A Yearning For The Hearth

Following the previous post, I was reminded of a book I read recently called Genetics and Christian Ethics by Celia Deane-Drummond.

The book looks at moral issues in genetics generally, but a large focus of it is on Genetic screening and counseling. Deane-Drummond builds a potent and troubling analogy between the motivations and objectives of these practices and those of the eugenics movement of the last century. Given that many of the conditions which are screened for have no treatment the implication is that the ‘positive result’ of the genetic screening is the abortion of the afflicted fetuses.

Deane-Drummond is really interesting because she’s a virtue ethicist who’s brought virtue ethics out the meta-ethical sphere and applied it to some of the stickiest issues facing ethicists, with some challenging and persuasive results.     

The strict scientific materialism that positions itself so prominently in public discourse has some interesting implications. One is highlighted in the most recent Time magazine. The cover story features an investigation into what makes us good or evil. The article fails to delve into the deeper questions of what constitutes a right or wrong action, rather arguing that social constructs have encouraged the development of moral systems. Yet throughout the article the idea of morality is never questioned.

Ultimately the materialism they assume means that morality, like everything else can be reduced to one thing: chemicals. What else is there? Every action, feeling, motive, sense and thought is one hormone or another acting on our organs and producing one response or another. This response has an effect upon our behaviour that either has had a beneficial or detrimental effect upon the viability of the species, and the development of our species and the cultures surrounding it will inform the emotional response and moral categorization of it. This is the ultimate consequence of ardent materialism. Love your spouse and children? Only because it has proven beneficial to the survivability of previous generations. The proponents of these philosophies seem to rarely (if ever) follow it through to its ultimate conclusion.

Most people hold to at least two conflicting worldviews, a scientific materialism that governs a large part of their lives and a pseudo-spirituality that governs the rest. Eventually this will become untenable and we will have to begin to grapple either with a world in which the things we generally hold to be the most meaningful are really not, or a world in which the spiritual permeates all things much more deeply than we readily recognize.

I think we’ll come to see that there’s more to love than chemicals.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20071203,00.html

Early on, back when I was at the University of Saskatchewan I began to think about the state of the Social Sciences. It seemed as though the Social Sciences were an attempt to organize and study human behaviour using the same rules and philosophy that governed the Natural Sciences…and which had (at least up till that point) provided such stunning success in describing and predicting natural phenomenon. Yet this attempt seems to have failed. Sociology, psychology, political science (and others) do not render meaningful accounts of the human experience. They are adept at describing phenomenon, but lack the power to produce satisfying explanations.

This has had several effects. One is the profusion of Social Sciences that have been invented (check a few big university websites; there is a discipline and a degree for almost every facet of the human experience). Another is a diminishment of the arts. Truth is now found in studies and statistics. Art, like beauty is ‘in the eye of the beholder’ and can’t be relied upon to say anything meaningful. It was not always thus; not that long ago social theory was demonstrated in great novels like those of Tolstoy, Henry James, even Jane Austen. Theology was expressed in a painting. An interesting phenomenon I found while studying literature was the attempt to look at literature in the terms of the social sciences: Hamlet suffered from such and such a neurosis, Lady Macbeth from such and such paranoia. I personally think Hamlet and Macbeth provide a much better account of who those characters were than plugging them into some generalized category.  

I’m  finding that those on what seems to be next wave of theology have strong opinions on these issues. Alasdair MacIntyre has an extraordinary understanding of the Social Sciences but notes their ‘lack of predictive power’ and narrow focus. As I understand them, John Milbank and those in the Radical Orthodoxy movement go much further, believing that the modern Social Sciences in their un-theological, modernist assumptions are floundering hopelessly and that they have bought into the false and violent narrative of modernity and need to replaced by a new understanding firmly rooted in a Trinitarian/Christological theology.

What is the future and proper place of the Social Sciences?  

As requested by Tarski, this expands on “Ethics of Virtue.” As I alluded to at the end earlier post MacIntyre now considers Aquinas to provide the best account of practical rationality available to us. Part of what he finds compelling about Aquinas is how he is able to integrate two rival systems of thought into one cohesive tradition.

When Aquinas arrived at the University of Paris the faculty was split between those reading and beholden to Augustine and those who were beginning to read and interpret Aristotle, whose works had only recently come to the West via contact with Islamic scholars. A controversy was beginning to develop due to the fact that while Aristotle was consistent and coherent, the conclusions drawn from his work were often at odds with Augustine and Christianity. So, it appeared there were two incompatible and incommensurate systems of thought in rivalry, and it seemed impossible to reconcile these differences.

The most important issues were:

·Aristotle’s ethics were designed for a particular class of Athenian gentlemen. Women, slaves, and ‘barbarians’ weren’t even considered capable of rational judgement. Christianity on the other hand, seeks an ethic for all people.

·Aristotle’s account of the virtues are at times inconsistent with the Christian notion of virtue.

·The Augustine Christian’s notion of the will is utterly foreign to Aristotle.

·The Creator God central to Augustine Christianity is also foreign to Aristotle.

MacIntyre demonstrates how Aquinas is able to address each of these in such as way as to demonstrate the weaknesses in a way comprehensible to the system in need of critique (on its own terms) and to remedy them using the resources of its rival.

MacIntyre sees Aristotle’s account of the telos and the virtues and flawed and incomplete, but when supplemented with Christian notions of humility and grace they are made complete, and available to all people. Aristotle is unable to account for the invariable nature of wrong actions; the Augustinian concept of the will accounts for this. MacIntyre goes on to demonstrate how he believes Aristotle’s philosophy of truth was flawed and in fact required the Augustinian Creator God for completion. On the other hand, MacIntyre sees Augustine’s ethics as unsystematic and prone to generalizations, and the integration of Aristotle’s systematic and carefully considered account of virtue and practical reason is necessary for the comprehension of Augustine’s own account of the virtues.

This is necessarily brief, but it outlines what MacIntyre sees as Aquinas’s crowning achievement in reconciling what appeared to be irreconcilable traditions, and reconciling them in such a way as to show, in terms both could comprehend, how each improved and required the resources of the other.

I’ve drawn on MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? pgs. 155-208 and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry pgs. 105-126.

The quote below is from an aricle called “Darwin’s Graveyards” by Edward T. Oakes. The article is a review of a book called From Darwin to Hitler. The book places Hitler in the stream of Social Darwinist thought. I think the quote is interesting because it reminds us of the diffculty of justifying ethics untheologically. I have serious doubts that it is even possible to do so.

 

“Alasdair MacIntyre famously said in After Virtue that every debate about moral issues in contemporary society can be boiled down to a debate between Nietzsche and Aristotle. Perhaps another way of phrasing that same insight would be to say that every contemporary ethical dispute is really a debate between Charles Darwin and Pope John Paul II, especially in his encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. One either regards man as a complicated bag of cells wrapped in skin, whose only law is the biological imperative of vitality, self-preservation, and procreation; or one sees man as created in the image and likeness of God, whose innate and divinely bestowed dignity absolutely forbids any metaphysically significant division in human society between fit and unfit, strong and weak, white and black, Aryan and Semite, Greek and Jew, adult and fetus, those new born and those near death.”

-Edward T. Oakes 

 

 

I’ve been studying Alasdair MacIntyre, who’s a philosopher who has had some important and influential things to say. Probably the most important and influential is his critique of modernity and the current philosophical/ethical discourse.

In “After Virtue” MacIntyre describes a world in which the past has been lost. A great catastrophe has robbed us of the knowledge and the systems of thought our predecessors used to understand things. We have bits and pieces of this old world around us, but they are out of context and only half understood. He then suggests that this is our world; that a breakdown in how we conceptualize concepts such as right, wrong, justice and truth occurred during the Enlightenment and we are living in the wreckage.

He recounts how during the Enlightenment it was presumed that truth could be discerned through impartial rationality. MacIntyre describes in some detail how various Enlightenment thinkers tried and failed to provide purely rational justifications for truth and right action. He argues that the Enlightenment project failed, and had to fail, because it was founded on a false presumption: that we have the ability to rationalize independently and impartially.

The breakdown of the Enlightenment led us to where we are now. We still hold to many of the ethical ideas of the Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment periods, but we have lost the justification for these beliefs. MacIntyre describes the modern dialogue as functionally emotivist, that is, whether we acknowledge it or not, most of us see ethical judgements as statements of personal will or opinion; these ethical judgements have no bearing on anyone else and have no rational justification. MacIntyre is more nuanced, but we commonly call this relativism, and it is the failure of the Enlightenment.

MacIntyre also laments the loss of ‘telos.’ ‘Telos’ is Greek for end, and MacIntyre borrows it from Aristotle in whose work its sense is the end as in the purpose and fulfilment of human life. It is from this, the goal and purpose of human life, that we derive the justification for moral action. The ‘telos’ is also essential for our understanding of our own lives and determining what actions are right and wrong, and on a larger scale, defining who it is we ought to become and what kind of people we ought to be. Ethics then is not simply about doing ‘A’ or ‘B,’ it’s also about becoming the type of person whose character leads them to make the right choice.

We become this type of person through acquiring the virtues. This leads us to the second influential aspect of MacIntyre’s work. His own conceptualization of how ethics ought to be done. Virtues (like courage, justice, mercy, etc.) function within several key frameworks: practices (activities which promote the exercise and development of virtues), narratives (the stories we hear and learn from, as well as the stories of which we are a part: our lives and the lives of others around us and the stories bigger than our own), and traditions (the historically rooted tradition of shared beliefs and ideas to which we belong). Each of these concepts is important and complex, and each of them has useful aspects for us to consider. For the purpose of this piece, however, I’m going to focus on tradition.

For MacIntyre, rationality only occurs within the framework of a tradition. We must recognize that we rationalize and perceive truth through lenses: systems of rationality and language with limited faculties and resources. It’s our traditions that give us the resources that we do have and it is from within a tradition that we can understand and account for our presumptions and properly evaluate our own tradition and its rivals.

Finally, MacInyre offers us a choice: Nietzsche or Aristotle. If moral pronouncements are merely expressions of will, then Nietzsche is the most consistent and honest account of our moral reality. If, however, there is some truth and some meaning, then we must undo much of what has been done, and recover a teleological understanding of human life, such as what Aristotle and his followers had, and begin rebuilding our traditions around it.

 

Through the process of developing this work in the books “After Virtue,” “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” and “Three Rival Forms of Moral Enquiry” MacIntyre went from being an avowed atheist to a Roman Catholic. He believes that the tradition of Thomas Aquinas provides the best rationality for right action, and that it has survived the challenges posed to it over the centuries.

There’s much, much more to MacIntyre’s work, but I hope to have provided here an outline that will be informative to anyone who is interested.