews on this subject. Its author spoke to believers who had undergone the experience of persecution, and who nevertheless considered material wealth—the normal source of security in life—of little account because they had found something else—the word of faith—which showed up the insufficiency of material well-being. These believers had a new freedom, a freedom which was revealed not only in martyrdom (the resisting of the overbearing power of ideology) but also in the great acts of renunciation of those who gave up their lives to faith and love in Christ and to helping those who suffered in body and spirit. And so the object of hope is, here in the words of N.T. Wright, a ‘genuine transformation

[16] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (On Christian Hope), Encyclical Letter, St Paul’s Publications, Sydney, 2007, p. 8. [17] Spe Salvi, 7. [18] Spe Salvi, 2. [19] Spe Salvi, 10. [20] Spe Salvi, 16.

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within the present world, anticipating the time when God will renew and restore all things’.21 To return, then, to the puzzlement that so many Australians felt at being so moved by their Prime Minister’s Apology to the Stolen Generation. On the occasion of the Apology, and in its light, Australians saw their lives and themselves differently. It could be said that, for a moment at least, Australians changed their minds about what mattered to them. They wanted the right state of human affairs, the world as it ought to be, the world of justice. They felt that state of human affairs being drawn into the world as it is, the world of seemingly-intractable injustices. They were moved to want that state of affairs, not as a mere preference but as a matter of the ‘wishing well to another for that person’s sake and being inclined, in so far it is possible, to bring these things about’ that Aristotle says is characteristic of the truest form of friendship.22 That is to say, Australians (those do not believe in God just as much as those who do) experienced the thinking, feeling and willing, the cognitive, affective and conative dimensions, of the person with the virtue of hope. Timothy Radcliffe says that, whereas the cardinal virtues are about becoming strong for the journey, the theological virtues give us a foretaste of the destination.23 Christian hope involves a trust in the reality (now and not just in some other world of the future) of an ultimate goodness and justice that does not depend merely on the success of our efforts. And that is another way of saying that human well-being is, somehow, guaranteed by God. Alasdair MacIntyre once argued that, if we were to engage in the project of designing our descendents, hope would be one of the virtues we would want them to have. He portrays it as a quality that challenges any merely secular conception of reason. In order to link past and future effectively in our present lives, we need the virtue of hope. And hope is in place precisely in the face of evil which tempts us to despair, and more especially that evil which belongs specifically to our own age and condition… Evil that seems overwhelming is [thus] all too often present in the modern world; and hope is the virtue that enables us to trust in the victory of good over evil even in the face of overwhelming evil. The image of hope is the image of those Jews who went into [21] N.T. Wright, ‘And what of this world?’, The Tablet, 8th December 2007, p. 10. [22] Rhetoric, 1380b35-1381a5. [23] Timothy Radcliffe. What is the Point of Being a Christian? Burns & Oates, London, 2005, p. 42.


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the gas chambers praising God; it is the image of everyone who has died believing against all calculation that their death would not be wasted or pointless. The presupposition of hope is therefore belief in a reality that transcends what is available as evidence.24

John Finnis points out that traditional morality’s willingness to discount consequences, in its view that some types of action are impermissible in and of themselves and not because of their consequences, ‘… is or was supported by the belief that Providence would inevitably provide that “all manner of things shall be well”…’. This willingness, he says, is a Christian phenomenon, one that seems absurd to the post-Christian ‘…consequentialist moralist, who nourishes his moral indignation on scenarios in which by killing an innocent or two he saves scores, thousands, millions, or even the race itself…’. 25 So the virtue of hope, the confidence that the world will ultimately be turned the right way up, with its accompanying epistemic humility about how our cooperative endeavours contribute to that right state of affairs, is essentially a religious virtue. It is a matter of debate just how far it can survive the rejection of the comprehensive world view in which it originates. Benedict himself says: ‘All serious and upright human conduct is hope in action.’26 He distinguishes two senses in which this is so. First, we strive to realize our own hopes, to complete this or that task ‘which is important on our onward journey’, to ‘work towards a brighter and more humane world so as to open doors into the future’. Second, we are enlightened by the ‘great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love…’.27 Hope in the first sense brings together things we hope for as individuals and as members of communities: it describes the kind of hope felt by Australians on the occasion of the Apology to the Stolen Generations: hope for a more humane world for indigenous Australians. But hope in the second sense is necessary to sustain hope in the first [24] MacIntyre’s discussion of the project of designing our descendants is best known for the paradox that it generates: that the project of designing our descendants would, if successful, result in descendants who would reject that project! Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Designing our Descendants’, Hastings Center Report, 1979, 9,1,5-7 [25] John Finnis, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion’, Cohen, Nagel and Scanlon (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1974, p.96 [26] Spe Salvi, 35, emphasis added. [27] Spe Salvi, 35.

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sense: ‘If we cannot hope for more than is effectively attainable at any given time, or more than is promised by political or economic authorities, our lives will soon be without hope.’28 Or, as the Australian poet, James McAuley, put it: The works of men are freighted on a tide Whose secret reason Moves also the bright signs above: Turn back and fight the wars of love. 29

[28] Spe Salvi, 35. [29] James McAuley. ‘Nocturnal’. Collected Poems, 1936-1970, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1973.

Richard Hamilton

Ethical Naturalism and the Challenge of Modern Biology Many of the central themes of this conference on Truth and Faith in Ethics centre on questions of the objectivity of moral judgement. For that reason, I will have a great deal to say about truth and not very much to say about faith. In what follows, I will be addressing one particular version of moral objectivism, namely, neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, a tradition which was revived by Elizabeth Anscombe and has been pursued with some élan by the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, John McDowell and, in this part of the world, Rosalind Hursthouse. I will be seeking to defend that view of ethics against a powerful series of challenges which appeal to contemporary Darwinian biology. Given the context of this conference, however, it would be remiss of me not to attempt to locate my discussion in the broader context. An unholy alliance of the New Atheists; Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and the biblical literalists that defend Creationism/Intelligent Design have conspired to create an impression that a commitment to Darwinian evolution inevitably entails a secular world-view. More sophisticated Catholic and Protestant theologians and not a few scientists have attempted to demonstrate the compatibility between modern science and theism. I do not intend replicating such subtle work in these short preliminary remarks. Instead, let me begin with an observation. Catholic ethical thought was forged in the struggle against a dualistic Gnostic vision which emphasizes the fallen nature of human beings and the corrupt nature of material existence. The dominant tradition in Catholic ethi-

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cal thought, which reaches its apogee in the work of Thomas Aquinas, stresses by contrast that redemptive action occurs within the created world and that the conditions of possibility for moral life are both afforded and circumscribed by our embodied animal natures. Aquinas, while never losing sight of the uniquely rational and spiritual dimensions of the human condition, balances this with a clear conception of our continuities with ‘other animals’. In this, as in so many other areas, Aquinas is both in keeping with the Greek tradition and anticipating subsequent developments. One way of interpreting the Darwinian revolution is that it restores the sense of our continuity with the rest of nature which was ruptured during the early modern period. I recognise that these observations will sound paradoxical to a contemporary philosophical audience fed on the Dawkins-Dennett view of evolution. For these writers, Darwin’s singular achievement was to complete the process, initiated in the seventeenth century, of ridding science of its Aristotelian hangovers. The theory of natural selection did for biology what Newton had done for physics and purified the science of biology of animistic and anthropomorphic elements, thus rendering it scientifically respectable. The task of philosophy, it seems, is to assist in this process by removing any intellectual barriers to the extension of this project to the human world. Faced with this challenge, it might seem comforting to those of us resistant to the idea of human beings as bête-machines to fall back on a revived Gnostic vision in which ethical life transcends our animal natures. In this paper, I wish to counsel against such a retreat and will argue that a proper understanding of contemporary biology shows it to be unnecessary. On this topic at least, Thomists and Aristotelians should be able to find common cause.

I There are many ways of founding objectivity in ethics but one which has become increasingly vigorous in recent years is the revived form of Aristotelian naturalism. For such a naturalist, not just anything makes human lives go well. What shapes the good life, however, is not reason, considered as the ability to form abstract generalisations, but our embodied animal natures. Against subjectivism, naturalistic virtue ethics insists upon the autonomy of the good life from our transient desires; against Kant, it asserts that the goodness of that life is intimately related to our carnality. Still, someone disenchanted with subjectivism and transcendentalism might question the rele-

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vance of biology. Would it not be better to look elsewhere, perhaps taking our natural history for granted and dealing with humans as we are, rather than delving too deeply into how we became so? Such an equiry would prioritise history, anthropology and related human sciences, rather than biology.1 Alasdair MacIntyre makes a persuasive case for why this would be mistaken; it is particularly persuasive since it is a mistake he acknowledges in his earlier writings. Mindful of the deep challenges that Darwinism poses for neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, MacIntyre had attempted to develop an ethical theory independent of Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’. Later he abandoned that project. In Dependent Rational Animals, he has the following to say: I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible… and this for two distinct but related reasons. The first is that no account of the good, rules and virtues that are definitive of our moral life can be adequate that does not explain—or at least point us towards an explanation— how that form of life is possible for beings who are biologically constituted as we are, by providing us with an account of our development towards and into that form of life. That development has as its starting point our initial animal condition. Secondly, a failure to understand that condition and the light thrown upon it by a comparison between humans and members of other intelligent species will obscure crucial feature of that development.2

For MacIntyre, biology has a twofold relevance. Firstly, virtue ethics places training at the centre of moral life. Ethical questions resolve themselves into questions about the development of character. Unless on assumes tabula rasa psychology, then we need an account of the kinds of raw material that training operates upon, the types of natural inclinations that we should foster and those which should be discouraged. As Aristotle suggests, ‘the moral virtues, … are engendered in us neither by nor contrary to nature; we are constituted by nature to receive them.’3 We therefore cannot forego any tool that will enable us to understand nature. [1]

A strategy urged by, for instance, Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA & London, 1985.

[2]

Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Duckworth, London, 1999, p. x .

[3]

Aristotle trans. J.A.K. Thompson, Nicomachean Ethics, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976 1103a24-6 .

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Second, we need to avail ourselves of comparisons with other animal species in order to better understand our own.4 This is an important point, too often overlooked by ethical theories which valorize supposedly unique characteristics of human beings and downplay our continuity with other animals. Moreover, it enables virtue ethicists to avoid the kind of crudities that have rightly been castigated as speciesism. Any consideration of the differences between ourselves and other animals tacitly acknowledges our continuities. Indeed, the endless agonizing over how we differ from other animals is itself indicative: little comparable energy has been expended asking how we differ from rivers or trees. Animal comparisons have long been a staple of moral thought. As an aid to sluggish imaginations, they are probably indispensable. Without the kind of imaginative identification that such comparisons facilitate, ethical discourse would be impoverished. I refer to imaginative comparisons of this kind as Aesopian and in a nonderogatory fashion. Of all the major ethical approaches, Virtue Ethics makes most of the fact that we were all children once, and it is partly through tales of loyal dogs and disreputable foxes that we acquire morality. Aesopian comparisons are impervious to the charge of anthropomorphism, since they wear their anthropocentric credentials on their sleeves. Suppose, however, a moral philosopher aspires to something other than imaginative Aesopian comparisons. She seeks to develop an account of human nature, partly through sensitive juxtapositions with other creatures and use this as the basis for claims about virtue. Here, anthropomorphism threatens. Who is to say that in identifying character traits and defects in animals, one is not simply arbitrarily projecting one’s own preferences and prejudices onto other animals? Is there not a danger that in reading back moral norms from nature we are simply dazzled by our own reflections? Take, for instance, Rosalind Hursthouse’s claim that since ‘wolves hunt in packs; a ‘freerider’ wolf that doesn’t join in the hunt fails to act well and is thereby defective.’5 We should understand his act as a violation of lupine and not human norms while at the same time recognising a pointed comment directed towards human freeriders. In justifying this claim, Hursthouse suggests that ‘more sophisti[4]

MacIntyre is not, of course, advocating the kind of crude comparisons one finds on the lunatic fringes of socio-biology, but rather more subtle work in ethology.

[5]

Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. 201.


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cated species’ have characteristic ends by which they may be evaluated, viz., (i) individual survival, (ii) the continuance of the species, and (iii) characteristic freedom from pain. If we… consider, specifically, social animals, we find that a fourth end comes in, namely, (iv) good functioning of the social group.6

In this light we can evaluate the conduct of the lone wolf. Insofar as his behaviour undermines the good functioning of his social group, it is contemptible. Neo-Aristotelian naturalism sees no difference in kind between the ethical evaluations we make of persons and our evaluations of other living things. Of course, degree of complexity matters: since humans engage in more complex collaboration than wolves, the ‘good functioning of the social group’ will be correspondingly more elaborate. Nevertheless, if we pursue the parallel, the behaviour of the asset-stripping capitalist is as obviously defective as that of the lone wolf. Is Hursthouse engaged in Aesopian comparisons? To some extent perhaps, but she also believes that she is appealing to fairly obvious facts about social animals. If one seeks to draw upon such facts, it is necessary to minimise the possibility of anthropomorphism. One safeguard is to enquire whether modern biological thinking would support such comparisons. This need not mean that ethics is reducible to biology. But it does mean that ethicists cannot make claims about nature in sublime disregard of what the natural sciences, particularly biology, tell us about the natural world. From this perspective, several objections loom large. For instance, it might be objected that in treating ‘continuance of the species’ (rather than the continuance of its lineage) as a goal for an individual member of that species, Hurshouse allows too great a scope for group selection. One might also follow Bernard Williams and suggest that the existence of complex linguistic norms means that one cannot simply extrapolate from the behaviour of social animals to human conduct. Both of these objections are serious but there is not the scope to address them here since the challenge I will be addressing is, if anything, graver. The consensus view in modern philosophy of biology suggests that there is no available concept of species which will do the work required by naturalistic virtue ethics. It makes no sense to talk about a species having ends because species are not entities of the sort that can reasonably be assigned ends. Perhaps even more [6]

Ibid.

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crucially, the population view of species offers such a thin conception of normality that deviations from the norm cannot be considered unnatural. Indeed, many commentators have suggested that modern biology offers no basis for a robust conception of human nature and that consequently talk of ‘our nature’ should be jettisoned.7 In order to assess this challenge, it is worth considering what virtue ethicists hope to accomplish by an appeal to our nature. It is connected with the question of objectivity. Unlike those versions of ethics which would base the good life upon the realisation of preferences, naturalistic virtue ethics suggests that some forms of life are objectively better than others. The good life rests upon the realisation of ends that we ought to have. But such a claim faces an obvious problem: anyone serious about understanding the human condition must acknowledge that human desires vary wildly between and within cultures and indeed over the course of an individual lifetime. Given this, we need some criteria for determining which desires should be encouraged and which discouraged. One candidate is that some desires are more rational than others. This, however, leads to conclusions which many find unpalatable. For instance, consequentialists typically see the good life as one characterised by impartial benevolence. On such an account, the good person should be prepared to deprive those close to her of certain nonessential goods in order to help distant strangers. Virtue ethicists typically object that while such suggestions might form the basis of an equitable social policy, they exclude one of the central concerns of ethics viz. the development of character in the context of a network of close relationships. Confronted with the sheer impracticality of a life of impartial benevolence its advocates typically mumble some excuse about imperfect rationality or arbitrary subjective preferences standing in the way of rational decision making.8 Impartial benevolence would be the regulative ideal for a rather different creature. By contrast, virtue ethics claims that our ethical aspirations should rest upon how human beings actually are, with our imperfect rationality and ‘arbitrary’ emotional preferences as central aspects of our humanity.

[7]

John Dupré, ‘On Human Nature’, Human Affairs Vol. 13(2), 2003, http://www.humanaffairs.sk/dupre.pdf

[8]

A perennial theme in the work of Peter Singer. See for example, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, Farrar and Giroux, New York, 1981.


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But even granted this fact, we do not want to commit ourselves to the untenable view that any desire is as good as any other. Virtue ethics’ demarcation criterion is that we should encourage virtuous desires and discourage vicious ones. Someone might rightly protest that unless we have some settled procedure for determining which desires are virtuous and which vicious, this criterion is vacuous. A partial response is provided by the maxim that virtue promotes eudaimonia or flourishing. Unless flourishing equates to whatever happens to make a given individual happy at any given time (in which case it would make sense to talk of flourishing Balkan gunrunners) there must be some way in which flourishing can be given an objective sense. Consequently, people can be mistaken about the good life. A famous anecdote about the late footballer George Best illustrates this well. A rather prim hotel employee entered his room to find Best, who was then at the height of his fame, in a bed covered in bank notes, drinking fine champagne with Miss World. The employee is reported to have murmured sadly: ‘Oh George, where did it all go wrong?’ This anecdote is usually recounted at the employee’s expense but a virtue ethicist will have no trouble seeing his point. Even if Best had survived the ravages of alcoholism, there is still something tragic about his life. He could have used his enormous talents in any number of positive ways; he fell victim instead to the cult of celebrity. A virtue ethicist would say that even if Best felt something approaching bliss in that hotel room, the concierge was right. Best’s life had by that point gone wrong, even if (tragically) he was incapable of seeing this. He died a famous drunk, who had been a good footballer. To which the obvious retort is: ‘who are you to say’? What entitles the virtue ethicist to peremptorily rule out some forms of life? While Best’s choice of lifestyle may not have been to everyone’s liking, by what right are we entitled to say that he was not happy? He was, after all, by many conventional criteria enormously successful. Naturalists will respond that there is simply something in the nature of being human which entails that a life of debauchery does not suit us as well as a life of moderate pleasure, especially when the alternative offers greater personal and professional accomplishment. However, unless the naturalist is prepared to offer some fairly substantial justifications, such a claim will sound like priggishness. For that reason, we need to enquire more deeply into what is at stake in the appeal to nature.

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Truth and Faith in Ethics II

One of the naturalistic tradition’s most attractive claims is that certain character traits ought to be fostered simply because they suit us. The fact that some cowards can do well by conventional criteria notwithstanding, courage is a more befitting trait for creatures like us. The same might be said for other canonic virtues such as justice. Only someone morally insensible can fail to be repulsed at the spectacle of Pol Pot on his deathbed smiling serenely having evaded prosecution for his atrocities. Pol Pot’s life is impoverished by contrast with that of someone like Sophie Scholl, even if Pol Pot was able to live to a ripe old age in relative comfort and Scholl paid with her young life for her resistance to evil. We might explicate such claims by suggesting that a life filled with courageous and just acts is more in accord with our nature than one characterised by cowardly and malicious ones.9 On such a view, the virtuous resemble athletes at their peak, while the vicious suffer something akin to the ravages of a terrible disease. This central claim is often expressed in the colourful analogy between flourishing ethically and other forms of organic growth. The coward resembles a withered rose. Courage is not simply more preferable but objectively better than cowardice; its value is autonomous of our preferences. Taken literally, the analogy suggests that there is a natural course of development which occurs provided all the appropriate conditions apply. If someone fails to develop in the right way, it is either because they were born defective or because some environmental insult occurred.10 Of course, this has to be balanced with the other central component of virtue ethics, namely training, a feature peculiar to social animals such as ourselves. We suppose that the courageous person has been brought up well. A proper upbringing is understood as one which most enables the person to fulfil their natural potential by moulding pre-existing propensities. Such a notion of flourishing implies that the initiation into virtue is not something artificially imposed from without.11 It represents the best possible course of development. The good life cannot be construed as simply one possible form of life among many, albeit one we favour. For naturalists, there must be some sense in which the life of [9]

The Stoic definition of the good life as ‘right reason in accord with nature’ captures this well.

[10] Our habit of referring to evildoers as ‘monsters’ or ‘deviants’ probably reflects the persistence of such a view. [11] Of course, this requires us to regard training as natural.


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virtue represents the norm from which the vicious deviate. There is thus an explanatory asymmetry between virtue and vice, with viciousness requiring the sorts of explanation that virtue does not. The virtuous are as they should be, while the vicious stand in need of explanation. The naturalist conception of virtue and vice maps well onto our everyday conceptions of health and disease. We recognise viciousness as an ethical defect just as we recognise blight on a rose or osteoporosis in the bent figure of an elderly person. Of course, vice may not always be immediately obvious but this is no more problematic than the fact that the detection of certain diseases requires the nous of an experienced clinician. It may take a whole lifetime and perhaps beyond for the true cost of vice to become manifest. And just as experienced clinicians can disagree over difficult diagnoses, mature morally serious individuals can disagree over the precise nature of the good life and various borderline cases. Aristotle draws repeatedly upon this analogy between health and virtue. For instance, in his discussion of brutishness (thÂriotÂs) in Book Seven of the Nicomachean Ethics, he suggests that someone may become brutish through ‘disease or arrested development’.12 He later considers whether some inappropriate desires might be attributed to ‘injury or diseases’.13 He notes, however, that brutishness is rare and most of his discussion is given over to those misuses of reason that characterise vice and incontinence, since such states are far subtler and hence more dangerous than brutishness. The apparent rarity of brutishness is worth noting for it seems to give credence to the view, expressed by Elliott Sober and others, that a natural state view of species is crucial to Aristotle’s thinking. On this interpretation, brutes are rare because they are unnatural. However, if this is the case, then Aristotle’s ethics (and any modern reformulation which seeks fidelity to the master’s vision) confronts severe problems. For, the natural state model of species is a feature of a biological ontology whose time has passed. From this perspective, attempts to retain it are as misguided as those who persist in believing in a flat earth or special creation. We are thus confronted with a dilemma: either defend an outmoded biology or abandon it an formulate an ethics independently of the biological sciences. If the first option condemns us to absurdity, the second falls foul of McIntyre’s observation, with which we began our discussion. Any account of [12] Nicomachean Ethics, 1145a15-34. [13] Ibid., 1149b20-1150a 8.

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ethics (particularly any that seeks the epithet naturalistic) must have a view on the biological condition which make ethical life possible for creatures like us. Let us consider whether modern biology permits any resolution to this dilemma.

III Our troubles apparently stem from the following observations. On the one hand, there is something deeply attractive about a conception of vice and virtue which locates them squarely within the natural world. On the other, those sciences which provide us with our best knowledge of that world seem to compel us to a view of nature which is deeply inhospitable to thoughts about vice and virtue. It no longer seems possible to say that the best person, ethically speaking, is simultaneously the best expression of human nature. From a biological point of view, while certain phenotypic characters may predominate in some environments rather than others, there is no warrant for considering any such character more natural than any other that the species norm of reaction generates. This leads to some fairly counter-intuitive conclusions. Consider the recent discovery in the Potomac river of male Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass producing eggs. On the natural state model, these fish are obviously monsters, since it is not in the nature of males to produce eggs. They are defective specimens of Micropterus Dolomieu and Macropterus Salmoides. In a more natural environment, they would not have developed in this distorted way. The natural state model reflects commonsense developmental assumptions. The population model’s analysis would be more complex. The production of eggs by male fish is part of the reaction norm for that genotype, as expressed in a polluted environment. There is nothing in the nature of the species itself that permits us to classify this variation as defective. Since the analogy, upon which naturalistic virtue ethics so heavily relies, requires us to say that the fish in question are obviously defective specimens of their kind, we seem to be in trouble. It appears that whatever distinguishes the virtuous person from the vicious, we are not entitled to say that one character is more natural than another. One might respond that producing eggs almost certainly decreases inclusive fitness and consequently the egg-producing fish are defective. Perhaps, by extension, there may be some tenuous relationship between ethical flourishing and inclusive fitness. But this response is unsatisfactory. Firstly, one cannot make this assess-


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ment without the invocation of an additional value, namely inclusive fitness (a norm which governs all obligate sexual organisms) thereby rendering membership of a particular species irrelevant. Secondly, while evolutionary theory assumes that most deviations from the norm are detrimental to inclusive fitness, the theory also presupposes that some (albeit a tiny minority) are not. For instance, a certain pollutant might lead to increased sperm production in some males, thereby making their genes dominant within a population. For their descendants, the polluted water was an optimal environment. As Sober notes, the problem here rests on the tension between our ordinary understanding of concepts like health and fitness and Darwinian fitness. Our current conceptions of function and dysfunction, of disease and health seem to be based upon the kinds of distinctions recommended by the Natural State Model. And both of these distinctions resist characterization in terms of maximum fitness. For virtually any trait you please, there can be environments in which the trait is selected for, or selected against. Diseases can be rendered advantageous, and health can be made to represent a reproductive cost.14

A good example of this in humans would be the possession of the sickle cell allele which offers carriers some protection against malaria but in a different setting inflicts a painful and debilitating disease upon those with two pairs of alleles. Our ordinary notions of health and illness find no direct correlate in evolutionary terms. If this applies to health and fitness, upon which biological considerations have an obvious impact, the same goes a fortiori for attempts to rest ethics upon an analogy with health. Basing a thick notion of flourishing upon fitness maximisation is question-begging if we use the ordinary conception of fitness, unfeasible if we employ the Darwinian idiom, and confused if we attempt some hybrid of the two. We seem forced to the conclusion that Sober draws, namely that ‘it is no more a part of human nature to be healthy than to be diseased’.15 By extension, if the central analogy holds, then it is no more a part of human nature to be virtuous than to be vicious, an observation seemingly supported by our commonsense knowledge of the [14] Elliott Sober, ‘Evolution, Population Thinking and Essentialism’, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 47(3), 1980, pp. 350-383. [15] Ibid., p. 379.

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social world. Is it then the case as Bernard Williams famously argued that human nature is a ‘bricollage’? If there are multitudes of ways to be human, what grounds (other than those furnished by our preferred ethical viewpoint) entitle us to say that some forms of life are better than others? Such a challenge has been posed starkly by Philip Kitcher.16 As a well-known opponent of the cruder forms of biological reductionism, Kitcher’s claims merit serious attention. In ‘Essence and Perfection’ he criticises Thomas Hurka’s neo-Aristotelian naturalism. Hurka had tried to base his account on a modified view of species essence. A large part of Kitcher’s argument is devoted to reprising arguments about why modern biology renders the search for a human essence untenable. In the context of these biological considerations, he also outlines a philosophical argument that he calls the ‘Reductivist Challenge’, which has a direct bearing upon our discussion. Kitcher delineates broadly between subjectivist accounts of the good which regard the good life as one filled with the satisfaction of preferences (real or ideal) and objectivist ones which regard the conditions for a good life as existing independently of any particular psychological states. Objectivists themselves fall into two camps: bare objectivists who regard the elements of a good life as self-evident and standing in need of no further justification; and explanatory objectivists who feel the need to justify their claims. Bare objectivists believe the list of such goods are self-evident and only perversity prevents us from acknowledging them.17 Given the anthropological and historical facts of ethical disagreement, bare objectivism seems implausible. Indeed, bare objectivists disagree amongst themselves about the nature of the good life, stymied by the fact that any argument they put forward ‘seems doomed to immediate stalemate’ since they cannot offer compelling reasons for their claims without abandoning the assumption that their purported goods are self-evident.18 For this reason, explanatory objectivism is the most interesting and coherent form. Explanatory objectivists can advance reasonable arguments by identifying ‘shared assumptions that may be used to

[16] Philip Kitcher, ‘Essence and Perfection’, Ethics, Vol. 110(1), 1999, pp. 59-83. [17] Kitcher cited no examples of a bare objectivist but the Intuitionist theory of Natural Law defended by John Finnis and Germaine Grisez probably comes close. [18] Kitcher, op. cit., p. 60.


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persuade erstwhile opponents’.19 Many explanatory objectivists seek to rest their claims on some account of human nature. For creatures like us, there are only a limited number of ways in which we can truly flourish. However, this means that in order to avoid the impasse that confronts bare objectivists, explanatory objectivists must fend off what Kitcher calls the ‘Reductivist Challenge’. Suppose for example that the objectivist contends that good lives are those in which human beings realize their higher natures, that developing friendships with others, achieving intellectual understanding and coming to appreciate artistic and natural beauty are all ways of partially realizing our higher natures— and consequently that friendship, understanding, and aesthetic appreciation are all objectively good. It would be quite appropriate to protest that there is no advance here, that both parts of the explanans are in need of clarification and justification, even that the alleged ‘explanation’ does no more than introduce a mysterious value term to say no more than a bare objectivist might say— to wit that friendship, understanding, and aesthetic appreciation figure on the objective list.20

Kitcher sees the Aristotelian appeal to the human essence as an attempt to meet this challenge. If someone can supply an objective account of human nature, then it might be possible to objectively specify the nature of the good life. Whether Aristotle regarded his ethical project in such a light is a moot point; the problem facing the neo-Aristotelian is that she cannot help herself to an Aristotelian natural state model of species while aspiring to the mantle of modern biology. The population view renders an appeal to essential species properties untenable. There is unlikely to be a characteristic or cluster of characteristics which is both distinctive to a particular biological species and widely distributed within that species. Therefore anything more than a trivial conception of human nature is likely to be false. However, Kitcher notes, while essentialist explanations are unfashionable in some areas of biological enquiry, a broader survey of biological practice indicates that they are still of use elsewhere. So, it is necessary to consider the specific claims of explanatory objectivists. Kitcher sees one possible source of support for essentialism in the Putnam-Kripke account of natural kinds. Perhaps some nontrivial property might supply a rigid designator for the concept ‘hu[19] Ibid., p. 59. [20] Ibid., p. 60.

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man’? He suggests some possible candidates, such as karyotype (number of chromosome pairs). Certain deviations from the normal twenty three can result in terrible defects and are obviously detrimental to the good life. Nevertheless, it would be tendentious to claim that organisms displaying a deviation from the norm are not human. Any attempt to do so risks becoming arbitrarily stipulative and any account of the human good based upon such a stipulation would clearly fail to meet the Reductivist Challenge. Moreover, any such stipulation would be out of kilter with current biological usage. A more promising route, he suggests, is to follow biological practice and distinguish between normal and abnormal members of a species. Once again, however, given the enormous range of variation that is possible, it is hard to see how anything more than Gaussian normality could be straightforwardly assessed. Gaussian normality is clearly an inadequate basis for ethical evaluation. So too, are the kinds of purpose-relative evaluations of normality that biologists might invoke in their explanatory projects. Even if some nontrivial sets of genotypic-karyotypic properties could be identified as normal, it is highly unlikely that they would be identifiable as the sorts of things that ethical life could be based upon. As Kitcher quips, ‘it’s unlikely that anyone is seriously going to suggest that it is good for us to develop the property of having twenty three pairs of chromosomes.’21 Moreover, when ethical theorists make an appeal to species membership, they have phenotypic characters rather than microstructural properties in mind. Given that any ethically relevant phenotypic character only emerges in a complex interaction with its environment, the idea of resting ethics on microstructural essences appears to be a non-starter. Thus ethical evaluation necessarily requires an account of normal environments. Yet again, this seems to run into the Reductivist Challenge: if we designate an environment as normal or natural due to the fact that it fosters the development of some desired characteristic, then we do not appear to have an independent answer to the question of why we should value the characteristic, or the environment in which it emerges. Kitcher quickly dismisses physical phenotypic characters; it is virtually impossible to delineate such a list narrowly enough to exclude members of other animal species while being broad enough not to arbitrarily exclude members of our own. The result is an account of human essence that is ‘so anaemic that it loses all connection with appeals to physics and [21] Ibid., p. 67.


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chemistry.’22 Without some nontrivial account of human essence, the explanatory objectivist degenerates into bare objectivism. If this is so, then the prospects for an account of human good seem bleak. Kitcher does not overtly defend subjectivism but this seems where his sympathies lie. He is explicit in his hostility towards ethical theories which help themselves to an objectivity to which they are not entitled. It is not possible to bypass the difficult work required in the epistemology of value by a hand waving appeal to ‘our nature’. Nevertheless, he does hold out one prospect for naturalistic virtue ethics in the forms of a coherentist epistemology. In order to explore the possibility of such an epistemology, I will examine Kitcher’s Reductivist Challenge more closely. The main thrust behind the Reductivist Challenge seems to be that that any objective account of value, if it is to avoid the charge of petitio principii, must rest upon some uncontroversial facts of the matter. When someone looks to biology for such facts she is immediately faced with the challenge: why this particular fact rather than some other? The Reductivist Challenge is certainly a formidable obstacle to a crude correspondence epistemology of value. But nothing commits virtue ethics to such an epistemology. As Hursthouse has persuasively argued, lurking behind the demand that ethics must rest on bare facts is the assumption that to be justified at all any ethical stance must be justifiable to someone totally unmoved by ethical considerations.23 But this is simply absurd. There is absolutely no reason why ethics should answer to Balkan gunrunners. As John McDowell writes in similar vein, ’nothing but bad metaphysics suggests that the standards of ethics should be constructed out of the facts of disenchanted nature.’24 Indeed such a view from nowhere is as untenable in the life sciences as it is in ethics. Without some evaluative starting point, the biologist has no way of answering the question why this particular feature and not some other attracts his attention. Settling questions of relevance is as much a feature of scientific deliberation as it is of ethical debate. To which someone might reply that scientific evaluations are of a different order from moral values, which would be to restate the ‘argument from queerness’ in which moral values are sui generis. Naturalistic virtue ethics rejects the argument from queer[22] Ibid., p. 69. [23] Hursthouse, op. cit., 2001. [24] John McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, in Mind, Value and Reality, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA & London, 1998, p. 187.

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ness. Ethical evaluations are no more or less projections than those about biological function. Neither are simply the arbitrary projections of an individual or culture’s desires onto disenchanted nature nor are they entirely remote from human interests. Indeed, there is no reason for exempting the much vaunted claim that the world really is cold and heartless to the cries of suffering humanity from the charge of projectivism. The claim that nature is absent of intelligible values is as much an evaluation as the claim that she is an allloving Mother. That ethics is related to human interests will seem mundane to anyone not in the grip of a bizarre metaphysics. The idea that the natural sciences are too may seem slightly less obvious until we consider the full range of scientific enquiry. Clearly, investigations in theoretical physics proceed at quite a remove from the business of building bridges and sound systems. But when we consider sciences such as agronomy or botany that distance is narrowed. Surely no-one supposes that the abstract sciences are of greater relevance to ethics than the more applied ones nor that the latter are somehow less respectable for being concerned with growing better wheat. Recall our earlier discussion of health and biological function. However compelling the arguments from evolutionary biology, no-one is likely to be persuaded that our concepts of health and disease are simply the arbitrary projection of human interests onto an indifferent cosmos. People get sick and die regardless of their wishes or the indifference of natural selection. The analogy with health highlights another important aspect of the debate. One reason why philosophers have insisted upon metaphysical queerness is that ethical statements have action guiding qualities which purely descriptive statements appear to lack. However, the analogy with health shows that this is not a problem unique to ethics. The statement ‘smoking causes cancer’ is action guiding just if someone hopes to avoid cancer and sincerely believes that refraining from smoking will enable her to do so. It is possible, if unlikely, that someone might not mind contracting cancer and therefore the statement would be motivationally inert. It is more plausible that many people who persist in smoking do so in the belief that the odds will somehow work in their favour. Similarly, some people are indifferent to or ignorant about considerations of vice and virtue. Our language is replete with words to describe both. A much more important consideration is the question of possible disagreement. It seems possible to dispute at least some ethical


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claims without pain of irrationality, in ways that it is not possible to rationally dispute well-founded medical advice. Someone who argues that courage is an essential component of the good life is not, it appears, arguing in the same timbre as someone who advocates regular exercise and eating one’s greens. But aside from the fact that a different kind of action is advocated in each case what divides the two claims? Presumably, it is that a rational person might dispute the first claim but not the second. Balkan gunrunners and precocious student relativists notwithstanding, one assumes that there is broad agreement on a number of gross features of moral life, such as promise keeping, truth-telling and the restraint of aggression. Of course, someone might object (as precocious student relativists do with tedious predictability) that there could be a society in which lying, promise-breaking and murder were held up as lofty ideals. The fact that the anthropological evidence is thin on the ground and the equally compelling conceptual point that we would probably question whether such ‘societies’ even count as such, should answer any such doubts. But perhaps this response is too quick, since it is not at the broad-brush level that the kinds of conflicts which interest moral philosophers occur. Moral disputes are more like disputes about whether being moderately overweight, occasionally overindulgent in food and drink and even enjoying the occasional smoke are risks worth taking for the happiness they bring.25 Mark Twain’s observation seems apposite, There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.26

Now, even those of us who side with Twain would hesitate to dismiss health zealots as irrational. There is no simple matter of fact which will determine this dispute since the dispute turns on the relative weighting of certain facts. Someone who chooses to knowingly disregard such facts in pursuit of other goods such as enjoyment is not behaving irrationally. Health and longevity may be goods but they are not superordinate ones. [25] Perhaps more compelling for those of a more puritanical disposition is the question of whether the benefits of competitive rugby justify the risks of serious injury. [26] Quoted in Petr Skrabanek, The Death of Humane Medicine, Social Affairs Unit, London, 1994.

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Pursuing the parallel further it might be objected that given the potential for conflict between goods, then there is no way of definitively settling disputes. From this perspective, while we may all abhor the image of a smiling Pol Pot; there is no simple matter of fact that will entitle us to say that Nelson Mandela’s life is a better one than George Best’s. Someone who prefers a life of self-indulgence will follow Best while someone who prefers a courageous pursuit of principle will opt for Mandela. Since both are possible human forms of life, only a prior valuation enables us to say that one life is better than the other and that prior valuation seems baseless. But, once again, to seek this kind of foundation is to place impossible demands upon ethics. As Aristotle notes, ‘neither in mathematical nor in moral science is the first principle arrived at by deliberation’.27 In other words, to think clearly about morality it is necessary that one is already initiated into ethical life. Our starting point is the range of human moral practices in which we are unavoidably embedded, practices such as what we choose to teach our children. Would we, for instance, teach children to regard Mandela or Best as an exemplar? To pose the question is to answer it. The fact that some parents might instruct their children in self-destruction is evidence of human folly not the radical incommensurability of values. This is evidenced even by the practice of moral philosophers. No subjectivist has ever seriously argued that one form of life is as good as any other.28 Consider Kitcher’s argument. In distinguishing between objectivist and subjectivist approaches, he introduces a crucial qualification. A subjectivist is someone who believes the good life is one in which ‘actual desires are fulfilled, or, more plausibly, the satisfaction of the desires the agent would have had, if she had undergone some appropriate therapeutic regime.’29 Kitcher’s subjectivist is clearly not committed to the view that all preferences are equally valid. For, what else would the goal of such a therapeutic regime be than to inculcate the kid of desires that the agent ought to have? But if we concede that then it becomes harder to determine the distinction between objectivism and subjectivism. Of course, much turns on the analysis of ‘ought’. Are the desires that the agent ought to have, and which form the goal of the thera[27] NE, 1151a4-23. [28] Even J.L. Mackie, after much bluster, offers a rather timid form of utilitarianism. [29] Phillip Kitcher, ‘Essence and Perfection’, Ethics, Vol. 110, Oct. 1999, p.59-83, p.59 My emphasis.


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peutic regime, those that are objectively good for her or simply those which her culture finds acceptable? Along this latter route lies a kind of collective subjectivism. For a virtue ethicist, enabling one to live harmoniously with one’s peers is an important function of ethics; nevertheless ethics is more than simply a mechanism for solving ‘coordination problems’. Ethical norms are only one such mechanism, alongside etiquette, legality, economic compulsion and sheer brute force and considering ethics in such terms does not tell us what is distinctive about ethics. Virtue ethics in particular is driven by aretaic considerations: what conditions and courses of action are most likely to produce excellent character. The problem with perceiving ethics in terms of social control is mechanisms of social control typically do better at producing obedient Nazis than Sophie Scholls. The virtuous educator is one who teaches her charges to conform to the norms of their society insofar as those norms are consistent with the demands of virtue. Sometimes, however, in a corrupt society, virtue requires one to be in a minority of one. So, the more plausible way of interpreting Kitcher’s ‘therapeutic regime’ is in terms of fostering good desires and discouraging bad ones, a goal which coincides with the central preoccupation of virtue ethics. If we reject the equation between good desires and collective or individual preferences, then the obvious option seems to be that good desires are those which foster the flourishing of creatures like us. Viewed thus, our capacity for practical reason, the fine-grained attention to situations and their consequences, can be plausibly regarded as the ability to track those features of a situation most conducive to our wellbeing and that of our peers. While the extent to which this capacity is developed in humans is remarkable, there is no incompatibility between recognising this and at the same time seeing it as a feature of our natural history. It is no more nor less remarkable than the ability of a cat to bring down a bird in flight or of that bird to evade its feline pursuer.

Julia Annas

Happiness, Virtue and Religious Commitments As is well-known, virtue ethics has had a massive revival in the last few decades; in philosophy departments it is now regularly taught as a third approach to ethical theory, alongside Kantian and consequentialist types of theory. Elizabeth Anscombe’s seminal article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ is often credited as one of major sources of this renewal.1 The most influential aspect of the article has been her suggestion of turning to a virtue ethics of an Aristotelian kind. The most prominent version of contemporary virtue ethics has been neo-Aristotelian2 (though this is not the only version to be found).3 One striking feature of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is that it is eudaimonist: it takes living virtuously to be constitutive of happiness [1]

Although it has been much reprinted; it is probably most easily accessible in Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds), Virtue Ethics, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997, pp 26-44.

[2]

The most prominent defenders of this kind of approach to ethics are Philippa Foot in her numerous writings, most recently Moral Dilemmas, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, and Rosalind Hursthouse, whose very influential On Virtue Ethics, Oxford University Press, New York, was published in 1999.

[3]

There are several kinds of non-eudaimonistic virtue ethics. Two kinds of consequentialist virtue ethics are defended by Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001, and Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice and Value, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001. Michael Slote, Morals from Motives, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001, defends an ‘agent-centered’ version. Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics, a pluralistic view, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003, defends a distinctive account, and has recently become interested in Nietzschean types of virtue ethics. Robert Adam, A Theory of Virtue, Oxford University Press, New York, 2006, and Linda Zagzebski Divine Motivation Theory Oxford University Press, New York, 2004, have both produced versions of virtue ethics which are distinct from, but related to, their versions of theism.

Happiness, Virtue and Religious Commitments

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or (as eudaimonia is more commonly translated) flourishing. The use of ‘flourishing’ has come about in part to avoid chronic misunderstandings that attach to the contemporary use of ‘happiness’ to mean pleasant feeling, or satisfaction of desires, and to keep the focus on what matters to eudaimonists: the living of a happy life. I will not here go into the complications of distinguishing the view that holds virtue to be wholly constituent of happiness from the one holding it to be only partly so. Another prominent feature is that most discussions take the default account of virtue and flourishing to be a naturalistic one.4 Virtues are standardly regarded as the dispositions which enable us to flourish as humans, thus requiring an account of human nature to be sought from the appropriate sciences—psychology, biology and the like. One reason, I think, that neo-Aristotelian eudaimonist virtue ethics has become so popular among philosophers so rapidly (‘popular’ in the sense of being regarded as an appropriate object of discussion, whether they actually agree with it or not) is that in contemporary terms it is, in effect, secular. This is not to say that anyone thinks that Aristotle himself had an approach to ethics that is secular in the contemporary way, but for Aristotle God does not come into ethics in anything like the way familiar to us from the monotheistic religions, and so his ethical framework is suitable for secular interpretation, and that is what it has mostly had. Interestingly, this is hardly what Anscombe herself would have taken to be a satisfying response to her original article, as some recent writers have begun to point out.5 I will not be discussing this particular issue here, however. In what ways can a eudaimonist virtue ethics framework of an Aristotelian kind accommodate the demands of monotheistic religion? The Thomist transformation of the Aristotelian tradition of eudaimonist virtue ethics is of course widely familiar. Here I want briefly to look at a different strand in the ancient ethics of virtue and happiness, and a different religious transformation of it. I shall be briefly exploring the approach of Philo of Alexandria to the life lived in accordance with Mosaic law. These ideas are interesting in their own right, and suggestive about the relation of virtue to law, regarded as structuring the commitments of a life lived in accordance with religion. [4]

Not that this is uncontroversial, especially among philosophers who think that naturalism is unable to account for normativity.

[5]

Cf. the articles in Anthony O’Hear (ed.), Modern Moral Philosophy: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 54, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.

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Philo is a Jewish philosopher whose work takes the form of commentary on the Torah; I shall here be concerned only with his works on the Ten Commandments and Mosaic law, in which he is clearly influenced by Plato in the Laws.6 In his second ideal state, Plato holds that not just the institutional framework of the state but everyday life should be structured by laws, which people are educated to obey. But people are not just to develop the disposition to do what they are told; they are educated, particularly by means of the laws’ preambles,7 to understand the point of the laws and to grasp that living according to the practices and ways of life structured by the laws will help them to develop virtues and thus, as Plato assumes in this work, to live a happy life. Law should persuade and not just force; living according to good laws, with understanding of them, develops aspiration to virtue, and so laws will produce people of good character who will live well and so happily. Philo takes himself, in this case as in others, to be making use of pagan ideas to make them contribute to a better purpose. He regards Moses as the supreme example of a lawgiver, comparing pagan examples unfavourably, and he thinks it ‘low and unworthy of the dignity of the laws’ to describe a system of ideal laws in the context of a city, even an ideal one, for this means that they are compromised from the start by thoughts of institutions created by humans.8 Rather, ideal law for Philo should be seen in the context of cosmology; by which he means Genesis. Philo is thus critical of Plato’s Laws, though he nevertheless has some respect for the way Plato sees God as the source of ideal human law.9 Philo’s God is of course not Plato’s cosmic reason but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and so the laws he is concerned with are the rules of Mosaic law given in the Torah.

[6]

Philo’s wording sometimes shows the influence of the Laws, and he explicitly refers to ‘preambles’, prooimia, Plato’s most distinctive innovation in that work.

[7]

Each law comes with a preamble or prelude (the Greek word puns on the idea of musical prelude), of varying type depending on the kind of law, but always aimed at producing in the citizens the appropriate kind of conviction about the point of the law and of obeying it.

[8]

Life of Moses II, 45-51. Cf the criticisms of other lawgivers at de Opificio Mundi 1-3.

[9]

Philo is arguably unfair to Plato here, whose account of law in the Laws, though located in an ideally run city, is also set in a distinctive account of the cosmos and its ordering.


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Philo is also influenced by the Stoics, and does sometimes think of Mosaic law as a ‘written copy of natural law’,10 and indeed it would not be unreasonable to see both Plato (in the Laws) and Philo as supporters of a kind of natural law theory. Here, however, I want to leave that aspect aside, and focus on Plato and Philo insofar as they are ethical thinkers who hold both of two positions; firstly, our end in life is to be happy, which we achieve by living virtuously, and secondly; we must live our lives according to laws and rules whose authority derives from God, and which structure a specific way of life. These two positions are in modern ethical thought often taken to be in patent and hopeless conflict. In the way they they integrate them both philosophers illuminate for us the resources of virtue ethics as a form of ethical thought which can accommodate a position that demands that we live our lives in a way structured by religious commitments. Philo is a eudaimonist. This might seem surprising to us until we reflect that eudaimonism was the default option in ancient ethical theory. It does not occur to him that laws and rules might be ethically self-standing, that simple obedience to rules might be what is most ethically basic in people’s lives, even if the rules have God’s authority behind them. Hence Philo thinks that it is obvious that living according to Mosaic law produces a virtuous character—not just a disposition to follow rules, but a character in which reasoning, emotion and decision are harmoniously integrated: For each of the ten pronouncements individually and all together prepare and exhort us (protrepousi) to practical wisdom (phronesis) and justice and piety and the rest of the chorus of virtues. They make our words (logoi) healthy with good deliberations, and attach good actions to our words, so that the soul’s instrument may throughout play in tune to procure concord of life and an unassailable harmony.11

Here is the standard ancient position, that the virtuous person is someone whose character is integrated and free of conflict, whose emotions and reasoning are ‘in tune’. Moreover, real virtue leads to happiness:

[10] See: Hindy Najman, ‘A Written Copy of the Law of Nature: An Unthinkable Paradox?’ Studia Philonica Annual, Vol. XV, 2003, pp.54-63 and Gregory Sterling, ‘Universalizing the Particular: natural law in Second Temple Jewish Ethics,’ Studia Philonica Annual, Vol. XV, pp 64-80. [11] Special Laws IV, 134; cf Virtues 184.

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If our words (logoi) are of the same kind as our deliberations, and our actions of the same kind as what we say, and these reciprocate with one another, being bound with the unbreakable chains of harmony, then happiness (eudaimonia) prevails; happiness is wisdom (sophia) free of falsehood, and practical wisdom (phronesis)—wisdom for the service of God, practical wisdom for the organization of everyday life.12

Living according to Mosaic law produces a virtuous character, one with the standard virtues (wisdom, temperance, courage and justice) though with an emphasis on piety (eusebeia), something notable also in Plato. And this leads to eudaimonia, happiness. Philo ascribes to Moses his own approach to presenting the demands of Mosaic law: Moses is said to think that mere command without encouragement is for slaves, not for the free, and he gives guidance by means of ‘preambles’ and other forms of discussion.13 For citizens well-trained and formed in virtue should not need the sanction of the actual written law: the mere recital of Sabbath duties, says Philo, ‘is enough to make those with good natures perfect with regard to virtue, without effort, and to render the restive and stubborn more open to persuasion.’14 Because he does not see rules as ethically self-standing, Philo does not deal with the Ten Commandments as a list of isolated rules, but sees the specific rules of Mosaic law as clustered round particular Commandments, which he sees as ‘generic’.15 For example, the Sixth Commandment is ‘You shall not commit adultery,’but Philo does not treat this as an isolated prohibition of just one kind of action, as though as long as you don’t commit adultery your attitude to marriage is fine. Rather, the Commandment picks out something crucial to the right maintenance of marriage, and this is treated as the ‘heading’ under which we find the rules which structure marriage in both positive and negative ways. We find here prohibitions against other kinds of sexual activity than adultery (incest, bestiality, homosexu[12] Praem. 81. [13] Life of Moses II, 50-51. The language in this passage contains many reminiscences of the Laws’ contrast of force and persuasion appropriate to slave and free respectively. [14] Special Laws II, 39,1. [15] Special Laws II 189: the ten are genikoi nomoi, while the others are ta en eidei; III 7: ta en merei are said to ‘tend towards’ the ten. Cf Decalogue 154: the ten are kephalaia (summaries) of the particular ones throughout the whole legislation. I have been told that this approach was also characteristic of the rabbinical tradition of Philo’s time.


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ality, rape, seduction) and rules regulating who can and cannot marry, and purity regulations within marriage. All these rules, which, on the surface are only loosely connected with one another and with marriage, are thus seen to be unified by their reference to the aim of properly controlling and conducting sexual desire, which is assumed to be universally strong and socially unreliable, always liable to transgress boundaries.16 It is Philo’s treatment of the Tenth Commandment which shows most clearly how he takes rule-following to be connected to the development of character. He reads it as, ‘You shall not desire (epithumein)’. For Philo, control of pathos: feeling or passion, is the point of many rules, and in keeping with this he treats this Commandment as the heading under which are brought rules to regulate desire.17 Nothing, he holds, is more troublesome than desire, the urge to get what we don’t have. It leads us to think things good which are not, and thus it systematically disturbs our values. It leads the irrational part of the soul to get the person to take irrational and disastrous courses and leads us to mistaken evaluations of what matters in our lives. This happens over our lives as a whole, not just in one area. Desire for money, for example, turns people dishonest, desire for fame turns them unreliable and desire for power turns them unscrupulous. It is important, then, to discipline the most basic form of desire right from the start, since this, the claim goes, will render its other forms more amenable. Hence our basic desires for food and drink are from the start to be regulated and trained by the dietary laws, which bring it about that even basic eating and drinking take place in a disciplined and discriminating framework. When they are hungry, members of the Jewish community will not just eat what is there to gratify desire; they will always think first in terms of what foods are permitted and forbidden, and which ways food can and cannot be prepared. Desire for food and drink will be trained to seek only orderly and discriminating gratification, and so will come to be itself orderly and discriminating. This lays a foundation for a well-regulated character in other areas where different kinds of desire are in question. Thus the overall aim of managing desire, as the basis of well-regulated character, leads to bringing Jewish dietary laws under the heading of the Tenth Commandment. This is something [16] Special Laws III, 8-82. [17] Special Laws IV 79-131. The discussion of desire is also prominent in the treatment of the Tenth Commandment in Decalogue 142-153.

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that would seem far from obvious if we think in terms of rules alone, in isolation from character. Philo’s focus here on desire, as a fundamental and potentially disastrous aspect of human psychology, emphasizes the importance of dealing with it rightly for the development of character. Philo presents the laws and rules that define a specifically Jewish way of life in a eudaimonist context that would be familiar to him both from philosophy and from ordinary ways of thinking. It is a system that defines a whole way of life, where following the written law is sustained by the traits and dispositions of character which develop from consistently following it (something illustrated most clearly in the case of the dietary laws). Two things become important in this regard. Firstly, people brought up to appreciate the point of living according to practices structured by certain laws will be able to acquire a positive attitude to them. Rather than just seeing them as requirements that have to be met to avoid sanctions, they can come to see them as positively helping virtuous development. Valuing the benefits of living according to the law will lead them to value even more the law’s being observed.18 Secondly, people brought up not just to obey laws and rules, but to appreciate that in doing so they are developing traits enabling a virtuous and so happy life, will come to appreciate the values that are fostered in obeying the laws, and thus will come to praise and blame behaviour that will encourage and discourage it accordingly before it gets to the stage of needing punishment for breaking an actual law. Hence, the way that people obey the law will be a self-maintaining system, where people follow the rules and organize their lives in self-directed ways. Stress only on law and rules, and on obligations to follow them, foregrounds obligation and sanction, but they can look different when seen as enabling the living of a good and happy life. This is why Philo stresses the importance of not only conformity to written law but also the ready acceptance and internalization of ‘unwritten laws’: Habits (ethe) are unwritten laws, the resolutions (dogmata) of men of old, engraved not on monuments nor on papyrus, which gets eaten up by moths, but on the souls of people who share in the same constitution. Children should inherit habits from their par[18] In Plato’s Magnesia the same effect obtains, and this leads, more alarmingly, to the attitude that part of being a good citizen is intervening in other’s lawbreaking, and informing officials of lawbreaking by others (Laws 730d2-7, 808e7-809a3).


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ents, as well as property, habits in which they were brought up and have lived with from the cradle, and should not despise them because their handing-down is not in writing.19

Philo is here thinking in the terms of Greek philosophy, but what he says answers well to some of the passages in the Psalms which stress that understanding, as well as following, God’s law brings happiness. Some brief examples: ‘Happy20 the man who did not walk by the counsel of the impious … Rather, his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he will meditate day and night.’ ‘The statutes of the Lord are upright, making glad the heart.’ ‘Happy are the blameless in way, who walk in the Lord’s law. Happy are those who seek out his testimonies.21 As well as concern with virtue and character, something else emerges in Philo’s treatment of the Fourth Commandment, to honour the Sabbath, which does not limit itself to treatment of the Sabbath day, but discusses all the Jewish festivals in detail.22 They belong together because they all require right observance of a festival, something which requires not just the performance of ritual (though ritual must be scrupulously performed) but the right frame of mind. He goes through the different ways in which the different festivals enable members of the community to come to understand the right relationship with God and with one another. People who dutifully go through the motions are obeying the law, but this falls far short of the virtuous performance of ritual, which involves understanding of God and one’s place in the world. If only we were not dominated by the vices, Philo says, ‘but the powers of the virtues had remained unconquered in any way, our time from birth to death [19] Special Laws IV 149-150; cf Virtues 65. Philo at once goes on to say that praise belongs to the person who willingly obeys unwritten laws, rather than the person who obeys the written law because he has to. This is quite close to Laws 822e-823a, where Plato insists that the most ‘complete’ praise of the virtuous citizen is that he obeys the written laws in the light of unwritten sanctions and the praise and blame attached to these. [20] The Septuagint word here and in the other passages is makarios, sometimes translated ‘blessed’. In Greek, however, it is used indifferently with eudaimon to mean ‘happy’ (Arius Didymus, a generation before Philo, tells us that it makes no difference which term you use). [21] Psalm 1.1-2; Psalm 19.9; Psalm 119.1-2. I use the version Philo used, the Septuagint, and A. Pietersma and Benjamin G.Wright (ed.), A New English Translation of the Septuagint, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007. I am indebted here to Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Happiness in Premodern Judaism, Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati, 2003. [22] Special Laws II 39-222.

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would have been one continual festival, and families and cities, in peace and freedom from fear, would have been filled with good things in tranquillity.’23 For, properly understood, keeping a festival is not just having a good time but ‘finding delight and festivity in the contemplation of the cosmos and what is in it, and in following nature and in harmony of words with actions and actions with words.’ Here we find not just an emphasis on the good character developed by following a specific way of life structured by Mosaic law, but the happiness this brings. Elsewhere Philo stresses this, and the way in which members of the Jewish community display virtues which pagans admire, as well as virtues like philanthropia, care for all humans, which he thinks they ought to admire but don’t. Here we find a particular way in which the fact that the way of life is structured by specifically religious commitments produces an overall attitude to life in which the ethical and the religious are blended. Philo was aware that this blend was not specific to Judaism. In Plato’s Laws there is a similar emphasis on the importance of having citizens who bring the right kind of attitude to the observation of religious festivals in a way which both reflects and expresses their attitude to life. ‘What I say is that we should be serious about the serious, and not about the unserious. By nature it is god which is worthy of every happy serious effort, while humans, as we said before, have been constructed as some plaything of god, and really that is what their best part is; and corresponding to this every man and woman should live their life at play in the finest ways they can..’. The right form of both education (paideia) and play (paidia) is this: ‘We should live our lives at play in certain ways, sacrificing and singing and dancing, so as to be able to have the gods favourable to us and to defend ourselves against enemies, and to conquer them if we fight’.24 Plato elsewhere stresses the low and humble attitude that humans should have towards God, so that contemplating the cosmos will produce indeed a sense of the goodness of the orderly organization of the whole, but also a deep sense of the insigificance of humans and their endeavours, and the unlikelihood that they matter in the cosmos. This is seen by Plato as the only appropriate attitude [23] Special Laws II 42. Cf Special Laws II 209: the Feast of Tabernacles is not just pleasant, but aids the practice (askesis) of virtue. Josephus (Against Apion II 188-189) says that Jews maintain all the time what pagans call musteria and teletai (religious rites, particularly of initiation). [24] Laws 803 c2–e3.


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to take to a God which is cosmic reason, not a person and not in a personal relation to humans (though he also thinks, perhaps unhappily, that his citizens can continue to worship God adequately through cleaned-up forms of the polytheistic civic religion of his time). Philo’s account of the role and point of festivals in the good life is rather different, in ways which bring out quite pointedly the abstract features of Plato’s God as opposed to Philo’s God, who belongs in a tradition of worship, scripture and tradition. Philo thinks that members of the Jewish community will ‘find delight and festivity in the contemplation of the cosmos and what is in it’ in ways other than admiring the mathematical regularity of the paths of the heavenly bodies and the orderliness of their motions, which is what Plato focusses on. For Philo, the delight and festivity are seen more in terms of the kind of pleasure produced by contributing to traditional activities in a way informed by awareness of tradition in the form of narratives, prayers, sacrifices and so on, tradition which brings God into relation with his people. So we find on this view, for both the pagan Plato and the Jewish Philo there is no distinction, when we are talking about the good life, between the ethical and the religious: no cutoff between bits of life which are merely mundane and parts that bring in a relation to God. God is seen as a lawgiver, but is not seen as giving a set of rules which then have to be thought through and applied to everyday life; they already are part of life. Accepting both ethical and religious commitments means not just following the rules, but learning to follow them in the right way, and this involves understanding the point of them and their role in the development of traits and dispositions which are virtues, and which help to constitute a life which is a good life: one which enables you to achieve happiness. In a eudaimonist system, the happiness which is the result of the agent’s achievement is not, of course, pleasant feeling or getting whatever it is you happen to want; it is eudaimonia, the flourishing life. Still, all accounts of eudaimonia require that it involve a positive attitude to your life, and so it is right to think of it as happiness—at least, as the happiness of a life. We can see a real connection with the idea expressed in the Psalms, that studying the laws of the Lord brings happiness. I have briefly put forward Philo’s view of law and virtue, because I think it is interesting in its own right, but in the present context more because I think it represents an intriguing option within virtue ethics. It has not been explored by contemporary virtue theorists, but this is not surprising since, as I noted, contemporary virtue ethics

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takes its cue from neo-Aristotelian eudaimonist virtue ethics, which has been developed in secular ways. The basic point, as underlined so far, is that virtues are developed, and help to constitute eudaimonia, within a way of life and a set of practices which are explicitly structured by religious commitments: commitment to a way of life organized in accordance with a system of laws whose source is God, a way of life which spells out sets of different commitments for different areas of life. It is because of this that the way the person flourishes, in this perspective, cannot be compartmentalized as purely ethical or purely religious. This perspective is most clearly open to members of religions which require commitment to such a set of laws and rules structuring everyday life. My example was of course Judaism, in its ancient Second Temple version. The prospect of living such an integrated life today is most obviously open to Jews who live by Jewish law, and by Moslems who live by Islamic law, and who regard living by the sets of rules in question as central to their commitment to their religion. Indeed, it is arguably the idea of a life integrated in this way which forms part of the appeal of these religions. Philo’s development of the idea in a eudaimonist framework enables us to get a deeper and richer idea of the kind of appeal in question. We can see how commitment to a system of laws and rules need not be experienced as a series of burdensome and frustrating obligations, even where the rules in question have to be obeyed and are not up for negotiation. For such a system of obligations can also be experienced in the kind of eudaimonistic framework which enables us to see that the way of life in question is one that is a flourishing and happy one, a life lived well, and thus that the traits encouraged are not just traits but virtues which help to constitute the flourishing life. Because Christianity separated from Judaism at a fairly early date, and it was decided that Christians did not have to observe Jewish law to be Christians, there is nothing in Christianity which corresponds to the role of Jewish law in Judaism or Islamic law—that is, a system of laws and rules which structures a recognizable way of life uniting all the members of that religion whichever other cultures they may live in. Christians are united in other ways, but not in the ways that Jews and Moslems are united across widely differing cultures by dietary restrictions, practices like circumcision and the like. Because of this, Christianity has always been more permeable to cultural influences from the society that Christians live in—as indeed early Christianity was deeply influenced in its formation by Roman society and culture


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in the West, and subsequently by Byzantine culture in the East.25 It has also been, by the same token, more open to change, or engagement with change, by different cultures. (This is of course a massively broad statement, and needs qualification by consideration of all the different forms that Christianity has taken over two thousand years, and the different cultures that have influenced it.) No tradition is static; any way of life develops over time and in response to various situations and challenges. And so it is no surprise that it is disputed not just outside these traditions but internally to them, whether the dispositions encouraged by specific practices are in fact virtues, whether the life that they lead to is in fact a flourishing life. As virtues develop, the virtuous person becomes more reflective and self-aware about the disposition that she has; she searches for the reasons both for which she acts and for reactions she has to various things, and seeks to understand them. This is commonplace in the neo-Aristotelian tradition, but since it is a feature of any eudaimonist virtue ethics it is only to be expected also when the virtues develop in a framework of religious commitment. Even when the religious commitments themselves are held steady, it can always be disputed whether the practices they structure have been contoured in the right way, or whether the relevant traits are being developed in the right way. Sometimes it may be queried whether the religious commitments in question are being rightly interpreted within the tradition—as is increasingly the case with patriarchal traditions. It is certainly true that, while we can recognize the appeal of the integrated life where the religious commitments provide the structure for ethical development, we should not be unrealistically nostalgic for what we take to be ideal forms of it. Such lives tend to be, as with most ideals, in large part romantic projections. Nonetheless, the idea that some virtues at least might be developed in a framework of religious commitment seems to me interesting and suggestive, even when we look at it outside the framework of an overall way of life of the kind that Judaism and Islam offer. In recent years there has been a spate of books on happiness, many of them concerned with the sources of happiness in modern life. Many of them are not talking about eudaimonia but about pleasure or feeling good, but some of them do recognize the importance of happiness in an entire life, and can be brought into a discussion about eudaimonia or flourishing. Many of them report numerous [25] For the influence of Roman society on Western Christianity, see G. Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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studies that indicate that ‘religion has a positive effect on happiness’, as it is often put.26 Claims like this need to be handled very cautiously indeed, because often the studies show little sophistication about either religion or happiness, or indeed about the value of people’s own reports on how happy they are. Still, with due caution, we can report that it does seem to be established that people who attend religious services (church, synagogue, etc.) regularly do score higher on psychologists’ measures of what they call ‘subjective well-being’: that is, they judge that their lives are going well and that they are flourishing. For example, they suffer less from stress and from ill health generally, and score higher on indications of ‘mental health’. Some of these results, however, could well be consequences of belonging to a religious community rather than constitutive elements of it. For example, regular church-goers have a reliable support system in times of trouble; they have a circle of acquaintances and are thus less likely to be lonely, and so on. These are real advantages, but they can be obtained in other ways, and so are not intrinsic to the role of religion in life. Doubtless these surveys need to be made more sophisticated before we can get anything from them useful about the role of religion in a happy life. One thing which I think we could perhaps explore with some hope of success would be the role of development of traits and dispositions, of a sort to be at least partly constitutive of a happy, flourishing life, in cases where these dispositions develop in practices structured by religious commitments. What of the role of religious commitments in the development of the traits that we exercise, and evaluate as virtues or vices, in everyday life? Does regular attendance at church, for example, with the discipline that this brings, and the resultant need to organize your life round it, produce some of the benefits of a disciplined character that Philo finds in the practice of the Jewish dietary rules? We might assume that any kind of regular commitment will produce a more disciplined character, and that this could be produced by regular Sunday golf as much as by regular Sunday church attendance. If Philo is right, though, this would be wrong. We are not dealing here with a simple case of disciplining desires for the sake of fulfilling some further desire, but of disciplining desires as part of a life structured round certain reli[26] See Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Happiness, Routledge, East Sussex, 2001; Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Basic Books, New York, 2006, Ch. 9; David G Myers, The Pursuit of Happiness: Who is Happy and Why, Morrow, New York, 1992, Ch. 10.


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gious obligations which come to be seen as having value in one’s life as a whole. There is nothing in the lives of most ordinary Christians today like the systematic demands of Islamic or Jewish law (and of course many members of these religions live in ways not structured by their traditions). The religious obligations of the lay Christian life are more fragmented and irregular, and they press much less heavily on the progress of ordinary living and the ways we spend our days. Is it worth exploring ways in which these obligations might nonetheless be seen in a eudaimonistic framework, as enabling the development of the virtuous and so flourishing life? Contemporary virtue ethics has done much preliminary work for us here, and it is no longer thought outlandish to argue that virtue is necessary, or even sufficient, for happiness. So we might hope for progress on the parts of both ethics and psychology. Aristotle took it for granted that the traits of character the members of his audience were developing in Athenian society were on the right track, by and large, for them to become recognizably virtuous. Contemporaries, including contemporary virtue ethicists, have insistently indicated the inadequacy of the institutions of 4th century BCE Athenian life to develop traits that we can regard as satisfactory virtues. The response to this, however, has been to point out the obvious: virtues can be developed in a number of very different ways of life. Aristotle naturally talks about his own society, and we about ours. We have to start from where we are when reflecting about virtue, though the virtues are accessible from a number of diverse ways of life.27 Contemporary virtue ethics has taken this point, and has accordingly developed study of the virtues in a variety of forms of contemporary life; thus we find virtue forms of medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics and the like. The model, however, has not been extended to the life structured by religious commitments. Why not? Partly this may be due to the assumption already mentioned, that ethical philosophy studies ethical theories only in their application to secular society. More centrally, I think it depends on the thought that such a life depends on accepting authoritative rules, and that this is incompatible with a virtue approach to ethics. I have tried to suggest why it might be well worth querying this thought.

[27] I have called this point obvious, but it does have theoretical underpinnings which I do not go into here.

Nancy Sherman1

For Cause or Comrade? In the summer of 2006, when Itamar Shapira’s reserve unit was called up to serve in Lebanon, Shapira refused to fight. But his first act was to join his comrades in Northern Israel and explain to them why he wasn’t fighting. Washington Post, August 27, 20062 As imperceptibly as Grief… Too imperceptibly, at last, To seem like Perfidy

Emily Dickinson

I. Fidelity The Marines’ well-known motto semper fidelis (‘always faithful’) does not make explicit just what the object of a Marine’s fidelity is. For most Marines, it is unquestionably a commitment to each other, and by implication to the Corps. For many in the Marines, and the military in general, there is also loyalty totheir mission and to the overall cause of war for which the mission is a part. Warriors prepare for war by rallying behind a cause. But what happens when they feel deep ambivalence about the justice of a cause? In preparing to write ‘the true story of GI Joe’ for a Hollywood war movie in the early 1940s, Arthur Miller warned that soldiers abhor an ideological vacuum. Unless the American people can ‘explain and justify this war,’ they are ‘going to injure and sometimes destroy [1]

The title of this chapter is a deferential nod to James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Nancy Sherman, The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds & Souls of Our Soldiers, W.W. Norton, New York, 2010.

[2]

Doug Struck, ‘In Israel, Protests by Soldiers often Drive Political Change,’ Washington Post, August 27, 2006, Art. 16.

For Cause or Comrade?

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the minds of a host of their returning veterans.’3 At issue for Miller was not just how to rally the troops, but also how to return them home whole. The rationale to go to war can be motivating, as it was to become for Miller’s World War II generation, and too, for a generation of soldiers who enlisted sixty years later in immediate response to the attacks of 9/11. But the rationale to stay at war, as we know all too well from our engagement in Iraq, can shift over time, be more or less rooted in fact, be more or less responsive to the realities on the ground. Cause, unlike camaraderie, can erode a soldier’s morale. What remains the central battle motivator in most wars is care for buddies and the knowledge that they care for you.4 ‘To bring each other home becomes the cause,’ as lawyer and former Army Reservist Captain Phil Carter said at a symposium on this subject.5 At the time, Phil had recently returned from Iraq where he served with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division as an adviser to the Iraqi police. Retired Army Reservist, Sergeant Dereck Vines, put it more bluntly: ‘You go because you don’t want to let your fellow soldiers down.’ The sentiment resonates throughout all militaries. One of the most striking examples comes from Siegfried Sassoon, the English poet and World War I soldier. Even in the face of his own political protest against the war, and a growing pacifism inspired by conversations with Bertrand Russell, Sassoon, as a young officer, felt a profound obligation to the men with whom he fought, ‘shoulder to aching shoulder.’ And so after a long psychiatric convalescence at the military hospital, Craiglockhardt, outside Edinburgh (which his good friend Robert Graves arranged to stave off possible court martial for Sassoon’s dissent), Sassoon insisted upon returning to the front in

[3]

‘You cannot make a true picture of this war until you make up your mind as to what this war is about. And the reason Hollywood has not so made up its mind is that the American people have been carefully prevented from making up their mind. And, movie making aside for a moment, until they do come to agreement on some basic credo which will explain and justify this war, they are going to injure and sometimes destroy the minds of a host of their returning veterans,’ Arthur Miller, Situation Normal, Reynal & Hitchcock, Lester Cowan Productions Inc., New York, 1944.

[4]

The interplay between factors is complex: If soldiers believe they are not fighting for an admirable cause, cause may decrease the overall willingness to fight and take risks. In taking fewer risks, soldiers are likely to incur more collateral damage. I thank Tony Pfaff for insight here.

[5]

At meetings of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy at the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association, December 2007.

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France to share the burden of battle with his troops.6 In Plato’s Symposium, a celebration of love at a drinking party, Phaedrus sings the praises of love in battle. An army of lovers, he insists, is the most courageous kind of army, for shame engendered through love and mutual admiration will check cowardice and self-interest. Plato had in mind homoerotic relations, and Sassoon, to some degree, as well. But the point is a far more general one. Profound mutual love and care are what bind soldiers together and motivate battle. And they are also what heal warriors after war. But cause has its place too, in motivating battle and just as critically, in a soldier’s personal sense of accountability for participating in war. Many soldiers whom I have interviewed—draftees, Reserves, National Guard, and career military alike—insist they are not responsible for the decision to go to war; that is for those at a higher pay grade, they often tell me. And yet those same individuals feel morally accountable not just for how they fight, but for what they fight for. They feel accountable for their participation in the collective end that defines a particular war. To the person, they are patriotic and often speak movingly about their responsibilities to do public service and their willingness to sacrifice. Some remind me of the vast public investment in them as soldiers, trained to fight when the call comes. But none want their willingness to serve exploited for a cause that is unworthy or for a war grounded in unjustified fear or waged for a pretext.7 When they believe that has happened, the betrayal felt is profound. Some view it as a kind of breach in the family, a rupture of the deepest kind of trust and care. They are hurt and angry, and also frustrated at themselves for being caught internally between the role of servant and conscientious free moral thinker. For those who are professional soldiers, the tension can feel much greater. They have chosen the military as their careers, and they know well, from years of service and command, the military good of discipline and order. But they also know that a good officer does not obey unlawful, unjust or morally unwise orders. How does war feel to individual soldiers who are caught between conscience and obedience to what they reasonably regard as legiti[6]

For a fictional casting of Sassoon’s story, see the Regeneration trilogy: Pat Barker, Regeneration, Penguin, New York 1992, The Eye in the Door, Plume, New York, 1993, and The Ghost Road, Plume, New York, 1995.

[7]

On just cause and the current wars in Iraq, see the helpful introduction in Larry May, Eric Rovie & Steve Viner, The Morality of War, Pearson/Prentice Hall, New Jersey, p.xi.


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mate political authority?8 How do honorable soldiers prepare themselves for battle when they don’t fully embrace the cause of war? How does the duty to take care of each other weigh into the balance? The questions are merged in the minds of soldiers: They fight for each other, but always within specific wars fought for specific causes. The war that they are part of is not something that they can hive off in their minds, however they may try.

II. Henry V and Cause Over lunch at the Tombs restaurant, I ask Lt. Col. Al Gill, then Professor of Military Science at the ROTC program at Georgetown, in what sense cadets are accountable for the wars they will fight. Gill, sitting tall in his fatigues with lynx eyes that peer behind Army-issued black wrap-round glasses, answers by way of Shakespeare’s Henry V. He takes me to Act IV, Scene V, where the king, under wraps, visits the troops the night before battle. ‘Here are these enlisted guys,’ says Gill with his deep Tennessee accent. ‘They don’t know who Henry is, and they have these very frank discussions about the rightness of the cause.’ In the famous scene, Henry baits the soldiers on, ‘Methinks I could not die any where so contented as in the king’s company; his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.’ One soldier pleads ignorance of cause: ‘That’s more than we know.’ Another counsels, ‘Ay, or more than we should seek after.’ The soldiers conclude that responsibility for just cause rests with the king and that their own ignorance is not culpable: ‘For we know enough, if we know we are the king’s subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’ In other words, mere participation in an unjust war is not wrongful action for a soldier. What a soldier is accountable for is conduct, not cause. Gill puts his own spin on Shakespeare’s verses: ‘I don’t know much but I know this… If the cause is not good, then all these guys with their arms and legs chopped off, all these wounded—the king is to blame for that shit.’ It is Spring 2006 and many of Gill’s young officers who entered the Hoya battalion in the wake of 9/11 are now in Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘This is the sort of thing cadets need to see,’ he insists. ‘There has always been this stuff. As I tell my class, the thing that makes Henry less to blame is that in those days, the king was there with sword in hand … Now we have this situation of guys making decisions for those who have arms and legs cut off, but they [8]

See David Estlund’s insightful piece ‘On Following Orders in an Unjust War’, Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 15 (2), pp. 213-34

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themselves have never done this stuff and never will. It’s very difficult.’ The weight of his own responsibility to his cadets hangs heavy. That ordinary soldiers are not responsible for the cause of war remains a dominant part of the philosophical tradition of just war theory. Michael Walzer, in his landmark post-Vietnam Just and Unjust Wars, defends the traditional view: ‘By and large we don’t blame a solider, even a general, who fights for his own government. He is not the member of a robber band, a willful wrongdoer, but a loyal and obedient subject and citizen, acting sometimes at great personal risk in a way he thinks is right.’9 This implies that soldiers on both sides have ‘an equal right to kill’ and enjoy a kind of ‘moral equality’ on the battlefield.10 What they are accountable for is how they prosecute war—for conduct free of atrocities and crimes and excessive collateral damage—not for what they fight for. 11 Francisco de Vitoria, the 16th century Catholic theologian advising the Castilian crown, puts forth the view in one of his lectures. With the Spanish conquest of the New World the catalyst for his remarks, Vitoria argues, ‘Even though the war may be unjust on one side or the other, the soldiers on each side who come to fight in battle … are all equally innocent.’12 Yet the moral equality of soldiers does not preclude, insists Vitoria in another lecture, a soldier’s individual responsibility to conscientiously reflect about what he ought and ought not fight for. ‘If their conscience tells subjects that the war is unjust, they must not go to war even if their conscience is wrong,’ and even if ‘ordered to do so by the prince.’13 To this, Vitoria adds the rider: merely to have doubts is not itself to violate conscience and does not warrant disobedience. Soldiers need more than doubt alone to renege on their obligation to fight.

[9]

Walzer, Ibid.,p. 38-9.

[10] Ibid. [11] Some might reasonably argue that this is too broad; not all governments have legitimate political authority. It is only in regimes that are considered legitimate that we tend to think a soldier who fights for an unjust cause is not a criminal. See Estlund op. cit. on this important point. [12] Francisco de Vitoria ed. A. Padgen & J. Lawrance, ‘On the Law of War,’, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991, 3.5-6, Par. 48. Note, though, Vitoria seems to contradict his earlier claim (Par. 22), that if a war seems patently unjust, then killing in that war would be like killing an innocent man and this is unlawful. The combatant who fights for an unjust cause is not the moral equal of the one who fights for a just cause. The first is like a murderer, he says. [13] Ibid. 2.1-2, Par. 22-26.


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Vitoria also addresses the moral responsibilities of leadership, with thoughts prescient for our own recent times where we have witnessed unprecedented executive power. It is not enough, he says, for a leader to believe that war is a just cause and the last resort. ‘The king is not capable of examining the causes of war on his own, and it is likely that he may make mistakes, or rather that he will make mistakes … . So war should not be declared on the sole dictates of the prince, nor even on the opinions of the few, but on the opinion of the many, and of the wise and reliable.’ In the back of his mind is Aristotle’s standard of the judgment of the practically wise person. Vitoria critically revises it, with a sharp lesson for our own times: Wisdom is not the province of one; it rests on the informed deliberation and scrutiny of many, duty-bound to counsel against war and a leader, if circumstances demand it. ‘One must consult reliable and wise men who can speak with freedom and without anger or hate or greed,’ propounds Vitoria.14 ‘If such men can by examining the causes of hostility with their advice and authority avert a war which is perhaps unjust, then they are obliged to do so.’15 Vitoria does not mince his words. He is counseling a monarchy worried about its perilous position as the universal protector of Christendom and Christian values. In a different time and place, he could be counseling a democratically elected leader about the moral hazards, for a nation and world, of shutting out opinions that do not agree with your own.16 Taken as a whole, Vitoria’s remarks actually push us beyond the traditional view that foot soldiers are not accountable for the causes of war for which they fight. True, he grants, foot soldiers, unlike advisers privy to a leader’s ears, will be limited in their power to prevent a war. But still, given the fallibility of a leader’s judgment and the magnitude of the destruction of war, soldiers ought to reflect conscientiously about what, in good faith, they are willing to fight for.17 The claim has continuing appeal today. It seems plausible to hold that individual citizen soldiers, especially of liberal democracies such as our own, ought to bear some modicum of responsibility for the causes of war for which they fight, and particularly so, when [14] Ibid. 2.1-2, Par. 21. [15] Ibid. 2.2-3, Par. 24. [16] For a detailed account of this pattern in the later years of the Bush Whitehouse, see: Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2008. [17] Ibid. 2.2-3, Par. 22-26.

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they are not conscripts. Given unprecedented access to information and critical debate through enhanced media modes, shouldn’t soldiers, at very least be more reflective than they often are about what they are willing to fight for? Moreover, wouldn’t such reflection tend to curb governments from too casually going to war? The philosopher Jeff McMahan has voiced just these concerns in an important series of public addresses and articles, arguing that soldiers act morally wrongly in fighting for unjust wars; they are ‘unjust combatants’ he says, though they are not criminally liable for mere participation.18 That is, what they do is morally wrong, though excusable. Others have argued that it makes sense to have exit options that allow citizen soldiers to refuse to fight specific wars they believe unjust, without the imposition of crippling penalties. To deny them reasonable exits, they claim, is to hold the liberal state ransom to the military.19 However, it is easy to see the practical problems with selective conscientious objection. Especially in the case of a volunteer army, it would be hard to raise troops for unpopular wars. Doubt about the cause of war might mushroom into rationalizations not to fight. The defense needs of a country would be left to the discretion and motivation of each soldier. But then how do we take into account a soldier’s responsibility to reflect on the justice of cause? McMahan holds that soldiers act morally wrongly in fighting for an unjust cause, though are not legally culpable. But this still seems too harsh and to miss too much about the practice of soldiering. However much we might like citizen soldiers to be more reflective about the causes for which they are willing to fight (and indeed all citizens who send soldiers to war), it seems too much to expect soldiers on the verge of deploying or hav[18] See: Jeff McMahan, ‘The Ethics of Killing in War’, Ethics, Vol. 144, July, 2004, pp. 693-733, ‘Liability and Collective Identity: A Response to Walzer’ & ‘Killing in War: A Reply to Walzer’, Philosophia, Vol. 34, 2006, pp. 13-17 & 47-51 & ‘The Morality of War and the Law of War’ in Just and Unjust Warriors ed. D. Rodin & H. Shue, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2008 [19] David Garren, ‘Soldiers, Slaves and the Liberal State’, Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, Vol. 27 (1/2), 2007, pp. 8-11. Israel is sometimes mentioned in this context, and specifically, the disposition of military courts in some cases to not punish harshly conscripts that selectively refuse to serve in the occupied territories. See Chaim Gans, ‘The Refusal to serve in the occupied territories in the second Intifada’ in the Jurist: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forum/forunnew109.php (submitted May 23, 2003). Also, see Amnesty International’s positions on this: http://web/amnesty.org/library/print/ENGMDE151692002


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ing deployed to track the shifts in official rationales and to puzzle whether they are now, at this point in time, fighting for a cause that justifies the use of lethal force. Army tours, as I write, are twelve months, with three months prior for preparation operations with a unit. During that time, soldiers are either immersed in training or marching to the tempo of missions. Days are long and emotionally and physically grueling. This is not the optimal time for the deepest reflection and analysis of war’s causes and rationales. There are other practical matters. Militaries work by coercion and command structures. While few good leaders want or expect blind obedience from their troops (and this includes responsible commanders-inchief from their top brass),20 they do depend upon mobilized cadres that operate with good discipline and order. This doesn’t efface individual responsibilities soldiers have to object to unlawful, immoral, and unwise orders, including the ultimate order to go to war, but it does recognize the collectivizing and coercive force of armies and raising armies.21 What I found throughout my interviews with soldiers is that soldiers actually do struggle hard with their individual accountability for participating in a war of others’ making. But it is often an internal struggle, and not a matter of others judging them. True, the boundaries are not always sharp. What others think and say is sometimes reflected in self-assessments. But the debate goes on largely inside, as a soulful struggle with conscience. Few think in the abstract terms of just war theory or its legacy in international law and the United Nations’ doctrine—that justified wars are conducted only to fend off attack or in the face of ‘immediate and imminent’ attack.22 Most don’t worry, as theorists and political, legal, and military advisers do (and did in the run up to the war in Iraq), about whether fending off ‘immediate and imminent’ attack allows not only preemption but [20] On this, again see Woodward, op. cit. and his account of George W. Bush’s reliance on a like-minded retired military general for counsel about the proposed surge of troops in 2006, and his shunting out of the loop the strong opposition of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen and the General George W. Casey, the Commanding General in Iraq from 2004-2007. [21] For a debate on this, see Walzer and McMahan’s 2006 exchange in Philosophia, Vol. 34 [22] As the founder of modern international law, Hugo Grotius, includes it in De Jure Belli ac Pacis [1625] trans. by Francis W. Kelsey, Oxford University Press, 1925, and as cited by May et al., op. cit., p.xi. For further discussion of preventive war, see David Luban, ‘Preventative War’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 32 (3), 2004, pp. 207-248.

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also prevention. But what they do worry about is whether they are going to war on a pretext for other actual causes. In a deep and personal way, they worry about whether they are being betrayed or manipulated by leadership, and how they can serve honorably in those circumstances. This is the worry of soldiers whose stories I tell. It is the worry of Dereck Vines who served in Iraq in an intelligence unit. It is the worry of Bob Steck who served in the Army in Vietnam, and of Hank McQueeny who was a naval officer in that war. Put more globally, soldiers worry about the goodness of the ends of their wars and whether those ends will outweigh the destruction. I get insight here from my father. Seymour Sherman, now 88 and a veteran of World War II, wrestles with that question over and over again, whether he is reading the papers now and following the current wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or in Gaza, or was doing the same, some 40 years ago, in the Vietnam war era. He looks on, often, through the eyes of a soldier, as the Army medic he was. Somewhere in his reveries, he is back on the Queen Elizabeth, Cunard’s luxury line that was refitted as a U.S. Army transport and hospital. He is zig-zagging across the Atlantic some 16 times on a slow 5-day journey to Gourock, Scotland in the Firth of Clyde, and then on to Normandy. In his case, he does have time to think, and wonders if the fight is worth the horrific ruin and devastation he anticipates and then sees up close in dying men and mutilated bodies. That image of his own responsibility for the specific war he fights is there, whether he talks about it openly or not. The worry is about proportionality, the ratio of the good anticipated to all the carnage. Is it worth it? In the war he fought, he believes it was, then and now, as most do. But the point I am making is that the moral oversight is internal. Yes, it is about not just what he did as an individual soldier, in his case, administering inoculations and relief to the war-torn and maimed. It is also about the war he was in. That frames his perspective and his responsibility. Perhaps, at some level, there is also appreciation of the role of luck in arranging for which war was his to fight, and the fact that moral luck is not itself equitable. My experience is that my dad’s worries are shared by many of the soldiers I have interviewed, whether they are engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, or served in Bosnia or Vietnam. They carry on their shoulders the burden of the wars they fight, and not just their individual conduct in those wars. But the debate is often internal and for many, it has never been fully verbalized or articulated. I have found that soldiers and veterans are willing to open up because they hope


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talk will help make sense of their moral responsibilities and the responsibilities of those in command. And they hope talk will help heal. Philosophers often miss this inner debate. And it’s not just because they don’t talk to soldiers. It is, in part, because of a long philosophical tradition that casts morality in terms of our praise and blame of others: the address is ‘second personal,’ to use philosophers’ jargon.23 A conversation between McMahan and a soldier who fights for an unjust cause might go like this: ‘Your participation is unjustified. But because you may have been coerced, deceived, understandably afraid of the authority of the state, or because of the unfeasibility of trials (who would conduct such a trial? certainly not the state which demands you fight, and if the trials fall under the jurisdiction of international courts, then not in their courts, given their already overextended dockets and underfinanced budgets), you are not held individually responsible or culpable. Given mitigating factors and pragmatic consequences of holding you, and others like you, liable, you are excused for your participation.’ But soldiers may have a reply. They might respond to McMahan by saying, ‘But even though I think that this war is immoral, I don’t know it. I worry about it, but I also worry about deserting my country in its time of need. I am a professional soldier. You have spent a lot of money and resources ensuring I would be ready when you called. You trust me to be there. What if I thought the call to war was just, but I still had my doubts? If I then said ‘I won’t go, unless I am certain the cause is just’ what, Dr. McMahan, would you say to me then? Would you honor me for my dissent? Or condemn me for being a coward? More importantly, what would history say? This is what I worry about when I worry about whether a war is just or not. I don’t just worry that the war might be unjust. If that were the case, my doubts might be enough to get me to quit. I also worry that it is just. If that were the case, giving in to such doubts would be an act of cowardice.’ This, in fact, is one soldier’s reply. I have quoted here Army Lt. Col. Tony Pfaff, at the time of this conversation, the military attaché to Kuwait, and a Ranger and infantry officer who has served twice in the current conflict in Iraq, advising Iraqi military police, and earlier, leading a company in the first Gulf War. Undoubtedly, he is more philosophical than many, and indeed, writes on issues of just war [23] For a recent account, see: Steven Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2006.

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and military ethics. (I disclose here that he is a Ph.D. student at Georgetown whom I supervise.) Still, his remarks voice something implicit in many soldiers’ minds. And that is that moral accountability for taking part in a particular war is part of a larger inner moral debate often framed in terms of virtue and cowardice, certainty and doubt about cause, obligation to fellow soldiers and to a country. Many soldiers I have spoken to hold themselves accountable for the wars they fight in, whether expressed in the fact that they feel proud or tainted, accomplished or disillusioned, compromised or angry. The feelings are typically mixed and complicated. Some try to compartmentalize their portion of war as a way of fending off more complicated feelings. It may be true that traditional just war theory is too limiting, because it too neatly pries apart cause from conduct. But it is also too limiting because it doesn’t invite us to look at soldiers’ own struggles with what they are asked to fight for. As a public that sends its citizen soldiers to war, it is our public duty to understand better, and help heal, their inner wars.

III. Tainted Bob Steck got his greetings to go to Vietnam a few days after he turned 26. At that point, he was too old to be drafted, but the letter from his Texas draft board had been postmarked before his birthday. Officially, he was still eligible. ‘There was a sense of the absurd,’ Bob said. ‘It was 1970, and I was against the war at the time.’ He had recently finished graduate course work in philosophy at Yale and was teaching at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. He even hired the firm of Boudin, Rabinowitz, and Standard, New York attorneys well-known at the time for their opposition to the war. The strategy was to test his orders to go to war as illegal, based on the fact that the war was illegal. ‘It was a way of trying to bring cause to the courts.’ The case didn’t go very far, and ultimately he faced, as many drafted did, an existential crisis. Canada was not much of an option for him. It was jail or going to the Army: ‘I decided to go to the Army because I didn’t think it was a one-step inference from ‘I don’t believe in this war’ to ‘I won’t serve in this war.’ I reasoned, if I don’t go, someone else will, who is maybe younger without my resources or someone who would be less likely to keep his wits and be more tempted to commit atrocities. It was very difficult, obviously. Maybe it was all rationalization. I never was entirely confident with my decision. Also my dad had died five years earlier, and my mother


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was on her own. My going to jail would have been terribly hard on her.’ Bob Steck served in Vietnam for a little less than a year as a radio operator with the Army Air Cavalry (‘A’ Troop, 3/17), keeping networks open so that helicopter teams could communicate with each other. Back then his light brown wavy hair fell onto his forehead, and he sported a thick brown mustache that matched his tortoiseshell specs. In one picture, taken in Quan Loi in 1971, he looks youthful in his fatigues, sleeves rolled up, seated on a pile of sandbags at a sentry post, with his rifle and cigarette in hand. I first met Bob Steck in 2005 at a reading of my book, Stoic Warriors, at Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in northwest D.C. During the question/answer session, he was one of the first to speak. Now in his early 60’s, Bob briskly stepped up to the mike, but then choked with emotion as he tried to talk. When he regained his composure, what followed was a fairly dry academic question: ‘Can you distinguish the justness of a war from the justness of a warrior?’ he asked. But it was clear that there were layers underneath. I hadn’t addressed the issue in my talk, so I was bit taken aback. As I paused, he offered his own answer. ‘Those of us who became anti-war veterans about Vietnam used to insist that we could—that we must—distinguish the war from the warrior.’ Some thirty-five years after his war in Vietnam, Bob had to believe that the cause for which he fought, and his conduct in fighting, were separate if he was to make peace with himself.24 Still, believing that was not easy. As I was to learn later, through many conversations with Bob over the last several years, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led him and scores of other Vietnam vets to relive some of their worst war trauma. Some have returned to therapy; others, including Bob, have regularly visited hospitals, like Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C., to share their own hard won lessons with returning, war-torn soldiers. (One such vet who has been public about his returning depression is Max Cleland, former Senator from Georgia and a decorated Vietnam veteran and triple amputee.)25 In Bob’s own case, what weighs heavily is a felt impotence at not being able to save soldiers from the suffering he went through. [24] Drawn from numerous ongoing conversations with Robert Steck between June 2005-to January 2009. [25] He spoke publically about the resurge of his symptoms of post war trauma at a discussion after the premier of Sean Huze’s play ‘Sandstorm,’ about Marines in Iraq, Fall 2005, Alexandria VA.

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This was on his mind as I interviewed him in February 2007 at my office at the Woodrow Wilson Center in downtown D.C. ‘I think my works and days are kind of marinated in a sort of melancholy,’ he said soberly. He himself had felt betrayed by World War II veterans who did not really tell him the truth about going to war—what it feels like, what it requires of soldiers, and what it does to them. The commitment he has carried since Vietnam, and his activism in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, is not to betray a future generation of soldiers. Bob reflects back to an incident early in his military career that was formative. He was standing in chow line in basic training when a drill sergeant ‘came down’ hard on an African-American soldier for being dressed sloppily. ‘He kicked the hell out of his leg and then kicked him again when the guy flinched. … I was just livid,’ says Bob. But maybe that’s how you have to make an army, he rationalized. Maybe that’s how you have to prepare for ‘the contours of what combat was really like.’ But the anger really never subsided, and with it the resentment that he had been kept in the dark about the true price of combat: ‘Why in heaven’s name didn’t the combat veterans from the Second World War come back and tell us, even though theirs was a war worth doing: “Hey folks, here are the prices of this kind of thing. We don’t go into this stuff lightly. We don’t go into wars of choice. We don’t go in on a bet or a theory. We go in if we have to stop Nazi Germany.” Why didn’t they tell us? So one of the things I sort of resolved for myself standing in that chow line out in Fort Lewis, Washington, was that I’m, not going to let people forget. I am not going to let this be just passed over.’ Returning to the present, he says with disbelief, ‘I thought we had talked enough. I thought we had talked enough. I thought we had talked so much people had gotten tired of it. I thought at least they knew.’ Bob Steck is visibly anguished about his own generation’s ultimate failure to inoculate future generations of soldiers. He is a man of strong moral sensibilities, well-read, knowledgeable, and an activist. (He has returned to Vietnam several times to heal himself and fellow vets, on one occasion, riding on a bike tour from Hanoi to Saigon on a tandem with George Brummell seated behind, a vet who lost his eyesight from an explosion during the war.) Over the past 35 years, Bob has not taken his mission lightly. Part of the anguish comes from the sense of political impotence, but also from the underlying fact that he can’t psychologically or morally fully separate him-


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self from the war he fought. Wars and warriors don’t easily come apart, even if they do in some theoretical formulation. Shortly after Veteran’s Day, 2007, Bob told me in a phone conversation that he had gone down to the Vietnam Memorial to commemorate the day. At the time, I was trying to understand the notion of shame some soldiers feel for their engagement in war and so we began to talk about that. In his case, he said, the predominant feeling wasn’t shame, but a sense of taint. ‘We all felt a sense of taint,’ even those who were in the nursing corps who were ‘on the side of the angels in that they did not carry weapons.’ Steck tells me that Michael Herr puts his finger on the feeling in his famous memoir of his years as a war correspondent in Vietnam. ‘I went to cover the war, but the war covered me.’26 Taint implies contamination by what’s toxic. In the Vietnam era, returning soldiers sometimes met jeering crowds who yelled ‘baby killer ‘ and ‘murderer,’27 even though the enlightened public, and probably many of the jeerers, knew well that not all returning soldiers committed those atrocities and that many (such as Bob) fought hard to prevent them.28 Still, honorable soldiers felt vulnerable to the criticism, for they viewed the shaming remarks as not only about how they fought the war, but that they fought the war. Being blamed for conduct was a way to really get at the fact that they fought at all. The soldiers were held, in some way, complicit, even if the preponderance of public criticism was reserved for those higher up, in particular, the civilian administration.29 By fighting in Vietnam, the soldiers had become tainted. Taint is a feeling seldom discussed in the philosophical or psychological literature. Researchers write about moral feelings like guilt and shame, remorse and regret, indignation and moral protest. Some with a more legal bent write about complicity. Taint is rarely mentioned. So just what does it mean when Bob tells me that he feels tainted? [26] Michael Herr, Dispatches, Knopf, New York, 1977 [27] From testimony of a veteran speaking at the Vietnam War Memorial, Washington DC, Nov. 11, 2007 and covered by NPR ‘All Things Considered.’ [28] Here I am reminded of Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who stopped the My Lai massacre and yet was viewed by many fellow soldiers, long after the war, as a traitor. For my interviews with Thompson, see Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005, 64; 93-95; 105-107. [29] See: H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, Harper Collins, New York, 1997.

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‘Taint’ implies pollution, staining, fouling. There is a kind of guilt by association. If complicity figures in the account, it is often of the mildest kind. In Bob’s case, it’s clear that as a young soldier he was far from the center of power, where decisions were made and policies formulated for why the war is fought or continued. He was a draftee, who went opposed to the war. Like most foot soldiers, he participated at the extreme periphery of a collective end and is, by any measure, far less complicitous than the top civilians and brass who call the shots.30 Yet Bob feels tainted—not corrupted or sullied. Those words are too strong, and not his. In his mind, there is a passive yet pervasive association with a policy that is wrong or unjust. The tinge spreads, irrespective of his moral protest. What’s toxic permeates. In that physical metaphor, taint fills the pores so that cleansing and purification seem impossible. Bob tells me the taint was reinforced when people would later say to him as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement, ‘you are not in a position to criticize the war, since you fought in it.’ Taint mingles with the shame of internalizing something you don’t really believe but that ‘has traction’—that you are guilty of hypocrisy. Some fellow veterans worried precisely about the risks of open dissent. So he noted, veterans who did not join the movement (perhaps some of whom would later become part of the ‘Swift Boat’ attack against John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid) may have pri[30] On this, see Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2000, esp. 157-65 and his helpful spatial metaphor for assessing an onlooker’s response to others’ relative complicity in a collective end. Kutz considers a vice president of sales, an engineer, and a shipping clerk who are part of an ethically irresponsible, international arms company that manufactures and sells mines. Though all participate in the end, the vice president more directly and knowingly engages with the harm, since he arranges for sales and lines up a schedule of production. In the spatial model, he is at the core of the activity and identifies with its success and uses. He must promote the product, advertise its benefits and deflect social criticism. Even if ethically conflicted, in role, as an effective vice president of sales, he backs the product, views it as reliable, and is its spokesman. The engineer is further from the core. He needn’t really care if the mines are ultimately sold, though does care that the individual products he makes work and are technically well designed. The shipping clerk is at the extreme periphery. He puts objects in boxes without a commitment to sales or technically sound products. Granted, says Kutz, all have ‘participatory intentions’ in the collective end that define their engagement. But given the workers’ different functional roles with respect to the product, as onlookers, we weigh their participation differently. While a shipping clerk may be criticizable for compartmentalization or indifference if he doesn’t think much about the ultimate end of his labor, in terms of participation in the collective end, he is not as complicitous as those at the core.


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vately felt that they fought an ill-conceived and unjust war, ‘but did not want to make it public because it would cast shame on veterans’ for being less than patriotic. As Bob Steck describes it, the taint comes from outside in. Others (and the circumstances of his war) stick it on him. Yet it sticks. This veteran was, and forever will be, part of a war he didn’t believe was just. There will always be that felt lack of confidence about his moral position for agreeing to fight. ‘Maybe it’s all rationalization?’ he muses ‘I will probably go to my grave not knowing if I made the right decision.’ But his own doubts get exacerbated when others see him as part of an undifferentiated force prosecuting a misguided war. He is implicated, not for some specific action or accident. Rather, he is implicated because of bad, circumstantial luck that has caught him in its snare. In a different war, in a different generation, he might have come home from war feeling pride and a sense of courage for putting his life on the line for the sake of what is noble. Instead, because of the war he fought, he feels contaminated. His assessment of himself, and how he views others assessing him, is wrapped up with moral luck and a kind of coerced choice. 31

IV. Suckered Dereck Vines is a veteran of Bosnia and Iraq who served in the Army Reserves in both wars. He is pensive and soft-spoken, and there is a sadness you can read in his eyes and voice. Now in his early fifties, he deployed to Iraq at 45, with the 404th Reserve Unit in Fort Dix, New Jersey, as a civil affairs sergeant in an intelligence unit. He retired at the rank of Army Sergeant First Class. I first met Dereck at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he was on the technical support staff and had come to my aid many times when my phone or computer acted up. When he learned about my project on soldiers, he asked to sit down with me to chat. We talked in the spring of 2007 several times, and again, several times, in late 2008. Each time we spoke, Dereck compared his experiences in Iraq and Bosnia. Bosnia was a war he could believe in and that he felt good about being part of. He went feeling he had a mission, and had come home feeling proud. ‘In Bosnia we had a purpose. The Serbs were about to wipe out the Bosnian people altogether. If we or the UN hadn’t stepped in, it would have been a catastrophe,’ he says. The war in Afghanistan, too, had a mission he said he could rally around and did when his unit was put on an alert roster to go there. ‘I felt the [31] I thank Ryan Balot for bringing this important point to my attention.

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importance of the mission in Afghanistan, to try to find Bin Laden and to get back at them for their attacks. Otherwise we’d be suckered. We’d let them just get us.’ But orders shifted and his unit was deployed to Iraq. ‘Iraq was the complete opposite of Bosnia,’ he says. It was a war he just couldn’t believe in. The word ‘suckered’ jumped out at me. It had come up before, the first time we talked. In fact it was the theme of that interview. In going to Iraq and in serving there, he felt ‘suckered.’ Dereck wasn’t talking about a public that had been suckered or blinded into going into war. And he wasn’t analyzing a history of America or other countries ‘suckered’ into war by blind patriotism or the beating of the war drums in effective propaganda.32 He was talking painfully about his own feelings, the notion that that his life might have been squandered on a pretext, for a mission whose purpose he couldn’t believe in and still believes was ill-formed: ‘The whole thing with the weapons of mass destruction. Did we ever find any? And that’s what we always say—did we ever find any weapons of mass destruction? All of the chemicals and stuff that Iraq was supposed to have—and we never found any … . It’s just like: Ok, I’ve been suckered.’ ‘I try not to think about it,’ Dereck says in his quiet, but angry voice. ‘The more and more you hear in the commissions, that this was false information and that was false information. You’re sitting there. You’re just like, ‘OK, I was almost killed. I was almost not here and they haven’t really given me a clear reason.’ You hate to be against the President and I don’t care if he’s a Republican or a Democrat or whatever. But for your upper echelon to really sucker you— that’s kind of a hard pill to swallow.’33 What Dereck Vines means by being suckered is that he feels duped, deceived, toyed with by those in charge to whom he has sworn fidelity and for whom he has put his life on the line. To be sure, like many soldiers, Vines is adamant about his patriotism: ‘When you are feeling these thoughts [of being suckered], pride in America and the uniform—that’s what kind of holds you together,’ he says. But what fractures is the sense of betrayal, the feeling of being abandoned, misled, unsupported, manipulated, by those who have put you in danger’s way. Even those terms are too abstract to

[32] For a discussion of American propaganda and the beating of war drums, I am grateful to Richard Rubenstein of George Mason University in a lecture delivered to Kehila Chadasha on Oct. 5, 2008. [33] Interview by author with Dereck Vines, May 31, 2007.


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capture Vines’ feeling. The betrayal is raw and existential: ‘I was almost killed. I was almost not here.’ The words are a soldier’s shorthand for traumatic moments imprinted in his psyche, in his case, images of picking up and bagging body parts of buddies caught in a fire bombing, of watching his convoy get severed by a bomb that thrust him against the windshield of his armored vehicle, of being medevaced, half-conscious, to a hospital. The memories are seared in his mind and return intrusively. But the trauma is exacerbated by moral anguish and resentment that his trust was misplaced and abused. The shock and the disappointment are tangible as he speaks. To be suckered by ‘your upper echelon,’ (by top military and civilian leaders, he means) is almost unfathomable to him. ‘You serve your country,’ he says passionately. ‘You don’t want to let your fellow soldiers down.’ In his case, there was never the thought that he wouldn’t go. But still he felt duped. He wanted and felt morally owed wiser leadership and better analysis of the intelligence from the military and government agencies. The teachings of Vitoria are relevant here: A leader cannot examine the causes of war on his own, nor can an insulated coterie of advisors. The likelihood for mistake is too great. The wisest and most reliable must deliberate and provide counsel. Again, in Vitoria’s words, ‘If such men can by examining the causes of hostility with their advice and authority avert a war which is perhaps unjust, then they are obliged to do so.’34 Betrayal is a word not to be taken lightly in military contexts. If we turn to the OED for instruction, the first definition is ‘a treacherous giving up to an enemy.’ Next is ‘a violation of trust or confidence, an abandonment of something committed to one’s charge.’ The definition of the verb ‘to betray’ again puts the military context first: ‘to give up or place in the power of an enemy by treachery or disloyalty.’ The military connotation is suggestive, but it doesn’t tell the full story. It is not, at least in Dereck’s case, that he is given up to the enemy. Rather, what counts as the betrayal for him is that a sacred bond of trust is broken, a ‘sacred band,’ like those Plato and Plutarch write about founded on military honor, loyalty, and a sense of shame.35 For some, the betrayal is experienced as the rupture of the [34] Vitoria, op. cit.,’ 2.2-3, Par. 24. [35] Plutarch describes the ‘Sacred Band’ founded by Gorgides at Thebes, around 378B.C. Within this sacred band, homoerotic ties bind individual couples. (See also Phaedrus’s speech in Plato’s Symposium on to an ‘army made up of lovers’ 178d). But the motivational point goes beyond homoerotism: honor, loyalty, and

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most basic caring bond: There is a rupture of the family that a soldier becomes part of when he or she joins the military. The reciprocal caring from those cared for and served breaks down. The betrayal is experienced profoundly, as perfidy. Here it is critical to remember that bonding in the military is not just horizontal, toward comrades, brothers and sisters in arms, though that undoubtedly is the most intense attachment. Bonding also runs vertically, up chains of command: Soldiers give allegiance and respect to superiors with the trust that that service and sacrifice won’t be squandered. Their trust is betrayed when a country and its soldiers are duped into going to war.36 The attachment element in military life cannot be overestimated. Many young recruits, just out of high school, join the military in search of a new family. What they have at home may no longer satisfy or for some, never did. They want new role models that give them something to believe in and idealize. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves where there is community and caring, if you are willing to work for it. Others don’t so much seek a new family as find it through the radical socialization process of boot camp. Markers of old attachments (first name, easy contact with home and family, civilian clothes and hair, comfort objects and personal styles) get effaced and replaced with new attachments and look alike images that stamp the recruit with a new family identity. Boot camp is about molding a new self, but also about becoming a part of a new family, with all its aspirations and promise of care. The Marines’ semper fi, again, speaks volumes. To be betrayed by this new family is devastating, especially for those who have sought it out because of earlier betrayals or traumas within their families of origin. Nancy Meyer, a psychotherapist who has treated scores of patients at Walter Reed Hospital for some five and a half years, 25-30 hours a week, commented anecdotally once, that in her experience, there is often an element of betrayal experienced in the war trauma of those who are wounded psychologically by war. The attachment bond has been snapped, and with it, the belief that fidelity ought to protective shame and fear of dishonor keep soldiers fighting. See Plutarch trans. John Dryden, Pelopidas, 14ff. in Plutarch’s Lives Vol.2, ed. A.H. Clough, Little Brown & Co., Boston, 1906 and Thomas K. Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003 for sources; also Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999 for further discussion of Roman ideas of masculinity. [36] I am grateful to Tony Pfaff for help in strengthening the point.


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be reciprocated by support and care and empathic leadership. It is a betrayal often not easily resolved, given the distance between ranks, and the implausibility of ‘working it out’ in the way individuals do in healthy families or marriages, face-to-face. The betrayal may just have to be accepted as a fact, a bitter fact. The soldier’s implicit wish, voiced by Dereck Vines, is that commanders not betray subordinates’ willingness to serve and make sacrifices. When commanders do, they act with treachery and perfidy. Dereck went to war as a graying NCO. He was ‘Pops’ to his troops, no naive, wide-eyed boy. Yet he feels suckered, taken for a fool. He is angry at others but also angry at himself for being gullible. If called again, knowing what he now knows, he tells me he’d still go. That is what he signed up for. Like many enlisted and reserved, he is willing to fight because he accepted that responsibility as part of his job. But still he feels betrayal—a sense that his willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country and comrades ought to be mirrored by gravest of responsibility from higher-ups. If betrayal is about the rupture of trust, perfidy and treachery are about the risk and danger to which abuse of trust exposes one. Shakespeare’s Henry V again makes the point, but this time from the perspective of the compassionate commander. If I live to see the king ransomed, says Henry in disguise to his troops, ‘then I will never trust his word again.’ Henry projects his wishes onto the soldiers: He desperately wants them to have faith in him, to believe that he won’t be ransomed or lose the war. He wants them to feel that it will not have been wrongheaded or in vain, and that they will not feel exploited or expendable. But the soldiers can’t and won’t share the luxury of his lofty fantasy. They are, after all, just subjects. Ransomed or unransomed won’t make a hoot of difference once they are dead, they say. They are (or in death will have been) just the king’s instruments. But Henry wishes they were more and he were less. In the shadow of soliloquy, he deflates his own ‘farced’ (stuffed) pomp and title that inspires ‘awe and fear in other men.’ Still, deflation in status is just for the sake of a ‘proud dream,’ a wishful fantasy that he might share the weight of his responsibility for war. But the moral reality is that he remains the king and calls the shots. At the end of the day, the soldiers still take his orders and die for his causes. They can only hope that their faithful service is not abused. Dereck Vines carries that feeling of being someone else’s instrument. What smarts is that he is no king’s subject. He votes. He’s informed. He now works in a Washington policy institute, whose

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head he much admires and feels special affection toward—Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana Congressman who with James Baker headed up the Iraq Study Group in 2006 to advise on American policy in Iraq. Vines never uses the word ‘tainted,’ as Bob Steck does. For Vines, Iraq is not toxic in the way Vietnam felt and feels to many veterans of that war. Vines was not a draftee. He did not feel coerced to serve in the way many draftees did going to Vietnam. He went willingly, as part of his duty. But he still felt ‘suckered.’ That feeling of being lied to and of letting himself be lied to is what tears him up.

V. Disillusioned Hank McQueeny is a retired naval officer who served in Vietnam and always wanted to be in the Navy.37 Of all the military uniforms, Navy summer whites, officer summer whites, ‘dress whites with the stiff neck and the bridge cap,’ were those he loved best. He also loved battleship grey ‘and the smell of the ship oils and resins and paint and the sea all mixed together.’ As a young boy, he could remember himself saying, ‘By God, if I’m in the service when I grow up, I want to be in the Navy.’ Growing up in Boston, there was also a local naval hero—John F. Kennedy, the young lieutenant and captain of the PT-109 that was ripped apart by a Japanese destroyer in August 1943 in the Solomon Islands. For Hank, the Navy called. And so in 1960 after graduating from Boston College, Hank McQueeny was commissioned, went to intelligence school, survived simulated POW training, and was assigned as a junior officer to a squadron in fleet. By 1964, he was aboard the USS Ticonderoga in the shores of Southeast Asia. But it wasn’t long before disillusionment set in. His disillusionment centered on the ruse that led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 5, 1964) in which Congress, in a near unanimous vote, authorized President Lyndon Johnson to use ‘all necessary measures’ to repel armed attacks against U.S. forces in Vietnam. 38 The surrounding incidents are well-known (and were narrated to me earlier by another officer on board the Ticonderoga, Vice. Adm. Jim Stockdale, who one year after the Tonkin incident was shot down in Vietnam and held as a POW for 7½ years in the Hanoi

[37] From an interview with Hank McQueeny and author on February 16, 2006. [38] The vote was unanimous in the House, and in the Senate only two Senators voting against it—Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska.


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Hilton).39 The circumstances are these, as Hank narrates the events: Two U.S. destroyers were ordered to enter the claimed sovereign waters of North Vietnam. ‘The idea was to prompt the North Viet-

namese to send small vessels… —the little fast PT boats—against the destroyers to have them back away from their port. … That would be an excuse, a reason to accelerate the war.’

From the Ticonderoga, two A-1’s (single seat aircrafts) were sent overhead to inspect the damage. ‘But they saw no PT boats. They saw nothing’ and reported as much through their command structure up to the Pentagon. All they saw was ‘the flash of the weapons aboard the destroyers shooting aimlessly against the presumed target.’ As one of the skippers of the aircraft told Hank at the time, ‘Hank, there’s nothing up there, no shit, nothing up there.’ In Hank’s sober words, ‘They said that the ships were attacked, falsely said that, and they used that as a ruse, manufactured a ruse, to thereby enlarge the war. That was a big disillusionment … . Everybody on the ship knew the truth, or practically everybody,’ even if many accepted it as the cost of moving the war forward. But for Hank, the reality of what happened loomed large in his consciousness. His disillusionment is a brooding anger in being deceived, toyed with, made party to a deception. The treachery is a kind of triple abuse of respect and dignity:40 you are lied to (or at least what you know to be true is denied) in order to play a role in a public deception (the ruse) which then puts you at great risk (the war’s acceleration through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). ‘I was disillusioned. I thought, I still think, that this country ought not to be above ordinary standards.’ From then on, as he puts it, ‘there was just a sense of going down a slippery slope real quickly.’ His way of coping, like that of many soldiers in all wars, was self-medication and avoidance: ‘We did a lot of drinking, carousing, a lot of running around. We played bridge.’ Drugs would come later in the war, after Hank’s time. The general tenor of this narrative is familiar to those for whom the Vietnam era was formative. But the point that emerges over and over again in my interviews is that combatants internalize their conflicts about the justification of war, suck it up, truck on, keep fight-

[39] For an interview with Stockdale, see Sherman, op. cit., Ch.1 and The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers, W.W. Norton, New York, 2010, Ch. 6. [40] I am indebted to Alisa Carse for discussion of this point.

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ing, and perhaps only later, if they are reflective and empathically supported, expose their anger and ambivalence. Like Dereck Vines, Hank McQueeny clings to the uniform as something that idealizes his service and helps him tolerate his disillusionment. ‘I used to enjoy my uniform,’ he says tenderly. ‘I used to greatly enjoy my uniform. I still have dreams about my uniform.’ He confides on a lighter note that he once failed to show up in his dress uniform because he refused to spend a hundred dollars on a ceremonial sword that was a mandatory part of the dress code. He chuckled as he relived the moment of youthful defiance: ‘I stood up the guy who wanted me to wear a sword to the party!’ Musing about this and his mention of dreams, I asked if he ever dreamt about his sword. ‘No, that’s too phallic,’ he shot back. ‘I never dreamed about that!’ Of course, in Hank’s case, if there weren’t the uniform, there wouldn’t be the disillusionment. For what he is saying is that there is a still an important place in him for the military at its best—for the ideal of the military and the protection and support it represents, captured for him in the gleam of bright summer whites. Holding onto that idealized object removes some of the taint, alienation, and loss, in service for a cause he fears may not have been worth it, and in service to leaders who may not have deserved his trust. To my ears, Hank McQueeny’s disillusionment is conceptually morally and psychologically distinct from Dereck Vines’s feeling of being suckered. True, Hank feels betrayed, but what hurts most is the deflation of himself and his ideals. What he imagined he stood for in his whites got drained of meaning and with it his image of self, defined by commitment to worthy public service and sacrifice. The disillusionment is the deflation that follows upon the betrayal. It is that deflated self that is so hard to reconcile with who he envisions he was in uniform, and who he was supposed to be.

VI. The Cesspool of Naples As a public, we tend to idealize World War II and have a tendency to think that American soldiers and Allies who fought in that war, by and large, did not have to struggle with the anguished feelings I have just been documenting. They went to war rallying not just for each other, but for a cause that was popular. The evil of Nazism and Hitler’s tyranny was real. Defending homeland and allies against attack was justified. The internal doubts and conflicts were, on the whole, fewer. Perhaps that is so for most. But consider one soldier’s voice from that war. The voice is from John Horne Burns’ under-read


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World War II novel, The Gallery.41 Written in 1947, it is more memoir than novel. The setting is Northern Africa and Naples, and the ‘gallery’ in the title is the Galleria Umberto Primo, a bombed out glass arcade that was ‘the unofficial heart of Naples’ where Americans, British, and Neapolitans commingled in sin. Through Burns we see again the internal tensions soldiers experience in fighting wars that they have come to lose faith in. Though World War II is by most portrayed as a war to save the world from evil, Burns, writing with fresh eyes, just three years after the war, paints a picture that is not so noble. Whatever he felt going to war soon evaporated in war. Naples was a cesspool of soldiers selling their rations for an hour at a brothel, of child-pimps with their prostitutes, of Neapolitan ladies showing up en masse at a public concert in winter coats sewn up from purloined Army issue blankets, of Army freighters, tanks, and wheels of military vehicles stolen by a population that was bombed out and starving.42 This we might say is an indictment not of the cause of war, but of how it is prosecuted and the reality of post-bellum occupation. But it is also about cause. For Burns, a writer schooled at Andover and Harvard, the lofty rationale for World War II never fully stuck. What he saw daily was war’s corruption, ‘its annihilation of everything’ that ‘the sensitive, shy, and gentle’ stand for, and the fury of those who die, who leave ‘this life angry, but not hurt,’ some wrestling ‘with the larger issues’ when it is not even clear if they can read or write. 43 Many of the soldiers he writes about see themselves as participants in the grotesquerie and hold themselves liable. They are their own persons, not just marionette-servants of someone else’s decision to go to war. It is their war. It frames what they do and their engagement. To disconnect from their feelings about the war comes at too great a psychological price, though some will pay the price for the protection. Hal is a character in one of Burns’ ‘gallery portraits.’ He has crossed the Atlantic to arrive in the ‘gummy city’ of Oran, Algeria. He visits the bars, as he used to in New York, from Central Park to Greenwich Village. There, he had been a looking glass in which [41] I am grateful to Janet Spikes, head librarian at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, for bringing this work, as well as many others, to my attention. [42] See Fussell’s introduction to John Horne Burns, The Gallery, The New York Review of Books, New York, 2004. See also Lewis 2004. [43] Burns op. cit., 87-88.

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others could feel understood and enlightened. But here, after ten minutes, conversation with the ‘Joe’ next to him freezes in a subconscious sense of shared complicity that indicts them all: Hal found it difficult, after a few drinks, to look them straight in the eye. There was some vast and deadly scheme in which they were all working; only they didn’t know it. Hal himself had an inkling of what was upsetting him. Casting about for a rational explanation of why he felt so odd, he decided it was because the war was beginning to seep into his bones. This war was the fault of everyone, himself included. 44

To read Burns is to feel the nausea, booziness, loneliness, and fear young boy-men evince as they leave home for the first time and steam across the world. But it is also to feel the ache of searching to justify the violence of war with a worthy cause, a fine and noble end that will ensure that courage is genuine, as Aristotle might put it. And when such an end isn’t easily found (and when war sucked of its glory is seen at best as just the least immoral option), characters like Hal turn war inward and line up enemy positions inside. The corruption of soul becomes war’s collateral damage: ‘Something in him seemed to be chasing another part. Often this hunt between sections of himself became so vicious that he had to put his head between his hands, as a man with a hangover expects his heart to stop in the very next moment, and prays for even the distraction of a bowel movement.’45 Ghoulish incubi inhabit his mind ‘with no bodies or faces,’ scuttling around ‘squeaking in furry voices of doubt and doom.’ ‘Hal knew that actually they were playing with him— that each of these vague animals was himself in pieces.’46 But to know it was not to relieve the self-persecution and fragmentation. This is where deep conflicts about the reason for which a soldier fights can recede to an unsavory interior where a soldier turns the battle inward, and relives unresolved battles of betrayal, complicity, and taint. From ancient Greek and Roman philosophy forward to contemporary philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, the moral and psychological quest is often about becoming a unified or harmonized psyche, ‘wholehearted,’ the enemy ‘beat back’ at the gates, as Seneca puts it in a Stoic plea for tight self-control and hegemony. But for most of us, and certainly for soldiers who sometimes see them[44] Ibid., 77. [45] Ibid., 75. [46] Ibid., 78.


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selves as fighting others’ wars in large tyrannizing bureaucracies, Freud seems more convincing. Battles are turned inward. Psyches fracture and self-empathy with the warring parts can be in short supply. There is a sense of accountability for one’s part in collective ends, but also a sense of being manipulated, beyond easy control, to carry out others’ mistakes or deceptions. Soldiers are good at compartmentalizing, I’ve been told over and over. But as the above stories attest, conflicts about complicity and personal responsibility for participation in collective ends don’t just disappear. More often, they are displaced, deferred, put on hold until soldiers find the safety and trust needed to express personal doubts and torments.

Christopher Cordner

Ethics, Philosophy and Love I want to sketch a rather different ethical picture from the one that has for the most part been on the canvas in this conference so far. The first of my two related main themes is in effect a querying of philosophy as it has historically been brought to bear on ethics—or rather, a querying of philosophy practised in a certain way. That practice will be contrasted with (something like) Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, and I’ll indicate what I prefer in the latter conception.

I In the printed abstract of this talk I spoke of a sense of the absolute value of human beings. A Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy does not obviously entail the sense of any such value. In the second part of the talk I therefore want to say a bit more about how a sense of the absolute value of human beings might be acknowledged under that conception of philosophy. In particular, I want to show why I think such a sense cannot be given what philosophers usually mean by a ‘rational ground’—not just that it does not need such a ground, but that it cannot be given one, and that what blinds us to this is the sway of the practice of philosophy that I have criticised. Showing how this is so will involve saying why I think the most fundamental idea in ethics is love, and also why love has not been, and cannot be, fully acknowledged by the philosophical tradition I shall be querying. In his printed summary of the territory to be covered in the conference Hayden Ramsay wrote of ‘concepts and arguments formerly particular to Christian ethics as having been adopted within broader ethical debate’, and he mentioned ‘exceptionless moral norms, human nature and dignity, human rights, universal culture, tran-

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scendent happiness, moral truth, tradition, universal justice, respect for persons from conception to natural death, commitment and charity, reason and faith’. This is a simple historical observation, but I want to begin by highlighting something else. Christian thought and practice could hardly be better displayed than in Jesus as given to us in the Gospels. But if we consider Hayden’s list of important concepts of Christian ethics that have long informed ethical debate I don’t think there is one that Jesus ever uses. Why so? Well, an obvious and easy answer is that Jesus was a moral teacher rather than a moral philosopher, and the concepts Hayden listed are the province of the moral philosopher. That’s true, but we can then go on to ask how what moral philosophers do with those concepts helpfully adds to what we might learn from Jesus’s teaching. A common answer goes roughly thus: ‘... the moral concepts Hayden mentions (among others) are important for providing the conceptual basis for that teaching; they help articulate the rational structure underlying it. They may not be needed for us to learn from the teaching, but they are needed if (among other things) we are to satisfy ourselves intellectually about the ground—and therefore the reliability—of that teaching.’ Nearly every word in that response raises more questions than it answers, but let me give just one perspective on it. It is an interesting question why Christianity developed a theology, and more specifically a philosophical ethics. It was surely not inevitable that it do so. After all, Judaism did not. There is (as I understand it) no Judaic philosophy remotely comparable to Thomistic Aristotelianism—St Thomas Aquinas’s taking over of Aristotle’s philosophy to provide a rational articulation of Christian ethics. Spinoza was a Jew who was a philosopher; he was not a Jewish philosopher in the sense in which St Thomas was a Catholic philosopher. Maimonides is otherwise the best known of not many Jewish philosophers. There is a tradition of scholarly commentary on the Torah and Rabbinical ethical discussion, but no systematic theology or philosophical ethics akin to that of Catholicism. The need for a rationally articulated ground for ethics does not seem to be felt. What need or lack in Christianity, that was not felt as a need in Judaism, was answered to only with the development of a philosophical ethics? And did the Jews fail to feel that need because they missed something important about ethics that only philosophy could reveal? Of course Christianity’s link to philosophy was forged centuries before Aquinas. Professor Finnis referred in his talk to the Church Fathers in the 1st century opting for Philosophy over mythos

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to ‘justify’ their religion. Perhaps the need to provide a rational justification to their Roman overlords played a role in the decision; perhaps it was simply the still-pervasive Greek educational background of the Roman Empire in which the early Church had to operate—I don’t know. Perhaps there is some historical consensus among scholars on this, but in any case what happened in this regard would seem to be highly contingent. Christianity could have gone on without developing a distinctively philosophical framework. The life and teachings of Jesus might instead have remained its constant reference point, perhaps along with interpretation of the parables and with the Epistles—but without philosophical Christian ethics. But why these speculations? Because I think there is a serious question whether we would have been better off if ethics had never been subjected to philosophical reflection in the way it characteristically has been. This will draw the immediate retort: ‘What? You think it would have been better if we had never thought about ethics? Without such philosophical reflection our lives would be ethically chaotic, there would be no system in our responses, no security in our reliance on them, no knowledge of whether we were acting rightly or wrongly, no justification available for our decisions, either to us ourselves, or for us to put to others. As a matter of faith alone, ethics would then be very imperfectly integrated, indeed not integrated at all, into the intelligent living of a human life.’ But for reasons I have already indicated, little of this retort hits the mark. Its basic error lies in its equating ‘thinking about ethics’ with a certain sort of philosophical reflection. No-one, surely, would say that Jesus’s ethical life was (for example) chaotic or thoughtless or insecure, yet he did not engage in any of the activity that counts, in Catholic philosophical ethics, as philosophical ethical reflection. But the point applies to philosophical ethics generally of course, not just Catholic philosophical ethics. In other words, it would be simply wrong to say that without the philosophical tradition as it has for the most part actually developed, our ethical lives would have to be thoughtless or chaotic or insecure or shallow, or incoherent with the rest of human life. But that phrase ‘the philosophical tradition as it has for the most part actually developed’ rightly suggests that what I have been saying needs further development. What philosophy is, or should be, is itself a philosophical question. There have been and are different conceptions and practices of philosophy, and in raising the question of whether ethics would be better off without the accretions of phi-


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losophy, I have one particular conception of philosophy in mind. I want to say a little about it, and at the same time to distinguish it from another conception. The Pauline principle as it is commonly called—that one may not do evil though good may come of it—is close to the conviction Socrates expresses in the Gorgias (one of Plato’s dialogues) that he would never choose to do evil, come what may. (That is the directly personal form of Socrates’ conviction—a statement about what ‘he’ would choose; he also expresses the conviction impersonally by saying that ‘it is better’ to suffer evil than to do it.1) St Paul gives no philosophical argument for his ‘principle’. But Plato is a philosopher, and so it is generally supposed that he must provide a positive argument, at least on Socrates’ behalf, for the conviction in question—the more so if it is a conviction as utterly ethically fundamental as Socrates claims it to be. But I find no such argument in the Gorgias. Indeed, I think the whole bent of the Gorgias is in a very different direction. Polus and then Callicles, Socrates’ main interlocutors in the dialogue, are both shown to be astonished at the conviction Socrates expresses, and are derisively sceptical of it. Interestingly, I think it is clear from the dialogue that Plato, recording the activities of his teacher, is every bit as astonished as Callicles and Polus are, but without at all being derisively sceptical. And his astonishment reaches further than theirs. Plato is astonished also because Socrates not only asserted this conviction but very evidently also lived it in his own life—Plato knows that his readers will be aware that the dialogue was composed in the shadow of Socrates having died for his refusal to compromise on the conviction. But his astonishment is greater still because Socrates says nothing in positive justification of the conviction. This need not have been astonishing if the conviction were simply Socrates’ own: if we think someone’s conviction evidently false, we need not be surprised if that person has nothing to say in justification of it. But what is also clear from the dialogue is that Plato himself shared Socrates’ conviction, persuaded of its truth by the compelling example of it in the life of his teacher. And then he was astonished as a philosopher to discover both that he too could find nothing more to say in positive justification of it, and that this did not in the least undermine his conviction of its truth. [1]

Plato, Gorgias 469b-c has both the personal and the impersonal formulations. (Citations from several of Plato’s dialogues below will all be from the translations gathered in The Collected Dialogues of Plato eds Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1961).

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But the suggestion that Socrates gives no positive justification in the Gorgias2 for his conviction that it is better to suffer evil than to do it will be challenged. ‘Surely’, it may be said, ‘Socrates does defend his conviction against the attacks on it by Polus and Callicles.’ Yes he does, but showing them that their reasons for rejecting it lack force against him is not the same as positively justifying its ethical cogency to them. ‘But doesn’t Socrates also give positive arguments for his conviction? For example, he says that only a person who lives by the conviction can avoid the wretched condition of being “out of tune with … himself”.3 And this is a precursor of the Republic‘s characterisation of justice as “the harmony of the soul”.’4 But this is not in any straightforward sense a justification of its being better to suffer evil than to do it. Polus and Callicles are sceptical of that conviction, after all, precisely because they think that living by it will expose one to the risk of the most terrible harms—if, for example, refusing to do what is unjust costs you your life or reputation, or the life of your friends or family.5 Both of them therefore simply reject as absurd the suggestion that living by the conviction that it is better to suffer evil than to do it is a condition of avoiding the greatest wretchedness. The point is that only someone who already shares the conviction will believe this. But then the claim that only someone who lives by the conviction can avoid the wretched condition of being ‘out of tune with himself’ is hardly an argument in favour of accepting the conviction, or a positive justification of it. For surely any consideration that is to count as an argument in favour of a conclusion, or a positive justification of it, must be in principle capable of helping move a person towards acceptance of the conclusion. But the claim that only someone with Socrates’ conviction can be ‘in tune with himself’ cannot [2]

Even if I am right about the Gorgias, there remains the question whether in some later dialogues Plato aimed to provide such a justification. I am sceptical about that, but in any case my present focus is confined to the Gorgias.

[3]

See Gorgias 482b-c.

[4]

Plato, Republic 443d-e.

[5]

This is precisely the theme of Polus’s incredulous outburst at 473b-d. ‘What do you mean?’ he says to Socrates: ‘If a man is caught in a criminal plot to make himself tyrant, and when caught is put to the rack and mutilated and has his eyes burned out and after himself suffering and seeing his wife and children suffer many other signal outrages of various kinds is finally impaled or burned in a coat of pitch, will he be happier than if he escaped arrest, established himself as a tyrant, and lived the rest of his life a sovereign in his state, doing what he pleased, an object of envy and felicitation among citizens and strangers alike? Is this what you say is impossible to refute?’ Socrates’ response is: ‘Now you are trying to make my flesh creep, my noble friend, instead of refuting me’ (473d).


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help move anyone towards the conviction, since he will find no reason at all to believe the claim until he has embraced the conviction! Being aware of all this Plato is, as I said, astonished that there are no positive arguments for the truth of the Socratic conviction he finds inescapable. He is then astonished that he both himself accepts what Socrates expresses as the truth, and also recognises that philosophy —i.e. reason—cannot provide an underlying rational justification of it. One living the conviction can then of course articulate the coherence of a life lived in its light—as Socrates does when he says that only a person living this conviction can be ‘at one’ with himself—but that is not what philosophers have commonly meant by providing a ‘rational ground’ or rational justification for it.6 (It is another important feature of the dialogue that Callicles is never persuaded of the truth of Socrates’ conviction. True, he cannot answer Socrates’ arguments against him, and he lapses into a sulky silence, but the suggestion of the dialogue is that Callicles supposes only that he has been bested by a cleverer orator. Plato leaves it as a further, unanswered question what more Callicles needs—or better, what would need to happen to him, what change he would have to undergo—if he were himself to come to embrace Socrates’ conviction as his own. But one thing is clear: what he will need is not another philosophical argument, for that will take him no further than he is now.) While the Gorgias is clearly philosophy, if what I have been saying about it is right it is not in the business of providing what philosophers usually mean by a rational ground or justification of Socrates’ conviction. Well then, what is the dialogue doing? The full answer to this is complex, but one thing it is doing is helping clear away some obstacles to people being moved to think and live in just and good ways. These obstacles of course include straightforwardly ‘bad arguments’ but such arguments are commonly bound up with our having been gullible, or our having subscribed to rhetoric that is shallow, or narcissistically self-dramatising, or complacent, or banal, or thoughtless, or simply ritualistic and conventional. The Platonic practice of philosophy (just in the Gorgias for the moment) aims to return us to what is expressed in the Socratic conviction that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, so we may be more open to being moved truly to embrace it. If it succeeds in its aim, what goes on in the dialogue helps create the conditions, as it were, in which [6]

For another drawing of essentially this distinction, see G. A. Cohen, ‘Reason, Humanity and the Moral Law’ in Christine Korsgaard (with others), The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), pp 179-182.

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our being moved by that conviction may become the expression of a pure responsiveness to what is ethically compelling. (It may not succeed, of course, as it does not with Callicles.) Philosophy is, in Plato’s practice of it here, most fundamentally a spiritual discipline, devoted to the purification of the ways in which we are moved—or as we might also put that, a purification of our loving responsiveness to the world. I’ve mentioned only the Gorgias, but in fact I think what I’ve just been describing is characteristic of Plato’s dialogues—at least the early and middle ones. They go through ‘definitions’—in apparent pursuit of a logos, a philosophical account, of whatever is the subject of discussion—and leave us without one. What is going on here, when in different dialogues we are left without a logos of various ethical ideas—justice, courage, friendship, piety, etc7—and we are also told that virtue is knowledge? Are we meant to take the dialogues as indicating just that we have ‘so far’ not lighted on the correct essence? Surely not.8 Are we meant to infer that Plato is an ethical sceptic because he is implying there is no such knowledge to be had? No. What then? Well, here we need to take Plato’s Apology—his reconstruction of Socrates’ speech at his trial—seriously. There Socrates says that the only interpretation he could give to the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement that no-one was wiser than Socrates was that he alone ‘knew what he did not know’.9 This is a form of humility, enabling a person to respond more humbly, openly, truly, to the next circumstance in which he or she is ethically challenged. It is a crucial point that this humility does not entail ethicaI uncertainty or dithering. A key moment in the Apology is Socrates’ recounting of the occasion when as a member of the Assembly he alone refused the order to go and arrest Leon of Salamis because this would have been

[7]

Justice in the Republic, courage in the Laches, friendship in the Lysis, and piety in the Euthyphro. (The Republic does say that justice is harmony of the soul, but that is a very different kind of answer to the question ‘what is justice?’ from any of the putative logoi mooted and rejected in the Republic and the other dialogues mentioned.)

[8]

Though this does seem to be Gregory Vlastos’s view at least of Socrates: ‘His is the aggressive outreach, the indiscriminate address to all and sundry, of the street evangelist. If you speak Greek and are willing to talk and reason, you can be Socrates’ partner in searching, with the prospect that truth undisclosed on countless ages, might be discovered here and now, on this spot, in the next forty minutes, between the two of you.’ ‘The Socratic Elenchus’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol 1 (Oxford University Press 1983), p 34.

[9]

Plato, Apology 22d.


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a gross injustice.10 The reader is surely meant to attend to the conjunction of Socrates’ ethical conviction on that score with his wholly unironic acknowledgement that he ‘does not know’. And in pondering this conjunction, we are not meant to conclude that Socrates should withhold ethical conviction until he does have a philosophical logos for it. The philosophical discipline of coming to realise that one knows one does not know is also a spiritual discipline purifying one’s capacity for responsiveness to the world. Of course I can’t prove this sketch of a reading of Plato here. My smaller aim is rather to point to different possibilities within philosophy, and thereby to complicate a contrast I drew earlier—between the Jesus of the Gospels and philosophical ethics. This reading of Plato locates him very differently within philosophy from standard readings of him. I think it locates him closer to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein described his philosophy as ‘an assemblage of reminders’, seeking to return us to the ‘rough ground’,11 on which we live and move. There is a conception of philosophy which says that true philosophy takes us to the real foundation of what we do and think, and that because it is a ‘foundation’ this place is below, and therefore outside, the everyday world in which we live and move and have our being. It is a space accessible only to reason, and which we can occupy only because, as Professor George put it in his talk yesterday, we share with God the property of being, in our smaller way, an ‘uncaused cause’; and ‘reason’ is what instantiates that divine property in us. There is then an account to be given, and natural law theorists (among others) give it, of how our occupying that space is supposed to gel with our living of our lives on the rough ground above. For Wittgenstein this account is not needed because his philosophy does not—or perhaps one should say strenuously strives not12—to remove us elsewhere. I have so far been suggesting that it is possible to read Plato, close to the beginning of western philosophy, as already having a similar conception of philosophical practice.13 If what I said is right, the Gorgias hopes to help us clear away obstacles [10] Op. cit., 32c-e. [11] L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell 1953), paragraph 107. [12]

I think Wittgenstein believes that the temptation to ‘use’ philosophy thus to remove us elsewhere is close to inescapable.

[13] The early dialogues do not just contain unsuccessful searches for a logos, they also thematise this failure, thereby pointing us in a different direction from that search. Although this requires further argument, I think the co-presence of these

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to our being able to respond to the power of the living orientation to the world exemplified in Socrates, and partly crystallised in his conviction that he would never knowingly do evil, come what may. I’ve been speaking of Plato—giving an admittedly uncommon reading of him—in order to point up a different-from-usual conception of philosophy. But I fear that what I have been saying will still be too abstruse for many. Let me turn to more familiar ground. The moment Eve wondered ‘why should we obey God?’—giving that gloss on her readiness to listen to the temptation offered by the serpent—the space for a reflective answer to her question was opened.14 But of course that leaves it entirely open just what kind of answer might actually be given. One kind of answer might be: ‘ask no questions; just obey!’—or, conversely, ‘there is no need to obey’. A second kind of answer might be: ‘well, are you sure you attended fully to the demand when it was made? Have you perhaps been distracted from what it was, when you heard it, that led you without hesitation to obey it?’ And this answer might involve or include ‘assembling all sorts of reminders’ of what the experience of the demand was like, these reminders perhaps returning the questioner to an obedience which had somehow been shaken or put in question. A third kind of answer would consist in the provision of rationally justifying grounds of obedience (or of justification for there being no need to obey). The first kind of answer—‘ask no questions, just obey!’—is not a philosophical answer at all, but rather the rejection of philosophy, an attempt to cut off reflection before it begins. The second and third kinds of answer are both philosophical answers to the question, but of very different kinds. The second is recognisably akin to Wittgenstein’s philosophical answers, the third is an answer of the kind that lies at the heart of the western philosophical tradition.15 The fact that the Judaic ethical tradition is not philosophically articulated should be seen in light of this difference between the second and third kinds of answer. The potential for philosophy implicit in Eve’s question did not have to grow into the western philosophical tradition. And even given the Church Fathers’ opting in the first century for philosophy rather than mythos to ‘explain’ Christianity, still they might have gone on to take up Plato in the different way I described—a way that led, as it were, to Wittgenstein. That did not happen. If it had, then Christianity might have bypassed the development of the distinctive philosophical ethics we have inherited. If, sticking to the example of Eve, we were to ask what Wittgenstein


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thinks leads us astray in answers of the third kind—the provision of rationally justifying grounds—a short reply is that he thinks they cannot satisfy the impulse out of which the question they were supposed to answer, actually arose. So when Eve asks the question ‘why should I obey God?’, any answer whose rational persuasiveness leads her to do what God demands will by that very fact not count as an answer to that question. Why? Because she will then be obeying not God, but the requirements of reason. These requirements may or may not be may be a fine thing to obey, but they are not God. Now consider a different example: ‘Why shouldn’t we torture terror suspects?’ In his book Faithful Reason Professor Haldane says this about torture: The evil of torture does not lie solely nor for the most part in its effects, as if these might in some cases be outweighed by beneficial consequences. In the first instance torture is evil and thus morally prohibited because of what it is and not simply because of what it produces. To act that way is to attack a basic human good…14

The first two sentences say important things and I agree with them. My question is about the shift the final sentence introduces: ‘To act that way is to attack a basic human good.’ That is in my view a bit of philosophy that belongs to the third kind of answer I distinguished —that is, to the kind of philosophy that consists in the provision of rationally justifying grounds, not the kind that consists in the assembling of reminders—and I believe it leads us astray. On Professor Haldane’s view the real ground or substance of the evil of torture is, it seems, to be crystallised in this final sentence—although the sentence would of course belong to a fuller description of ‘basic goods’ and how they are to be integrated. We can diagnose what I believe goes wrong here this way. Knowledge, too, is held by Professor Haldane to be a basic good. Of course depriving people of knowledge can be a very serious business, but even a relatively trivial instance of it would satisfy Professor Haldane’s description of the rational ground of moral objection to torture—that it is an attack on a basic good.15 But something seems to have gone wrong if the supposedly deeper level of understanding to [14] J. Haldane, Faithful Reason (London: Routledge 2004), p 160. [15] Someone might see a gap between my speaking of ‘depriving’ someone of knowledge, and my then describing this as an ‘attack’ on a basic good, and might then suggest that only if the deprivation of knowledge was a really serious one would it count as an attack on the basic good of knowledge. But then—so the

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which philosophy takes us, with its rational justifications, dissolves the ethical difference between a relatively minor offence (depriving someone of some trivial knowledge) and the appalling violation of a human being that is involved in torture. Professor Haldane’s sentence then seems not only to have taken us no deeper in our understanding of the evil of torture, but actually to have distracted us from that understanding. Someone asks: ‘why should I obey the implicit ‘demand’ not to be tortured that I am confronted with in the vulnerable creature in front of me?’16 Professor Haldane’s sentence proposes a certain kind of philosophical answer to it. My challenge to the adequacy of this answer can then be put starkly: ‘This human being in front of you, perhaps naked, certainly defenceless: you mean that might not be enough to stay your hand from the thumbscrews, but the discovery that in torturing him you would be “attacking a basic human good” would be enough?’ That is supposed to be the answer that provides the ‘foundation’, the ‘rational ground’, for what is otherwise a ‘merely emotional’ response in someone who sees the victim and simply cannot torture? But the impossibility of torturing a human being is the ground, there is nowhere deeper to go. And the sense that something has gone wrong in the scenario I just described —that rather than taking us to the ‘real ground’ of the moral impossibility of torturing it leads us away from that impossibility—suggests not only that a rational ground of the philosophical kind is not needed, but also that it cannot be had. For no ‘ground’ of that kind seems adequate to answer to that sense of the terribleness of torture that the ground is meant to sustain. I’ve singled out Professor Haldane’s formulation here, but many other familiar formulations also fail in the same way. So some philosophers say that the really deep reason it is wrong to torture is that the victim is treated merely as a means and not as an end-in-himself; and others say that the really deep reason is that torture is a violation of human dignity. But once again, the idea that those reasons lay bare suggestion would continue—we really are much closer to a parallel with the case of torture. There is something in this suggestion, but in my view not something that cuts against the point I am making. For the suggestion ascribes weight to the difference between a good being ‘attacked’ and its merely being ‘undermined’ (or its availability being reduced); and the question then is whether that weight can be made good sense of by the kind of view Professor Haldane espouses. I think it cannot, but certainly there is more to say about the question. [16] Perhaps what is at issue could be crystallised in other terms. Crystallising it this way sustains a parallel with Eve’s situation. This question, like Eve’s, reflects an implicit acknowledgment of the situation that has prevailed until now: obedience to God in Eve’s case, and ‘obedience’ to not torturing in the other.


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what must be doing the real work in staying someone’s hand from the torturer’s thumbscrews if that is to be the expression of an ethically sound response strikes me as bizarre.17 Recently, Professor Raimond Gaita spoke in a television program about torture. I was struck by the fact that everything he said in passionate opposition to torture, consisted of ‘assembling reminders’. For example: he mentioned rightly that many people say that ‘the world changed on 9/11’ and that this key event opened up the question whether torture might sometimes be permissible—to prevent such terrible deeds. But as Professor Gaita then went on to say, the originators of the international prohibition of torture knew full well about the perpetration of such deeds: they were well aware of evil deeds on the scale of 9/11, and they proposed an absolute ban on torture in the face of that awareness. So we need to shake ourselves and ask what it shows that so many people now take the deaths on 9/11 as opening up the question about torture. That was the gist of what Professor Gaita said. It is not an argument against torture in the mode of traditional philosophy—providing a rationally justifying ground. It is rather a reminder, something aiming to lead us back to a sober critically reflective sense of where we are—back to the ‘rough ground’ of our lives among others. Or to put it differently, Gaita’s way of proceeding here undertakes to show why ‘the reasons you give (for example, that 9/11 provides a good reason for reconsidering the ban on torture) are not good reasons’, just as Socrates undertook to do this with Polus and Callicles. But that is not the preamble to something else that is supposed to be the real philosophy—the provision of the justifying rational ground of a ‘mere’ conviction that torture is always a terrible violation. Such reminders here are the real argument. This of course does not guarantee that people will heed the reminders: they may not get a grip on those who are now willing to reconsider the ban on torture. But there is no reason at all to suppose that telling them ‘torture is an attack upon basic human goods’ will do so either.18

[17] I mentioned Kant before. Various Kantian formulations of the real ground of our ethical responses are, I think, vulnerable to a similar line of criticism. See R. Gaita, Good and Evil (London: Routledge 2004), Chapter 3, ‘Mortal men and rational beings’, pp 24-42. [18] Some will reckon that what I have been saying makes ethics inherently reactionary, lacking in critical power. ‘Reminders’, it will be said, ‘can’t take us beyond what we already think, but ethical argument is often needed for precisely that purpose.’ I think the worry is misconceived. Recall that marvellous

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The enterprise of providing articulations of the ‘rational ground’ of ethics is, I believe, misguided. Of course I have scarcely conclusively proven this here. But I hope at least to have indicated the possibility of a space for philosophical reflection upon our ethical responses that is occupied by a very different activity.

II What implications might there be, for a conviction of the absolute value of human beings, in the difference between these two conceptions of philosophy? It is tempting to suppose that such a conviction needs a ground that only philosophy of the rationally justifying kind can provide. I think this is completely mistaken: not only is such philosophy not needed for that purpose, but there is no possibility of its fulfilling that purpose. I now want to speak to that conviction in a way that is informed by the different conception of philosophy already described. The idea of love is central to this undertaking. One link between the two parts of this talk is the thought that the philosophical tradition as it has mostly developed in the west has in fact reduced our capacity to speak reflectively about love in a way that rises to the demands of doing so truthfully, and that this incapacitation has in turn actually disabled us from making real sense of the conviction that human beings are of absolute value.19 Once again, my aim is make these claims plausible, not to prove them conclusively. The phrase ‘unconditional love’ is bandied about rather freely these days. But even so, its meaning is clear enough: one who loves unconditionally loves come what may. Of course in human beings, fallible as they are, any loving may in fact falter. To speak of human love as able to rise to being unconditional is not to deny or overlook that fallibility, but to point to what that love is so to speak aiming to be in relation to the one who is loved. It aspires not to falter, whatever

reminder, in the form of the parable of the Good Samaritan, that Jesus gave to the lawyer who asked him ‘Who is my neighbour?’. It revolutionised ethics. Reminders need not ‘leave everything as it is’. [19] One effect of this incapacitation is the almost universal philosophical assumption that the absolute value of human beings, and the very coherence of the idea of absolute value more broadly, stands or falls with the cogency of exceptionless moral principles. I think this is not so. I have broached some questions around this issue in my ‘Life and Death Matters: Losing a Sense of the Value of Human Beings’, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 26, 2005: pp 207-226


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the person who is loved may do or become.20 But this means that the one loved unconditionally is taken to be not-wholly-constituted by whatever qualities he may have shown, or ever will show, nor by whatever personality or character he realises himself to have through these qualities. Any and all of that is the coming-to-presence of a being who can never fully come to presence. This is not a speculative judgment about the reality of the other by the one who loves, open to falsification by further evidence. His love is rather the affirmation of such a reality. So far as human loving aspires to be unconditional, I am suggesting, that is the sense it makes of the ‘being’ of the one who is loved. Erich Fromm said that mother’s love is experienced by her child as unconditional, and he said that this is felt by the child as his being loved simply ‘for himself’. Fromm contrasted this with ‘father’s love’, which must be earnt.21 We need not suppose that these two kinds of love are always or even mostly distinguished by the gender of the one who loves: a father can love ‘like a mother’ and vice versa. And there are no doubt other loves (in addition to father’s love) that in other ways fall short of being unconditional. Fromm does not say a lot about the import of unconditional love when its unconditional character so to speak flows through to the one loved. But the suggestion seems to be that it is experienced by the one loved as an absolute affirmation of who he is, an ‘absolute’ affirmation because it is an affirmation not dependent on how things are with respect either to the efforts of the one loved, or to his particular qualities or achievements or deeds or circumstances. So when the child experiences unconditional mother’s love as his being loved ‘for himself’, he cannot take himself to be constituted by this or that set of qualities or traits or achievements, simply because he experiences this love as ‘for him’ whatever he does or becomes. So the affirmation of who he is that is involved in unconditional love is initially an affirmation by the one who loves, but it can then become a self-affirmation by the one loved. And it is a self-affirmation quite different from selfesteem, which is based (as the etymology of the word suggests) on an ‘estimation’ of oneself, which should therefore alter with any alteration in what the estimation is based on.

[20] I’m tempted to put this by saying that the love that actually flows from one person to another may be unconditional, while the human ‘carriage’ of it—the ‘loving’ if you like,—is always fallible. [21] E. Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Unwin Books 1962), pp 33-36.

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This different affirmation of course occurs within time, and within a world that is subject to change; and as I said this means that it can falter—it can (so to speak) lose faith in itself. But the affirmation itself aspires to be not subject to time and change. There is therefore some reason here for saying that the ‘who one is’ that is affirmed by such unconditional mother’s love is not an item in the world, though we don’t have to conclude that it is therefore an item outside the world. But what room is there for speaking in these terms? What sense can it make to say that this ‘who one is’ is neither an item in the world nor an item outside it? Well, the child who feels loved ‘for himself’ by mother’s love, thereby has a sense of himself as in excess of whatever does or might come to presence in his actual life, personality, character, deeds. This sense is not a hypothesis, or a speculation, about the existence-somewhere-else of such a ‘himself’: it is a living enactment of who he is. It is not easy to keep one’s feet in talking about these matters. The best way I can speak further to what is at issue here is by pointing to some other things. In his marvellous book Romulus, My Father, Raimond Gaita speaks of seeing his father, his mother and her lover Mitru ‘as the victims of misfortune, in their different ways broken by it, but never thereby diminished’.22 How, we might ask, can a mere human creature not be diminished by being broken by what has happened to him, for to be thus broken is surely no longer to ‘hold together’ as ‘who one is’. I would say that in Fromm’s remark that one loved unconditionally can experience this as his being loved ‘for himself’, this ‘himself’ is exactly what is ‘not diminished’ in those Gaita says were broken by their sufferings. Of course, Gaita’s ‘not diminished’ is said by another about those who were thus broken. It may indeed be that one or more of them did lose that sense of himself. But Gaita’s affirmation is not touched by that possibility. To put this another way, seeing those who are broken by their sufferings as ‘not diminished’ is seeing them in the light of unconditional love. When Gaita speaks in ways akin to this he gives us examples in extremis. He has written movingly about the extraordinary power of the love of a nun, who came to a psychiatric hospital in which he was working while a University student in the 1960s, to ‘reveal the full humanity’ of those patients who were suffering terrible affliction and had been long abandoned by friends and even family.23 He also mentions Simone Weil speaking about those who have been ‘struck [22] R. Gaita, Romulus, My Father (Melbourne: Text Publishing 1998), p 124. [23] R. Gaita, A Common Humanity (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), p 20


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the kind of blow which leaves a being struggling on the ground like a half-crushed worm’,24 and he comments on the difficulty of finding words for what it is in every human being that cannot be touched even in the circumstances Weil describes. Sometimes he calls this the ‘infinite’ or ‘inalienable’ ‘preciousness’ of every human being;25 and these phrases can be heard as expressions of a sense of what I called the ‘absolute value’ of human beings. Those examples are important, powerful and moving, but they may also mislead us. I think the ‘infinite preciousness’ Gaita speaks of can show elsewhere than in the extreme examples he gives us. It may sometimes be harder to ‘see’ in other circumstances, but that is not always so. In George Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, Lennie and George are a pair of itinerant labourers in 1930s southern USA. They have been together a long time. Lennie is large, strong and intellectually handicapped; George is slight and clever. George tells Slim how he often used to ‘prank’ Lenny as he calls it, playing on his ‘dumbness’ in front of others—‘made me seem God damn smart alongside of him’. One day he told Lennie in front of ‘a bunch of guys’ to jump into the Sacramento River. George says: ‘An’ in he jumped. Couldn’t swim a stroke. He damn near drowned before we could get him. An’ he was so damned nice to me for pullin’ him out. Clean forgot I told him to jump in.’26 George was overcome by remorse, and not only has never pranked Lennie since, but has seen him in a new light. But why so, when on an earlier occasion he might just have laughed and taken Lennie’s ‘forgetfulness’ as further proof of the dumbness he enjoys pranking? Well, who knows, but perhaps this. Lennie trusted George faithfully, without question. (It will matter for what I say shortly that we could equally well speak of love as of trust here; indeed, the trust that is in question is a form, a profound form, of love.) So, Lennie trusted George faithfully, without question: ‘George wouldn’t never do nothing out of meanness’, he says at one point. Well, from one point of view what George actually did on that occasion, and had done on other occasions before that, is proof that Lennie was wrong. But without denying that, I think we can also say that the way George is moved by the purity of Lennie’s trust in him [24] Op. cit., p 18. [25] Good and Evil, p. xv. [26] G. Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (London: Pan Books 1974), p 39. I am indebted to Yana Canteloupe for drawing my attention to this episode, and for illuminating discussion of it with her.

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—moved to immediate remorse for what he did—shows that Lennie is indeed right. But how can we say this? Surely the most we can say is that George changed and became—what he was not earlier—someone to whom Lennie’s trust was a true response? Well, Lennie would certainly not accept that his earlier trust of George was simply mistaken. For he would not take what George actually did in ‘meanly’ pranking him, as revealing the true George. But of course this is also a way in which George can see himself. Indeed, I would say that the story invites us to think that it is the only way he can truly see himself, and that this is the way in which his remorse for what he did in fact shows he does see himself. George speaks as one who feels he has ‘come to his senses’. That expression, interestingly, allows both that George can count as ‘having changed’—after all, one who has ‘come to his senses’ is not as he was before he came to his senses—and also that the change is in fact a recovery or recuperation of what he was before, and so of what he really or ‘truly’ is. Thus George has come to ‘who he really is’, but this is also a ‘who he is’ that was not, so to speak, manifest in the world prior to his becoming it. (We can appreciate here the attraction of Plato’s lovely image of this life on earth as sometimes affording us glimpses—reminders—of the perfection of being we enjoyed before birth.27 At the same time, as creatures who have ‘fallen’ through birth into ‘this’ world, we have to own in remorse, as George does, to what we do that is untrue to this perfection. A more congenial contemporary psychological translation of this is that remorse expresses our owning of deeds with which we no longer morally ‘identify’.) George was enabled to come to this sense of himself only through Lennie’s trust of him that was already oriented towards the ‘who he is’ that he had never actually been before. Lennie is thus oriented to a ‘who George is’ that is ‘not touched’—to use Gaita’s phrase in discussing Simone Weil—by what George did and indeed had often previously done. But it is crucial in the episode as Steinbeck gives it to us, that what is needed to see this ‘true’ George is a trust or a love as pure as Lennie’s. And the further, creative power of that love is shown in its enabling George himself, as the one on whom that love lights, thereby to realise who he truly is. Here, in a very different context, is something close to what Fromm described when he spoke of [27] I hope it is clear that in calling it a ‘lovely image’ I am resisting thinking of it as a claim in the register of metaphysical philosophy providing ‘rational grounds’ for anything.


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unconditional mother’s love as enabling the infant’s ‘true’ self-affirmation. All I have just said, at the same time as it reveals sense in talk of an absolute value of human beings, is perfectly ‘everyday’. And what is revealed in the episode, and also in numberless other such moments in our lives, is no less wondrous than what is realised for us in more extreme examples like those Gaita discusses, even if 2000 years of exposure to it sometimes dulls our appreciation of its wonder. I have of course been ‘doing philosophy’ in speaking to an ‘idea’28 of the absolute value of human beings. But what I have been doing is much more like assembling reminders of aspects of our everyday experience that (in various ways and for various reasons) we can easily lose touch with, than it is like providing a rational ground for that experience. And to try instead to provide some such ground for it is simply to change the subject, to shift attention away from where it had been engaged. ‘Speaking to’ an idea or experience of the absolute value of human beings does take place across a reflective distance from the experience, for philosophy is an activity of reflection. But unlike ‘providing a rational ground’ it is a mode of reflection that remains inflected by the experience it speaks to. I’ve already given one example of philosophical reflection that I think fails to remain thus inflected—Professor Haldane’s neo-Thomist rational ground for what is wrong with torture, viz., that it attacks a basic human good. Here is another example, drawn from Professor George’s remarks yesterday about the imago Dei, human beings as made in the image of God Professor George said that it is our sharing with God the property of being an uncaused cause that constitutes the real content of our being made in God’s image. Well, the proposition that God is the uncaused cause is a description of the philosopher’s God; ‘God is Love’29 is not. And if God is love, then perhaps to be made in God’s image is to be made as creatures who love, indeed creatures whose capacity for love is of their essence. In that case what Professor George said is a philosophical distortion of something important. God is creator, and ‘God is Love’ thereby catches the creativity of love. We are creatures—created beings—but as made in God’s image we also share in the creative power of love. If that is the divine

[28] ‘Idea’ is an inadequate word here. ‘Experience’ is perhaps closer to the mark. See also the following paragraph. [29] The Bible, I John 4.8.

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in us, then it is also the source of ethics, our deepest connection with what is good. Professor George also spoke about how that ‘power of being an uncaused cause’ that we share with God, finds expression in our lives. He said that this power enables us ‘to bring states of affairs into existence the intelligible point of which we see’, and that we do this whenever we act with a goal in mind. Perhaps so. But there is also Lennie, by his loving trust of George, creatively enabling George to become the good person he really is. Here there was no ‘state of affairs’ which Lennie first envisaged and saw the ‘intelligible point’ of, and which he then sought to ‘bring into existence’ by how he related to George. His love simply went out in his trust, and creatively enlarged the world, or in this case George, but perhaps also others who came to be energised by its light and warmth. Similarly Socrates’ love both of truth and justice shows its creative power in part through its transformation of Plato who witnessed that love, and in this case that creative power has echoed through the ages. And there is the extraordinary power of the unconditional love Fromm speaks of—to which Lennie’s trust of George is akin—that enables a child to affirm itself in a way that is not, like self-esteem, tied to contingent achievements or merits. One could go on. In each case there is genuine creativity at work, a creative responsiveness to the world that is not captured by the formula of ‘bringing states of affairs into existence the intelligible point of which we see’, and the scope of whose continuing creative power is unforeseeable. The point even spills over into areas of life that are often not thought of as centrally ethical or moral (though perhaps this spilling over should make us suspicious of a sharp distinction between the ‘moral’ and other areas of life). I mention just one which will resonate with many people at this conference. One of the great blessings a teacher can have is for a student met by chance years later, to come up and say, ‘That class of yours on logic (or medieval philosophy or political philosophy) inspired me to … ‘. The love of her subject that inspired the teacher creatively informed that student’s learning, and then who-knows-what life and activity that may have flowered from there. Certainly the sins of the fathers are often visited upon the children, even ‘unto the third and fourth generation’.30 But equally, when John Donne said: ‘Gentle love deeds, As blossoms on a bough, From love’s awakened root Do bud out now’, his words may be taken to celebrate the indefinitely renewed [30] The Bible, Exodus 20.5


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creative power of even such an everyday thing as that teacher’s love of her subject.31 ‘God is Love’. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and all thy strength and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.’32 ‘For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’.33 As these familiar passages so beautifully affirm, love is at the heart of the Christian understanding both of God’s relation to us, and of our relation to God and to the world. But even without invoking a specifically Christian or other religious context, one might reckon love to be at the heart of our relation to the world; and in the second half of this talk I have been entertaining such a reckoning. One important question here I shall mention only to put aside: does the possibility of ‘unconditional love’ in human life depend on its instantiation in God’s love for us, as that is so marvellously affirmed in St Paul’s moving words; or does St Paul’s affirmation depend on the experienced reality of such love in human life? Whatever the answer might be, my line of thought leaves us with a different, pressing question: has philosophy as it has mostly been practised in the western tradition perhaps actually hampered us from fully appreciating the centrality of love to ethics, and therefore also from living fully in, and out of, love?

[31] John Donne, ‘Love’s Growth’, The Poems of John Donne ed. H. J. Grierson (London: Oxford University Press 1942) p 30. The overt context is romantic love, but the poem invites a much wider reading. [32] The Bible, Luke 10.27. [33] The Bible, Romans 8.38–39.

Sandra Lynch

Friendship: Poignancy and Paradox As the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict Spinoza has argued, an adequate understanding of our place in the world reveals the nature of the interconnection and interdependence between human beings. Spinoza recommends ‘a joyous acceptance’ in the face of the inevitability of the position in which we find ourselves. He explains that as individuals we are constantly affected by the chance impingements of what he refers to as ‘other bodily modes’, that is by our chance encounters with others. We are parts of Nature which cannot be perceived clearly and distinctly on their own.1 As such, we are determined to act through the mediation of others and likewise we determine the actions of others in the same kind of process.2 Thus, given the nature of our connection with and our dependence upon them, we are not free to choose a path of selfunderstanding independent of others. 3 Spinoza is in fact pointing out a tension between seeing others as the authors of our destiny and working to appropriate our destiny for ourselves. In this way, he makes available to us what he sees as a relative kind of freedom. In colloquial terms he is suggesting that the freedom which is available to us is relatively restricted since it amounts to the freedom to make the best of the situation in which we find ourselves. However, we in the modern west often take a different view of our freedom. We live our individual lives against the background of a collective belief that the borders between the controllable and the [1]

Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. R.H.M. Elwes, (New York: Dover, [1677] 1955), IIIP3S.

[2]

Lloyd, Genevieve, Spinoza and the Ethics, (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 76.

[3]

The Ethics, IIIP47S.

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unavoidable are infinitely malleable. With regard to relationships between friends, the element of choice inherent in these relationships encourages us in this belief since we can choose our friends, if not our relatives. In this paper, I wish to argue that in fact we human beings find ourselves immersed in the world and that the element of choice in our relationships—including those we have with friends—is less easily exercised than we might wish to believe. The fact that our liking, care and activity within friendship is predicated on freedom of choice makes the relationship less stable and more fragile than more formal relationships in which we engage, such as those involving family, business or institutional relationships. Questions about what can be expected of a friend, about the notion of duty in friendship and about what to do in the face of conflict with friends are open-ended; and perhaps these characteristics are what led Samuel Johnson in 1758 to say of friendship that while ‘life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship. It is painful to consider that … there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain’ given that friendship can be impaired or destroyed by innumerable causes.4 Yet we yearn for and need friendship. We enjoy the camaraderie, the comfort, the pleasure and the playfulness it provides, even though we are also at times confronted with anxiety, loss and disappointment in friendship. Our need and yearning for friends is felt against a background of inherent fragility in our relations with them and this gives the relationship its poignancy. This poignancy is partly explained by the structure of friendship and the tension between similarity and difference that it entails; it is also partly explained by our desire to avoid this tension, the implications of this avoidance and the difficulties associated with confronting difference within friendship.

The Structure of Friendship: Similarity & Difference There is much that is appealing in the idea of friendship as a relationship which brings human beings together in a shared pursuit of reason and virtue; and which emphasises a sense of belonging. As St. Thomas Aquinas has argued ‘likeness … is a cause of love … friendship … [and] well-being. For the very fact that two men are alike, having, as it were one form, makes them to be, in a manner one in [4]

Johnson, Samuel, The Idler, No. 23, Saturday Sept. 23rd, 1758 in The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol.3: The Rambler (digitalized book).

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that form’.5 Friendships often originate in the context of shared concerns, similar interests and joint activities. Greek notions of civic friendship broaden this appeal bringing out the continuities between individual friendship and public citizenship to present a model of a shared public space of communication, reflection and action. For Aristotle, the love between individual friends provided a model for the expression of social and political ideas and arrangements. By comparison, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida in his book The Politics of Friendship focus on the tension between similarity and difference inherent in friendship; and on separateness as the crucial structural feature of friendship.6 Nancy Sherman in a paper entitled ‘Aristotle on the Shared Life’ also draws some attention to the separateness of friends.7 Sherman points out that on Aristotle’s view, friends bear varying degrees of similarity to one another and she argues that this fact may be important to self-realization within friendship. It is my view that Derrida’s emphasis on the gap that separates friends is insightful and important for our understanding of our friends and of the relationship. A failure to recognise the tension between the degree of similarity and the reality of separateness in friendship emasculates the relationship; such a failure to recognise the significance of difference in friendship undermines the possibilities that friendship presents for genuine engagement and for the understanding of both self and other. It undermines the possibility that we can, as Aquinas puts it, come to ‘know ourselves aright’.8

St. Thomas Aquinas on Friendship and Charity Aquinas refers to friendship as a form of charity at one point in the Summa Theologiae. Charity is in turn defined as ‘the friendship of man for God’ since ‘God is the principal object of charity’ and as the basis of our relationship with ‘our neighbour [who] is loved out of charity for God’s sake’.9 So friendship of a particular kind has a theological significance as the central virtue of our moral lives for

[5]

St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Questions on Love and Charity’ from Summa Theologiae in Michael Pakaluk (ed.) Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), ST, 1-11, q.26, a.3, p.159.

[6]

Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).

[7]

Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Badhwar (London: Cornell U.P., 1993).

[8]

Op.cit., ST, II-II, q.25, a.7.

[9]

Ibid., ST II-II, q.23, a.1, p.172; II-II, q.23, a.5, Pak, p.174; II-II, q.23, a.5, p.174.


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Aquinas. This is the case because ‘[t]he object of charity’s love is the ultimate goal of man’s life, his eternal happiness’.10 St. Thomas also discusses friendship in a different context, in his treatment of love, and this discussion is closer to the treatment of friendship found in the work of his non-Christian philosophical predecessors. But the two treatments are related in that Aquinas presents charity as providing the ground of our relations with others, arguing that ‘charity is a disposition implanted in us and inclining us to love readily and with joy’.11 It is charity that enables our friendships to become Aristotelian friendships of virtue or friendships of the good in which a friend is one who cares for the other for the other’s own sake and not for any other reason.12 This is not to suggest that virtuous friendships aren’t enjoyable or that friends of the best kind don’t prove useful to one another at times; it simply demands that pleasure and utility are not the grounds of such friendships. What I want to emphasise is that while Aquinas’ more philosophical treatment of friendship deals with friendship in the context of care, emotion and natural affection, it is dependent on his theological treatment of charity which underpins it and provides the possibility of its improvement , if not its perfectibility. Aquinas goes on to make connections between love, knowledge and goodness in his discussion of the causes of love and these imply what he later makes explicit; that is, that charity is built upon an injunction to ‘know ourselves aright’.13 It is only with this knowledge—knowledge that enables us to ‘think ourselves to be what we actually are’—that we can ‘love ourselves aright’. Aquinas also argues, with Aristotle’s support, that ‘the love with which a man loves himself is the form and root of friendship’.14 It is self-love which gives us the capacity to love others as friends. The Aristotelian conception of self-love provides a model for friendship since he argues that each of the features he identifies as definitive of the best kind of friendship are found in the good person’s relation to himself (sic). Self-love implies selfawareness and self-knowledge as well as union, equality and wish[10] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott (Allen, Texas: Christian Classiscs, 1989), ST, II-II, q.23, a.4, p. 350. [11] Ibid., ST, II-II, q.23, a.2, p. 350. [12] Ibid., ST, II-II, q.23, a.8, p. 351. [13] St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Questions on Love and Charity’ from Summa Theologiae in Michael Pakaluk (ed.) Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), ST, I-II, q.27, a.2, pp. 157-58; II-II, q.25, a7, p. 180. [14] Ibid., ST, II-II, q.25, a. 4, p. 178.

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ing one’s good for one’s own sake. Aquinas takes this to imply that this kind of self-love grounds friendship since it demands that we know and love ourselves ‘aright’ if we are to be able to cultivate loving relationships with friends. Yet, since we come into the world immersed in relations with others, others will mediate the possibilities we have for coming to know, understand and love ourselves. John McDowell in his book, Mind and the World argues that concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world.15 Concepts do mediate our understanding of the world and ourselves, but it is in part others who mediate the processes by which we come to understand those concepts that are relevant to our understanding of self and our understanding of the self’s relations with others in the world. Thus we see the force of Spinoza’s claim that others mediate the possibilities we have for gaining an adequate understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. This paper began by referring to the tension Spinoza explores between seeing others as the authors of our destiny and understanding and appropriating that destiny for ourselves. Spinoza pushes us toward the second of these possibilities—the enterprise of appropriating our destiny for ourselves—since from his point of view, we have no other option. The freedom we have is the freedom to accept the proposition that we are not the authors of our own destinies. Resistance to this proposition is futile, but more seriously this kind of resistance and the accompanying desire to see ourselves as the authors of our destinies will have the effect of determining that even the enterprise of appropriating our destinies for ourselves will be beyond us. Spinoza’s view that our destiny is unavoidably determined for us by the nature of our connection and dependence upon others is particularly interesting in the context of a discussion of friendship. He argues that the rational acceptance of the impossibility of becoming the author of one’s own destiny need not be a dispiriting acceptance; and in fact it must not be a dispiriting acceptance. Dispiritedness would indicate a failure to understand the interconnections between oneself and others in the collectivities of which we are a part; a failure to appreciate the nature of our relations with the individuals involved. With regard to our relations with friends, the philosophical literature has often idealised and celebrated the connection and interde[15] McDowell, John, Mind and the World, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 3.


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pendence to which Spinoza draws attention. As noted above, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics argues that in friendships of the best kind the friend is so closely connected to us in shared interests and pursuits that we can refer to him as another self.16 In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne writes of the deepest connection between friends as a fusion of two souls.17 But as Derrida, and Aquinas long before him, have pointed out this kind of connection between friends is in fact impossible.18 The desire for it gives friendship a paradoxical flavour since we desire a union, connection or fusion with the friend which is impossible, given our separateness and the inevitable differences which arise between friends. This paradoxical desire co-exists with our yearning for friendship, as well as with the uncertainty and fragility of relations with friends as evidenced in experiences of anxiety, loss or disappointment. Our situation brings to my mind Jean Paul Sartre’s definition of love as a conflict. Sartre refers to passionate love in this way since he argues that to love is to experience two simultaneous desires. Firstly, the lover has a desire to be found irresistible by the beloved—so that the beloved has no choice but to be passionately overcome by his feelings for the other; and secondly—and paradoxically—the lover wants to be rationally and freely chosen on his or her merits.19 Sartre points out that it is impossible to satisfy both these desires at the same time. The paradox which philosophers have identified at the heart of friendship entails a similar logical impossibility. We cannot easily and unambiguously both see the friend as another self with whom we are fused and in total agreement; and at the same time acknowledge our separateness from him or her and the possibility of disagreement or conflict. Spinoza’s recommendation of a joyous, rather than a dispirited acceptance of the interconnection and interdependence between human beings implies an acknowledgement that our relationships with others will sometimes be fraught.20 He [16] Nicomachean Ethics, 1168a18-b7. [17] Montaigne, ‘Of Friendship’ in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, [1572-1576, 1578-1580], 1965), p. 140. [18] St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Questions on Love and Charity’ from Summa Theologiae in Michael Pakaluk (ed.) Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), ST, II-II, q.25, a.4, p. 178. [19] Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), pp. 477-478. [20] The Ethics, IIIP47S

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argues that we’ll impinge on one another in ways that we sometimes find agreeable, but also in ways that we find disagreeable. The tension between similarity and difference in friendship bears witness to the possibility that our relations with friends will sometimes be fraught; but it also illustrates Spinoza’s claim that an adequate understanding of ourselves will require coming to an understanding of the nature of our relations with others generally. Relations between friends can be particularly conducive to coming to this kind of self-understanding or self-realisation. It is precisely the tension which can arise between similarity and difference which stimulates reflection on the nature of this relationship—in which one has chosen to be involved—and on oneself within that relationship. In the context of feelings of disappointment, irritation or anger with a friend, I must ask myself whether these events ought to lead me to question the nature of the relationship; or whether my sentiments are justified; whether or not my expectations of the friend were reasonable; whether or not I might have been motivated by envy or jealousy; or whether my feelings are confused. In Aquinas’ terminology, I’m attempting to ‘know myself aright’ and to think myself to be what I actually am. In the context of disagreement knowing ourselves ‘aright’ is central to the possibility of an outcome with which we are likely to be satisfied or at least to be able to tolerate. And yet, our motivations are not always transparent—even to ourselves; in fact they often reveal themselves to us—and to others —within our interactions with those close to us. A tempered scepticism toward our opinions and perceptions is as critical to coming to ‘know ourselves aright’ as it is to coming to understand others. Each of us is prone to misrepresentation, misidentification, error and deception; this is a point which Aristotle recognises in Book II of the Rhetoric where he refers to such emotions as appearances (phantasia)21 Aristotle points out that we can feel an emotion even though we may not be able to justify it to ourselves. We can simply be disposed to feel an emotion, e.g. in a mood to take offence regardless of the justification for doing so. If we cannot always expect to be in agreement with a friend, then we must also be prepared for the possibility that there are ideas to which we are committed, or responsibilities we must honour, which could justifiably prove divisive enough—or ought justifiably prove divisive enough—to disrupt a friendship. If there are, we must then [21] Rhetoric, Book II, 1383a17-20; 1380a10 and 35.


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consider what this implies about the notion of duty within friendship. It is clear that attitudes to duty in friendship differ. We are all aware of friendships which have faltered over unwillingness to forgive what many would see as a relatively insignificant slight. Joseph Epstein refers to just such a case in his book Friendship: An Exposé in which he refers to a friendship which suffers a fifteen-year interruption on the strength of a critical but humorous comment which was not appreciated.22 At the other extreme is the view, which Sándor Márai expresses in his novel Embers, that a friendship once established is an unconditional commitment. It persists regardless of what injury the parties to the friendship might do one another; and regardless of any incompatible ideas to which the friends might become committed.23 Jean Paul Sartre’s argument that love is a conflict given that it expresses two contradictory desires simultaneously; and Derrida’s view that friendship entails an impossible desire for connection in the face of the reality of the separateness of friends are relevant here. Sartre’s focus is on the individual self. The Sartrean lover wants the beloved’s affections to be determined by his irresistibility but he also wants to be thoughtfully and freely chosen. The focus of Sartre’s comments seem to be on what the lover is able to get from the relationship. Given his views on the structure of consciousness, this is what we should expect; as subject the lover has no choice but to objectify the beloved as the object of his consciousness. For Derrida the friend wants connection but faces an obvious gap of distance or separation. In Derrida’s case, a desire conflicts with the reality of the situation in which friends find themselves. The writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and Benedict Spinoza suggest a different approach since both insist that loving takes us out of ourselves. When Aquinas considers the question of whether charity is friendship, he accepts Aristotle’s view that ‘not every love has the character of friendship, but [only] that love which is together with benevolence, when, to wit, we love someone as to wish good to him’.24 Aquinas goes on to claim that ‘in the love of friendship, the [22] Epstein, Josef, Friendship: An Exposé, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). [23] Márai, Sándor, Embers, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (London: Penguin, [1942] 2001). [24] St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Questions on Love and Charity’ from Summa Theologiae in Michael Pakaluk (ed.) Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), ST, II-II, q.23, a.1 (my italics).

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lover is in the beloved, inasmuch as he reckons what is good or evil to his friend, as being so to himself; … he wills and acts for his friend’s sake as his own sake, looking on his friend as identified with himself, thus the beloved is in the lover’.25 Again we become aware the paradox already noted: we read that the love of friendship takes us out of ourselves to focus on the good of the other at the same time that we read the claim that the beloved is in the lover. We are outside ourselves in the sense that we are genuinely involved with the concerns of a friend who is separate from us, but we are in the beloved in the sense that his or her concerns become our own. Spinoza’s view of friendship is that it entails a certain nobility, a desire to strive under the dictates of reason to aid others.26 Our love for a friend on Spinoza’s view will be a kind of contentment in the presence of the other, but one dictated by rational and adequate ideas of ourselves and others. Taking an approach to friendship informed by Aquinas, and to some extent by Spinoza, allows us to say that we wish our friend’s good as if it were our own good. Our love and concern allows us to imagine ourselves in the place of the other and to feel ourselves united with him or her as if we were one. Emotion and imagination come together here, but they are tempered by ‘the dictates of reason’. In fact we are not and cannot be united with a friend in any substantial way. An ideal or imagined model of friendship based on similarity must be juxtaposed to a realistic and rational model of friendship based on difference and separateness.

Christianity and Separateness in Friendship I do not wish to deny that Christian philosophers and writers have marginalised friendship. To give one example, St. Augustine in his Confessions berates himself for the depth of his love for a recently deceased friend: ‘What a fool I was to love another human being as if he were God.’27 Immanuel Kant also questions the moral worth of friendship and is pessimistic about the human capacity for friendship. He reveals his suspicions as to the likelihood of our success in maintaining friendships in giving the following advice:

[25] Ibid., ST, I-II, q.28, a.2 (my italics). [26] The Ethics, IIIP59S. [27] St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin, (Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), Ch. 4.


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We must be benevolently disposed to our friend, but the friend must ensure that he is never in need of our benevolence. 28

Any demonstration of benevolence will apparently disturb the equality that Kant sees as crucial to relations between friends. However, the Kantian distinction between pathological love and agape or Christian love (which Kant refers to as practical love) does go some way to providing a theoretical framework for the practical problem of dealing with the tensions that arise in friendship and close interpersonal relationships. Kant regarded close interpersonal relationships as pathological since they were based on personal and subjective inclination and hence could not be relied upon as sources of motivation; it is the fact that philia (the love of friendship) and eros (erotic love) are motivated by personal inclination that destroys their moral worth for Kant. But in practice, it is the fact of the personal affection and love between friends that makes it possible for them to do the kind of good for one another that they are able to do for one another. For example, we can comfort a close friend in times of distress in a way that no one else can, given our knowledge, and love and understanding of the person. Nonetheless, agape and charity can seem curious forms of love to us by comparison with philia and eros, since we think of love as a feeling or a passion and hence not as an attitudes that can be required of us. But agape and charity are reliable in the way that philia and eros are not, since they are applied to all others by virtue of a common humanity and a common relation to God.29 Regardless of the nature of any particular disagreement with a friend or loved one, agape and charity demand that we treat one another with dutiful respect. Thus only agape or practical Christian love is morally worthy in the sense that it can be guaranteed or commanded. This feature of agape suggests that we can best think of it using Aquinas’ view of charity as a disposition rather than an emotion. Agape or charity can be regarded as a foundational attitude upon which close interpersonal relationships such as friendships can be built and must be built if they are to have the capacity to survive significant challenges, conflict and disagreement. In this way, Chris[28] Kant, Immanuel, ‘Lecture on Friendship’, p. 213. [29] Kant argues that ‘[t]he more civilised man becomes, the broader his outlook and the less room there is for special friendships; civilised man seeks universal pleasures and a universal friendship, unrestricted by special ties;’ in ‘Lecture on Friendship’ in Michael Pakaluk (ed.) Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis: Hackett, [1775-80], 1991), p. 216.

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tianity emerges as providing a foundation for personal engagement. Certain Christian virtues or traits such as humility, generosity and forgiveness also make a contribution here since they emphasise and reinforce the idea of acceptance in friendship. They suggest that we can feel pain in the context of relationships with friends without the need for violent or aggressive reproach. These virtues imply a commitment to duty and an acceptance of the possibility that one’s own motives and behaviour in friendship may not be beyond reproach; we may perhaps share the very fault that we have identified in an estranged friend, the trait may be one not atypical of human beings in general. David Novitz in his paper ‘Forgiveness and Self-Respect’ suggests that these virtues can best be regarded as tasks rather than capacities that we can call on at will.30 However, the disposition to undertake them, the disposition to choose well, can be regarded as a virtue. With regard to forgiveness in friendship, the disposition to undertake it seems to me to be built upon a recognition of our unavoidable difference and separateness from the other. This disposition reinforces the need to reflect on the lived experience of the individuals within a relationship, to relate to one another in terms of the realities of each person’s character, circumstances, interests and needs. In doing so we consider what we owe each other rather than what we are due or how we feel at the time. Consideration of what we owe each other takes us out of ourselves since it emphasises duty in friendship, rather than free choice or our rights as friends. As noted above, Sándor Márai in his novel Embers proposes a notion of duty in friendship as unconditional commitment. But this would seem to be a thoroughly theoretical commitment, given that the estrangement he describes between two friends makes any continued interaction between the friends impossible. It is even perhaps a version of agape or Christian love, since it is agape which is unconditional in the sense that it means ‘I’ll continue to love you even if that love is not reciprocated and does me no good (as Vacek points out).31 This notion of duty as unconditional acceptance is problematic since it can conflict with self-respect. People can and do sometimes forgive too readily and thus, as David Nowitz also points out, a tension between self-respect and

[30] Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LVIII, 2, June 1998, p. 229. [31] Vacek, Edward Collins, Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics, (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1994), p. 175.


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forgiveness can arise.32 So here again we find an ambiguity in friendship: we have duties in friendship, but we are uncertain as to the extent of those duties since we also have duties to ourselves. Self-respect encourages us to reflect on our expectations in friendship; while forgiveness asks us to balance this reflection by taking account of the experience of the other. We can think of love or affection in friendship as a gift which goes beyond the self so that the happiness of the friend becomes my happiness and so we are unified in this shared concern. Love moves the friend outside himself to a concern with the other for the other’s own sake but unlike agape and charity, the love of friendship is not a disinterested or impartial affection. Both forms of love are concerned with my similarity to the other: the love of friendship in terms of unity (however fragile); and agape or charity in terms of dutiful and equal respect. But since only the latter is love applied equally to all, it is the form of love which can be seen as foundational when we take the shortcomings of human nature into account. It is agape or charity which can assist us with difficulties such as the difficulty we sometimes find in placing the happiness of the other before our own; the difficulty of dealing with tension and conflict in such a way that a relationship can survive disagreement; and the difficulty of avoiding the kind of reproach that will undermine a valuable relationship or accepting pain as part of a more or less unconditional commitment to the friend. Agape is love for all and is to extend even to one’s enemies; it is ready to give to others even where there is no chance of gain and in fact where we face the possibility of harm. This unconditional love is a response to human need and is underpinned by a recognition of the intrinsic value of each individual; as such it is a human achievement. I have referred to an eclectic community of philosophers to support my argument that if we are to develop friendships which Aristotle would have called friendships of the good, then we must accept that we have less choice in our relations with friends than popular notions of friendship might suggest we have. My view is that friendship can and should rest, even repose, upon a foundation of agape or charity if it is to persist in the face of difference and difficulty. A foundation of agape or charity provides us with a potential avenue toward self-understanding; it encourages us to engage in a process of coming to understand our place in a world in which we [32] Ibid.

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are separate from, and yet in interdependent relations with, other human beings. Spinoza’s recommendation that we greet the reality of our relations with others with ‘joyous acceptance’ is undermined by Aquinas’ argument that charity in fact guarantees this since on his view joy is an effect or the fruit of charity. 33 Nonetheless, it is important to emphasise that the foundational role of agape or charity in dealing with difference in friendship cannot remove the paradoxical or ambiguous nature of the relationship. The delicate balance of similarity and difference, equality and concern for the other for that person’s own sake and of inclination and duty remains; these features serve to preserve the uncertainty and fragility that is inherent in friendship.

[33] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.–II., Q. XXVIII, A. I (London: R & T Washbourne, 1917), p. 374.

John Lamont

In Defence of Villey on Objective Right The object of this paper is to provide an exposition and defence of the work of one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. Michel Villey was a philosopher of law who taught at the University of Paris II, and who played a central role in reviving that subject in France. The main focus of his work was the development and content of the notion of human rights. His principal theses were that there are two concepts of human rights that have been developed in Western juridical thought: that one concept, that of objective right, was developed by Aristotle and Roman jurists, and embraced by St. Thomas; that the other concept, that of subjective rights, was first developed in explicit form in the Middle Ages, and came eventually to completely supplant the notion of objective right in Western thought; that objective right, rather than subjective right, is the concept that properly describes reality; that subjective right has had a disastrous effect on Western culture and society; and that it ought to be rejected, and replaced by the notion of objective right. I think that Villey has conclusively established the truth of these positions, and that they are of the greatest importance.1 The object of this paper is not however to argue for these positions, a task that was Villey’s life’s work. It is instead to answer criticisms of Villey that have led this work to be dismissed by many scholars. Knowledge of Villey’s work in Anglophone countries has suffered from the fact that it has regrettably not been translated into English, so that in these countries his ideas are known mainly from the criticisms made of them by the small number of scholars who [1]

I have previously given some exposition and defence of Villey’s views in ‘Conscience, freedom, rights: idols of the Enlightenment religion’, The Thomist 73 (2009): 169-239.

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have directly examined them.2 His works are still a standard reference for the history of the subject, due to his great erudition,3 but his ideas are not much discussed except in Francophone countries, where the power of his thought has made his very unpopular and unfashionable ideas hard to ignore. Most Anglophone scholars, when they have heard of him at all, have generally accepted the claim that his critics make of having sufficiently refuted his positions. If one compares these alleged refutations with Villey’s work, however, it becomes apparent that this claim lacks any substance. The object of this paper is to expose the hollowness of these criticisms. However, given the inaccessibility of Villey’s work for most English-speakers, it will be necessary to preface a discussion of these criticisms by a brief outline of Villey’s position.

I. Outline of Villey’s thought The best way to grasp Villey’s thought is by considering his account of the historical development of notions of rights. In order to grasp this account, though, a preliminary description of his basic concepts of objective and subjective right is helpful. Objective right (Villey prefers the singular for this expression, and the plural for subjective rights) is a relation of some sort between specified people and things; a relation that consists in a certain distribution of goods, offices, or obligations. Its nature is determined by the sort of just proportion considered by Aristotle in book V of the Nicomachean Ethics. This just proportion that arises from human societies being natural entities with a final cause, a telos, and natural components that are present in every human society (such as rulers, families, private property of some sort). Objective right is a thing, a ‘res’, whether actually existing or possible to be realised, in which the persons entering into the relation receive the benefit or discharge the obligation that is their due. It is not determined simply by the nature of human societies as such, but by the circumstances that the societies and their members find themselves in—circumstances such as history, geography, culture, [2]

A few of Villey’s works are accessible in English; see ‘Epitome of Classical Natural Law’ Griffith Law Review 2000:9, ‘Epitome of Classical Natural Law (part II), Griffith Law Review 2001:10, ‘Law in things’, in Controversies about Law’s Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).

[3]

The work usually cited is his La formation de la pensée juridique moderne (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 2003), a reprint with a helpful introduction by Stéphane Rials. This reprint in paperback of a work largely produced in the 1960s indicates its scholarly quality, and the absence of any suitable replacement for it as an overall history.

In Defence of Villey on Objective Right

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and so on: objective right emerges from these circumstances, without which it cannot be determined. In its full sense it can only exist between people and things who belong to the same state, and hence are governed by the same legal authority. Subjective rights, on the other hand, are not relations, but monadic properties of individuals. These properties consist in powers to act freely in some sphere—such as the power to worship as one chooses, or to travel wherever one wants—and follow from the essence of human nature. Action in accordance with them cannot be justly prevented, and the law is required to conform to them. Some intervention of positive law may be necessary for their proper juridical existence (as e.g. the specification of the punishments imposed by the state for infringing them), but legislation does not create these rights. It declares them rather than creating them, and individuals have a just claim in law to the protection of their subjective rights: a legal system is unjust if it infringes on them or does not properly recognise them.4 Subjective rights are a basic principle underlying a just organisation of society. In an understanding of society that is based entirely on subjective rights, anything like a natural structure of society drops out of the picture. The principle of organisation of a just society will instead be analogous to the properties of the ions that are joined together to make a physical solid. As the structure of the electron shells of the ions determine how they can be joined together in a whole, so the subjective rights of individuals determine how individuals can be justly connected together in a society. Having given some explanation of objective and subjective right, we can set out Villey’s position on them, which can be summarised in the following claims. A.) A brief but sufficient philosophical account of objective right is given by Aristotle. ‘Aristotle distinguishes between the subjective virtue of the just man, the “dikaios”, who wills to give to each his due; and that which is just, the neuter expression “dikaion”, the reality which is that thing, the right proportion between goods distributed among persons; the thing that is the objective centre of attraction, the external reality towards which the efforts of the just individual are aimed.’5 [4]

On this see Villey, ‘Droit subjectif I (La génèse du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d’Occam)’, in Seize essais de philosophie de droit (Paris: Dalloz, 1969), pp. 144-7.

[5]

Michel Villey, ‘Torah-dikaion I’, in Villey (1969), p. 18. Translation of Villey’s French are my own. Villey usually talks of ius in terms of a division of goods, but he makes it clear that it involves a division of punishments as well. In ‘Des délits et

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B.) The notion of objective right was given full juridical existence by the great jurists around the time of the end of the Roman Republic, who created the basic structure of Roman law. This work was done under the influence of Greek thought, which led these jurists to the plan of giving a structure to the law that would make it a coherent intellectual system. It was explicitly influenced by Aristotle’s thought, and its basic concept was his concept of objective right, ‘to dikaion’, which it translated as ‘ius’. This notion was not equivalent to any form of subjective right, and was indeed incompatible with it. A subjective right is a power to act, but an objective right is something that limits the power to act. C.) The rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire did not produce any worked-out Christian reflection on the nature of law. The Fathers of the Church did not see it as part of their task to produce any such reflection.6 D.) In Western Europe after the fall of the Empire, the thought of Aristotle and the Roman heritage of law was lost, and along with it any worked out philosophical or legal notion of objective right. What served as law was a mix of traditional customs and moral commands addressed to individuals, with sanctions attached to the breaking of these precepts. The only model for law was the Mosaic law as found in the Old Testament, which was often taken as still authoritative for civil law. E.) During the Middle Ages, the prevalence of individualism and of voluntary associations (feudalism based on oaths of allegiance, guilds, associations, religious orders) led to an insistence on individual rights, ‘rights of a particular feudal lord or particular body or a particular class of individuals, rights that are conceived of as buttresses for powers, and that are more or less confused with powers’.7 This created a climate favourable to the development of a full-fledged notion of subjective rights. Such a climate was assisted by a constant factor that favours the notion of subjective rights; egoism, and the intellectual limitations that naturally accompany it. ‘It is natural to conceive of everything in terms of one’s self, to press into the service of one’s self everything that pertains to the common good, and accompeines dans la philosophie du droit naturel classique’, Archives de Philosophie du droit 1983: 28, he points out that in Roman law the ius of a parricide was to be sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and thrown into the sea. [6]

See Villey, ‘Torah-Dikaion I’, in Critique de la pensée juridique moderne (douze autres essais) (Paris: Dalloz, 1976), pp. 25, 26-28.

[7]

Villey (1969), p. 156.


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modate it to the needs of one’s egoism. And thus it is probable that the notion of subjective right has had some existence in all times.’8 F.) St. Thomas, however, recovered the notion of objective right in Aristotle and the Roman law, and made it the centre of his account of justice. He took this step only after commenting on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, and his mature views on objective right are set out in the Secunda secundae. This embrace of objective right involved explicit rejection of the idea that the Scriptures contained any properly legal precepts applicable to all Christians (2a2ae q. 104 a. 3). The distinctness of his conception of objective right is shown in the structure of the Summa theologiae. His discussion of law, including the moral law, occurs in the Prima Secundae, but his discussion of ius occurs dozens of questions later in the Secunda Secundae. The natural moral law, lex, that governs the actions of individuals, is discussed in 1a2ae q. 94, and human law is discussed in 1a2ae qq. 95-97. The virtue of justice is however discussed 62 questions later, in 2a2ae qq. 57-122; the discussion of justice itself is qq. 57-60, of justice together with related issues qq. 57-122. This segment of 65 questions devoted to justice is by far the largest single component of the Summa devoted to a specific topic, which indicates the significance that St. Thomas attached to objective right, ius, and the virtues and vices connected to it. This separate treatment of the moral law and of justice of course does not mean that he considers them to be unconnected. The natural moral law that is grasped through synderesis, the first principles of practical reasoning, tells individuals that they ought to be just. However, it does not tell them what justice consists in. It cannot do so, because synderesis only grasps the goods that belong to human nature as it exists in individual human beings. Justice, however, identifies the good of human societies. Human societies are entities with a nature of their own, and hence a good of their own; so the good of human societies cannot be deduced from the good of individual human beings. The connection between ius—objective right—and moral principles for St. Thomas can be illustrated by an analogy. A good parent will provide for the health of his child; this is a moral obligation. But the nature of moral obligation as such does not determine what a child’s health consists in, or what will promote it. The nature of health is an external reality, that provides the object for virtue, but that is not derivable from moral principles alone—the moral principles that are derivable from the first principles of the [8]

Villey (1969), p. 140.

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natural law discussed in the Prima Secundae. The same is true for ius, as St. Thomas explains: the other moral virtues are chiefly concerned with the passions, the regulation of which is gauged entirely by a comparison with the very man who is the subject of those passions, in so far as his anger and desire are vested with their various due circumstances. Hence the mean in such like virtues is measured not by the proportion of one thing to another, but merely by comparison with the virtuous man himself, so that with them the mean is only that which is fixed by reason in our regard. On the other hand, the matter of justice is external operation, in so far as an operation or the thing used in that operation is duly proportionate to another person, wherefore the mean of justice consists in a certain proportion of equality between the external thing and the external person (2a2ae q. 58 a. 10).9

The distinction between moral law and justice is explicitly stated when St. Thomas distinguishes between the moral and judicial precepts of the Old Law, in 1a2ae q. 104 a. 1. The distinction is also implied by his assertion that there can be no exceptionless positive laws (1a2ae q. 97 a. 2 ad 2), although he holds that there are exceptionless moral principles. He does not deny any connection between moral principles and positive law, however; he asserts that a positive law that commands immorality, such as the worship of idols, has no force. In his discussion of justice, he distinguishes between general justice and particular justice. General justice refers to every aspect of the virtue of an individual, in so far as it bears on the common good (2a2ae q. 58. a. 6); as such it relates to many different kinds of virtuous action. Particular justice, the virtue that specifically concerns our dealings with others, is entirely defined by St. Thomas in terms of objective right. It has as its object the just proportion of distribution of exterior goods and things, which is what objective right consists in (2a2ae q. 58 a. 10). The act of justice is to give to each his due, his ius (2a2ae q. 58 a. 11). The virtue of justice is the perpetual and constant will to render to each his due, ‘constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum unicuique tribuens’ (2a2ae q. 58 a. 1).10 The task of the judge is [9]

St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Second and Revised Edition, 1920; Online Edition Copyright © 2008 by Kevin Knight, at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3058.htm#article10.

[10] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. III: Secunda Secundae (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1951), p. 388.


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not to command that certain things be done, but to declare what ius is, what is due to people (2a2ae q. 60 a. 1). G.) An explicit philosophical conception of subjective rights first emerged in the work of William of Ockham. Ockham’s achievement in this regard was the result of two things; i) the dispute between the Franciscans and the papacy over the issue of Franciscan poverty, which both gave Ockham occasion to write on political subjects and furnished him with ideas and motivation to develop a theory of subjective right, and ii) Ockham’s nominalist ontology, which removed the metaphysical underpinning necessary for objective right, and left the qualities of individuals as the only basis for just claims. This philosophical conception is used by theories that make subjective rights the sole basis of political order, so Ockham’s elaboration of this conception was the essential first step in the development of such theories. Ockham’s thought emerged from a Franciscan context in which the will had primacy over the intellect, a context that was opposed to St. Thomas’s affirmation of the primacy of the intellect.11 H.) The subjective notion of a right as a monadic property of an individual became generally accepted, and even dominant, after Ockham’s time. Even authors who commented on St. Thomas’s discussion of ‘ius’ in the Secunda Secundae, such as Vitoria, Suarez, and Molina, did not bring out the sense of objective right that he meant by it. Instead, they interpreted ‘id quod iustum est’ as meaning a just action, rather than the reality a just action is meant to bring about— which is the point of view of a moralist, rather than a jurist. 12 I.) This assimilation of law to morality took systematic form after a decisive step made by the baroque scholastics on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In commenting on the Summa, which had become the standard theology text, they based their discussion of human law on St. Thomas’s discussion of the natural law in the Prima Secundae, rather than on his discussion of justice in the Secunda Secundae. This assimilation gained a hold on the thought of secular jurists with the aid of Stoic morality as conveyed by Cicero. J.) There was a clericalist motivation to this step, as it occurred in clerical authors. The clergy are the teachers of morality, and the conception of a director of consciences that was current during the Counter-Reformation emphasised the authority of the moral direc[11] Villey (1969), pp, 171-173. [12] See Villey, ‘Bible et philosophie gréco-romaine’, in ‘Dimensions religieuses du droit et notamment sur l’apport de saint Thomas d’Aquin’, Archives de philosophie du droit, XVIII (1973), pp. 46-7.

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tor over the actions of the directee. If law belongs to the province of morality, the clergy thus have authority over the law—an authority that was exercised in practice when clerics served as spiritual directors for Catholic rulers.13 K.) This assimilation of law to morality produced modern natural law theories. In the course of this assimilation, the notion of objective right was lost. Law becomes prescriptive—as is the case with moral precepts—rather than descriptive—as is the case with objective right. It is derived from the nature of human beings considered as individuals, not from a) the notion of human society considered as a natural entity whose properties are not reducible to the properties of the individuals who make it up, and b) a consideration of the specific circumstances in which a given society finds itself. L.) This assimilation of law to morality is the basis, in one form or other, of all subsequent political theories. Such theories take one or other of the basic human drives that are the subject of the first principles of practical reason, and elevate them into a system: self-preservation (Hobbes, Spinoza); secure enjoyment of pleasure (Bentham); social existence (Grotius, Pufendorf); culture and self-improvement (Locke, Thomasius, Wolff); living a rational life (Kant); or when Scriptural influences predominate, loving God and one’s neighbour (Domat).14 M.) It is accompanied by the full maturity of political theories that base society on subjective rights; Hobbes’s position is the first fully worked out theory of this kind. The key aspect of these theories is rejection of the idea that human societies are natural entities with an end that specifies what justice is, and replacement of this idea by subjective rights as the glue that joins individuals into societies. Social contract theories exemplify this replacement. N.) Modern natural rights theories and subjective rights together give a theoretical justification for the injustices of absolutism and early capitalism. In the form given it by Hobbes, a political theory based on subjective rights justifies absolutism, because the act of forming a political society involves the forming of a contract that hands over the subjective rights of individuals to the ruler, who can [13] Villey (1973), pp. 42-4. One could give a contemporary version of this analysis; a conception of justice that assimilates it to morality provides, if not authority, at least influence and employment to scholars who are employed as ethicists. The idea that specialised knowledge of ethics does not confer any particular authority to pronounce on what is just probably does not recommend Villey’s thought to moral philosophers. [14] Villey (1973), p. 50.


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then act as he pleases—the essence of the notion of subjective right. Since the authority of the ruler is conceived of as a subjective right to command his subjects, there is no limit to the obedience they owe him, and no appeal that can be made against his commands. 15 In Locke’s political theory, unlike Hobbes’s, the subjective right to property is not handed over to the ruler by the social contract, but is retained by individuals. Since a subjective right to property confers an absolute power to possess and use something, no claim in justice can be made to someone’s property, and the state’s function is simply that of guaranteeing the security of the possessions of existing property holders. The traditional Christian view that in extreme necessity the poor have the right in justice to sustenance from the superfluity of the rich is rejected. Subjective rights also had the bad effect of separating mankind from the rest of creation. Objective right is determined by an ordering of human society, that itself has a place in the order of the cosmos as a whole. It thus gave a rationale for respecting the non-human portion of the physical universe. Subjective right, drawing all relations of justice from human nature, left no place for such respect. O.) Partly in reaction to these injustices, claim-rights began to be postulated. They resemble subjective rights in being attributes of individuals that are supposed to be derived from human nature as such, but are not spheres within which an individual is free to act; they are rather entitlements to some external good. Their content emerges from the identification of law and morality; the basic inclinations of the human will, whose objects are the principles of morality, are the usual contents of claim-rights—the inclinations to life, health, knowledge, social existence, and so on. P.) Modern natural law theories turn out to be unworkable; the alleged deductions they involve are full of holes. 16 Q.) In response to this unworkableness, positivist accounts of law are developed, which conceive of rights as creations of positive legislation. The most commonly used definition of the terms ‘objective right’ and ‘subjective right’ emerges from a positivist account; objective right is the positive law itself, subjective right is the advantage that an individual can claim from an objective right.17 In practice, positivist theories of law fail for a reason analogous to the reason for [15] Villey (1973), p. 52. [16] See e.g. Villey (1969), pp. 107 ff. [17] Villey (1969), p. 143.

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the failure of modern natural law theories; it is impossible for a body of positive law to actually settle the questions that arise before the courts—there are always questions to be asked about which laws apply to a particular situation and how a given law should be applied to it, and the body of positive law, not being infinite, cannot furnish adequate answers to these questions. In effect, what judges end up doing much of the time is looking for objective right. R.) Despite the practical unworkableness of subjective right, it still dominates our conceptions of justice and the structure of society—if only because objective right having been forgotten and positive law being inadequate, there is no other way available for people to conceptualise just human relations and social structures. S.) Subjective rights—in both the precise definition of powers to act, and in the broader sense that includes claim-rights—do not exist,18 and the belief in them does great harm. Since they do not exist, the version of them that gets accepted is the version that people with power and control over the means of forming opinion find in their interests—a version that such people genuinely believe in, because their egotism coupled with belief in subjective right gives rise to this belief. Subjective rights thus become the tool of injustice. The claim-rights form of subjective right is used as an opiate, that compensates people for their real sufferings by making solemn promises and acknowledgements of entitlements that never will be and never can be fulfilled. Subjective rights are an idol, that leads to the deification of man and the rejection of God. 19 T.) Objective right exists, and is the real basis for just action and a just society. Subjective rights should be rejected, and objective right should be accepted.

[18] This claim has also famously been made by Alasdair MacIntyre, in his After Virtue, 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 69; ‘There are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches or unicorns.’ I have not found any sign of MacIntyre being influenced by Villey; MacIntyre also supports St. Thomas’s view of justice, but it would scarcely be surprising for the two philosophers to have arrived at their support for St. Thomas independently. Leo Strauss is another thinker opposed to the notion of subjective rights. Villey’s review of Strauss’s work in Archives de philosophie du droit, 1954, p. 280-282, was not enthusiastic about its overall thesis, and Strauss’s work appeared after Villey’s interest in the origin of subjective rights had developed, so Strauss does not seem to have been an inspiration for his thought. [19] See Stéphane Rials, Villey et les idoles (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 2000), esp. p. 18, and Lamont (2009).


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II. Criticism of his views From this summary, it emerges that Villey’s position on objective and subjective rights includes both a historical account of the development of the notions of objective and subjective rights, and a case for the acceptance of objective right and the rejection of subjective rights. The two features of his thought are connected, since much of his criticism of subjective rights involves a criticism of the arguments that led to their acceptance, and a description of the bad consequences of this acceptance. Such a connection is appropriate and necessary in any thorough study of an important ethical, political or legal concept. Villey’s philosophical criticisms of the notion of subjective right as such are explained and substantiated by his account of how these criticisms explain the drawbacks of the notion of subjective right. The grounds that have been usually given for rejecting the substance of Villey’s views are not criticisms of his philosophical arguments, but criticisms of his historical account. The historical criticism that has been seen as fatal to his position on subjective rights is that of Brian Tierney, whose principal contention is that a clear notion of subjective rights does not first appear in Ockham, as Villey claims, but can be clearly found in the twelfth century canonists who comment on the Decretals of Gratian. Tierney’s work has been used to justify a general dismissal of Villey’s thought. Examples of this dismissal are Martin Rhonheimer,20 John Mahoney,21 Charles Curran,22 and Nicholas Wolterstorff.23 The step from rejecting Villey’s historical account to rejecting his criticism of subjective rights in themselves is clearly invalid. Yet the puzzling fact remains that after accepting Tierney’s historical criti[20] ‘Tierney convincingly challenges the view of Michel Villey, for whom the idea of “rights” (as subjective rights) is specifically modern.’; Martin Rhonheimer. ‘The Political Ethos of Constitutional Democracy and the Place of Natural Law in Public Reason: Rawls’ “Political Liberalism” Revisited’ (Notre Dame Law School, Natural Law Lecture 2005), American Journal of Jurisprudence 50 (2005), p. 5. [21] ‘In his detailed study of The Idea of Natural Rights, Brian Tierney dismantled this standard view promoted by Villey’; John Mahoney, The Challenge of Human Rights: Origin, Development and. Significance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 5-6. [22] ‘Distinguished medieval historian Brian Tierney and his student Charles Reid have convincingly challenged Villey’s historical thesis’; Charles E. Curran, Catholic social teaching, 1891–present: a historical, theological, and ethical analysis (Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press, 2002), p. 216. [23] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 53.

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cisms, these scholars feel they can treat Villey’s entire position as refuted and move on to other issues. It is even more puzzling because acceptance of Tierney’s assertions does not in fact alter Villey’s historical picture all that much. Villey does not claim that subjective rights sprang entirely from Ockham’s thought, like sin from Satan’s head. He asserts, as noted in E) above, that some sort of conception of subjective rights has always existed, and that they emerged from notions influential in medieval society prior to Ockham. He holds that a complete theory of subjective rights only arrives with Hobbes, as noted in M). Nicholas Wolterstorff is unusual in offering a defence of this rejection of Villey on the basis of Tierney’s work. He claims that the case that has been offered for rejecting subjective rights is based almost entirely on historical narratives of Villey’s kind; the polemic against subjective rights, he asserts, is conducted ‘almost entirely by offering a narrative concerning the supposedly disreputable origins of the conception of justice as inherent rights’.24 Wolterstorff identifies the strongest criticism of subjective rights as the claim that ‘rights-talk expresses and encourages one of the most pervasive and malignant diseases of modern society: possessive individualism.’25 He identifies this criticism as conducted almost entirely by means of narrative, and a social critique based on a narrative. Once upon a time, so it is said, everybody who thought about justice thought of it in terms of right order. Individualistic modes of thought then gave birth to the idea of inherent natural rights. … the old way of thinking about justice gradually lost its appeal and was displaced by the conception of justice as grounded on inherent rights … there is an intrinsic connection between, on the one hand, the idea of inherent natural rights and the conception of justice as inherent rights and, on the other hand, the possessive individualism of modern society.26

[24] Wolterstorff (2008), p. 21. [25] Wolterstorff (2008), p. 3. Wolterstorff quotes Stanley Hauerwas as making this criticism: ‘the language of rights tends toward individualistic accounts of society and underwrites a view of human relations as exchanges rather than cooperative endeavours. Contemporary political theory has tended to concentrate on the language of rights, not because we have a vision of the good community, but because we do not.’ Stanley Hauerwas, ‘On the Right to be Tribal’, Christian Scholar’s Review, 16:3 (March 1987), pp. 238-239. [26] Wolterstorff (2008), p. 11.


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A minimal familiarity with Villey’s work, however, shows that this is not true. A substantial proportion of his large scholarly output is devoted to arguments against the notion of subjective rights in themselves; a very cursory summary of his thought lists nine different arguments of this kind.27 He uses historical evidence to substantiate and illustrate these arguments, but they are not in themselves historical. Reliance on Tierney’s work, it is true, might lead to neglect of these arguments, since Tierney does not discuss them; and such reliance is tempting, seeing that Villey’s massive body of work is almost entirely untranslated from the French. Although Wolterstorff misrepresents Villey’s position, this misrepresentation may help to explain how and why rejection of Villey’s historical account has been seen as justifying a rejection of his attack on subjective rights in themselves. The idea behind this move would be that if subjective rights are essentially bound to a possessive individualist forms of society, the conception of subjective rights would not exist outside such forms of society. The fact that historians such as Tierney have demonstrated that the notion of subjective rights existed before Ockham would show that this notion is not tied to such forms of society, and thus that the criticism of subjective rights as intrinsically connected to possessive individualism has no force. This seems to be Wolterstorff’s thought, when he asserts that ‘the idea of natural rights was already common currency among the canon lawyers of the twelfth century; and the recognition of such rights, if not yet the concept, was present in the Church Fathers. No one will accuse the Church Fathers or the canon lawyers of nominalism or social atomism.’28 This line of reasoning would only furnish a decisive refutation of Villey’s position if it could be shown that the twelfth century and the patristic era were devoid of possessive individualism. We need not dwell on the hopelessness of this task, however, because such reasoning depends on acceptance of Tierney’s criticism of Villey’s historical account of subjective rights. Surprisingly, given its almost universal acceptance, his criticism can be shown to be wrong quite easily. The error in Tierney’s criticism results from his not being clear on what Villey means by subjective rights. Villey’s claim about Ockham is that Ockham is the first thinker to elaborate a philosophical conception of subjective rights, and that this conception is linked [27] See Lamont (2009), pp. 230-232. [28] Wolterstorff (2008), p. 63.

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to Ockham’s nominalism. This philosophical conception attributes four attributes to subjective rights; l

they are monadic properties of individuals, not relations

l

they are possessed simply in virtue of being human

l

they are powers to act freely within a certain sphere

l

they must be respected by the state, and are juridically enforceable whether or not they have been enshrined in positive law.

To refute this claim, it is necessary to show that such a conception was possessed by thinkers before Ockham. Tierney’s principal attempt at doing this is found in his paper ‘Villey, Ockham, and the Origin of Individual Rights’.29 Tierney contends that the notion of subjective rights is clearly found in the canonists of the twelfth century, before Ockham and the development of nominalism. None of the evidence that Tierney adduces, however, establishes this contention. Tierney’s mistakes arise from his defining subjective rights in a far broader sense than Villey does, as ‘a faculty or ability or power of individual persons, associated with reason and moral discernment, defining an area of liberty where the individual was free to act as he pleased, leading on to specific claims and powers of humans qua humans.’30 The term ‘leading on to’ should be noted here, as it is not the same as ‘conferring’. The canonists that Tierney describes all offer definitions of the term ‘ius’ that fit Tierney’s description, if ‘leading on to’ is understood in a sufficiently broad sense. But these definitions disagree significantly with each other, and none of them corresponds to the philosophical conception of subjective right that Villey is talking about. The only feature that these examples have in common with subjective rights is that they use the term ‘ius’ to refer to some kind of power possessed by an individual. This is true of the definition of ius naturale cited by Tierney, that is given by Rufinus in about 1160: ‘Natural ius is a certain force instilled in every human creature by nature to do good and avoid the opposite. Natural ius consists in three things, commands, prohibitions, and demonstrations …’31 The same is true of the definition of Odo of Dover, c. 1170: ‘natural ius is a certain force divinely [29] Brian Tierney, ‘Villey, Ockham, and the Origin of Individual Rights’, in The Idea of Natural Rights: studies on natural rights, natural law, and church law, 1150-1625 (Grand Rapids: Emory University Press, 1997). [30] Tierney, ‘Origins of Natural Rights Language: Texts and Contexts, 1150-1250’, in Tierney (1997), p. 54. [31] Tierney (1997), p 62.


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inspired in man by which he is led to what is just and right and equitable’,32 and that of Simon of Bisignano; ‘natural ius is said to be a force of the mind of the superior part of the soul, namely reason which is called synderesis’.33 Tierney lays considerable stress on the views of the canonist Huguccio, who asserts that ‘natural ius is called reason, namely a natural force of the soul’; ‘ius ergo naturale dicitur ratio, scilicet naturalis uis animi ex qua homo discernit inter bonum et malum’.34 But this definition identifies natural ius with the human reason itself. Possession of reason certainly confers powers upon its possessor, but having reason itself is obviously not identical with having subjective rights. If Huguccio has a different account of ius naturale that does correspond to subjective rights, Tierney does not mention it; and indeed everything he says about Huguccio’s views conforms to the definition of ius naturale as human reason itself. A better example offered by Tierney is the right of a poor man in extreme necessity to the superfluity of the rich.35 Discussion of this right played an important role in the development of the notion of subjective rights. However, the existence of such a right can be explained by an objective right theory as well as by a subjective rights theory; it is postulated by St. Thomas, whose thought, as Tierney acknowledges, does not contain the notion of subjective rights. Indeed, St. Thomas’s theory is the more natural account of this right, since on the face of it the right presupposes the existence of rich men upon whom the needy poor man has a claim; it is thus better understood as a relation between rich and poor, rather than as a monadic attribute of the poor man. Postulating this right thus does not entail possession of the philosophical conception of subjective rights, and we therefore cannot conclude that the canonists had such a conception simply because they postulated this right. The purported counterexamples to Villey’s thesis offered by Charles J. Reid are even farther away from subjective rights than Tierney’s cases.36 Reid’s examples of the right of a cathedral chapter

[32] Tierney (1997), p. 63. [33] Tierney (1997), p. 63. [34] Tierney (1997), p. 64. [35] Tierney (1997), pp. 70 ff. [36] See Charles J. Reid, ‘The Canonistic Contribution to the Western Rights Tradition’, Boston College Law Review 33 (1991): 37-92; ‘Thirteenth-Century Canon

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to vote in the election of the bishop,37 and the right of spouses to claim sexual intercourse from each other,38 are clear examples of objective right. They are relations between specified individuals or groups, not monadic properties of individuals. Reid specifically mentions the right to not be impeded in contracting marriage, widely recognised by canonists before Ockham, as an objection to Villey’s thesis.39 This is obviously not a subjective right, since if it were it would bear upon absolutely anyone—which would include the prospective spouse, willing or not. Indeed Reid implicitly recognises the limitations of this right, remarking that ‘this was a right assertable chiefly against familial authority, but it was also assertable in certain contexts against public authority.’40 A similar misunderstanding of the conception of subjective right is found in Michael Zuckert’s criticism of Villey’s assertion that subjective rights do not exist in Roman law. Zuckert remarks that ‘there is an easy migration of meaning from objective to subjective right: if one begins with right in the objective sense of “the right or just thing itself”, that is, the correct assignment or relations of things to persons, then the “part” in that distribution that pertains to each readily becomes the basis for the assertion of a claim of the subjective right sort.’41 This is exactly what Villey holds, except that he would not use the term ‘subjective right’. What Zuckert describes as a subjective right is the power to make a just claim that is based on the existence of an objective right. Such powers are a logical consequence of the existence of objective right, but they are incompatible with subjective rights as Villey understands them. They are not spheres of action within which an agent’s power is absolute, as subjective rights are; they are powers to exact the realisation of a particular state of affairs. So, for example, possession of a bond that promises payment of a given sum on a given date confers a power of the sort Zuckert is referring to, viz. the power to demand payment of that sum at that time. But such a power is not a subjective right; it does not confer any absolute control over anything, or give its possessor a free sphere of Law and Rights: The Word ius and Its Range of Subjective Meanings’, Studia Canonica 30 (1996): 295-342. [37] Reid (1991), p. 67. [38] Reid (1991), p. 39. [39] Reid (1991), p. 80. [40] Reid (1991), p. 80. [41] Michael Zuckert, ‘“Bringing Philosophy down from the Heavens”: Natural Right in Roman Law’, The Review of Politics 51;1 (Winter, 1989), p. 74.


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action of any kind. In fact Zuckert confirms Villey’s general thesis about Roman law, asserting that ‘one may readily concede, indeed ought to emphasise with Villey, that the primary meaning of ius is objective right.’42 Zuckert makes the point that Roman law at times uses the term ius to designate a power to make a just claim, not simply to refer to an objective right that grounds such a power. But this terminological point, helpful as it is for the interpretation of Roman legal texts, does not furnish an objection to Villey’s denial of the existence of subjective right in Roman law. The alleged historical case for the existence of subjective rights prior to Ockham is thus without substance. What about Villey’s positive claim that Ockham gives an account of subjective rights that corresponds to the philosophical conception described above? Annabel Brett has pointed out that this claim is correct. She observes that Ockham defines a right of use, ius utendi, as follows; ‘A right to use [ius utendi] is a licit power to make use of some external thing, a power of which one should not be unwillingly deprived without rational cause unless one has committed some crime, and the deprival of which can be contested at law (ius utendi est potestas licita utendi re aliqua extrinseca, qua quis sine culpa sua et absque cause rationabili privari non debet invitus; et si privatus fuerit, privantem poterit in iudicio convenire).’43 Here we have the idea of a right as a power of an individual to use something as he likes, a right that is as such enforceable in law. Brett remarks of Ockham that ‘it is here that his originality becomes clear … The ius utendi is thus the basic juridical attribute justifying personal activity. The ius utendi is, then, as Villey rightly stressed in his early articles, a subjective power of action. It is not a relation of control over things, as was ius for the early Franciscans.’44 Ockham postulates both a ius utendi arising from positive law and a ius utendi arising from natural law, and [42] Zuckert (1989), p. 74. . Natale Rampazzo’s overview of scholarly reaction to Villey’s claim about the non-existence of subjective right in Roman law concludes that the reaction is generally favourable; see Rampazzo, ‘Critique de la lecture villeyenne du droit romain: le droit subjectif’, in Michel Villey: le juste partage, eds. Chantal Delsol and Stéphane Bauzon (Paris: Dalloz, 2007). [43] William of Ockham, Opus nonaginta dierum, in R. F. Bennet and H. S. Offler eds, Guillelmi de Ockham. Opera politica, vol. 2 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), p. 302; quoted in Annabel Brett, Liberty, right, and nature: individual rights in later scholastic thought (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), pp. 62-3. The formulation is quoted by Villey (1969), p. 166. [44] Brett (1997), p. 63. Brett’s account provides a reply to the criticism made of Villey by Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: CUP, 1979), pp. 22-3. Brett remarks (p. 51 fn. 8) that Villey, in ‘La

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asserts that a natural ius utendi cannot be renounced.45 He describes the right to take what is needed to sustain life in extreme necessity as a natural ius utendi. Here there is both the claim that the right to take what is need to sustain life exists, and a philosophical explication of this right that exemplifies the philosophical conception of subjective right. Villey is thus correct in attributing such a conception to Ockham. In addition to his historical criticism of Villey, Tierney also criticises Villey’s linking of Ockham’s theory of subjective rights to his nominalism. This criticism fails, as the historical criticism does, and for a similar reason. Tierney does not grasp the claim that Villey is making.46 He takes Villey’s talk about Ockham’s nominalism to refer to Ockham’s position on the problem of universals, and argues that the position one takes on the problem of universals has no implications for the issue of subjective vs. objective right—which is quite true.47 But Villey, in referring to nominalism, is not discussing Ockham’s view on the problem of universals; he is talking about a school of medieval philosophy of which Ockham was one of the most significant figures. This school is characterised not only by its rejection of universals, but also by its rejection of the reality of relations.48 It is this rejection of relations that is important for subjective rights, because objective right is a relation. If relations are banished promotion de la loi et du droit subjectif dans la seconde scolastique’, La seconda scolastica nella formazione del diritto private moderno (Milan: Giuffré, 1973) p. 54, modified earlier his claim that Ockham was the sole originator of the notion of subjective right, in response to the work of Paolo Grossi, ‘Usus facti. La nozione di proprietà nell’inaugurazione dell’età nuova’, Quaderni fiorentini 1 (1972), 287-355. Villey remarks that ‘I had written earlier that [the notion of subjective rights] dated above all from the 14th century; I would now say that it dates from a bit earlier, after the article of M. Grossi in the Quaderni, but that it the notion only became widespread in the worlds of jurists in the modern epoch.’ Villey’s change of mind here indicates how little importance he attached to the exact point of origin of the notion of subjective rights. Brett, however, agrees here with Villey’s earlier thesis. [45] Ockham (1963), pp. 556, 559; quoted in Brett (1997), pp. 64-65. [46] A similar point can be made about Charles Zuckerman, ‘The Relationship of Theories of Universals to Theories of Church Government in the Middle Ages: A Critique of Previous Views’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Oct.–Dec., 1975), whom Tierney cites. [47] A. S. McGrade denies this, and defends the claim that Ockham’s position on universals is relevant to his position on rights, in ‘Ockham on the Birth of Individual Rights,’ in Authority and Power, ed. Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). However, McGrade’s arguments are not relevant to Villey’s quite different views. [48] On this see Jeffrey Brower, ‘Medieval Theories of Relations’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =


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from one’s ontology, it is impossible to consistently postulate the existence of objective right,49 and a replacement for it is needed, which subjective rights provide. There is thus undoubtedly a logical connection between Ockham’s development of a philosophical conception of subjective right and his nominalist ontology. Ockham does not appeal to this ontology to justify his theory of subjective rights, but it is reasonable to suppose that there was some connection in his mind between his ontology and his theory of rights. Obviously the postulation of subjective rights does not imply that relations as a metaphysical category do not exist, but it is worth inquiring about links between the postulation of subjective rights and an individualistic conception of society. Such links do exist if subjective rights are taken to be the sole basis for just relations in society. The whole idea of subjective rights is that they belong to individuals, and do not involve the existence of anything beyond the individual who possesses them. If such rights are the basis of social existence, it follows that society can be no more than a collection of individual human atoms. This consequence of subjective rights was clearly realised by Hobbes and Locke, and their social contract theories conform to it. Nothing could express social atomism more clearly than these social contract theories. It is odd to find Wolterstorff disputing the link between subjective rights and social atomism, when Hobbes and Locke, the most influential proponents

. Paul Vincent Spade remarks, ‘Ockham removes all need for entities in seven of the traditional Aristotelian ten categories; all that remain are entities in the categories of substance and quality, and a few entities in the category of relation, which Ockham thinks are required for theological reasons pertaining to the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Eucharist, even though our natural cognitive powers would see no reason for them at all.’ Paul Vincent Spade, ‘William of Ockham’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), . [49] The postulation of objective right by St. Thomas seems indeed to go further than St. Thomas’s own ontology of relations would permit, if strictly construed, and to fit better in a modern ontology of relations. Such modern theories take relations to be entities that link relata but that do not inhere in them, while St. Thomas understood relations as accidents of relata. On the assumption that a modern ontology of relations is correct, this discrepancy is easily explained; St. Thomas, because he described the relation of objective right accurately, was inevitably led to portray it as a relation in the modern sense, despite the resulting incompatibility with his philosophical account of relations. For exposition of St. Thomas’s ontology of relations and contrast with the modern view, see John Lamont, ‘Aquinas on subsistent relation’, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévale, June 2004.

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of subjective rights, explicitly made such atomism the starting point for their political theories. Most criticism of Villey, as remarked above, is aimed at his account of the history of rights rather than at his position on objective and subjective rights in themselves. Such criticism of this latter position as exists is hard to evaluate, because to do so one must distinguish between criticism of Villey himself and criticism of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition which he defends. Of course, there is not a sharp line between these kinds of criticism, but it is not practical in this paper to undertake a defence of one of the major traditions of Western ethical and legal thought as such; and in any case a better defence of this tradition can be found in Villey’s own works than any I am capable of providing. It is however worth mentioning one criticism of Villey’s views on objective and subjective rights in themselves, since it occurs as part of an attack on Villey in particular rather than on the Thomist view as such. This criticism is offered by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut; while not of any intellectual value, it has some significance due to the importance of the critics (Ferry, grandson of the secularist and imperialist French prime minister Jules Ferry, was French Minister of Education from 2002 to 2004).50 Ferry and Renaut state that the concept of objective right is determined by Aristotelian cosmology.51 We understand how this order works by looking at how inanimate objects behave in it. Such objects spontaneously seek their natural place in the hierarchy of the universe—fire moves away from the centre of the universe to its proper sphere, for example, whereas earth moves towards the centre. The operations of classical natural law, which are what determine objective right, follow this pattern. Differences in nature lead humans to take up different places in the social hierarchy, with the natural rulers gravitating to the top and the natural slaves to the bottom.52 The impulse of nature that produces this result is a necessary one.53 No place can be found for human equality in such a scheme,54 because of its rejection of the existence of a common human nature. The determination of the best political structure is achieved by considering the natural order, not by taking human requirements into [50] See Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Philosophie politique 3: Des droits de l’homme à l’idée républicaine (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1984/1999). [51] Ferry and Renaut (1999), pp. 47-57. [52] Ferry and Renaut (1999), pp. 57, 69. [53] Ferry and Renaut (1999), p. 67. [54] Ferry and Renaut (1999), pp. 57-58.


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account.55 This classical conception of human society and justice is unacceptable, so the classical notion of right should be rejected. As a criticism of the conception of objective right held by Villey and St. Thomas, this is totally absurd. On this conception, essential differences of nature of the kind that give rise to the order of the physical universe cannot produce the hierarchies of human society, since human beings all have the same essential nature; St. Thomas accordingly states that all men are by nature equal (2a2ae, q. 104, a. 5). The structures of human society cannot be produced by any sort of natural necessity, because the nature of human beings is precisely to act out of knowledge and rational will, rather than out of natural necessity. Even as a description of right in Roman law the criticism is wrong, since the Institutes of Justinian state that slavery does not derive from the law of nature (lib. 1 tit. 3). Ferry and Renaut’s criticism is a transparent attempt to associate Villey’s views with racially based systems of slavery, apartheid, and the privileged status of the nobility under the Ancien Régime. Its unscrupulousness is in its way a tribute to the power of Villey’s work, since the refutation of Villey’s position is seen to call for such drastic propaganda. This overview of criticisms of Villey’s work has shown that they all fail to undermine his positions. It has also shown something puzzling, which is that in a sense none of these criticisms are really criticisms of Villey. None of them accurately identify his positions, and hence none of them reach even the initial stage of disagreeing with what he actually said. This failure may be partly due to lack of philosophical exactness, a fault shown in the characterisations of the notion of subjective rights offered by Villey’s critics. However, the differences between objective right and subjective rights are not that abstruse. The explanation for this failure may be that the conception of subjective rights is such a foundational part of our current culture that it is not just a topic for scholarly discussion, but an essential feature of the everyday assumptions and perceptions of scholars. Serious questioning of a foundational notion of one’s everyday life is psychologically difficult, and scholars are not exempt from this difficulty. Of course, philosophical hypotheses like Cartesian scepticism and Berkeleyean idealism question foundational notions, but they do not present alternatives that people could actually believe. Villey’s support for objective right, on the other hand, does advance a real alternative to acceptance of subjective rights. The psychological reflexes that reject real consideration of alternatives to one’s [55] Ferry and Renaut (1999), p. 55.

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foundational beliefs are thus likely to impede a proper consideration of his position. This is a factor on the individual level. On the collective level, subjective rights are the explicit justification for the systems of government of France and the U.S., and are strongly integrated into the legislation of many other countries. Accepting Villey’s arguments thus has drastic political implications, which people loyal to their systems of governments will find very unwelcome. The nature of political legitimacy means that it is not only acceptance of Villey’s arguments, but also serious consideration of them, that has unwelcome implications. The nature of political legitimacy demands that political authority be taken as beyond serious questioning. Once it is admitted that there are plausible arguments against the basis of a political system, arguments that require serious consideration, the legitimacy of that system is shaken. It is likely that Ferry and Renaut grasp this fact, and are motivated by it in their caricature of Villey. There are thus very high stakes in the debate over the truth of Villey’s basic position. It is odd to see these stakes being fought over on the battlefield of twelfth century canonical thought, and interested parties should rightly feel that a wider sphere of operations is needed for a decisive victory to be won. Hopefully this paper will contribute to the opening of such a wider sphere.

Robert P. George1

Natural Law Oliver Wendell Holmes, the legal philosopher and judge whom Richard Posner has, with admiration, dubbed ‘the American Nietzsche,’2 established in the minds of many people a certain image of what natural law theories are theories of, and a certain set of reasons for supposing that such theories are misguided and even ridiculous. While I have my own reasons for admiring some of Holmes’s work—despite, let me hasten to add, rather than because of, the Nietzscheanism that endears him to Judge Posner—I think that everything Holmes thought and taught about natural law is wrong. I have elsewhere set forth a detailed critique of Holmes’s thought.3 I won’t repeat my critique of Holmes here. Rather, I will offer a constructive account of what natural law theories are in fact theories of, say why the idea of natural law and natural rights is far more plausible than people influenced by Holmes have supposed, and show how natural law theories are similar to and different from leading competing accounts of practical reasoning and of moral judgments that provide the justificatory basis of positive law as well as standards for its critical evaluation. Theories of natural law are reflective critical accounts of the constitutive aspects of the well-being and fulfillment of human persons and the communities they form. The propositions that pick out [1]

This paper was originally delivered as the 2007 John Dewey Lecture in Philosophy of Law at Harvard. I am deeply grateful to Dean Elena Kagan and the faculty of Harvard Law School for the honor of being invited to return to my alma mater on April 9, 2007 for this occasion.

[2]

Introduction to Richard Posner (ed.) The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992, p. xxviii.

[3]

Robert George, ‘Holmes on Natural Law’, in Jean De Groot (ed.), Nature in American Philosophy, Catholic University of America Press, Washington D.C., 2004, pp. 127-37.

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fundamental aspects of human flourishing are directive (that is, prescriptive) in our thinking about what to do and refrain from doing (our practical reason)—that is, they are, or provide, more than merely instrumental reasons for action and self-restraint. When these foundational principles of practical reflection are taken together (that is, integrally), they entail norms that may exclude certain options and require others in situations of morally significant choosing. So natural law theories propose to identify principles of right action—moral principles—specifying the first and most general principle of morality, namely, that one should choose and act in ways that are compatible with a will towards integral human fulfillment.4 Among these principles are respect for rights people possess simply by virtue of their humanity—rights which, as a matter of justice, others are bound to respect, and governments are bound not only to respect but, to the extent possible, also to protect. Theorists of natural law understand human fulfillment—the human good—as variegated. There are many irreducible dimensions of human well-being. This is not to deny that human nature is determinate. It is to affirm that our nature, though determinate, is complex. We are animals, but rational. Our integral good includes our bodily well-being, but also our intellectual, moral, and spiritual well-being. We are individuals, but friendship and sociability are constitutive aspects of our flourishing. We form bonds with others not only for instrumental purposes, but because of our grasp of the inherent fulfillments available in joining together in a wide variety of formal and informal types of association and community. In ways that are highly relevant to moral reflection and judgment, man truly is a social animal. By reflecting on the basic goods of human nature, especially those most immediately pertaining to social and political life, natural law theorists propose to arrive at a sound understanding of principles of justice, including those principles we call human rights. In light of what I’ve already said about how natural law theorists understand human nature and the human good, it should be no surprise to learn that natural law theorists typically reject both strict (or radical) individualism and collectivism. Individualism overlooks the intrinsic value of human sociability and tends to view human beings atomistically. It reduces all forms of human association to the instru[4]

On the first principle of morality and its specifications, see John Finnis, Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., and Germain Grisez, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 281-287.

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mental value they possess (which is not to deny that some forms of association are indeed purely instrumentally valuable, or that virtually all forms of human association have instrumental value in addition to whatever intrinsic value they may have). Collectivism compromises the dignity of human beings by tending to instrumentalize and subordinate their well-being to the interests of larger social units. It reduces the individual to the status of a cog in the wheel whose flourishing is merely a means rather than an end to which other things—including governments, systems of public and private law, and other institutions created by members of human communities for the sake of their common good are—however noble and important (or, to use Aristotle’s description ‘great and god-like’)5—in the end merely means. Individualists and collectivists both have theories of justice and human rights, but they are, as I see it, highly unsatisfactory. They are rooted in important misunderstandings of human nature and the human good. Neither can do justice to the concept of a human person, that is, a rational animal who is a locus of intrinsic value (and, as such, an end-in-himself who may never legitimately be treated as a mere means to others’ ends), but whose well-being intrinsically includes relationships with others and membership in formal and informal communities in which he or she has, as a matter of justice, both rights and (ordinarily) responsibilities. I’m sometimes asked whether natural law theorists suppose that rights are ‘hard-wired into our nature.’ I fear that this metaphor is more likely to mislead than to illuminate. There are human rights if there are principles of practical reason directing us to act or abstain from acting in certain ways out of respect for the well-being and the dignity of persons whose legitimate interests may be affected by what we do. I certainly believe that there are such principles. They cannot be overridden by considerations of utility. (So a complete defense of any account of natural law and natural rights must include a telling critique of utilitarian and other consequentialist or aggregative accounts of moral reasoning.)6 At a very general level, they direct us, in Kant’s phrase, to treat human beings always as ends and never as means only. When we begin to specify this general norm, we identify important negative duties, such as the duty to refrain from enslaving people. [5]

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.2.1094b10

[6]

For such a critique by an eminent contemporary theorist of natural law, see John Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics Oxford University Press and Georgetown University Press, Washington D.C., 1983, ch. 4.

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Although we need not put the matter in terms of ‘rights,’ it is perfectly reasonable, and I believe helpful, to speak of a right against being enslaved, and to speak of slavery as a violation of human rights. It is a moral right that people have—one that every community is morally obliged to protect by law—not by virtue of being members of a certain race, sex, class, or ethnic group, but simply by virtue of our humanity.7 In that sense, it is a human right. But there are, in addition to negative duties and their corresponding rights, certain positive duties. And these, too, can be articulated and discussed in the language of rights, though here it is especially important that we be clear about by whom and how a given right is to be honored. Sometimes it is said, for example, that education or health care is a human right. It is not unreasonable to speak this way; but much more needs to be said if it is to be a meaningful statement. Who is supposed to provide education or health care to whom? Why should those persons or institutions be the providers? What place should the provision of education or health care occupy on the list of social and political priorities? Is it better for education and health care to be provided by governments under socialized systems, or by private providers in markets? These questions go beyond the application of moral principles. They require technical (e.g., economic) and prudential judgments—including judgments of the sort that can vary depending on contingent circumstances people face in a given society at a given point in time. Often, there is not a single, uniquely correct answer. The answer to each question can lead to further questions; and the problems can be extremely complex, far more complex than the issue of slavery, where once a right has been identified its universality and the basic terms of its application are fairly clear. Everybody has a moral right not to be enslaved, and everybody an obligation as a matter of strict justice to refrain from enslav-

[7]

By the phrase ‘our humanity,’ I mean to refer more precisely to the nature of humans as rational beings. The nature of human beings is a rational nature. So in virtue of our human nature, we human beings possess a profound and inherent dignity. The same would be true, however, of beings other than humans whose nature is a rational nature, if indeed there are such beings. In the case of humans, even individuals who have not yet acquired the immediately exercisable capacities for conceptual thought and other rational acts, and even those who have temporarily or permanently lost them, and, indeed, even those who do not possess them, never possessed them, and (short of a miracle) never will possess them, possess a rational nature.

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ing others; governments have a moral obligation to respect and protect the right and, correspondingly, to enforce the obligation. 8 What I’ve said so far will provide a pretty good idea of how I think we ought to go about identifying what are human rights. But in each case the argument must be made, and in many cases there are complexities to the argument. One basic human right that almost all natural law theorists would say belongs in the set is the right of an innocent person not to be directly killed or maimed (including by torture). This is a right that is violated when someone makes the death or injury of another person the precise object of his action. It is the right that grounds the norm against targeting non-combatants, even in justified wars, and against abortion, euthanasia, the killing of hostages, and the torturing of prisoners, even for the sake of preventing disasters. Of course, in the case of abortion, some people argue that human beings in the embryonic or fetal stages of development do not yet qualify as persons and so do not possess human rights; and in the case of euthanasia, some argue that permanently comatose or severely retarded or demented people do not (or no longer) qualify as rights-bearers. I think that these claims are mistaken, but I won’t here go into my reasons for holding that the moral status of a human being does not depend on his or her age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency.9 For present purposes, I will say only that people who do not share with me the conviction that human beings in early stages of development and in severely debilitated conditions are rights-bearers, may nevertheless agree that whoever qualifies as a person is protected by the norm against direct killing of the innocent. The natural law understanding of human rights I am here sketching is connected with a particular account of human dignity. Under [8]

Having said this, I do not want to suggest a sharper difference than can be justified between positive and negative rights. Even in the case of negative rights, it is sometimes relevant to ask how a right should be honored and who, if anyone has particular responsibility for protecting it. Moreover, it can be the case that there is not a uniquely correct answer to questions about what place the protection of the right should occupy on the list of social priorities. Consider, for example, the right not to be subjected to assault or battery. While it is obvious that individuals have the obligation to respect this right, and equally obvious that governments have an obligation to protect persons within their jurisdiction from those who would violate it, different communities reasonably differ not only as to the means or mix of means that are used to protect persons from assault and battery, but also as to the level of resources they allocate to protecting people against violations of the right. I am grateful to Allen Buchanan for this point.

[9]

See: Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life Random House, New York, 2008.

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that account, the natural human capacities for reason and freedom are fundamental to the dignity of human beings—the dignity that is protected by human rights. The basic goods of human nature are the goods of a rational creature—a creature who, unless impaired or prevented from doing so, naturally develops and exercises capacities for deliberation, judgment, and choice. These capacities are God-like (albeit, of course, in a limited way). In fact, from the theological vantage point they constitute a certain sharing—limited, to be sure, but real—in divine power. This is what is meant, I believe, by the otherwise extraordinarily puzzling Biblical teaching that man is made in the very image and likeness of God. But whether or not one recognizes Biblical authority or believes in a personal God, it is true that human beings possess a power traditionally ascribed to divinity—namely, the quite literally awe-inspiring power to cause things one is not caused to cause. This is the power to envisage a possible state of affairs, to grasp the value of bringing it into being, and then to act by choice (and not merely by impulse or instinct) to bring it into being. That state of affairs may be anything from the development of an intellectual skill or the attainment of an item of knowledge, to the creation or critical appreciation of a work of art, to the establishment of marital communion. It’s moral or cultural significance may be great or, far more commonly, comparatively minor. What matters for the point I am now making is that it is a product of human reason and freedom. It is the fruit of deliberation, judgment, and choice. We may, if we like, consider as a further matter whether beings capable of such powers could exist apart from a divine source and ground of their being. But I don’t think it makes sense to say that beings whose nature is to develop and exercise such powers are lacking in dignity and rights and may therefore be treated as mere objects, instruments, or property. On this point, I find myself sharing common ground with my atheist colleague and friend Jeffrey Stout, who argues on something closely akin to this basis that unbelievers, too, can affirm human dignity and fundamental human rights. 10 Now, what about the authority for this view of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human rights? Natural law theo[10] Professor Stout made this point most clearly in his comment on John Finnis’s paper ‘Secularism, Law and Public Policy’, given at Princeton University on October 11, 2003 at the conference on ‘Faith and the Challenges of Secularism,’ sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. See also Jeffrey Stout, ‘Truth, Natural Law, and Ethical Theory’, in Robert P. George (ed.), Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, pp. 71-102.

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rists are interested in the intelligible reasons people have for their choices and actions. We are particularly interested in reasons that can be identified without appeal to any authority apart from the authority of reason itself. This is not to deny that it is often reasonable to recognize and submit to religious or secular (e.g., legal) authority in deciding what to do and not do. Indeed, natural law theorists such as Yves Simon have made important contributions to understanding why and how people can sometimes be morally bound to submit to, and be guided in their actions by, authority of various types.11 But even here, the special concern of natural law theorists is with the reasons people have for recognizing and honoring claims to authority. We do not simply appeal to authority to justify authority. One might then ask whether human beings are in fact rational. Can we discern any intelligible reasons for human choices and actions? Everybody recognizes that some ends or purposes pursued through human action are intelligible at least insofar as they provide means to other ends. For example, people work to earn money, and their doing so is perfectly rational. Money is a valuable means to a great many important ends. No one doubts its instrumental value. So even skeptics do not deny that there are instrumental goods. The question is whether some ends or purposes are intelligible as providing more than merely instrumental reasons for acting. Are there intrinsic, as well as instrumental, goods? Skeptics deny that there are intelligible ends or purposes that make possible rationally motivated action. Natural law theorists, by contrast, hold that friendship, knowledge, various forms of skillful performance, aesthetic appreciation, personal authenticity and integrity, and certain other ends or purposes are intrinsically valuable.12 They are intelligibly ‘choice worthy,’ not simply as means to other ends, but as ends-in-themselves. They cannot be reduced to, nor can their intelligible appeal be accounted for exclusively in terms of, emotion, feeling, desire, or other subrational motivating factors. These basic human goods are constitutive aspects of the well-being and fulfillment of human persons and the communities they form, and they thereby provide the foundations of moral judgments, including our judgments pertaining to justice and human rights.

[11] Yves R. Simon, A General Theory of Authority University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1962. [12] See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, Ch. 3-5.

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Of course, there are plenty of people today who embrace philosophical or ideological doctrines that deny the human capacities I maintain are at the core of human dignity. They adopt a purely instrumental and essentially non-cognitivist view of practical reason (e.g., Hume’s view that reason is nothing more than ‘the slave of the passions’)13 and argue that the human experience of deliberation, judgment, and choice is illusory. The ends people pursue, they insist, are ultimately given by non-rational motivating factors, such as feeling, emotion, or desire. ‘The thoughts are to the desires,’ Hobbes has taught them to suppose, ‘as scouts and spies, to range abroad and find the way to the thing desired.’14 Truly rationally motivated action is impossible for creatures like us. There are no more-than-merely-instrumental reasons for action—no basic human goods. Now, if proponents of this non-cognitivist and subjectivist view of human action are right, then it seems to me that the entire business of ethics is a charade, and human dignity is a myth. But I don’t think they are right. Indeed, I don’t think that they can give any account of the norms of rationality to which they must appeal in attempting to make a case against reason and freedom that is consistent with the denial that people are capable of morethan-merely-instrumental rationality and true freedom of choice. Germain Grisez and Joseph Boyle, together with the late Olaf Tollefsen, make a powerful argument along these lines against skepticism and the denial of free will in a book entitled Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument.15 They, and I, do not deny that emotion figures in human action—obviously it does, and on many occasions it (or other subrational factors) does the main work of motivation. But we hold that people can have, and often do have, basic reasons for their actions—reasons provided by ends they understand as humanly fulfilling and desired precisely as such. These ends, too, figure in motivation.16 Now, if I am correct in affirming that human reason can identify human rights as genuine grounds of obligation to others [13] David Hume ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge & P.H. Nidditch, Treatise on Human Nature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978, bk. 2, pt. 3, sec. 3, p. 415. [14] Thomas Hobbes ed. Ernest Rhys, Leviathan, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1914, ch. 8. pp. 35-56. [15] Olaf Tollefson, Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1976. [16] Although she identifies herself with the Kantian (rather than the Aristotelian) tradition in ethics, the distinguished Harvard moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard makes a similar point when she argues that there can be no true practical rationality—not even an instrumentalist one composed of hypothetical

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—rights which people possess as a matter of natural law (what have been termed ‘natural rights’)—how can we explain or understand widespread failures to recognize and respect human rights and other moral principles? As human beings, we are rational animals; but we are imperfectly rational. We are prone to making intellectual and moral mistakes and capable of behaving grossly unreasonably—especially when deflected by powerful emotions that run contrary to the demands of reasonableness. Even when following our consciences, as we are morally bound to do, we can go wrong. A judgment made in good conscience may nevertheless be erroneous. Some of the greatest thinkers who ever lived failed to recognize the human right to religious liberty. Their failure, I believe, was rooted in a set of intellectual errors about what such a right presupposes and entails. The people who made these errors were neither fools nor knaves. The errors were not obvious, and it was only with a great deal of reflection and debate that the matter was clarified. Of course, sometimes people fail to recognize and respect human rights because they have self-interested motives for doing so. In most cases of exploitation, for example, the fundamental failing is moral, not intellectual. In some cases, though, intellectual and moral failures are closely connected. Selfishness, prejudice, partisanship, vanity, avarice, lust, ill-will, and other moral delinquencies can, in ways that are sometimes quite subtle, impede sound ethical judgments, including judgments pertaining to human rights. Whole cultures or subcultures can be infected with moral failings that blind large numbers of people to truths about justice and human rights; and ideologies hostile to these truths will almost always be both causes and effects of these failings. Consider, for example, the case of slavery in the antebellum American south. The ideology of white supremacy was both a cause of many people’s blindness to the wickedness of slavery, and an effect of the exploitation and degradation of its victims. Let us turn in a more focused way now to the question of God and religious faith in natural law theory. Most, but not all, natural law theorists are theists. They believe that the moral order, like every imperatives—unless there are (in her words) ‘some rational principles determining which ends are worthy of preference or pursuit,’ some ‘normative principles directing the adoption of ends,’ ‘something which gives normative status to our ends’ by providing (what she describes as) ‘unconditional reasons for having certain ends, and, it seems, unconditional principles from which those reasons are derived.’ ‘The Normativity of Instrumental Reason,’ in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 220.

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other order in human experience, is what it is because God creates and sustains it as such. In accounting for the intelligibility of the created order, they infer the existence of a free and creative intelligence—a personal God. Indeed, they typically argue that God’s creative free choice provides the only ultimately satisfactory account of the existence of the intelligibilities humans grasp in every domain of inquiry. Natural law theorists do not deny that God can reveal moral truths and most believe that God has chosen to reveal many such truths. However, natural law theorists also affirm that many moral truths, including some that are revealed, can also be grasped by ethical reflection apart from revelation. They assert, with St. Paul (Rom. 2.14), that there is a law ‘written on the hearts’ even of the Gentiles who did not know the law of Moses—a law the knowledge of which is sufficient for moral accountability. So the basic norms against murder and theft, for example, though revealed in the Decalogue, are accessible and knowable even apart from God’s special revelation.17 The natural law can be known by us, and we can conform our conduct to its terms, by virtue of our natural human capacities for deliberation, judgment, and choice. The absence of a divine source of the natural law would be a puzzling thing, just as the absence of a divine source of any and every other intelligible order in human experience would be a puzzling thing. An atheist’s puzzlement might well cause him to re-consider the idea that there is no divine source of the order we perceive and understand in the universe. Such a re-consideration figures in the accounts given by some eminent modern thinkers of their conversions from one or another form of secularism to religious faith—examples among Anglophone philosophers include Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Dummett, John Finnis, Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Geach, and Nicholas Rescher. It is far less likely to cause someone to conclude that our perception is illusory or that our understanding is a sham, though that is certainly logically possible. Of course, puzzlement may not necessarily lead to religious faith even for those who accept our perception of reason and freedom as epistemically warranted. Consider, for example, Michael Moore, a distinguished contemporary natural law theorist for whom it is ‘obvious … that nothing exists answering to a personal conception of God and that the human needs to create such a

[17] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (S.T.), 1-2, q. 91, a. 2, and q. 100, a. 1.

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fictional creature are the only explanation why so many people have come out the other way on the question.’18 The question then arises: Can natural law—assuming that there truly are principles of natural law—provide the basis for a regime of human rights law without consensus on the existence and nature of God and the role of God in human affairs? In my view, anybody who acknowledges the human capacities for reason and freedom has good grounds for affirming human dignity and basic human rights. These grounds remain in place whether or not one adverts to the question: ‘Is there a divine source of the moral order whose tenets we discern in inquiry regarding natural law and natural rights?’ I happen to think that the answer to this question is ‘yes,’ and that we should be open to the possibility that God has revealed himself in ways that reinforce and supplement what can be known by unaided reason. But we do not need agreement on the answer, so long as we agree about the truths that give rise to the question, namely, that human beings, possessing the God-like (literally awesome) powers of reason and freedom, are bearers of a profound dignity that is protected by certain basic rights. So, if there is a set of moral norms, including norms of justice and human rights, that can be known by rational inquiry, understanding, and judgment even apart from any special revelation, then these norms of natural law can provide the basis for an international regime of human rights. Of course, we should not expect consensus. There are moral skeptics who deny that there are moral truths. There are religious fideists of various faiths who hold that moral truths cannot be known apart from God’s special revelation. And even among those who believe in natural law, there will be differences of opinion about its content and implications for certain issues— including important ones. So it is, I believe, our permanent condition to discuss and debate these issues, both as a matter of abstract philosophy and as a matter of practical politics. I have elsewhere criticized certain inferences for political morality drawn by the late John Rawls from what he labeled ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism,’ but I do not deny that it is a fact; rather, I affirm it as such.19 There are burdens of [18] Michael S. Moore, ‘Good Without God’, in Robert P. George (ed.) Natural Law, Liberalism and Morality, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 259. [19] Robert P. George, The Clash of Orthodoxies, ISI Books, Delaware, 2001, pp. 52-53. See also Robert P. George and Christopher Wolfe, ‘Natural Law and Public Reason’, in Wolfe & George (ed.), Natural Law and Public Reason, Georgetown University Press, Washington D.C., 2000, pp. 51-74.

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judgment; ethical questions can be difficult; in circumstances of political liberty reasonable people of goodwill can be expected to develop divergent views even about some profoundly important moral matters—extending even to questions of who is to count as a member of the human community and, as such, someone to whom obligations of justice are due. It is sometimes regarded as an embarrassment to natural law thinking that some great ancient and medieval figures in the natural law tradition failed to recognize—and indeed have even denied— human rights that are affirmed by contemporary natural law theorists and others, and even regarded as fundamental. Consider a right I have already mentioned in this connection, namely, the basic human right to religious liberty, or what the Constitution of the United States refers to as the right to the free exercise of religion. This right was not widely acknowledged in the past, and was even denied by some prominent natural law theorists. They wrongly believed that a wide conception of liberty in matters of faith presupposes religious relativism or indifferentism, or entails that religious vows are immoral or non-binding, or the comprehensive subservience of ecclesial communities to the state. It is interesting that when the Catholic Church put itself on record firmly in support of the right to religious freedom robustly conceived in the document Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council, it presented both a natural law argument and an argument from specifically theological sources. The natural law argument for religious liberty is founded on the obligation of each person to pursue the truth about religious matters and to live in conformity with his conscientious judgments.20 This obligation is, in turn, rooted in the proposition that religion—considered as conscientious truth-seeking regarding the ultimate sources of meaning and value, and the effort to establish harmony between oneself and the divine—is a crucial dimension of human well-being and fulfillment. It is among the basic human goods that provide rational motivation for our choosing. The right to religious liberty follows from the dignity of man as a conscientious truth-seeker and a rational and free being. Of course, people who reject the natural law understanding of human dignity and human rights will differ from natural law theo[20] Second Vatican Council, Declaration on Religious Liberty Dignitatis Humanae (7 December 1965), nos. 2-3, in Vatican Council II, vol. 1, Austin Flannery O.P. (rev. & ed.), The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, Austin Costello Publishing Company, New York, 1988, pp. 801-802.

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rists on questions of what constitutes progress and decline. From a certain theological point of view, the type of religious freedom defended by contemporary natural law theorists will be regarded as licensing heresy and religious irresponsibility. Natural law ideas will be seen as just a rhetorically toned down form of liberal secularism. By contrast, from a certain liberal secularist point of view, natural law ideas about abortion, sexuality, and other hot-button moral issues will be regarded as intolerant and oppressive—a philosophically gussied up form of religious fundamentalism. In the end, natural law ideas—like theocratic ideas or secularist liberal ones—will have to stand or fall on their merits. Anyone who wonders whether they are sound or unsound will have to consider carefully and dispassionately the arguments offered in their support and the counterarguments advanced by their critics. Let me now turn to the ways in which natural law theories are both like and unlike utilitarian (and other consequentialist) approaches to morality, on the one hand, and Kantian (or ‘deontological’) approaches on the other. Like utilitarian approaches, and unlike Kantian ones, natural law theories are fundamentally concerned with human well-being and fulfillment and, indeed, take basic human goods as the starting points of ethical reflection. Unlike utilitarian approaches, however, they understand the basic forms of human good (as they figure in options for morally significant choosing) as incommensurable in ways that render senseless the utilitarian strategy of choosing the option that overall and in the long run promises to produce the net best proportion of benefit to harm (however ‘benefit’ and ‘harm’ may be understood and defined). Natural law theorists share the Kantian rejection of aggregative accounts of morality that regard the achievement of sufficiently good consequences or the avoidance of sufficiently bad ones as justifying choices that would be excluded by application of moral principles in ordinary circumstances. Unlike Kantians, however, they do not believe that moral norms can be identified and justified apart from a consideration of the integral directiveness of the principles of practical reason directing human choice and action towards what is humanly fulfilling and away from what is contrary to human well-being. Natural law theorists do not believe in purely ‘deontological’ moral norms. Practical reasoning is reasoning about both the ‘right’ and the ‘good,’ and the two are connected. The content of the human good shapes the moral norms which are applied in judgments about right (and wrong) choices and actions, and moral

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norms themselves are entailments of the primary practical principles which direct us to basic aspects of human well-being or fulfillment and whose integral directiveness is articulated in the master principle of morality and its specifications in morality’s norms. Such a view presupposes, of course, the possibility of free choice— that is choosing that is the pure product neither of external forces nor internal but subrational motivating factors, such as sheer desire. So a complete theory of natural law will include an account of principles of practical reason, including moral norms, as providing rational guidance for free choices, and a defense of free choice as a genuine possibility. This entails the rejection of strict rationalism, according to which all phenomena are viewed as caused. It understands human beings—some human beings, at least sometimes—as partially uncaused causings21 of those realities that they bring into existence for reasons but by choices that are free because underdetermined by reasons and passions alike. On the natural-law account of human action, freedom and reason are mutually entailed. If people were not really free to choose among options—free in the sense that nothing but the choosing itself settles what option gets chosen—truly rationally motivated action would not be possible. Conversely, if rationally motivated action were not possible, the experience we have of freely choosing would be illusory. Philosophers in the natural law tradition, going all the way back to Aristotle, have placed particular emphasis on the fact (or in any event what we believe to be the fact) that by our choices and actions we not only alter states of affairs in the world external to us, but also at the same time determine and constitute ourselves—for better or worse—as persons with a certain character.22 Recognition of this self-shaping or ‘intransitive’ quality of morally significant choosing leads to a focus on virtues as habits born of upright choosing that orient and dispose us to further upright choosing—especially in the face of temptations to behave immorally. People sometimes ask: Is natural law about rules or virtues? The answer is that it is about both. A complete theory of natural law identifies norms for distinguishing right from wrong as well as habits or traits of character whose cultivation disposes people to choose in conformity with the norms and thus compatibly with a what we might call, borrowing a phrase from Kant, a good will, viz., a will towards integral human fulfillment. [21] Here again I refer to the capacity possessed by human beings, as free and rational creatures, to cause things they are not caused to cause. [22] See, e.g. Nicomachean Ethics 3.5.

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Now, human beings live not as isolated individuals, but in families, kinship groups, clans, and various forms of political association. And, as I’ve mentioned, natural law theorists hold that among the irreducible aspects of human flourishing are various forms of harmony or unity with others. And so we propose accounts of the common good of communities, including political communities. The political common good is understood not as some additional human good alongside the others, but, rather, as the securing of conditions in which people can flourish by cooperating with each other as fellow citizens. There is a common good because (a) the basic human goods are aspects of the flourishing of each and every member of the human family; (b) many of these goods can be enjoyed, or enjoyed more fully, by common action to secure them; and (c) common action itself can be intrinsically fulfilling inasmuch as humans are indeed ‘political animals’ whose integral good includes intrinsically social dimensions. The common good of any human society demands that governments be established and maintained to make and enforce laws. Law and government are necessary not merely because human beings may treat one another unjustly and even behave in a predatory manner towards each other, but more fundamentally because human activity must often be coordinated by authoritative stipulations and other exercises of authority to secure common goals. Consider the simple case of regulating highway traffic. Even in a society of perfect saints, law and government would be necessary to establish and maintain a system of traffic regulation for the sake of the common good of motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, and everyone who benefits from the safe and efficient transportation of goods and persons on the highways. Since often it is the case that there is no uniquely reasonable or desirable scheme of regulation—only different possible schemes with different benefits and costs—governmental authority must be employed to choose—by stipulating—one from among the possible schemes. Authority in such a case is necessary because unanimity is impossible. Authority serves the common good by making a stipulation and enforcing its terms. Assuming that there is no corruption or other injustice involved in the choice of a certain scheme of traffic regulation or the enforcement of its terms, we can regard this as a focal case of legal authority under a natural-law account of the matter. Of course, the complete account would begin by identifying the human goods that schemes of traffic regulation are meant to advance and protect—including (but not limited to) the protection

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of human life and health—and the evils that they seek to allay. It would observe that in the absence of a legally stipulated and enforced scheme of regulation these goods would be in constant jeopardy as motorists—even motorists of goodwill who were doing their best to exercise caution—crashed into each other or created traffic gridlock of the sort that often could easily be avoided by the prudent stipulation of coordinated schemes of driving norms. It would then defend the legitimacy of governmental authority to make the required stipulations not by reference to the unique desirability of the scheme it happens to choose, bur rather by appeal to the need for a scheme to be given the standing of law. Law-making and law enforcement are central functions and responsibilities of legitimate political authority. The justifying point of law is to serve the common good by protecting the goods of persons and the communities of which they are members. Where the laws are just and effective, political authorities fulfill their obligations to the communities they exist to serve. To the extent that the laws are unjust or ineffective, they fail in their mission to serve the common good. As Aquinas says, the very point of the law is the common good.23 In that sense, law is, as he defined it, ‘An ordinance of reason for the common good given by whoever who has the responsibility to care for the community.’24 Inasmuch as the moral point of law is to serve the integral good of human beings—people as they are—laws against many of the sorts of wrongdoing common, alas, in human societies are necessary and proper. Aquinas’s definition of law also requires that there be some individual, group, or institution exercising authority in political communities and fulfilling this authority’s moral function by translating certain principles of natural law into positive law and reinforcing these principles with legal sanctions; i.e. the threat of punishment for law-breaking. In this sense, we can say that justified authorities derive the law they make (positive law) from the natural law (or equivalently, translate natural law principles of justice and political morality into the rules of positive law). Following Aquinas, who was himself picking up a lead from Aristotle, natural law theorists hold that all just positive law, from schemes of traffic regulation to complex sets of rules governing, say, bankruptcy, is ‘derived’ from natural law, though there are two dif[23] S.T. 1-2, q. 96, a. 1. [24] S.T. 1-2, q. 90, a. 4.

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ferent types of derivation corresponding to different types of law.25 In certain cases, the legislator, for the sake of justice and the common good, simply and directly forbids or requires what morality itself forbids or requires. So, for example, the legislator in making murder a criminal offense puts the force and sanctions of positive law behind a principle by which people are bound as a matter of natural law even in the absence of positive law on the subject, namely, the principle forbidding the direct or otherwise unjust killing of one’s fellow human beings. Aquinas noted that in acting in this way, the legislator derives the positive law from the natural law in a manner akin to the deduction of conclusions from premises in mathematics or the natural sciences. For other types of positive law, however, such a ‘deductive’ approach is not possible. Here again the case of traffic regulation is illustrative. In choosing a scheme from among a possible range of reasonable schemes, each with its own costs and benefits, the legislator moves not by a process akin to deduction, but rather by an activity of the practical intellect that Aquinas called ‘determinatio.’ Although, unfortunately, no single word in English captures all that the Latin term denotes and connotes, the concept is not difficult to understand. Aquinas explained it by analogy with the activity of a craftsman commissioned to build a house—what we would probably call an architect. There is, of course, no uniquely correct way to design a house. Many different designs are reasonable. Certain design features will be determined by the needs of the person or family that will occupy the dwelling, others are simply matters of style and taste and others again of optional compromises between expense and risk. So, in most cases the architect will exercise a significant measure of creative freedom within a wide set of boundaries. Consider the question of ceiling height. While some possibilities are excluded by practical considerations—for example, ceilings of only four feet in height would make living in the house impossible for most people; and ceilings of forty feet in height would ordinarily be impractically expensive—no principle of architecture fixes ceiling heights at seven feet four inches or nine feet or anything in between or a bit higher or lower. In executing his commission, the architect will endeavor to choose a height for the ceilings that harmonizes with other features of his design, including features (such as door heights) that are themselves the fruit of determinationes. Like the architect, the lawmaker or lawmaking body will in many domains exercise a considerable measure of creative freedom in [25] S.T. 1-2, q. 95, a. 2.

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working from a grasp of basic practical principles directing actions towards the advancement and protection of basic human goods and away from their privations to concrete schemes of regulation aimed at coordinating conduct for the sake of the all-round well-being of the community, viz., the common good. Among the considerations that a good legislator will always bear in mind is the fairness of the distribution of burdens and benefits attending any scheme of regulation. Because on the natural law account all persons have a profound, inherent, and equal dignity, the interests (i.e., the well-being) of each and every person must be taken into account, and no one’s interests may be unfairly or otherwise unreasonably favored or disfavored. The common good is not the utilitarian’s ‘greatest net good’ or ‘greatest good of the greatest number’;26 rather, it is the shared good of all, including the good of living in a community where the dignity and rights of all—including the right to have one’s equal basic dignity respected—is honored in the exercise of public authority. Although the natural law sets the translation/derivation of laws as the task of the legislator (and it is only through his efforts that the natural law can become effective for the common good), it is important to note that the body of law created by the legislator is not itself the natural law. While the natural law is in no sense a human creation, the positive law is indeed created (posited, put in place)—and not just implemented—by humans. This point is telling about the metaphysical status of the positive law. Following Aristotle, we might say that the positive law belongs to the order of ‘making’ rather than the order of ‘doing’. It is thus fitting that the positive law is subject to technical application and is analyzed by a sort of technical reasoning. Hence, law schools do not (or do not just) teach their students moral philosophy, but focus the attention of students on distinctive techniques of legal analysis, e.g., how to identify and understand legal sources, how to work with statutes, precedents, and with the (often necessarily) artificial definitions that characterize any complex system of law. At the same time, we must be careful to distinguish a different metaphysical order that attaches to the moral purpose of the law. It is in the order of ‘doing’ (the order of free choice, practical reasoning, and morality) that we identify the need to create law for the sake of the common good. The legislator creates a cultural object, viz. the law—which is deliberately and reasonably [26] On the incoherence of these Benthamite notions, see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980, pp. 112-118.

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subject to technical analysis—for a purpose that is moral and not merely technical.27 The fact that the law is a cultural object that is created for a moral purpose engenders much confusion about the role of moral philosophy in legal reasoning. For instance, a much debated question in American constitutional interpretation is the scope and limits of the power of judges to invalidate legislation under certain allegedly vague or abstract constitutional provisions. Some constitutional theorists, such as Professor Ronald Dworkin, defend an expansive role for the judge by arguing that the conscientious judge must bring judgments of moral and political philosophy to bear in deciding hard cases.28 Others, such as Robert Bork (and Justice Antonin Scalia), fear such a role for the judge and hold that a sound constitution—at any rate, the Constitution of the United States—does not give the judge any such role.29 They maintain that moral philosophy has little or no place in judging, at least within the American legal system. Where should natural law theorists stand on this complex issue? Natural law theory treats the role of judge as itself fundamentally a matter for determinatio and not for direct translation from the natural law. Accordingly, it does not presuppose that the judge enjoys (or should enjoy) as a matter of natural law a plenary authority to substitute his own understanding of the requirements of the natural law for the contrary understanding of the lawmaker in deciding cases at law. On the contrary, the Rule of Law (ordinarily understood as a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for a just system of government) morally requires—that is, obligates as a matter of natural law—the judge to respect the limits of his own authority as it has been allocated to him by way of an authoritative determinatio. This entails a hypothetical solution to the puzzle that confronts us: If the law of the judge’s system constrains his law-creating power in the way that Justice Scalia believes American fundamental law does, then he is obliged—legally and, presumptively, morally—to respect these constraints, even where his own understanding of natural justice deviates from that of the legislators (or constitution makers and ratifiers) whose laws he must interpret and apply. Hence, we see that the question of what degree of law-creating power a judge [27] See: John Finnis, ‘Natural Law and Legal Reasoning,’ in George, Natural Law Theory, pp. 134-57, especially pp. 138-43. [28] See: Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1986. [29] See: Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law, The Free Press, New York 1990, esp. pp. 251-9.

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enjoys is itself a matter of the positive law of the Constitution and is not determinable by natural law alone. I will conclude by briefly treating an issue—which I believe is actually a non-issue—that has exercised some influential modern critics of natural law theory, such as Hans Kelsen.30 They have seized upon the saying or slogan, found in St Augustine and echoed by Aquinas, that ‘an unjust law is not (or seems not to be) a law.’31 They claim that the proposition expressed in this slogan, which they regard as being at the heart of natural law thinking, is utterly implausible. Either it sanctifies injustice by entailing that any law possessing validity by reference to the criteria of a positive system of law is morally good and therefore creates an obligation to obey, or it contradicts plain fact by suggesting that what everyone takes to be laws (i.e., rules possessing validity by reference to the criteria of a positive system of law) are in fact not laws if they are unjust. But this line of criticism is misguided. Natural law theorists through the ages have taken note of the distinction between the systemic validity of a proposition of law—the property of belonging to a legal system—and the law’s moral validity and bindingness as a matter of conscience. They have had no difficulty accepting the central thesis of what we today call legal positivism, viz. that the existence and content of the positive law depends on social facts and not on its moral merits. (Indeed, it is hard to see how one would otherwise make sense of the locution ‘an unjust law.’) Note, however, that accepting this thesis is independent of denying other modal connections between morality and the law. In particular, it is unlikely that we would be able to understand significant aspects of the law if we were unable to grasp moral reasons. This is so because the reasons that people have for establishing and maintaining legal systems are often moral reasons that issue from normative practical deliberation that is aimed at the common good. Far from threatening the thesis of positivity, such explanatory connections are necessary to provide any fine-grained descriptive account of the law.32 How else would we home in on the focal cases of the law or appreciate the standards by which laws are judged to be defective qua laws (as we surely do, e.g., in the case of laws that show unjustified partiality to certain [30] Hans Kelsen, ‘The Natural-Law Doctrine Before the Tribunal of Science’, in What is Justice? Justice, Law, and Politics in the Mirror of Science: Collected Essays by Hans Kelsen, University of California Press, Berkley, 1957 pp. 144. [31] S.T. 1-2, q. 96, a. 4. [32] See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, pp. 12-18.

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groups)? A particularly fundamental connection in this vein is the way in which the normativity of practical reasoning and its directiveness towards human well-being and fulfillment explains the normativity and the action-guiding character of law’s authority. (Thus we see that while natural law theory preserves a descriptive characterization of the law, it does not commit the fallacy of explaining prescriptive features by reference to nothing but descriptive features.) Natural law theorists join with many self-described legal positivists, such as Herbert Hart and his great student (and my teacher) Joseph Raz, in deploying the concept of ‘law’ in a way sufficiently flexible to take into account the differences between the demands of (i) intrasystemic legal analysis or argumentation (e.g., in the context of professional legal advocacy or judging); (ii) what, following Hart, we might call ‘descriptive’ social theory (e.g., ‘sociology of law’); and (iii) fully critical (i.e., ‘normative,’ ‘moral,’ conscience-informing) discourse. Aquinas, for example, made central to his reflections the question whether, and, if so, how and to what extent, did unjust laws bind in conscience those subject to them to obey.33 It is clear enough that Aquinas believed that human positive law creates a moral duty of obedience even where the conduct it commands (or prohibits) would, in the absence of the law, i.e., morally, as a matter of natural law, be optional. This critical-moral belief in the power of positive law to create (or, where moral obligation already exists, reinforce) moral obligation naturally suggests the question whether this power (and the duties that are imposed by its exercise on those subject to it) is absolute or defeasible. If defeasible, under what conditions is it defeated? To answer this question, it is necessary to press the critical-moral analysis. What is the source of the power in the first place? Plainly it is the capacity of law to serve the cause of justice and the common good by, for example, coordinating behavior to make possible the fuller and/or fairer realization of human goods by the community as a whole. But, then, from the critical-moral viewpoint, laws that, due to their injustice, damage, rather than serve, the common good, lack the central justifying quality of law. Their law-creating power (and the duties they purport to impose) is, thus, weakened or defeated. Unjust laws are, Aquinas says, ‘not so much laws as acts of vio-

[33] S.T. 1-2, q. 96, a. 4.

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lence.’34 As violations of justice and the common good, they lack the moral force of law; they bind in conscience, if at all, only to the extent that one is under an obligation not to bring about bad side effects that would, in the particular circumstances, likely result from one’s defiance of the law (e.g., causing ‘demoralization or disorder,’35 as by undermining respect for law in a basically just legal system, or unfairly shifting the burdens of a certain unjust law onto the shoulders of innocent fellow citizens).36 That is to say, unjust laws bind in conscience, if at all, not per se, but only per accidens. They are laws, not ‘simpliciter,’ or, as we might say, ‘straightforwardly’ or in the ‘focal’ or ‘paradigmatic’ sense, but only in a derivative or secondary sense (secundum quid—in a certain respect but not in all respects). Nothing in Aquinas’s legal theory or in the thought of modern natural law theorists, such as myself, suggests that the injustice of a law renders it something other than a law (or ‘legally binding’) for purposes of intrasystemic juristic analysis and argumentation. It is true that Aquinas counseled judges, where possible, to interpret and apply laws in such a way as to avoid unjust results where, as best they can tell, the law makers did not foresee circumstances in which a strict application of the rule they laid down would result in injustice, and where they would, had they foreseen such circumstances, have crafted the rule differently.37 But even there he does not appeal to the proposition that the injustice likely to result from an application of the rule strictly according to its terms nullifies those terms from the legal point of view. Nor does Aquinas say or imply anything that would suggest treating Augustine’s comment that ‘an unjust law seems not to be a law’ as relevant to social-theoretical (or historical) investigations of what is (or was) treated as law and legally binding in the legal system of any given culture (however admirable or otherwise from the critical-moral viewpoint). Now Professor Hart was careful never to promote the sort of caricature of natural law one finds in the writings of [34] Ibid. [35] Ibid. Note, however, that, according to Aquinas, one may never obey a law requiring one to do something unjust or otherwise morally wrong. And sometimes disobedience is required to avoid causing (or contributing to) ‘demoralization or disorder.’ (On issues relevant to the translation of Aquinas’s phrase ‘scandalum vel turbatio,’ see John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Thought, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 223 at n. 23, 273 at n. 112, and 274 at n. d.) [36] See S.T. 1-2, q. 60, a. 5. [37] Ibid.

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Kelsen and Holmes. He had a real if qualified respect for the tradition of natural law theorizing and was, in fact, the person who commissioned for Oxford’s Clarendon Law Series the book by John Finnis—Natural Law and Natural Rights—that revived interest in natural law among analytic legal philosophers in our time. Still, Hart was among those who misunderstood Aquinas and his stream of the natural law tradition on precisely this point. He seemed to think that there was something antithetical to the principles of natural law theory in the ‘descriptive sociology’ of law he proposed in his masterwork: The Concept of Law. But this is the reverse of the truth. Natural law theorists need not suppose that Hart erred by treating as laws (and legal systems) various social norms (and social norm-generating institutions) that fulfill the criteria or conditions for legality or legal validity of Hart’s concept of law, despite the fact that his social-theoretical enterprise (reasonably!) prescinds to a considerable extent (indeed, it seeks to prescind as far as possible) from critical moral evaluation of laws and legal systems. The criticism Hart’s work invites from a natural law perspective has nothing to do with his willingness to treat unjust laws as laws; it has rather to do with his unwillingness to follow through on the logic of his own method and his insight into the necessity of adopting or reproducing what he calls the internal point of view—a viewpoint from which (pace Hobbes, Bentham, and Austin) law is understood not as causing human behaviour, but as providing people with certain types of reasons for action, what Hart described in chapter 10 of his Essays on Bentham as ‘content-independent peremptory reasons.’38 Finnis and others have argued that a rigorous following through of Hart’s method will extricate legal philosophy from Benthamism altogether by identifying the focal or paradigmatic case of law as just law—law that serves the common good—and the focal or paradigmatic case of the internal (or what Raz calls the ‘legal’) point of view as the viewpoint of someone who understands law and legal systems as valuable to establish and maintain (and legal rules as ordinarily binding in conscience) insofar as they are just—and, qua just, fulfill what natural law theorists contend is the justifying moral-critical point of law and legal systems, namely, to serve the common good. 39 [38] HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982, pp. 252-55. [39] This criticism of Hart (and Raz) is carefully developed by Finnis: see Natural Law and Natural Rights, pp. 12-18. On Hart’s misinterpretation of Aquinas on these matters, see: Ibid., Ch. 12.

John Finnis

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics Any jurisprudential, moral or political theory that affirms natural law needs to respond first to sceptical denials that reason can discover any truths about what ends all human individuals or groups ought to pursue. But any such theory also needs to make clear how it differs from, even when it coincides in moral judgment with, bodies of moral teaching self-identified as part of a divine revelation addressed to everyone. It also needs to show how truths of natural law provide grounds for rejecting, as well as for accepting, particular human claims to be the bearer of such a universal revelation. Parts I to III below address these issues through a critical examination of some contemporary philosophizing which, while acknowledging the warranted universality of the predicate ‘is true,’ withhold that predicate from the principles of practical reason. Parts IV and V address another aspect of universality and particularity about which natural law theory needs to get clear: how the moral norms of natural law, properly as universal as human nature and the community of all people and peoples, nonetheless warrant unyielding loyalty to specific communities, above all one’s country and one’s marital family.

I When Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy was published in 2002, Princeton University Press described its author Bernard Williams as Britain’s greatest living philosopher, and today, five years after his death, the biography at Wikipedia begins with the thought that he was ‘the most important British moral philosopher of his

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 223 time’. The last philosophical publication of my own mentor in Oxford, H.L.A. Hart, was a penetrating review of Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Both men had studied philosophy in what was then the Oxford way: first Plato and Aristotle, firsthand, by close and critical argumentation, and only then the Enlightenment and the moderns. Each of them, though Williams much the more extensively, gave whole lecture courses on Plato; though unusually familiar with the origins of our philosophy, each of them can be taken as representative of the methods and opinions characteristic of philosophy as it is being practised among us today. In that review of Williams’s 1985 book, Hart endorsed Williams’s opinion that ethics and morality have no rational foundations; for some ‘thick’ ethical predicates—such as ‘is courageous’ or ‘was cruel’—a particular culture has defined what facts make it correct, within that culture, to predicate courage or cruelty of some person, deed or disposition; but there are no more general, or universal, truths in ethics, nor any moral truths about what is obligatory or right or wrong.1 The ‘project’ of Williams’s 2002 book is announced in these terms: ‘to see how far the values of truth could be revalued, how they might be understood in a perspective quite different from the Platonic and Christian metaphysics which had provided their principal source in the West up to now’.2 The occasion for the ‘revaluation’ of the ‘values of truth’ is what Williams calls the ‘pervasive suspicion about truth itself … [and about] whether we should bother about it’, a suspicion that is ‘very prominent in modern thought and culture’.3 And so the book begins with a fairly vigorous and successful brief deployment of what is, though Williams does not say so, the classical dialectic against sceptical deniers of the existence (and therefore the value) of truth,4 the dialectic which unfolds by showing how such denials refute themselves, rely upon what they deny, ‘peck … into dust the only tree that will support them’.5 The later chapters follow a method that Williams ascribes essentially to David Hume, and [1]

See Finnis, ‘On Hart’s Ways: Law as Reason and as Fact,’ American Journal of Jurisprudence 52 (2007) 25-53 at 47-50; also http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=1100170; also in Matthew Kramer & Claire Grant (eds.), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political & Moral Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2009) 1-27; and in John Finnis, Philosophy of Law (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 230-56 at 251–53.

[2]

Bernard Williams, Truth & Truthfulness (Princeton U.P., 2002), 18.

[3]

Ibid., 1.

[4]

See ibid., 5.

[5]

Ibid., 19.

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involve both imaginary and historical genealogies intended to show how ‘very basic human needs and limitations, notably the need for cooperation’,6 are such that ‘every society not only needs there to be dispositions of [the] kind [summed by Williams as the virtues of Accuracy and Sincerity] but needs them to have a value that is not purely functional [but rather is intrinsic]’.7 And in this argumentation, which is indeed, as Williams says, ‘an example of philosophy,’8 there is embedded the striking and reiterated thesis that ‘The concept of truth itself—that is to say, the quite basic role that truth plays in relation to language, meaning, and belief—is not culturally various, but always and everywhere the same.’9 Everybody everywhere already has a concept of truth, indeed, they all have the same concept of truth.10 (The fact that they may have very different theories of truth just shows how much people’s theories of truth misrepresent their grasp of the concept.)11 For instance, ‘all human beings everywhere have understood that some statements about what has recently happened (for instance, what has just happened) are true’, ‘simply true’.12 And this universal concept involves thinking of truth as valuable: Genuinely asking a question, wondering how things stand, I aim at a true answer. Assertions can be assessed for truth, and they would not be assertions if they could not. The assessment of [6]

Ibid., 38

[7]

Ibid., 42, with 44 and 59.

[8]

Ibid., 39.

[9]

Ibid., 61.

[10] To avoid misunderstandings, note that this sense in which ‘truth is a universal concept,’ while important to an understanding of human capacities, is of less interest to the questions considered in this paper than a sense which is quite different (even though it presupposes the universal human capacity to understand and predicate ‘is true’), namely, that it is a ‘mark of truth,’ one which we advert to when we understand that to assert that ‘p is true’ is to imply one’s belief that under ideal epistemic conditions everyone would concur in that judgment: see the discussion of David Wiggins’s explorations of truth, in Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford and Washington DC, Oxford U.P. and Georgetown U.P., 1983), 63-6. [11] Williams, Truth & Truthfulness, 163. See also 276: ‘the richness and complexity of the archaic [Greek] truth vocabulary does not mean that the concept of truth, as we would recognize it, is absent. Indeed, it is only in the light of its presence, the fact that people in this culture stated things as true, questioned whether they were true, passed them on as true, and so on, that we can understand what this rich vocabulary means.’ [12] Ibid., 160.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 225 beliefs and assertions as true is a favourable one … to that extent we can see that truth must be regarded as a value. 13

Just to what extent truth is a value—whether it is of intrinsic value for its own sake, Williams leaves to later. For the moment let us stay with his dialectical critique of scepticism. Part of it is an effort to minimize the scepticism of Friedrich Nietzsche, for whose ethical positions Williams had much sympathy, but whose wider positions many of the post-modern deniers ‘take … to be that we should give up on the value of truth altogether’.14 Williams quotes late writings of Nietzsche to show that, even at ‘the very end of his active life’, he was dedicated to ‘the value of truthfulness [, which] embraces the need to find out the truth, to hold on to it, and to tell it—in particular, to oneself’.15 Williams’s estimate of Nietzsche’s dedication makes light of the counter-evidence afforded by Nietzsche’s own frivolous playing, quite truculent about selfcontradiction, with ‘the value of truth’ (Nietzsche’s phrase before Williams) in the third part of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887),16 the work from which Williams takes both the subtitle of his book on truth and the name (and not merely the name) for the method of his project. And takes, indeed, his project itself. For Williams says it was Nietzsche’s project, to which he, Williams, will ‘in this book … try to contribute.’17 The reason why Williams’s statement of the project refers to ‘the Platonic and Christian metaphysics’ is found in the passage he had just quoted from Nietzsche: … it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests— … even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousandyear-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. 18

[13] Ibid., 84. Williams proceeds immediately to insist that this leaves entirely open the question whether telling the truth is a value. [14] Ibid., 13. [15] Id. [16] See Finnis, ‘Retribution: Punishment’s Formative Aim‘, American Journal of Jurisprudence 44 (1999) 91-103 at 94; also in Finnis, Human Rights and Common Good (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 167-79 at 169–70. [17] Truth & Truthfulness, 18 [18] Truth & Truthfulness, 14, quoting Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882], trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge U.P. 1994), 344.

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‘Truth is divine’ is a too high-flown and opaque formula for something that Plato takes care to articulate more soberly and intelligibly in the parts of his dialogue Republic that Williams discusses more than once in Truth & Truthfulness. These are the parts whose centre is the great parable or eikon of the Cave in which one man is suddenly freed from a chained-up group who have all spent their lives looking at the shadows cast on the cave’s back wall by artifacts which, unknown to the prisoners, are being carried back and forth between the prisoners and a fire which is burning far above and behind them, much nearer the cave’s entrance. The man freed is turned around and made to look first at the fire and then compelled to make his way right up to the cave’s entrance and into the sunlight. There he sees for the first time the light of the sun, ultimate source of the shadows, the fire and artifacts that cast those shadows, and of the moon and stars outside the cave—cause, that is, of everything that this man and his fellows had ever seen (in any sense of seen).19 And then Plato has Socrates make the decisive affirmation that is the point of the whole parable: just as the sun stands to sight and visible things, as source of their visibility but also of their coming to be, growth, nourishment, so ‘the good itself’, the very ‘Form of the Good,’ stands to understanding and intelligible things, as source of the being (reality) of what we understand and source of all our understanding of it.20 ‘What gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the Form of the Good [tou agathou idean]’ (one might say, to capture this use of ‘Form,’ the very archetype of all goodness and reality).21 Now it is true that Plato sometimes—for example in the very next sentence—exaggerates the difference between what is purely intelligible, like geometry, and the empirical, material things that are ‘mixed with obscurity’ because they come to be and pass away. Aristotle had reason to insist more steadily on the extent to which material things are intelligible through the forms that are intrinsic to them. In doing so, he was only drawing out what Plato himself plainly implies in his last dialogue, The Laws, when he discusses the natural, empirical world as a domain not of mere brute fact and chance but of the art and providence of ‘God who is supremely wise, and willing

[19] Rep. VII 514a-517b, esp. 516c with VI 508b-509b. [20] Rep. VI 508b. [21] Rep. VI 508e.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 227 and able to superintend the world,’22 a world of beings whose movements are saturated in intelligibility, ‘the cause of their changes lying within themselves’.23 But to Williams, though he is credibly reported to have regarded Plato as the greatest of all philosophers, the theses Plato was intimating with the Sun and the Cave are thoroughly objectionable. (i) Plato’s ‘account of the Form of the Good in the Republic’ associated truth with goodness in a way which represents them as ‘altogether prior to a human interest in them’, indeed as ‘in themselves entirely independent of our thoughts and attitudes’,24 so that (ii) Williams ‘can only suppose, with Nietzsche, that such views, precisely in their obliteration of human interests, must be an expression of human interests’25 (by which Nietzsche meant, of course, discreditable, twisted human interests such as self-lacerating guilt, malicious entrapment of the strong by the slavish, resentful weak, and so forth: the shameful, deflating genealogy of conscience and morality itself). (iii) To understand the intrinsic goodness of truth we should ‘consider only certain human attitudes toward the truth, people’s dispositions to discover it and express it’, so that our inquiry has ‘a naturalistic outlook’ and so ‘should be seen as an exercise in human self-understanding.’26 It is only relative to such attitudes and dispositions which people happen to have that we can speak of human ‘needs’;27 calling a need ‘basic’ and ‘human’ does not override this relativity to desire.28 (iv) Instead, Plato’s ‘suggestion [with the Sun and the Cave and the Republic as a whole] is that real beauty and value are not to be found in this world at all, and that what is here is

[22] Laws X 902e-903a. [23] Laws X 904c; the argument unfolds from 888e to 905d. And see Rep. VII 530a on ‘the craftsman of the heavens’ who ‘arranged [the stars and their motions] and all that’s in [the heavens].’ [24] Truth & Truthfulness, 61. [25] Id. [26] Ibid., 60. [27] See text at n.6 above. [28] On the Humean character of Williams’s conception of basic reasons for action and of basic values, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, Columbia University Press, [1993] 1996), 85 n. 33; Christine Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason,’ Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986) 5-25 at 19-23.

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only some image or association of them; it is as though the world contained a photograph in place of a lover …’29 These four claims quite misconceive a text that is foundational for our civilization and among the most important of Providence’s preparations for the reception of Christian revelation 400 years later. Take point (iv). There are many good and beautiful things in this world, says Plato right here: start the list with knowledge and truth themselves.30 Their source, what they are due to, is the Form of the Good—the good, divine31 good—which is more beautiful and more valuable than they or any other good. So when Plato calls knowledge and truth images of the good—‘goodlike’ or ‘boniform’ [agathoeide] —the sense of ‘image’ is very remote from the static, lifeless photograph substituted for the lover. The images he is talking about are present particular realities, items, of knowing, rightness, justness, understanding and so forth, each and all being caused—authored or ‘controlled and provided’—by that of which they are likenesses.32 By treating a photo as the relevant paradigm of an image, Williams shows how remote he and many like him have become from what Genesis and St Paul hold out to us as revealed: that human persons are each an image and likeness of their divine author,33 and that indeed, as Thomas Aquinas explains, each created reality is a likeness of God, ‘approaching that likeness more perfectly if it is not only good but also can act for the benefit of others.’34 So, though the divine cause is ‘in itself entirely independent of our thoughts and attitudes,’ as point (i) asserts, it is considered and discussed by Plato and the whole philosophical and theological tradition precisely as what causally enables us to think (most thoroughly when our thoughts are true) and supports and makes best sense of our attitudes when they are just and right. Even when Plato is most unbalanced in ways that Aristotle and Christianity correct, his account cannot truthfully be said (as point (ii) says) to ‘obliterate’ human interests. His concern, in the Republic, with the divine things [29] Ibid., 143 with its endnote at 205. ‘“Elsewhere’ than in the Republic, says Williams (143), pointing to the Symposium, Plato more truthfully suggests that real beauty and value are indeed to be found here in this world ‘but only in an incomplete, never entirely satisfactory form.’ [30] Rep. VI 508e. [31] See Rep. VII 516c. [32] Rep. VII 516b (’cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything’). [33] Genesis 1: 26-27; Acts 17:28; Colossians 3: 10; cf. Romans 8: 29. [34] Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles II c. 45 n. 2.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 229 there envisaged and in some measure affirmed is with their significance as making sense of all the realities with which moral thought and political life are concerned—as providing a model [paradeigma] to those persons who ‘see’ these divine things, a model for the putting-in-order of their political community, of its citizens, and of themselves,35 which these persons are to accomplish, or at least attempt, by sharing in their fellow citizens’ labors, great and small,36 including their law-making and above all their educative undertakings. 37 So, as to point (iii), Plato will say that a truly ‘naturalistic’ attempt to understand truth and knowledge will indeed be ‘an exercise in human self-understanding’ which will only go well if it relates and extends self-understanding both to its sources, more and less remote, and (even before that) to the objects of human understanding. I have started with these difficult matters of divine causality and its dependent images and analogues because Williams’s uncomprehending dismissal of them helps explain the oversights which facilitate the subjectivism or scepticism of his ethics, the ethics of so many whose truncated, ‘naturalistic,’ self-understanding is that of ‘we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians.’

II ‘The values of truth’, for Williams are ‘Sincerity and Accuracy’, which he everywhere calls ‘virtues of truth.’ Here I shall say nothing about Sincerity, and look only to Accuracy. It is a great intellectual virtue. But, as Williams never recognizes, it is necessarily a secondary element in the disposition or desire to have true beliefs. More primary is curiosity, the desire to learn, to find out.38 And most primary is the insight that knowledge is a good, pursuit-worthy for its own sake, and ignorance—not just error but also and more fundamentally ignorance—is something to be avoided. Having this insight is in every way prior to, and foundational for, intellectual virtues such as accuracy. And it is an insight we gain, not by reading books which like Aquinas’ discourse on natural law identify this insight’s content as a first and self-evident principle of practical reason and natural law, but by advancing from our own experience. What experience, and what advance? [35] Rep. VII 540a. [36] Rep. VII 519d, 520d. [37] Rep. VII 519e. [38] And so Aristotle puts this first, in the opening sentence of the Metaphysics I.1: 980a21.

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As children, we ask questions, and they get answered.39 Answers suggest further questions, which in turn elicit answers we can understand as answers, that is, satisfactory responses to the questions. At a certain point there comes a step change in our understanding; noticing how the answers hang together, we have the insight that together they constitute knowledge, that, in other words, our belief in these answers is justified and what we believe is true. It is part of the same insight that future answers to future possible questions will be further elements in this open-ended field, knowledge. So the core of the insight is that knowledge, our coming to know what up to then we did not know, is possible. This insight is not a deduction; in that sense it is not reasoned to, though it is grounded in the lived experience of (a) puzzling experience, (b) pertinent question and (c) satisfying answer confirmed or at least not disconfirmed by experience. This insight, which becomes foundation and framework for many other insights and trains of reasoning, is itself a first, one of a number of such firsts, as we shall see. And usually, in the history of one’s intellectual development (our biographies), this primary insight is accompanied or closely followed by another insight, equally in its own field a first, not a conclusion of any reasoning from deeper premises: the insight that knowledge is not simply a possibility but an advantage—a desirable, beneficial possibility, a good thing, a kind of benefit, a way of being that is better than being ignorant: one is better-off than if one’s questions remained unanswered. And this kind of possibility is understood as sometimes beneficial even when no further or other purpose seems to be served, or even capable of being served, by gaining it. This first principle of practical reason, that knowledge is beneficial—a good that is worthy of pursuit, that is, in other words, to be pursued—is foundation (principium, arche) and framework for practical thought about how to make good on the opportunity, how to realize or actualize (achieve) it. The core of this thought is already normative: ‘is to be pursued’ means ought to be pursued, in a sense of ‘ought’ that is not yet moral (though it is incipiently moral). The desirability of this good, and sometimes attainable, possibility is the source of this normativity.

[39] Here we could say a good deal more about the way in which (i) the answers given us (’It’s hot! Careful!’) are sufficiently often verified by our experience of or credible reports of confirmatory events or phenomena, and (ii) our belief in these answers is shown to be justified by those answers’ coherence with each other and with the available answers to any further relevant questions, and (iii) this in turn lends credibility to other answers from the same or similar sources.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 231 In this insight, one understands the advantage of knowing as good both for me and for anyone like me, anyone who like me asks or can or could ask questions—the girl or boy in the next desk, for example, or, come to think of it, girls or boys anywhere. As I say, this is not yet moral thinking. The normativity is not yet of the form ‘they ought to be seeking knowledge’, or ‘I ought to be helping them overcome their ignorance or confusion’, but it is an understanding, a recognition, that as I’m better-off overcoming my own ignorance so they are better-off overcoming theirs.40 That understanding can promptly be reinforced by another: it is good for each of us if we are in such a relationship to each other that each wants the other to be better-off, and finds some satisfaction or even joy in the other’s (or others’) success (say, in overcoming ignorance or confusion). This further insight, in other words, is that this sort of state of things between us really is better than the state of things which obtains when each is coldly indifferent to the other’s (or others’) success or failure, or when each of us wants the other’s misery, as the playground bully wants the misery and humiliation of his victim. Like the insight into the good of knowledge, this further insight is neither a deduction from any proposition, nor a data-free ‘intuition,’ but is harmonious with certain sub-rational inclinations and feelings. Gaining the insight stands, however, as a step-change in one’s perception of reality and its possibilities, possibilities now understood as advantages and benefits and opportunities pursuitworthy for their own sake. The intelligible good which is the object (subject-matter) of this further insight we can label the good of friendship, taking that term in its widest extension along the wide spectrum of relationships, from concern to protect a passing stranger from imminent peril in the bush all the way to the many-sided, stable and loving friendship of good and true friends. The good of friendship is a common good, not simply my good to which yours is good only as a means, nor your good to which mine is good only as a means, but the good of our each flourishing in and by concern for and promotion of the other’s wellbeing for its own sake and for the sake of both of us. Each instance of this sort of particular [40] As one learns that knowledge can be disturbing or distracting, and that many things are hardly worth knowing, one does not conclude that knowledge is not a good in itself, or good only for its utility as a means to satisfying other desires; rather, one concludes (or should conclude) that its bad side-effects can be guarded against and/or worked-around, and that knowledge which is strategic or fundamental is to be pursued in preference to trivialities that may arouse curiosity or win a game.

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common good, whether it involve two persons only or many more, is an instance of a universal human opportunity, advantage, benefit: friendship. And the intelligibility of this kind of common good both exemplifies and reinforces the intelligibility of each of the other kinds of universal opportunity, each of the other aspects of human wellbeing. For there are other aspects of human wellbeing, other basic reasons for action, besides the two aspects and reasons I have been speaking of, knowledge and friendship. There is, for example, the intelligible good of human life and health itself, and there is the good of transmitting human life as parents of the offspring generated by that specific and specifically procreative friendship, the marriage of husband and wife, committed to being each of their children’s father and mother, jointly progenitors, educators and in due measure lifelong companions. The reasons which all these and the few other basic human goods give for action cut across Bernard Williams’s famous distinction between internal and external reasons. For of all and each of them it is right to say that it would give reason for action even to a person who happened to lack all (motivating) responsiveness to it, all ‘subjective motivation’ to pursue this kind of benefit, and even if such responsiveness to this kind of benefit could not be ‘rationally arrived at’41 from that person’s existing motivations.42 Williams’s arguments [41] ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), at 109. On the distinction, see generally sec. 4 of Timothy Chappell, ‘Bernard Williams’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . A reason that fits the description given summarily in this sentence of my text is, in Williams’s terminology, ‘external’ (and in his view impossible). Williams’s point (i), text supra at n. 24, complained, in effect, that Plato treated the forms of the good as external reasons. For a decisive critique of Williams’s categorization of reasons as internal or external, see Korsgaard, supra n. 28. [42] Here I part company with the critique of Williams’s internal/external reasons arguments which is advanced by Christopher Tollefsen, ‘Basic Goods, Practical Insight, and External Reasons’, in David Oderberg and Timothy Chappell, edd., Human Values (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2004), and later entertained also by Chappell, supra n. 41, just in so far as Tollefsen relies on the position (which is Aquinas’s) that ‘the starting points of correct deliberation are shared by all agents —the basic goods, plus the recognition of well-being as the point of action.’ I do not doubt that this thesis is true of all agents of sufficient intelligence and maturity. But I think it better not to try to explicate what a practical reason is by appealing to a fact such as universal sharing of starting points. Basic goods and reasons for action are intelligible, without reasoning, given only the experience

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 233 against (what he calls) external reasons arbitrarily assume that there can be no originating practical insight into the intrinsic advantage (benefit, opportunity—intelligible good) offered by some kind(s) of possibility that experience and (non-practical) understanding show to be attainable; these arguments thus ally themselves with the unwarranted Humean dogma that reasons as such cannot motivate. That dogma is inattentive to the variety of kinds of reasons there are, and equally inattentive to the central human reality of human will as one’s capacity to respond to, be motivated by, the intelligible goods one understands, including goods understood as good for their own sake and not only as means to something else, goods identified in the basic reasons for action, reasons accessible to everyone able to deliberate and choose. It should be obvious that even though nothing is a practical reason if it could not motivate a rational person, and though no-one is rational who lacks the capacity to be motivated by reasons, it by no means follows—nor is it the case—that such reasons do motivate everyone (or even anyone) on all occasions when they might have; or that there is no-one who lacks the capacity to be motivated by such reasons.43 Ethical thought, morality itself, has as its shaping object the good of being directed in all one’s choices and actions by the basic reasons for action, undeflected by sub-rational motivations that would, without reason, cut back on the directiveness of each and any of those basic reasons. That good of practical reasonableness has as its propositional core the master principle of morality (or ethics): that one have a will open to integral—one could say universal—human fulfillment, the fulfillment of all human persons and groups. Specific moral principles, such as the Golden Rule, have their intelligibility and force as specifications of that master principle: for example, just as one cannot have a will open to integral human fulfillment if one is willing to inflict harm on others for the sake of harming them, so one and non-practical understanding of possibility which are available to virtually everyone. [43] The points made in this sentence are well made, against Williams, by Korsgaard, supra n. 28 at 11-25. See further Christine Korsgaard, ‘The Normativity of Instrumental Reasons,’ in Ethics & Practical Reason, ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 215-54; Finnis, ‘Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited,’ American Journal of Jurisprudence 50 (2005) 109-31 at 112-8 (also in Finnis, Reason in Action (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 19-40 at 23-7), adopting Korsgaard’s critique of Humeanism but criticising her Kantian failure to move decisively beyond Humeanism, a failure to attend to the practical reasons which direct us to basic human goods besides practical reasonableness, goods such as knowledge, life and friendship.

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cannot have such a will if one is willing to do to others what one is not willing for others to do to you. More specifically still, moral rules pick out ways in which, for example, kinds of choice are wrong because, for example, such a choice intends the destruction, damaging or impeding of a basic human good in the life of one or more persons. Moral rules thus picking out kinds of act that are exceptionlessly wrong identify those acts by their objects, that is their close-in objectives, not by reference to their consequences or other circumstances. Such rules are thus exceptions to the generalization44 that moral reasoning becomes less certain as its propositions descend from high-level universal principles towards specific conclusions about particular options available in complex and imperfectly foreseeable or controllable circumstances. There are plenty of principles or rules identifying more or less specific affirmative responsibilities, but the relatively few exceptionless moral rules are all negative, identifying kinds of option always to be excluded from one’s deliberations.45 Wherever those inevitably wrong kinds of option bear on the acting person’s relations to another person or persons, those same exceptionless negative norms, rules or precepts pick out the content of an human right that is not only inalienable but also (to use the terminology of the European Court of Human Rights),46

[44] See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 94 a. 4c; Finnis, Aquinas, 90-91. [45] Affirmative moral rules, identifying choice-worthy kinds of option, apply semper sed non ad semper (are always relevant but not in all circumstances to be chosen); only negative moral rules can be semper et ad semper (always relevant and in all circumstances to be followed). The exclusion of inevitably wrongful options will characteristically, if not always, leave open more than one option for choice, even if only the option of taking no action. See Aquinas, 163-4. [46] See e.g. Saadi v. Italy ECtHR 28 February 2008. However, this unanimous decision of the Grand Chamber runs together an absolute prohibition (exceptionless norm) with an absolute duty not to do anything that might (as a matter of real risk) result in someone else violating that prohibition (or the equivalent exceptionless moral or natural-law norm). That is, it obliterates the distinction between intended results and side-effects which has been found necessary for the coherence of sets of moral teachings which include exceptionless (absolute) negative norms: see Finnis, Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth (Washington DC, CUA Press 1991), 67-74. The rule adopted in the case may be defensible on its merits (e.g. by a Miranda-like policy argument), at least in relation to ‘torture’ as distinct from ‘degrading treatment,’ though in relation to deportation where there is a risk of later torture but no shadow of intent to subject the deportee to that risk or of collaboration with the potential torturers, the non-absolute rule in Suresh v. Canada 2002 SCC 1 (Supreme Court of Canada) at para. 78 seems preferable. What is certain is that the rule in Saadi is not defensible as an interpretation of the Convention’s intended meaning or as an exposition of

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 235 absolute, such as the right not to be tortured. 47 The moral truths I have been recalling in these broad brushstrokes are a main part of what Bernard Williams called ‘the morality system,’ which—in the book that Hart reviewed—he labeled scathingly ‘the peculiar institution’ (a euphemism once used in the American South to refer defensively to slavery). Morality has, on Williams’s account of it, nine or ten defining features, each of which he attacks; his main criticisms have been assembled from his writings by Timothy Chappell, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,48 and you can see how strong in rhetoric and weak in refutatory force they are. Most if not all of them simply assume the absence of any substantive first principles of practical reason (and thus of moral reasonableness), such as are provided by the basic reasons for action that direct us towards realizing the basic human goods in our own life and the lives of others. In this assumption, nowhere (so far as I know) examined by Williams, he shares the same utter detachment from and apparent unawareness of the mainstream tradition (exemplified by Aquinas) as is displayed by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, the Utilitarians, Kant and accordingly by most of yesterday’s and today’s Englishspeaking philosophers. But equally—I have been suggesting—what is missing is sufficient reflective awareness of certain primary workings, and the foundational content, of the practical understanding and reasoning available to all of us and manifested at least unreflectively in the life of everyone who more or less rationally chooses. These substantive first principles, directing us to substantive goods such as life, knowledge, friendship, and so forth, provide genuinely ‘thick’ practical predicates between the wholly abstract or formal predicates ‘ought’, ‘right’ and ‘good’ and such morally laden and circumstance- and culture-relative predicates as those Williams called thick (courage, cruelty and the like). But so far as I can see these first principles and basic goods and reasons for action don’t get a mention, or a thought. the logic of the interpretative gloss-term ‘absolute’. In terms of the last paragraph of the section ‘Absolute Rights’ in my Natural Law & Natural Rights, 225-6, the Court’s argumentation (if not its conclusory ruling) confuses a two-term with a three-term right. [47] Natural Law & Natural Rights, 224. For the derivation of a philosophically defensible natural (human) right not to be tortured, identifying with some precision the kind of act that counts as torture in warranted assertions of this right, and relating the right to basic human goods, see Patrick Lee, ‘Interrogational Torture,’ American Journal of Jurisprudence 51 (2006) 131-147. [48] Chappell, op. cit. supra n. 41.

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Truth and Faith in Ethics III

Plato’s work, not least the part I have mentioned, seemed to Christians in the first few centuries of our era to be highly convergent with what the revelation they believed to have been completed in Christ disclosed about God’s existence, nature and will—so convergent that some hypothesized meetings or other communications between Plato and the prophet Jeremiah. St Augustine eventually concluded, in 416 AD, that accurate computation of dates precludes that particular connection.49 But he was deeply impressed by the way in which Plato and his successors (first among them Aristotle) went through and beyond natural science, epistemology and ethics to a knowledge of God as cause of the organized universe, source of the light by which truth is perceived, and spring of human happiness and fulfillment.50 Augustine wavers between thinking that Plato must have had some acquaintance with Israel’s sacred books, and thinking that the sound parts of Plato’s teachings about divine and human existence and goodness were made known to the philosopher by God in that broad sense of ‘revelation’ which Paul puts near the beginning of his letter to Rome: ‘what can be known about God has been manifested among them; in fact God has manifested it, for his invisible realities, indeed his power and divineness, have from the [time of] the world’s creation’—that is, universally—‘been made visible to [human] understanding through his created works.’51 To which Paul adds, on the next page, ‘when nations that do not have the Law [revealed to Moses and the prophets of Israel] nevertheless do by nature what the Law [summed up in the Ten Commandments] requires, they … show that what the Law requires is written on their hearts, to which their conscience testifies.’52 Here ‘heart’ and ‘conscience’ refer to the same reality—the activities of human reason— which the earlier passage called ‘understanding’. The ‘Revelation’ in this paper’s title is that body of teachings that identifies itself as transmitted by God to a particular people by that series of intermediaries we call Moses and the prophets and completed by all that Jesus of Nazareth said and did as witnessed and witnessed to by his apostolic disciples. It is a faith—a body of teachings and practices—which affirms that its foundations are estab[49] Augustine, De Civitate Dei VIII, 11. [50] Id. [51] Ibid., VIII. 12; Romans 1.19-20. [52] Romans 2.14-15.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 237 lished (demonstra[ta]) by reason,53 that its accounts of the life and deeds of Jesus are true, sincere, historical in character even while keeping to the style of preaching,54 and that the moral precepts it teaches are valid for all people everywhere and accessible to everyone’s understanding and fully rational acceptance. In relation to those truths of faith (including moral truths) which are knowable by reason without revelation and faith, what divine revelation does is enable those matters to be known in a way which surpasses unaided reason in accessibility, certainty, and freedom from error. 55 Morality (if you like, ethics and conscience) precedes faith in two important ways. It is by love of truth—by that responsiveness to the desirability of knowledge which I was recalling a little earlier—that one (anyone) is moved to ask questions about the source of the world’s existence, and of its astounding processes of orderly evolution and its stable and thus scientifically accessible orderliness, and to seek a really adequate explanation for these overarching realities of existence and orderliness as well as for the more specific realities studied by science and history. The moral obligation to seek such knowledge, or at least to be receptive to it when it comes one’s way, and in either case to act upon what one has rationally judged to be true, turns out to be a compelling motivation to acceptance of a revelation whose content in part confirms reason’s findings but in part far exceeds, without contradicting, what can be known by reason unaided by revelation. So this obligation is a part of natural morality, prior to religious faith.56 And ethics precedes faith in a second way. Revelation, in the sense I am concerned with, has been conveyed by particular human persons, most notably by this Jesus. The necessary judgment that he, his forerunners, and those who preached and wrote about him were persons of truth not imposture is a judgment with various foundational elements, not least—as Aquinas’ review of these elements makes clear—his and (in more mixed ways) their manifest personal virtue and the inherent excellence of the way of life he proposes to

[53] Vatican I, Dei Filius (Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic faith) (1870), c. 4 (D-S 3019): foundations, but not its whole content (D-S 3041). [54] Vatican II, Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), sec. 19. [55] Dei Filius c. 2 (D-S 3005). [56] As is stated in Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty, 1965), sec. 2.3.

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us.57 A prophet whose message is mixed with self-serving permissions for acts of lust, hatred and vengeance thereby not only rivets immorality, injustice and intimidatory menace into the permanent content of any faith he (or she) founds, but also shows his (or her) message to be unworthy of belief.58 (And here it is worth recalling that in the teaching of the community of faith founded by Christ, public revelation is closed with the age of the apostles, so that ‘no new public revelation is to be expected’ thereafter,59 a teaching of faith which entails that any later proclamation of a subsequent revelation proposed to all must be taken to be a delusion or an imposture.) Revelation, then, is a remarkable evidencing of truths universal in their significance and application to all human persons, by really particular, unrepeatable historical events and choices. To the reasonable assessment and appropriation of these evidences, philosophy however soundly done can be no more than a preparation and then an ancillary means, among others, of clarification, and of some conceptual contributions to ‘the growth in understanding of the words and realities handed on [by traditio] from the apostles.’60 This process of handing on involves the adoption of the revealed truths into particular human cultures which it more or less reforms but does not obliterate. Some elements of the reform are in themselves cultural, for some elements of revelation are themselves cultural, that is, the product of human choices that could morally have been rightfully different. The paradigm of an element which is in this way both cultural and universal is the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster…), established by the choice of a particular human individual and referring, as it does, to a cultural artefact (bread) that is not inherent in the natural world, not required by reason, and not universal. The two-way inter-dependence between revelation and reason includes this: that the moral precepts of the Catholic faith are understood by the Church as—and indeed are—also, at the same time, truths of public reason, accessible to any reasonable person even if and when de facto widely rejected. Like the rational preambles to faith, such as Plato’s, Aristotle’s, or Aquinas’s proofs of the existence [57] See Aquinas 320-21. Other leading elements in Aquinas’ list are the miracles worked by Christ, and the self-sacrificial heroism of his apostles and other witnesses. [58] See Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles I c. 6. [59] Dei Verbum, sec. 4. [60] Dei Verbum, 8.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 239 of God,61 or the refutation of Hume’s sophistries about the possibility and knowability of miracles,62 these ethical positions and their political applications are matter for open public debate, to be proposed and defended as defensible and acceptable without appeal to the authority of revelation or its author. Those believers who accept them simply on faith, lacking the ability, education or leisure to appropriate them by unaided reason, can reasonably rely on them in making political decisions, without needing to appeal to the ‘Proviso’ that John Rawls belatedly introduced into his ‘liberal’ but highly restrictive theory of public reason when he said we can appeal to religious considerations ‘provided that, in due course, we give [what he calls] properly public reasons to support the principles and policies our [religious] doctrine is said to support.’63 Christians of the central tradition do not have to hope that ‘in due course’ such public reasons will become available; if a moral teaching is proposed as a matter of doctrine in their tradition, public reasons both including and supportive of that very position are already available. The position I have just stated is part of the general position about revelation that it clarifies and confirms God-related propositions and judgments of reason, including moral/ethical judgments about the good for human persons. And this, at least in anticipatory outline, is what is suggested by Plato’s philosophical thesis that perception of the divine archetype and cause of all human good enables those who have that perception—that glimpse of understanding— to judge better about the issues of individual, social and political life.

IV If practical reason finds its master moral principle in the ideal of integral or universal human fulfillment, and if the revelation I have been discussing identifies and is transmitted in a universal (that is, ‘catholic’) human society (‘the new and universal Israel’)64 whose teachings include the proposition that all created sub-personal goods or [61] On the main lines of some of the many proposed by Aquinas, see Aquinas, 298-304. [62] See e.g. Anscombe, ‘Hume on Miracles’ in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (eds.), Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exeter, UK, and Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2008), 40-48; Finnis, ‘Historical Consciousness’ and Theological Foundations, Etienne Gilson Lecture No. 15, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1992 (also in Finnis, Religion and Public Reasons (Oxford: OUP, 2011) , 139-62). [63] John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Harvard U.P. 1999), 144. [64] John Paul II, Memory and Identity (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), 81.

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resources have a ‘universal destination’,65 and if both reason and this religion endorse the contemporary moral-political consensus articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the question fairly arises: What should we think about ‘universalism’ in political theory, and about ‘cosmopolitan’ duties of justice? Those are labels for the thesis that whatever duties of and rights to assistance we owe to our neighbors (say, our fellow citizens) must be owed in equal measure to all persons everywhere. How might that thesis be applied? Take just one of the many ways in which that question might be posed:66 Is it ever right to discriminate (distinguish in treatment) between persons, at our borders, on the ground that this person is a national, a citizen, and therefore may certainly enter, and that person is not and therefore may perhaps not? That question was approached independently and with varying explicitness addressed, in 1993, by two persons, Karol Wojtyla and John Rawls, who had each reflected long on inter-personal ethics; and each later wrote up and published his response. In his Memory and Identity, appearing within two weeks of his death in 2005, Wojtyla says: ‘The term “nation” designates a community based in a given territory and distinguished from other nations by its culture. Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention. Therefore, in human history, they cannot be replaced by anything else.’67 The right way [65] Catechism of the Catholic Church, under the heading ‘The universal destination and the private ownership of goods,’ says ‘2402 In the beginning God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind to take care of them, master them by labor, and enjoy their fruits. The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race. However, the earth is divided up among men to assure the security of their lives, endangered by poverty and threatened by violence. The appropriation of property is legitimate for guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persons and for helping each of them to meet his basic needs and the needs of those in his charge. It should allow for a natural solidarity to develop between men. 2403 The right to private property, acquired by work or received from others by inheritance or gift, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise.’ [66] See the three papers cited infra n. 81, and see n. 77 on the most grave and searching question for contemporary political theory. [67] Ibid., 77-8 (emphasis added); likewise 75. See also Vatican II, Decree Ad Gentes (1965), sec. 21: ‘Christians belong to the nation in which they were born. They have begun to share in its cultural treasures by means of their education. They are joined in its life by manifold social ties... They feel its problems as their very own... they must give expression to this [Christian] newness of life in the social and

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 241 of avoiding unhealthy nationalism is, he says, ‘through patriotism. Whereas nationalism involves recognizing and pursuing the good of one’s own nation alone, without regard to the rights of others, patriotism … is a love of one’s native land that accords rights to all other nations equal to those claimed for one’s own.’68 And ‘the native land (or fatherland [patria]) is in some ways to be identified with patrimony, that is, the totality of goods bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this context … one frequently hears the expression “motherland”. Through personal experience we all know to what extent the transmission of our spiritual patrimony takes place through our mothers. Our native land is thus our heritage and it is also the whole patrimony derived from that heritage … the land, the territory, but more importantly … the values and the spiritual content that go to make up the culture of a given nation.’69 cultural framework of their own homeland [patriae], according to the traditions of their own nation, a culture which they should get to know, heal, preserve, develop in accordance with contemporary conditions, and finally perfect in Christ’. [68] Memory & Identity, 75. For the background in earlier forceful papal teaching on patriotism, see John J. Wright [later Cardinal Wright], National Patriotism in Papal Teaching (Westminster, MD, Newman Bookshop, 1943). Wright shows how, in this extended body of teachings, strongly supportive of a not unconditional patriotism, the elements constitutive of the patria and the nation are primarily ‘cultural, historical and religious traditions’, with shared language given a certain priority in Wright’s exposition, and the shared [love of] ‘this our native land’ firmly included, and the upshot being a certain shared mentalité: ibid., 56-66. Wright’s arguments (ibid., 28-51) for discounting certain other factors, not least what Rawls (quoting Mill) will list as ‘race, descent’ (see at n. 72 below), are in some tension with his (Wright’s) general account. [69] Ibid., 66 (emphasis added). Here and elsewhere Wojtyla refers to and quotes (p. 96-7) from his papal address of 2 June 1980 to UNESCO, especially ‘concerning the right of the nation to the foundation of its culture and its future… a stable element of human experience and of the humanistic perspective of man’s development…a fundamental sovereignty of society which is manifested in the culture of the nation…through which, at the same time, man is supremely sovereign.’ This was taken up again by Pope Benedict XVI in his address to the bishops of France on 14 September 2008: ‘I am convinced, in fact, that nations must never allow what gives them their particular identity to disappear. The fact that different members of the same family have the same father and mother does not mean that they are undifferentiated subjects: they are actually persons with their own individuality. The same is true for countries, which must take care to preserve and develop their particular culture, without ever allowing it to be absorbed by others or submerged in a spiritless uniformity. “The Nation is in fact”—to take up the words of Pope John Paul II—”the great community of men who are united by various ties, but above all, precisely by culture. The Nation exists ‘through’ culture and ‘for’ culture, and it is therefore the great educator of men in order that they may ‘be more’ in the community” (Address to UNESCO, 2 June 1980, no. 14).’

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John Rawls’s far-reaching theory of universal justice denies that a justice universal in its reach is cosmopolitan in its content, that all persons everywhere have equal basic rights, entitlements and liberties.70 Instead it speaks of justice—equal rights etc.—between peoples, and within each people, but not directly as between all the individuals in the world as if the world were one people. Rawls uses ‘a people’ to refer to what John Paul II and John Stuart Mill and most people call a nation.71 Like John Paul II and Mill, he takes shared culture to be central to the reality of a particular people. He analyses this cultural reality into (a) first, and primarily, the members of this people being ‘united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and others’, which (b) ‘make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people …’, and (c) may result from various causes, such as commonality of race, descent, language, and religion but ‘strongest of all is identity of political antecedents … of national history, and consequent community of recollections, collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.’72 Then he articulates the legitimate fundamental interests of peoples: their political independence and their free culture; the security, territory and well-being of their citizens; and ‘their proper self-respect of themselves as a people, resting on their common awareness of their trials during their history and of their culture with its accomplishments.’73

[70] See Law of Peoples, 82-5. The present paper’s discussion of Rawls does not touch at all on the question whether he was justified in refusing to extend from the internal arrangements of political communities to the worldwide community of all persons that principle of justice most distinctive of his A Theory of Justice, namely the ‘difference principle,’ that all social decisions (at least about the basic structure of society) should improve as far as possible the wellbeing of the worst-off group in the state. Forbidding immigration would be (in principle, and on certain conditions) compatible with accepting the very demanding requirements of a ‘global difference principle.’ But in practice it would require world government, which again might not abolish boundaries—but would certainly relativize boundaries as it dissolved all conceptions of nationality as for some purposes decisive. [71] See Law of Peoples, v, 23-5. [72] Ibid., 23 n. 17 quoting J.S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1862), chap. 16. For Rawls’ tentative speculation about how far all these elements are necessary for a just constitutional regime, see Law of Peoples, 24-5. [73] Ibid., 34. For the implications of this kind of reality for a ‘multiculturalist’ politics, see my critical engagement with Joseph Raz’s essays on multiculturalism (e.g. op. cit. infra at n. 79), in Finnis, ‘Universality, Personal and Social Identity,

Does not the ethical legitimacy of these fundamental interests suffice to legitimate the maintenance of boundaries and the concomitant limitation of (or right to limit) immigration? Rawls does not consider that question. Instead he grounds the right to limit immigration on the Aristotelian argument for the justice of the institution of property, whereby parts of the world’s resources including land are appropriated to a particular person or group of persons: the argument that an asset tends to deteriorate ‘unless a definite agent is given responsibility for maintaining [it] and bears the loss for not doing so.’74 Rawls is right, I think, to link the justice of boundaries with the justice of property.75 Property rights—at whose core is the right to exclude others from free use of one’s property—are well understood in the main tradition to be qualified both by their purpose of benefiting not merely the owners or other holders but in one way or another the whole community, and by their liability to being overridden in situations of real necessity. But Rawls uses a particularly thin version of Aristotle’s argument about the purpose of property systems, an argument made even thinner by Rawls’s focus on maintaining the territory ‘and its environmental integrity’,76 as if for their own sake rather than for the sustenance and flourishing of those who cultivate it and those within and without who consume its fruits.77 Only in a and Law,’ Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05/2008: http://papers. ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1094277, part III (also in Finnis, Intention and Identity (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 100-21 at 108-19). [74] Ibid., 39; also 8. [75] This is not to say that national territory is best understood as a form of property: see Samuel Freeman, ‘Distributive Justice and the Law of Peoples’ in Rex Martin & David A. Reidy, Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?(Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) 243-260 at 247-8. [76] Ibid., 38-9. [77] Cf. Finnis, ‘Universality, Personal and Social Identity, and Law’ (n. 73 above), part IV (also in Intention and Identity at 119-20): ‘Is there a more grave and searching question for a contemporary political and legal theory than this…: Do people (perhaps the people, the whole population) of some areas of the world have a right, in justice, to choose to emigrate from those areas and immigrate into another country of their preference—a right such that it would be an injustice for the authorities or people of that other country to refuse to accept them into the territory as at least potential citizens? …The question is not altogether unlike the question that has always faced the Church in relation to the rich: Does Dives have an obligation in justice to let the poor satisfy their needs or desires by taking from his property as they select? [Luke 6:19-31] Does he have rather an obligation to distribute to the poor, on his own initiative and preferences as owner, all the resources he holds in excess of what he needs to maintain himself, his family and

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footnote does he observe that ‘another reason for limiting immigration is to protect a people’s political culture and its constitutional principles.’78 He might very appropriately have brought to bear, right here, his own judgment that a good political culture will itself be dependent on what he calls ‘common sympathies,’ shared by this people because of its shared memories and identity. Such shared sympathies, and the willingness to cooperate that they encourage, close dependants? Or is he entitled to devote the excess, so defined, to pursuing his professional or skilled vocation, educating his children, supporting the institutions and arrangements appropriate to maintaining the Rule of Law, the advancement of knowledge, architectural and other glories of God, and so forth? Dire emergency and famine aside, may he not treat as superflua, dedicated to relief of the poor, only what is left after contributing reasonably to these “vocational” good works? Saintly philosophers such as St Thomas, like the universal church’s most authorized pastors and teachers, have favored the last of these possible answers. The right of a particular political community’s members, acting through its government and law, to exclude from entry or residence all non-members whose residing would directly or indirectly pose a risk to that community’s common good is a right similar in ground and structure to the rights of exclusion and exclusionary use which are central to dominium and other analogous rights of property or ownership. Both kinds of right must be understood and exercised compatibly with the truths, first [1] that the Earth belongs to all, and second [2] that it can be and almost universally is reasonable, indeed required by justice, to divide it up and appropriate its material resources and its territories to some for their exclusionary use. For, as to resources: their cultivation and management will be more fruitful in economic and moral goods than if they were tended as common or as publicly owned. And, as to the territories of states: the culture, law and politics carried forward on them will be more human, adequate, and just than if carried on (a) in a context of deep disharmony among their inhabitants and/or (b) where those preconditions for law (and much else) which Raz identified for us [in his essays on national self-determination and on multiculturalism] are not in place or would be negated by the entry of many and different peoples. For, in turn, immigration of such a scale or kind can overwhelm or outrun assimilation, dissipate the general (near unanimous) “sense” (including intelligently willed disposition) of identification with the country, nation, state, government and law that our forebears built upon this land, and thereby bring about the elimination or non-fulfilment of the preconditions for peace, welfare and good government. So, [1] since the Earth belongs to all, the right of exclusion must be subject to override by the kind of real necessity that in our tradition’s teaching, as articulated by St Thomas, makes property revert to common availability to the extent required to relieve such necessity. [Aquinas 191-6 That kind of override is found in the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees 1951 as extended temporally and geographically by Protocol of 1967. But [2] as that Convention shows in its determinationes [specifications or particularizations] of the universal right of refuge, the exercise of even this fundamental right is by no means unconditional, and requires, among other things, that the refugee conform to our (just) laws and regulations as well as to (just) measures taken for the maintenance of our public order.’ [78] Law of Peoples, 39 n. 48.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 245 he might well have called, with Aristotle, civic friendship or, with John Paul II, solidarity within the framework of patriotism. Modern political experience and reflection suggests that without a real and fairly pervasive sharing of sympathies, nothing short of massive state coercion79 will suffice to ensure that people’s loyalties to their family and its wealth and other interests are transcended sufficiently to sustain what we call a welfare state.80 Since the maintenance of a welfare state within the framework of the rule of law is a major component of the common good and a strong requirement of justice, it will be a rather strong requirement of justice—in conditions favorable to mass movement—that immigration be regulated by discriminating among some kinds of non-nationals and other kinds, with a view to preserving one’s people from the destruction or corrosion of these various cultural and dispositional preconditions for a just and stable common good.81 [79] ‘Extensive force and coercion’: Joseph Raz, ‘Multiculturalism,’ Ratio Juris 11 (1998) 193-205 at 202. [80] And, to recall Mill’s point, such sympathies are particular to the members of this people; as sympathies, they ‘do not exist between them and others.’ Plato was so impressed by the problem of overcoming exclusive family and/or tribal loyalties that, with due hesitations, but repeatedly, he postulated a ideal of a community-wide sharing of women and children, so that (as a profound modern interpreter puts it) ‘the profound sentiments arising from sex relations, as well as the parent-child relations, will no longer be contained in the small family but will be communized’ (Plato’s word: koinoneo). See Eric Voegelin, Plato & Aristotle (Order & History vol. 3) (Baton Rouge & London, Louisiana State U.P., 1957, 1985), 118. Plato himself was aware of the extremism of this communist (or excessively universalist) proposal, and Aristotle’s criticisms of it (see Politics II. 1-2: 1260b37-1264b3; Voegelin, Plato & Aristotle, 319-22; Finnis, Natural Law & Natural Rights, 144-7, 158) enhance the efficiency argument for private property with elements relating to independence, autonomy and generosity. These elements are not included in the efficiency argument later deployed by Aquinas and, though thinly, as we have seen, by Rawls. But they are present in mutated form in one part of Leo XIII’s defence of property in Rerum Novarum, encyclical 15 May 1891, secs. 13-15. [81] Finnis, ‘Nationality, Alienage and Constitutional Principle,’ Law Quarterly Review 123 (2007) 417-45; also as SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=1101495; also in Finnis, Human Rights and Common Good (Oxford: OUP, 2011) 133-51); ‘Discriminating between Faiths: A Case of Extreme Speech?,’ in Hare and McNeil (eds.), Extreme Speech and Democracy: (Oxford University Press 2008), also http://ssrn.com/abstract=1101522; “Universality, Personal and Social Identity, & Law” (2007) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=1094277; also in Finnis, Intention and Identity, 100-21. Neither that set of essays nor this section of the present paper provide a sufficiently comprehensive consideration of the questions of justice and charity at stake in

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Two additional points about Rawls’s defence of the ethics of maintaining strong, secure nations. They are points of special importance, I think, in the face of the ever more indiscriminate use by courts and activists of an anti-discrimination principle, which functions rather like a new communism.82 The first point to be made is that Rawls’s defence of nations, which is significant because it cuts against what many assumed were the implications of his original theory of justice, depends not only on factual assumptions, i.e. judgments, about the conditions under which the common good can be maintained but also on strongly (albeit highly plausible) substantive and positive evaluations. Think particularly of his thesis that it is right, or at least often right, for a people to be united in judging that their historic culture has been and is, at least substantially, a good one—that it has ‘accomplishments’ on which they can look with legitimate ‘amour propre.’83 So, secondly, Rawls’s affirmation of the necessity and legitimacy of this particular, substantive evaluation by the people (or the dominant portion of them) significantly limits—if not eliminates— the application of two of the more famous theses that together are central to his account of ‘public reason.’ The first is that a liberal society (the main one of only two legitimate forms of nation) has no ‘comprehensive conception of the good;’84 and the second is that his own theory of ‘political liberalism’ is not put forward as true but as an exercise in ‘constructivism’.85 His willingness to affirm what amounts to the necessity of patriotic evaluations makes yet more visible how much his programmatic constructivist deflation of such large-scale immigration. But I doubt that such a consideration would render unimportant the considerations advanced in those essays and the present paper. [82] On one old kind of communism, see supra at n. 80. [83] Law of Peoples, 34 (“what Rousseau call amour propre”). [84] Id. But this is no more than a summary recall of the elaborate constructivist theory of ‘public reason’ articulated by Rawls in his Political Liberalism ([1993], 1996), where concern for the truth of moral and political principles is replaced by a postulated obligation to make one’s political judgments and decisions within the confines of a supposed overlapping and stable consensus of ‘all reasonable people’ or at least of ‘a sizable body of adherents in a more or less just constitutional regime’ (ibid., 15). [85] ‘Constructivism’ here signifies a proposal to replace the question of a proposition’s truth or falsity with the question whether the proposition has been arrived at by an appropriate ‘procedure of construction’ (ibid., 90) such as, in the context of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (that is, of justice within political communities) a (postulated} agreement within an ‘original position,’ or, in the same context as reconceived in Political Liberalism, within the ‘overlapping consensus.’

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 247 affirmations shares with the sceptical ‘post-modern’ deniers of truth, whose self-refutatory approach to philosophy is nicely caught by Bernard Williams, paraphrasing Alisdair MacIntyre genially noting ‘the awkwardness that inevitably catches up with the writer … who holds up before the reader’s lens a sign saying that something is true or plausible or worth considering [or, we may add, legitimate], and then tries to vacate the spot before the shutter clicks.’86

V In the foregoing reflections on the pre-conditions for the degree of unity (as opposed to diversity) necessary for the rule of law and a welfare state, the family figures as source, or at least locus, of an acute, standing threat to the common good of the polity. So it is necessary to add that it seems equally clear that those same preconditions include appropriate sound nurturing of children within families flourishing as families. Family as threat to the political common good is only the perversion of family as foundation of that common good. This foundational significance doubtless includes various elements, biological, psychological, and cultural. So, for example: If the shared culture so important to a state’s stability and fruitfulness for good is to be maintained, it must be transmitted in the first instance by the nurturing of children within their families. Neither political nor legal theory can neglect, or pass over as if embarrassed by, the thesis given a declaratory articulation by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 16(3): ‘The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.’ To call the family (or with Wojtyla, the state) ‘natural’ is not, primarily, to say that it exists by necessity, or by instinct or sub-rational inclination. Rather it is to say, above all, that the possibility of establishing, maintaining, and living in a family can easily be understood to be an object of choices that is desirable because fulfilling, not only as a means to other ends but in itself, inherently87—and fulfilling not only for the choosers but for many others, especially those whose very existence is an effect of such choices. Despite Plato’s dalliance with a communism of wives and children as solution to the problem created for political communities by [86] Truth & Truthfulness, 19. [87] As Aquinas never tires of saying, X’s nature is understood by understanding its capacities, which are understood by their act(uation)s, which are understood by reference to their objects. See Aquinas, 29-32.

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family loyalty, both he and that communism’s critic, Aristotle, thought their way through to an understanding, real albeit not flawless, that family is essential to the soundness of the polis, marriage is essential to the family, and sex acts are meaningful and ethically sound only in the context of marriage. One measure of the perhaps surprising extent of Plato’s clarity on these matters: the leading scholarly study of love and friendship in Plato and Aristotle in the last thirty years concluded, with manifest reluctance, that the sex ethics of Plato, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II were essentially identical.88 (As for Aristotle, his prime example of the category of acts always wrong in themselves is adultery.)89 Four centuries later, around the end of the first century AD but independently of Jewish and Christian influences, we find the Roman Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus and the Greek polymath Plutarch articulating with clarity the two essential elements of the basic human good of marriage: procreation/parenthood and friendship between husband and wife, who act as equals in the acts of bodily union by which they experience, actualize and express both those elements together.90 Does it not once again appear that revelation was needed for nothing more (nor less) that this: that its teachings—here its teachings on marriage91—make more widely and stably available truths which were always accessible to natural reason and had in fact been affirmed by philosophical reflection and even, to some extent, by some cultures which had not been informed by that revelation? To answer that question with appropriate generality, one should go back to what Bernard Williams (like Hume and Kant and so many [88] Anthony W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (1989), 229-35, especially 233, 235; Finnis, ‘Law, Morality, and “Sexual Orientation”,’ Notre Dame Law Review 69 (1994) 1049-76 at 1060, and see 1057-63 for Plato’s views as a whole. For brief responses to some responses to that article, see the later version: Finnis, ‘Law, Morality, and “Sexual Orientation”,’ Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 9 (1995) 11-39 at 18-26. What the predicate ‘is natural’ means in relation to the family is equally contained in what the predicate ‘is unnatural’ asserts in Plato’s repeated description of homosexual acts as para physin, contrary to nature, unnatural: e.g. Phaedrus, 251a, Laws 636c, 836, 838, 841. [89] Nicomachean Ethics 2. 6: 1107a9-17; also Eudemian Ethics 2.3: 1221b20-22; for the questionableness of the common opinion that these passages merely make a linguistic and thus tautologous point about the pejorative word ‘adultery’, see Finnis, Moral Absolutes, 31-2. [90] See ‘Law, Morality and “Sexual Orientation”’ at 1062-5; 24-30. [91] John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, 22 November 1981; see especially sec. 29, reaffirming the key teaching in Paul VI, Encyclical Letter, Humanae Vitae, 25 July 1968, secs. 9, 11, 12.

Reason, Revelation, Universality and Particularity in Ethics 249 other philosophers) missed, the first principles of practical reason which direct us towards the basic intelligible human goods, goods that are in countless ways both the source of all intelligibility and reasonableness in our choices, and the outline of human flourishing —of human nature in its full actuation. Each of these first principles is, so to speak, transparent for the human persons in whom such good can be actualized, so transparent that it is, in truth, those persons for whose sake we are responding when we respond at all to the summons and direction of those principles.92 But this actualization of universals does not exhaust the reality of what is present in such flourishing. Specificity and particularity always add to what is more universal, generic.93 Love responds to all that is there in the beloved; it responds to the passing stranger in the desert,94 but makes its necessarily exclusive commitments, and has its necessarily discriminatory loyalty to this my people or my friend. But to say this is still to speak too generally. Human nature, as the child can see in its parents, is not quite complete (whether in capacities, dispositions or fulfillments) in either male or female. That is why one of the basic human goods is marriage. It is also why—since marriage has the specific kind of act in which it can be actualized, experienced and expressed—there is a part of ethics which particularly concerns the conditions under which choosing behaviour that is or might be of that kind respects that universal good sufficiently to be judged reasonable and right.95 The conditions, as everyone knows, are demanding enough for revelation to be needed to confirm, and in some lesser measure to clarify, deepen and extend, what the most careful thinkers of Greece and Rome could recognize and teach, [92] See Finnis, ‘Foundations of Practical Reason Revisited,’ American Journal of Jurisprudence 50 (2005) 109-131 at 129, 131 (also in Finnis, Reason in Action at 38, 40). [93] Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles II cc. 26 & 42. [94] See Anscombe, Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. Mary Geach & Luke Gormally (Charlottesville, VA and Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008), 234: ‘…there are lesser friendships: there are friendships of advantage or pleasure, the friendships of fellows in an association, of fellow workers and of fellow citizens—and also of fellow men, as would make its appearance if fear did not when two humans alone find one another in the desert.’ [95] See Finnis, ‘Marriage: A Basic and Exigent Good’, The Monist 91/3 (2008) 396-414 (also in Finnis, Human Rights and Common Good, 317-33); Aquinas, 143-54; ‘The Good of Marriage and the Morality of Sexual Relations: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations,’ American Journal of Jurisprudence 42 (1997) 97-134 (also in Human Rights and Common Good, 353-88).

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even in the midst of a culture devoted, in ways paralleled and surpassed in our day, to shadows in the Cave.

Raimond Gaita and John Haldane

Is God Necessary for Morality? A broadcast discussion introduced and chaired by Phillip Adams

Editorial Preface The following is based on a transcript of a public exchange between the philosophers Raimond Gaita and John Haldane in which they were invited to discuss the issue of whether morality depends upon God, or upon religious belief. The exchange took place in June 2008 before an audience of eight hundred people gathered for the purpose in the Seymour Centre of the University of Sydney, Australia. The first half of the event, from which the following is drawn, was also broadcast as an edition of Radio National Late Night Live, a programme of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the event was chaired by Phillip Adams the regular presenter of Late Night Live and a well-known Australian broadcaster, social commentator and film-producer. (Recording on http://mpegmedia. abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2008/06/lnl_20080626_2205.mp3). The context of a broadcast public event, with mostly unscripted contributions, made for an accessible and less academic exchange than would have occurred in the setting of an academic seminar. This was agreeable to the participants who are both well-known public intellectuals, as familiar to the educated public as to their academic peers, and who are both strongly committed to public engagement; but inevitably there is a looseness in presentation and argument and readers seeking more developed and sustained versions of their positions might look at the following books: Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (Routledge, 2nd edition,

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2004), A Common Humanity (Routledge: 2002); and John Haldane, Practical Philosophy, Ethics, Society and Culture (ImprintAcademic, 2009) and Reasonable Faith (Routledge, 2010).

Phillip Adams: Introduction Tonight in the form of a public debate, part of an international conference on moral philosophy hosted by the University of Notre Dame. I will now welcome two leading philosophical minds who are more than qualified to grapple with our question, Is God Necessary for Morality? I am of course, entirely neutral on this debate, I am a ‘faithiest’, and that’s someone with deep faith in atheism. Our first guest speaker puts the affirmative case that God is indeed necessary for morality, and that’s John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He has also held the Royden Davis Chair in Humanities at Georgetown in Washington, D.C., and the Stanton Lecturship in Divinity at the University at Cambridge, and he has lectured at various other universities. He is also a consultant to the Pontifical Council for Culture and the author of numerous books including, An Intelligent Persons Guide to Religion and Faithful Reason and Reasonable Faith. Our second speaker who will present his case, positively and negatively, is Raimond Gaita, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Kings College, University of London, and Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. His books include, Good and Evil: an Absolute Conception, A Common Humanity, Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice, and that incomparable book, Romulus, My Father, which was transmogrified into one of the best Australian films I have ever seen. John, if you wouldn’t mind, the pulpit is yours.

John Haldane: Opening Statement Although this exchange has been advertised as a debate, I think of it more as a conversation and I expect that’s how it will in fact develop. Both Rai Gaita and I are professional philosophers who have given a good deal of thought to these sorts of issues over many years. Anybody who does that, very quickly comes to be dissatisfied with brief answers that typically fail to capture the depth of the issues. So I hope that we will get somewhere in exploration of those depths, but also managing to come back to the surface again.

Is God Necessary for Morality?

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A question such as, ‘Is God Necessary for Morality?’ invites from a philosopher, as most serious questions do, the reply [coined by the once well-known British academic and broadcaster CEM. Joad] ‘it depends what you mean’. In this case, it depends what you mean by ‘necessary’ and it depends what you mean by ‘morality’ and it also, I suppose, depends what you mean by ‘God’. Also, we need to distinguish this question from the related thought that it is not so much that God is necessary for morality as that religion or religious belief is somehow required for morality. One initial thought, therefore, is that the question itself admits of some further clarification. I will be coming to that in due course and saying something about what ‘necessary’ and ‘morality’ in this context might mean. A second initial thought that occurs to me is that behind this question lies a background assumption or perhaps several sets of assumptions. In this setting the question isn’t being posed in a purely abstract form in the way in which it might be in a purely academic forum. I imagine the background is something like this: that whereas it was once widely the case that private and public ethics were faith-based, we seem to be living, particularly in the developed world, in a period in which people have moved away from engaged religious belief and practice, a fact that some regret and some welcome. And so, in answering this question, I suppose it has to be borne in mind, that there are those who would wish to see it answered in one way rather than another, in the hope of either reintroducing religion into ethics or of further expelling religion from it. So, with those two thoughts in the background, let me proceed if I may, with a quotation. The source is a British Prime Minister of past years, Harold Macmillan. Like most British Prime Ministers, and I suspect like most leaders in the western world in the twentieth century, Macmillan was a Christian. In fact, in the First World War he took with him into the trenches a copy of the New Testament. Many years later he chose to reflect on the matter of the place of religion in his own life and in the life of the nation as he understood it, and he wrote as follows: Whatever your views happen to be about practical theology, I don’t think a nation can live without religion. If you don’t pray every night and you don’t believe in God and if you don’t think you can serve God eventually, you can’t solve all these problems and you can’t even survive them. When you give up religion, you give up any kind of idealism.

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I want to come back and consider the later part of that, in which Macmillan says that ‘when you give up religion, you give up any kind of idealism’, but let me start with the more immediate thought, not so much about idealism but about morality, and consider some ways in which it might be thought that morality requires either the existence of God or, at any rate, a belief in the existence of God. The first way in which that might be thought to be the case is this: that the very content of morality, what morality delivers to us, what it is about, the force that it has and so on, reveals its very religious or divine source. This thought, I suppose, goes somewhat like this. When we think about morality, we see that what it consists of is a number of absolute rules, prohibitions or requirements; things that one must or must not do; and the question would be, how can there be such a set of rules? One sceptical thought might be that there is such a set of rules because we made them up. But morality seems to stand beyond human invention, as a standard by which we might criticize it. So it looks as if we are faced with morality as a system of rules or requirements that are not of our own making but have a kind of commanding force, and the thought would be, where could that originate but from a legislator? But if this is beyond human invention, then it certainly doesn’t derive from a human legislator and so perhaps it originates with a divine one. I am not myself particularly attracted to this line of reasoning, in part because I don’t think it captures exactly the character of morality; and in any case, philosophers have explored how there might be other means of explaining morality, even if it does consist of a set of laws, other than by reference to religion. So let me move on to consider a different way in which it might be thought that morality has religion ‘standing behind it’ and necessarily so, and that is by way of supporting it psychologically. The thought here is just this: people will only be motivated to do the right thing, only be motivated to live good lives, if they have ahead of them the prospect of reward and the threat of punishment. Once again it seems to me that this isn’t obviously so, for there are plenty of people who seem to live moral lives, or who certainly appear to be concerned with morality, whose motivation has got nothing to do with the possibilities of reward or of punishment. A particular version of the idea that religion is required to motivate us morally is one that might appeal to people who are interested in markets and economics. It is the thought that social interactions depend upon trust. One of the classic problems in societies is that of


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‘free riders’, people who take the benefit of social arrangements without actually contributing to them. If a free rider is very clever and can conceal the fact that they are doing this from their fellows, he or she will escape sanction and punishment. But if they believe there is a God who oversees all of this, then they know, or they believe they know, that they will receive punishment for their exploitation of others; therefore appeal to religion might be a way of grounding trust, getting people to trust and cooperate fairly for fear that if they do not do so, they will be punished. Once again, however, I don’t think this is a very good way of thinking about the matter, for people can be motivated towards trust without fear; and even if they were motivated by that fear, is this really a very fitting basis on which to argue the case for religious motivation? I proceed finally to two further thoughts. The first is that morality can require us to sacrifice everything. There can be circumstances under which the only way of doing what is right, what the situation calls for, is one that involves enormous sacrifice; perhaps not just in the lives of those immediately involved but in those of their family and friends or even in parts of a wider society. It may seem at times that to do the right thing would involve the death or suffering of very large numbers of people and one question that arises is this: ‘how could it be like that, how could it be possible that life could ever require that kind or scale of sacrifice?’ And one thought in response might be that if morality is underwritten by, or has standing behind it a just God who will apportion what is due to those who suffer or endure for what is right, then this would give it some kind of foundation and sense. It would be a basis for hope that people could live morally in the belief that whatever sacrifices they incur, or are borne by their loved ones, that somehow at the end of the day this will be accounted for. I think there is something in this idea, but I want to end with a different thought, which is that if we are going to talk about what it is to have a good human life, then we have to go beyond morality as a set of rules or requirements, and start to think about what is involved in human nature and to think about it’s fulfilment. As we start to do that two thoughts should occur to us. The first is that we often aspire to be good. The second is that we also behave badly, sometimes very badly indeed; for sometimes we are mired in evil. Where does that disposition or inclination come from? Equally, we seem to aspire to a condition beyond any that we ourselves can achieve. Where does that aspiration come from? Here is where religion offers an answer,

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and in particular, the Christian religion. Because on the one hand it teaches, in the words of Augustine, that human beings suffer a darkness of the intellect and a disturbance of the passions: their minds are snared in certain ways, darkened in other aspects, and at times their appetites and desires drag them down. But equally, Augustine teaches that we are made for God and that we have in our hearts a desire for a kind of fulfilment that human beings cannot achieve on their own account. The human world cannot bring this completion to pass. In this understanding of life, as having these existential dimensions: an aptitude for evil, and aspirations for salvation, the only thing that adequately explains and answers to it, is a religious understanding of human beings. Thank you

Adams Thank you John Haldane. I must say, that I’ve got to be saved because I feel myself on the verge of converting to Catholicism, so I hope that Rai Gaita will bail me out.

Raimond Gaita: Opening Statement I doubt I can deliver that. Like John, I don’t think of this as a debate, and that might disappoint anybody who has come here for cultural combat; but I want to feel free to agree with him and he with me, because understanding is what matters. To that end, I’ll make certain observations and draw distinctions that I hope will make for a fruitful discussion and I think it is probably in the discussion that the differences between John and I will become much clearer, but until then you might wonder which side I am on. It is the relation between God and morality rather than the relation between religion and morality that’s at issue. I will talk for the sake of convenience about morality as though it were all one thing, which obviously it isn’t. There are many moralities, none of which I think can be fully underwritten by facts or by reason, and some people distinguish nowadays between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, partly because they identify ‘morality’ with moralising in the pejorative sense of the term whilst they prefer to bring the values they admire under the concept of ‘ethics’. I have some sympathy with this, but there is no agreement on how to use the distinction between ethics and morality, so I will continue to speak about morality. Also for the sake of convenience, I will speak sometimes just of ‘religion’, but always I will mean religion of the kind that requires one to speak God’s name in prayer and in worship. That is something I


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can’t do, which is why I don’t think of myself as religious, though it seems that plenty of other people do. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the connection between prayer and the very notion of what it is to believe in God, is so intimate that it would be absurd, I think, for a Jew or a Christian to say, ‘I know God exists but whether one should pray to him, well that I haven’t yet settled.’ So I will just assume, and I take it to be obvious, that the division between morally good and serious people doesn’t map neatly onto the distinction between people who believe in God and people who don’t. I also take it as obvious that, at least for the most part, morally good people who don’t believe in God, people who care passionately for justice, virtue over vice, have a strict sense of obligation, moral necessity, for whom it matters profoundly to live decently; indeed people for whom nothing matters so much as to live decently where ‘nothing’ really means nothing. I take it that for the most part, these people aren’t living off intellectual capital borrowed from religion. Well now to some of my observations. Many people think that if one doesn’t believe in God, if morality is purely of human origin, then human beings must have created it to serve their purposes, the value of which can be appreciated by any normal human being: safety, security and happiness, conceived from the perspective of an enlightened self pursuing interests, for example. Morality must therefore, this thought continues, be assessed according to how well it serves those purposes and should be adapted when our purposes change or when circumstances make some of the means with which we have achieved them inefficient or obsolete. Irresistibly natural though that chain of reasoning may seem, it’s mistaken I believe. The reason, to oversimplify a little by putting it into a slogan, is that morality is not the servant of our purposes; it’s their judge. Hardly anybody believes that decent ends justify all the necessary means to achieve them. Most people at least take seriously the belief that justice sometimes requires us to renounce the most efficient means to protect what we most value. But when we ask which means are morally available to us, we can’t look to the purpose that morality serves because there is no such purpose. If we are the ones that suggest, for example, that the purpose of morality is to secure social cooperation, then one will discover on reflection that it is morality that judges which forms of social cooperation we can decently enjoy. The same is true of all the purposes that morality is alleged to serve, be it individual flourishing, self-realisation, autonomy, happiness, the collective good, even survival of the species.

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Morality will judge which forms of them, and which means for their achievement, are acceptable. Once one has acknowledged that morality doesn’t serve our interests, but is their judge, one will be free of the illusion that if morality is of human origin, that it must always be able to adapt rationally and creatively to serve our interests. Freed from that illusion, one can acknowledge that morality and the world are not always suited to one another, and to recognize that is to do no more than to acknowledge tragedy. Sometimes we may be morally obliged to do what is morally terrible to do. Some people have recently argued, for example, for torture on those grounds, saying that it is the lesser evil, meaning that the lesser evil really is an evil. That means that they believe, as some people don’t believe, that one can’t justify an evil merely by pointing to the way in which it would generate a great good or avert a great evil. Others however, myself included, argue that torture is morally terrible, and can never be counted as a ‘lesser’ evil, even where morality obliges one to carry it out But none of these positions, I think, and this I think this will be a matter of dispute between John and I, none of these positions, depend for their coherence on belief in God. Some people go further than denying that belief in God is necessary for morality, they actually say that belief in the omniscient and omnipotent Judeo-Christian God is incompatible with morality; that worship of Him is inconsistent with an understanding and struggle against evils of this world, and this I am sure you will know is an old debate, and I hope that I don’t sound high-minded if I say that I often find it distasteful. We know that people came out of Auschwitz with their belief in God intact, and some indeed with it deepened. They thank God for the grace which enabled them to retain a sense of His goodness to worship and to praise Him, despite what they have seen or suffered. Others of course came with their faith shattered and some cursed God, some thought anything else was unintelligible, even obscene. I have no idea why one should think that detached philosophical thinking about the problem of evil should settle which of these is right. I don’t even know what it is to say or to think that one of these might be right and the other wrong. It would seem not only wrong but I think, more importantly, presumptuous to believe that only those who came out of Auschwitz with their faith shattered, fully understood the horrors that they saw and suffered. Presumptuous


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in the same why that some pacifists are presumptuous when they claim that only they see the true horror of war. I don’t believe that there is an independent, non question-begging account of what it is to have really seen the horrors of Auschwitz, really to have appreciated their full significance. One couldn’t convict those who retained their faith after Auschwitz of a failure to understand, and for that reason, I find distasteful the idea that any clear-headed person should be prepared to hold God to account for failing adequately to manage the universe to the moral standards of something that looks like utilitarianism. Especially if that means advancing, in a spirit of sweet reasonableness, hair-raising suggestions about what God might reveal to us in Heaven concerning the providential role he assigned to Auschwitz. Coming back now to morality, I said before that it is obvious that one could be a morally good person without believing in God, but there are people who think that morality will always be vulnerable to a serious kind of moral scepticism unless it has rational foundations, and providing God is one of the means of providing those foundations. What they fear is a kind of scepticism that morality is an illusion and that the concepts of justice and obligation and so on are really an answer to nothing. I know nobody who really seriously believes this, not at any rate, anybody who believes that or is inclined to believe it just because they’ve been convinced by argument of one sort or another. There are of course, many people for whom morality means nothing at all, but they have not got to that decision because after reflection, they have found that it has no rational basis. Ever since the days of Plato, philosophers have been haunted by this kind of scepticism. There are characters in Plato who profess it, but generally they go off in a sulk whenever the argument gets tough, so they’re hardly models of people who seek the truth fearlessly wherever it may take them, and that may indeed have been Plato’s point. Then on other occasions, philosophers raise the possibility that morality has no rational basis, but do so in abstract ways, never being prepared to speak in their own name, never saying, I am the kind of person who wishes I could follow reason to the point that I am prepared to accept morality as entirely an illusion. There is a reason for this, I think, which I will just quickly sketch. A person who is morally serious can’t think morality is of marginal significance in her life. She may not think it over as all other values, but she must take her moral concern as the most serious of her life. And now I

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think it is intrinsic to moral seriousness, to the kind of seriousness morality must have for anybody who understands what it is, that a morally serious person must fear to fall into that kind of nihilism. Fear to become the kind of person who would say ‘for me it doesn’t in the end matter, provided I am faithful to reason, if I have to abandon morality’. Because reason can’t rightly be in conflict with a proper understanding of the nature of things, it can’t be in conflict with a fear to succumb to nihilism, a fear that I think is intrinsic to an understanding of morality. Kierkegaard once expressed this really well, he said, just as a logician most fears a fallacy, so the ethical thinker most fears to fall away from the ethical. This obviously has implications for the more general thought that perhaps without God, life will cease to have meaning or its meaning will be fraught and attenuated and less deep. Obviously that idea must entail amongst other things, a propensity to the nihilism I have just spoken about, but of course includes much more; that meaning cannot be sustained merely by the love of people, or the institutions of art and the beauty of the world. I don’t say that people can’t fall into this kind of state, because of the considerations of the kind I sketched a moment ago; but I don’t think they can rightly claim that the threat to meaning is rationally necessitated by such considerations. To the contrary, those very same things can prompt one, as they did Albert Camus, to an affirmation of life just as one sense of the beauty of a blossom may become more intense with an appreciation of its fragility. Camus is best known for making Sisyphus an existentialist hero, someone who disdained false hope and false conciliation as fiercely as the soldier in the first act of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, who says he wouldn’t give a farthing for the mortal whom false hopes could set afire. The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the astonishing claim that there is only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Even as a young man when I first read this, I believed that was posturing and that only muddle followed it. But even so, The Myth of Sisyphus contains something finer than one finds in most of Camus or clear-headed critics; and to find it at its best, one should go to the lyrical essays on Algerian cities and on the desert on Iran. Nowhere is Camus tragic humanism more attractive than in his celebration in those lyrical essays of the loves of the young men and women of Algiers, and nowhere is a celebration of the yearning for happiness whose fulfilment is always short lived, more tenderly qualified by a sense of the tragic, made all the more heart-rending by the poetic


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beauty of it’s expression. Those essays are marked thoroughly throughout by an intensity about what it means to live truthfully that now seems alien to us. It would be a mistake to assume that in Camus, it is merely another expression of the intensity with which French intellectuals characteristically respond to philosophical questions about meaning, value and purpose. When it’s authority, rather than grandstanding, the intensity of The Myth of Sisyphus is the expression of Camus fearful love of the world, fearful because he is conscious of the many ways he might betray it. Camus’ need for ‘lucidity’, the word appears often in his writings, is not a response to abstract philosophical doubts, it expresses his need to be faithful to his love of the beauty of the world, as does his rejection in the end of the kind of suicide that would leave the world as though it were a ‘smoke-filled room’ as Kant once put it. Camus writes scornfully, against people who disdainfully turn their back on the world, especially if they want to make an aesthetic or morality or even a philosophy of religion out of it. Despite his torments, his Sisyphus discovers a joy that is an expression of an unconditional love of the world and like everything else, this love is vulnerable to misfortune; and to think otherwise would be hubris for at any moment we can lose everything that gives sense to our lives. If it is a lucid and an unconditional love of the world, it must acknowledge that affliction could destroy it, but because severe affliction can destroy everything in a person, its power to destroy the person’s love of the world does not mean that that love was not unconditional.

Adams

Discussion

I feel a bit like a mangy old lion in a den of Christians, and so what I want to do is to speak for someone who lives in the universe without an author, without a purpose, where the only destiny is the final outcome of the second law of thermodynamics, where I do not face the prospect of reward or punishment, just the certainty of the personal annihilation provided by death. I would have thought, and I put this to you, if I may John, that someone in my position, who lives a meaningless life ultimately, probably may have greater need to create a meaning for him or herself in that void and that someone like me might be propelled towards morality, a personal morality albeit, because of that quite extraordinary sensation of aloneness.

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Haldane In a way, this touches on the question that Rai was also concerned with, which is the (possibly) tragic condition of humanity when it looks upon the world and is unable to resolve matters in ways that would seem satisfactory, and yet tries to find meaning(s) in the context of that. So, I think that maybe one way of responding to what you are saying is to make a connection back, if I may, to the quotation from Macmillan.

Adams: It is the nastiest quotation I have heard in years. Haldane Let’s see how we get on with that, nonetheless. What I find interesting about the Macmillan passage is that he begins by talking about morality (’practical theology’) and ends by talking about idealism. That’s to say he starts by speaking about morality in a rather conventional sense as a set of rules and so on; but then talks about religious practices like prayer and belief and the way in which those might be expressed, and he claims that you can’t begin to tackle what lies ahead of you without having some kind of idealism. Now, this is the case of somebody who obviously is charged with enormous responsibilities, while you are talking about the condition that many more people will find in themselves in, of just trying to get through the day, trying to salvage something from it or make something from it and so on. But I think that is the human condition in general; which is to say that each and everyone of us may find ourselves in circumstances of severe vulnerability, feeling a sense of isolation and a sense of limitation. What I am interested in, is what religion has to say about that condition. Not the idea that it just rushes in with comfort, because part of what it may rush in with is something that underlines one’s vulnerability. This is why I was talking, for example, about the way in which religion exposes the darkness of human life and doesn’t set it aside as something that is merely an artefact of social circumstances, but view it as something that may be written into the human soul. What I want to say therefore is that what Macmillan was touching on—and perhaps what you, Phillip, were touching on, and in a way what Rai with his quotations from Camus was touching upon—is something about the human condition and it’s very nature. What I think religion offers, and perhaps only religion offers, is a deep account of that nature, an account that both reveals to us the source


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of the potential for evil but also makes sense of the aspiration to meaning, not just as an expression of individual desperation, nor a cultural artefact, but something that has an objective counterpart in reality. To quote Augustine, ‘you made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they come to rest in you’. It is that sense of restlessness I am interested in.

Gaita I first heard this talk about the third law of thermodynamics from C.P. Snow who used to describe it as part of the tragic vision of life. I remember a television interview between C.P. Snow and Ludovic Kennedy, years and years ago in Britain. Snow expressed this view and said ‘this is part of the tragic view of life’ and Kennedy said ‘why is it tragic?’ and Snow said ‘because what it means is that it all runs down into porridge in the end.’ Ludovic Kenney said, ‘Oh God! When?’ and Snow said, ‘Oh, well in a few billion years.’ The reason why I mentioned this is because there are very banal versions of that thought and C.P Snow’s was, I think, one, as in fact, was a much celebrated essay by Bertrand Russell called ‘A Free Man’s Worship’. I don’t want to deny, though I have to say that I have no inwardness with this myself, I don’t want to deny first, obviously, the thought of death, and perhaps more the thought of the death of loved ones, and then maybe too, the much more abstracted thought about everything that human beings have created and striven for must perish. I don’t deny that it can create a kind of estrangement from things in the world that matter to them; but to the extent that it does it is not because in any way reason forces this on anybody. So if anybody feels that estrangement on account of these things, I don’t think that person can say, ‘Ok give me reason now why I should feel differently, give me a rational basis.’ But as I say, I feel no inwardness with this at all. It terrifies me that some of the people I love are going to die, but for me, that testifies to the sense of meaning, that terror is an expression of the meaning. If it was meaningless, there wouldn’t be that terror. I am sure you feel the same about one’s horror at the sense of the injustices and evils in the world. This isn’t something that generates a sense of meaningless; this is a heightened intense sense of meaning.

Adams Surely all of us can have that sense irrespective of whether or not one believes in a god. I like the word ‘numinous’ and I can assure you

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that despite the fact that I live in a meaningless world, when I walk out at night and look out at the stars above the homestead at the farm, I am as overwhelmed by that sense of awe and astonishment and, yes, dread as any Christian or any Hindu. This is, I think, common to us all, and perhaps sometimes we exaggerate, greatly exaggerate, the difference that religious faith brings to the human experience.

Haldane It seems to me that what it brings is an interpretation. We have been speaking just now about certain aspects of human sensibility: what it is that human beings feel in the face of certain possibilities: their own death, the death of a loved ones, suffering and so on; the frustration of not merely ambitions, but of deep projects to which they are morally committed and whose real value they believe in. The question is: ‘is there anything to be understood here about the nature of this sensibility, about the delicacy of feeling, the sense of hope, but also the fear of loss?’ And here, I think, it’s important to add something that I don’t believe has been made explicit so far which is this: just as I said we can ask of the original question, in what sense ‘necessary’? and in what sense ‘morality’? so we also have to ask, in what sense ‘God’? Sometimes people talk about ‘God’ as if this were just a generalised idea and everybody who believed in God, believed in that. But it depends on the kind of god you believe in, and in the particular case that I am concerned with, Christianity, God is held to have partaken in that common human experience, shared in that sensibility, that suffering, those fears, and so on, through the incarnation, through the person of Jesus Christ. So it’s this datum, the shared sense of human capacity for feelings of certain sorts, for hopes of certain sorts, that calls out for a constructive interpretation. Now maybe there isn’t an interpretation, maybe there is just more description of it. Maybe one just says, this is what human beings are like, but it would be inappropriate I think, to foreclose on the possibility of an interpretation that makes sense of that and then carries it forward into something else.

Adams I often end letters or emails to people who write to me trying to persuade me to embrace this or that faith with ‘let’s not a little thing like God come between us.’ Let me now eliminate God entirely from the discussion, just for a moment or two. If my fellow atheist/‘faithiest’


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Dawkins was here tonight, he would be introducing an argument, which I haven’t heard hinted towards, and that is that perhaps forms of morality predate human existence by thousands and millions, perhaps billions of years. He would argue that there is evidence in evolution at various levels that altruism is as powerful a force as the much more often advertised violence which is seen as part of Darwinian Theory. Living on a farm, I am constantly overwhelmed by observations of the tenderness of mothers; the mothers of calves and fowls and joeys and puppies and chickens, and if you want to see altruism and self-sacrifice, study a beehive. These extraordinary, gifted little creatures will happily give up their own lives for the cause of the community. So I put this to you Rai, is it not possible that morality is simply a very sensible outcome of an infinitely long evolutionary process?

Gaita Well, I don’t want to deny the evolutionary origins of all sorts of dispositions that are moral ones. Altruism is often mentioned, as is compassion, and so on. I think this is just an empirical matter and I don’t know what the answer is. It is mostly a hell of a lot of speculation as far as I can see, but I have no reason to deny it. But there is a big difference it seems for me, between the kinds of things you have described: the tenderness of animals to their young and so on, and the tenderness of beings who have reflective lives in such a way as to actually determine the nature of that kind of tenderness. What I am trying to say is that it is essential to a lot of things that we count as virtues and vices, of what we count as our inner life, our love and so on, that we distinguish between real forms and certain false forms, real love from infatuation, courage from recklessness and so on. This we tend to think, and we are right to think, is of the very nature of those dispositions and that’s not available to animals. I’m not one who says that animals can’t think, but animals don’t, for example, wonder about whether its been really compassionate to their kittens as opposed to some self-serving maternal instinct etc. So it is certainly true, and Dawkins is really good at this, if you have a reductionist sense of what morality is in the first place: a really thin and trivial sense of it, then any kind of evolutionary theory will account for it. Have a shallow enough sense of what altruism is, and even soldier ants turn out to be altruistic, it doesn’t help much.

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Adams John, do you give that ex-cleric in England, Mr. Darwin,1 do you give him any credit for discovering another mechanism that perhaps is as important as faith?

Haldane Thank you because I wanted to come in on that. Here I want to pick up something that Rai was saying; not in his immediate remark just now, but something he said earlier on which seems to be highly relevant to this. The question is not so much the comparison that might be made, though I follow this as well, about the relationship between say animal behaviour of the sort that you were describing and human behaviour. Somebody might think that this just differs in complexity, let’s say, even allowing there is a difference. But I took Rai to be saying at an earlier stage that appeals to explanations of morality in terms of the purposes that it might serve: the benefits that it might provide, whether those be social, economical, ones of personal confidence, or whatever else, are vulnerable to this thought: if somebody says ‘look, here’s an advantage that this confers’, which might be part of an evolutionary story such that we possess it because it conferred these advantages on our ancestors, we have to ask the question ‘but is this good?’ For us it is a real question as to whether or not something that confers a certain selectional advantage, is also something we want to make part of our lives, to embed within our reflective existence. So if it turns out, for example, that morality, or religious belief reinforcing morality, confers certain advantages in the marketplace, we might still want to ask ‘do we want to have that, do we want to behave in that kind of way in the marketplace?’ Rai’s point I take it—and this I want to endorse—is that morality is not so much explained in terms of purposes, that morality judges purposes that might be proposed as being a part of the explanation for it. So we come back to this idea. We are reflective beings who find ourselves moved in certain ways, drawn in certain ways, both good and bad, and I want to try to understand why that is. And something about our evolutionary history isn’t going to either endorse or disconfirm, reinforce or undermine, those things. They are open to reflection and what is at issue is

[1]

Editorial Note. Charles Darwin did at one time consider taking holy orders in the Church of England, but never in fact did so.


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where one goes once one begins on that reflection. This perhaps is where the difference lies between us.

Adams John, you’ve also written about the de-intellectualisation of the Church—this is the marketplace if you like—that in a sense the church has dumbed itself down in order to maintain its appeal to the masses. Is this disturbing you?

Haldane: Yes. Adams In other words, I think you would get a better audience amongst a lot of well-informed atheists than you would if we were having this discussion in one of the deep southern states in George Bush’s America.

Haldane I think there are well-informed theists as well as well-informed atheists. So the matter of being ‘informed’ doesn’t quite get to the depth of the issue. My concern about de-intellectualisation among Christians is that this is part of a quite pervasive and general trend within our culture to be satisfied with quick and easy answers and to convert what ought to be serious reflection into other kinds of things. That is traceable, dare I say it, to the influence of the media, including broadcasting media, but it is something that surrounds us. I have a particular view about why it occurs within religious groups; I think it is partly that they are fearful of precisely the kinds of challenges that you might want to present, to which I think there are robust replies. They are fearful that such challenges will expose the whole thing as being a kind of fraudulent show, a myth and superstition. What I want to say in response is reflect on these things and you will see that they are not myths, they are not superstitions, or at any rate you will be better placed to address those questions. This is why I want a re-intellectualisation of people of faith; but I want a re-intellectualisation of people in general.

Adams Rai, you make a distinction between the god of religion and the god of philosophers, can you address that?

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Gaita I take it that for a person whose God is the god of religion, she must think that religion deepens her sense of things that matter in life, and that this is just a kind of truth about the nature of religion. It would be, for such a person, a kind of contradiction to be able to say something like, I know it’s sentimental, I know it’s banal, I know it does the dirt on life, it’s disdainful of everything that really matters to human beings, but there you are, it’s my religion: it doesn’t matter to me, I’m interested in truth, not in these aesthetic categories as to whether it is banal. I have often remarked, for example, that it is the banality of the thought that if God is omniscient he must know my email address, that undermines it, rather than anything, so to speak in logic. But what that really means then, if this is true, especially for religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam whose sacred texts constantly hold up examples to us upon which we are to meditate, is that such meditation will deepen our sense, not only of what is religiously significant, but what it is for something to be religiously significant. And that’s why it seems to me, someone can’t say, look, I know this translation makes what Jesus says terribly banal and tone deaf to irony, but again, that doesn’t matter, I am not interested in literature, I am interested in the truth. Whereas the god of the philosophers I take it, is a philosopher sustained by speculation which is deliberately in a kind of ‘tone free’ zone, of which it is as inappropriate to ask ‘is this sentimental?’ or ‘is this banal?’ as it would be to ask these questions of a proposition in maths or physics. I am not religious, but this has, I think, an important consequence also for people who say they are atheists, but who say things such as that they are deeply moved by the beauty of some religious practices or by the beauty of religious art or music, of let’s say Bach. For they then say ‘that’s merely an aesthetic matter’, they are making the same mistake as the person who is says, ‘well that’s merely an aesthetic matter that this translation makes what Jesus says sound so banal.’ In this case, banality is not an affront to an aesthetic sensibility; it’s a form of the false.

Adams As someone who has always viewed religion, all religions, with a sort of anthropological detachment, let me now put this to you John. If God is necessary for morality, why doesn’t religion do a better job being moral? I look at 2,000 years of human history and see oceans of


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blood produced very largely by religious disputations, often not between religions, but even within religions. The morality doesn’t seem to be working very well.

Haldane Two things about that. First of all, it is worth pointing out the positive things that religion has contributed, and I am not just thinking of the obvious cases of aid to people and so on. Western Civilisation was redeveloped in the period prior to the Middle Ages through the re-establishment by the Church of what we now think of as civil society : the creation of schooling systems, the creation of a welfare system, the creation of universities, of course, but also of hospital care, and such like. Now on the other side, as you say, there is the violence in the past and there is also the violence in the present. On my account of matters, however, religion makes its own contribution to explaining why religion itself can behave in this way because of recurrent and degraded spiritual tendencies. I spoke earlier, quoting Augustine, of the darkening of the intellect and of the disturbance of the passions. Religion is not immune from those. It can pathologically turn back upon itself and distort its own purposes, just as human beings may do in other areas. But why religion is particularly destructive when it does this, is because religion, like sex, touches some of the deepest motivating powers in human beings. If we want to try to understand religious cruelty, therefore, understanding it religiously sometimes gives us a deeper insight than does a secular, somewhat banal account of the matter.

Adams That’s it. Let me now thank our guests, John Haldane, Raimond Gaita. Thank you very much, gentlemen.

ST ANDREWS STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS Founding and General Editor: John Haldane, University of St Andrews Values, Education and the Human World edited by John Haldane Philosophy and its Public Role edited by William Aiken and John Haldane Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism by Graham Long Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally The Institution of Intellectual Values: Realism and Idealism in Higher Education by Gordon Graham Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility by Anthony Kenny and Charles Kenny Distributing Healthcare: Principles, Practices and Politics edited by Niall Maclean Liberalism, Education and Schooling: Essays by T.M. Mclaughlin edited by David Carr, Mark Halstead and Richard Pring The Landscape of Humanity: Art, Culture & Society by Anthony O’Hear Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally Subjectivity and Being Somebody by Grant Gillett Understanding Faith: Religious Belief and Its Place in Society by Stephen R.L. Clark Profit, Prudence and Virtue: Essays in Ethics, Business & Management edited by Samuel Gregg and James Stoner Practical Philosophy: Ethics, Society and Culture by John Haldane Sensibility and Sense: Aesthetic Transformation of the World by Arnold Berleant Understanding Teaching and Learning: Classic Texts on Education edited by T. Brian Mooney and Mark Nowacki Truth and Faith in Ethics edited by Hayden Ramsay

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