What is Morality?

At first glance, the title of this post might seem a little silly. When someone claims to be a moral person, we take her to mean that she’s a decent, law-abiding, good person. When someone calls an act immoral, we take him to mean that the act is wrong in some way. And when someone says they follow their own code of morals . . . well, what should we take them to mean?

Mark Sanford has a moral code, and, according to this Huffington Post blogpost, he had a moral agenda too. But most people aren’t clamoring to defend Mark Sanford as a moral person. Moreover, the parts of Sanford’s moral code that the author Emma Ruby-Sachs has a problem with–opposing gay adoption, for example, is a moral value that a lot of other people espouse. This blogger looks at Sanford’s adultery–something most of us clearly think is immoral–with a “more rational moral code than Christianity” and finds Sanford isn’t all that bad.

Perhaps she is worthy of his love. We do know that she had long been a friend and that this was unlikely to have been a casual love. This may be a very genuine and deserved love and Mark Sanford may love his wife also, for all I know.

People in general like the idea of a “more rational morality” but it still strikes even the most rational person as false that Sanford should get to cheat on his wife simply because some woman is “worthy of his love.”

So maybe this whole business of asking “what is morality” is a more useful inquiry than we thought. Modern moral scholarship has been greatly influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. At the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant remarks that “two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” This conception of morality as consisting in a sacred moral law has been the dominant conception of morality in the modern period. We think of morality as some transcendent realm of obligation into which we wander when we run into dilemmas, a code of rules imposed on us from some mysterious ethereal realm. Bernard Williams called this conception of morality a “peculiar institution” which we are better off without, despite its compelling nature.

We think of morality as that area of study concerned with dilemmas like “is it wrong to have sex with a woman that is not my wife” or
“do I have an obligation to carry my unborn child to term?” But the original use of the word “morality” had a much wider concern than just specific dilemmas or problems. The term “morality” is actually not etymologically related to the word for rules or obligation. It comes from the Latin word mos (plural mores) which is more properly translated “custom” or “practice.” We tend to think of morality as a body of normative precepts or a “code,” as I indicated earlier, that exists as an entity on its own right, but the original use of the word “morality” meant something different. Morality was a way of living life, and particularly, of living life well. Bernard Williams argues that in light of this, we should broaden the scope of morality to answering the question “How should I live?” rather than “which rules should I follow?”

This is how Thomas Aquinas thought of morality. Of course, rules and obligations were part of the picture, but rules and obligations do not give us the full breadth of morality’s essence. Morality for Aquinas is about how to achieve happiness, completion, and well-being.

Some readers will object to this as wishy-washy or bordering on relativism. One might ask, “If Mark Sanford is made happy by cheating on his wife, should he do it?” If morality is about happiness and well-being, by which standards should we hold people accountable?

Aquinas was by no means a relativist, nor did he think that people should get to choose arbitrarily which things make them happy. Morality for Aquinas is about doing what is good. Moreover, Aquinas’ moral theory is grounded in a general metaphysical theory of goodness. This term requires some clarification.

In response to the question “what does it mean to choose the good?” Aquinas asks “what do we even mean by goodness?” This is the metaphysical question, meaning that it is a question about ultimate reality, not just about the physical universe around us. Goodness, according to Aquinas, is a transcendental (this is why his idea of goodness is called a metaphysics of goodness, since transcendentals are by definition not physical). Transcendentals are certain entities which capture the complex ways in which created things exist. Besides goodness, truth, unity, and beauty are transcendentals–they describe some dimension of existence that lots of different things share. What do all “good” things share? According to Aquinas, all good things are in some way desirable. Thus the good, piggy-backing off of Aristotle “is what all things desire.”

This concept requires some explanation. Why do I read? To make myself smarter, because I enjoy reading, because I have to in order to get a doctorate. The good, therefore, is whatever is the object of desire. But we have lots of desires, and some are clearly better than others. Mark Sanford had a desire to have sex with his Argentinian lover, but he also had the desire to fulfill the duties of his gubernatorial office, sans scandal. This morning, I had the desire to exercise, but I also had the desire to sleep in. In so far as all of these various things fulfill mine or Mark Sanford’s desires, they are, in some way, good.

But if goodness is something so general, it loses its meaning. Why bother talking about Mark Sanford choosing to have or resist an affair if both are good in some sense of the word? Aquinas is aware of this objection. He argues that goodness is used most properly to refer to something that is perfected, something that is doing what it is designed to do. A pen is good if it writes well. A table is good if it doesn’t wobble. Goodness for each thing is most properly the perfection of its own proper act of existence.

For human beings, existence is complex. There is not just one thing we need to do to exist well, like a pen just needs to write well in order to achieve the perfection of its existence. Human beings need to have and do lots of different things to fulfill the perfection of their existence. They need health and all the accompanying material goods that go into creating health like food and shelter and clothing; they need a certain amount of intellectual stimulation; they need relationships, and leisure and art. Human beings desire all these things because they are good, they satisfy desire, and they allow human beings to be what it is that they are supposed to be.

But there is a certain ontological and circumstantial hierarchy to these goods. That is, certain goods are better than others. And certain goods are better than others under certain circumstances. Food is a good, but learning is a much better good. Relationships and art are both goods, but if art were to ruin all of a person’s relationships, we might not consider it so good. Love is good, as is serving well in one’s political office, but if love gets in the way of proper service, as it did with Sanford, we no longer consider it so good.

Morality is about figuring out goodness. It is about figuring out what a person needs at any given time to be a full, complete, satisfied person. And this is why morality is not, in Aquinas’ thought, just about rules. Mark Sanford broke a rule, but what is more important for a moral evaluation of his act, at least in the Thomistic sense, is what his actions did to him as a person. Mark Sanford is somehow less of a person. He’s less well-off, less-complete, flourishing less.

So what is morality? Morality is a practical form of knowledge, what Aristotle called a science. It is that complex inquiry into the dynamism of practical action and what it is that human beings need to flourish, to be happy, to succeed in being human. Morality is not its own discipline which has as its specific focus the study of rules and obligation, but is rather the complex study of anthropology and metaphysics and sociology and psychology. Morality is simply what we do as human beings, trying to be good at what we are.

Marriage as Friendship

In Christian theology, marriage is typically thought to have three ends or purposes: begetting children, bestowing grace and providing a remedy for sin, and creating mutuality in interpersonal communion. The first purpose is easy to achieve (though a little more difficult to do well); the second purpose is entirely up to God’s gratuitous action. In this blog post, then, we are going to focus on the last purpose, which does not receive nearly enough philosophical and theological attention. We are going to examine how Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas’ theological and philosophical system allows us to think of marriage as friendship.

Aristotle identified three types of friendship. The first is called a friendship of utility. These are relationships based on benefit and what Aristotle calls eros or erotic love. These are relationships that exist because each party gets something out of it. The friendship that exists between soldiers or co-workers or classmates is an example of such a friendship. Aristotle says that these relationships are impermanent, and they form and dissolve frequently based on changing circumstances. A friendship based on utility does not have to be between people who necessarily like each other, but simply has to serve some benefit.

The second type of friendship is a friendship of pleasure. Friendships based on pleasure, unlike those of utility, are between people who like each other and desire the other person’s company, precisely because it is pleasurable (and not necessarily useful). The partner in such a friendship is desired for their own sake because it brings so much pleasure. These are the friendships most of us have–our conversation partners, the people who share our hobbies, the people who delight us when we are in their presence. Among this type of friendship, Aristotle includes lovers who find sexual intercourse mutually pleasurable.

The last type of friendship is a friendship of virtue. If friendships of utility are based on material advantage, and those of pleasure are based on pleasures of the body, the last type of friendship is based on the good and the mutual pursuit of virtue. The tie that binds these relationships is not the good received, but the good that is willed to the other. These are friends who want primarily what is good for their friend, even when the pursuit of this good is not always easy or pleasurable. However, this last type of friendship according to Aristotle is indeed the most useful and the most pleasurable in the long run.

For Aquinas, this last type of friendship is the ideal relationship that rational creatures and designed to cultivate. We have the best chance of flourishing intellectually, morally, and spiritually when we have a social life based on this last type of friendship. In fact, without friends, the virtuous person’s life would be impaired. Without friends, a person would lose enthusiasm for virtuous living, and lose the motivation to act in the right way.

Friendships based on virtue allow a person to expand their capacity for virtuous deeds. Say I struggle with temperance but excel in courage. A virtuous friend who excels in temperance can provide me with the much needed motivation to act temperately in a given challenging situation. In turn, I may help this friend to become more courageous by providing her motivation to have fortitude in a challenging situation. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that in friendships based on virtue, our friends are united to ourselves in such a way that their actions are in some way also our own. The friend is more than an Other. The friend is rather another Self.

My instinct tells me that most people think of marriage as either the first or the second type of friendship. A marriage of utility is one that might be formed because of financial benefit, or because a woman thinks that her child needs a father, or to help someone get immigration status. These marriages used to be very common, but I suspect they still happen an awful lot, especially between single moms and the “nice guy” who is just so good with her kids.

A marriage of pleasure is probably much, much more common. These are marriages formed between people who like each other, who have mutual interests like wine tasting, a love of Irish literature, or jogging. These are marriages that form because after years of dating, the two people still like each other a lot, the sex is good, and marriage is just the logical next step.

For both Aristotle and Aquinas, a friendship based on pleasure is not a bad thing in itself. The problem with these friendships is that they tend to dissolve when the pleasure dissolves. Say the sex stops being good, or every conversation on Irish literature has been exhausted, or knee surgery and pains of aging make jogging an impossibility. When the pleasure subsides or loses intensity, the friendship dissolves. And this is what happens to an awful lot of marriages.

Even marriages that last may still be these ephemeral pleasure-based friendships. This is why people push the contractual nature of marriage–you make a vow with another person to stay with them until “death do you part.” It is these vows which keeps marriages of pleasures together. When the vows are not taken seriously, the marriage simply dissolves. And this is why we have the divorce rates that we have today–a bunch of people who married because of a friendship of pleasure, and when the pleasure died, so did the marriage.

A better way to think of marriage, one that is more theologically and philosophically sound, is as this last type of friendship. According to Aquinas, there are three “acts” or fruits of this last type of friendship: benevolence, concord, and beneficence.

Benevolence signifies the willing what is good for the other, rather than just willing what is good for oneself. Beneficence signifies the doing good for the other, rather than just doing what is good for oneself. Both of these are important, but the truly distinctive mark of this last type of friendship is what is called concord.

Concord is the union of will which sustains common projects. A relationship has concord when the couple enjoys each other’s company, converses with one another, and agrees with one another’s opinions. But just agreeing with one another is not enough for a relationship to have concord, because even strangers may agree. Concord, according to Aquinas, is principally about choice, when two people agree on what is advantageous, believe in the same things, and make decisions based on these common values. Friends need not agree on everything–one may believe that vegetarianism is a better way of life, while the other may love a more carnivorous lifestyle–but they do need to have similar values. For example, they must agree at least that healthy eating is an important value to them both and they must also make decisions with an eye towards living out that value in their practical decisions.

In other words, the highest form of friendship is characterized by a union of wills. One’s choices should align with one’s friends, and not just occasionally, but habitually. And if the friendship is a true one, these choices should be virtuous ones. Say one person in the couple always wants to drink and party to excess, whereas the other one wants to drink and party in moderation. This is a relationship lacking in concord, and thus, not the sort of friendship we are looking for. This is why Aristotle and Aquinas say that friendships based on virtue need to be between people who are of similar levels of virtue.

So how does this play out in marriage? A virtuous marital relationship is one that forms because two people share similar values, and they act on those values. Pleasure, of course, is part of the equation, but it is not the most important factor. That is, a virtuous marital relationship is not based on the fact that two people enjoy the same things (although they probably do in a lot of cases) but because they believe in the same things.

The important thing to realize is that a relationship with concord is not a static one, not formulaic, and always changing as circumstances change. Aquinas says that the realm of the particular–that is, the realm of concrete action–is infinite in possibility, even though the virtues and values behind such actions remain constant. There are innumerable ways, for example, to be courageous in any given situation.

To go back to our original example of sharing values about healthy eating. The vegetarian and the carnivore may have different ways of living out their values, but they agree on the values behind those lifestyle choices. As they both grow and learn more, the way they continue to make decisions to live out their values will change. They may come to find that processed foods are most detrimental to their health, and they may resolve together to cut back on or avoid all together the processed snacks they love so much. They may find that the temperate enjoyment of fine wine fits in nicely with their resolve to eat healthy, and they may take a wine tasting class or a trip to visit vineyards in order to learn more about their new hobby. They may have conversations and debates about the health value of genetically modified foods, or share health articles like this one from the NYTimes. But what is important to the friendship (and to the marriage) is that they embark on these things together, sharing together their effort to live a healthy life. They learn from one another, they strengthen one another, and they grow closer to one another in the process.

A marriage based on this type of friendship is not fleeting. It’s foundation is much more than just utility, and more also than fleeting pleasures. This is a relationship that grows, develops, and strengthens because the people in it grow, develop, and strengthen one another. This is a relationship that changes without ending because the people in it change, and yet their beliefs and values remain constant. This is a relationship in which there will always be something to talk about and something to do because the people in it are constantly seeking for ways to live out a virtuous life. This is a relationship where two people walk together toward a common goal, helping each other along the way.

On a final note, a marriage will face certain challenges that other friendships of virtue will not face. For example, a married couple may face financial difficulties, reproductive difficulties, or mental illness or depression. And unlike other friendships, married people have to live under the same roof, face the same challenges, and bear all the same burdens. Partially for this reason, Aquinas calls marriage a sacrament, meaning that in the institution of marriage, God offers the grace necessary to endure the difficulties the couple will face on their path to their ultimate goal–union with God.

An Ethical Response to the Fragility of Human Life

Human life is a fragile thing. The goodness of human life is dependent on (or threatened by) external circumstances such as wealth, health, beauty, talent, and simple luck. Since antiquity, people have pondered how to factor in the seeming necessity of external contingents into an ethical account of the “good life.” The Stoics were notorious for their conclusion that external contingents like health, wealth, friends, and family were not relevant factors in the formula for a good life. For the Stoics, all that mattered was virtue. If you were a virtuous person–that is, a courageous, temperate, just, and prudent person–you could lose your home, your friends and family, all your possessions, and even your health and still, if you kept your virtue, you would still be happy.

Although most of us probably feel that the Stoic response is somehow not really human, we can be sympathetic to what this school of philosophy was trying to achieve. Bad things happen to good people. Even in antiquity, this was a truism. In light of this, the task of ethics is to keep good people from turning into bad ones when disaster hits. The Stoics concluded that detachment from the need for external goods was the only way to stay good in a world full of badness. “Love only virtue,” was the Stoics’ rallying cry. If you loved only virtue, you could lose a child and remain unfazed. If you loved only virtue, you could get a cancer diagnosis and not be troubled. In the face of any adversity, you stayed stoic, and most importantly, virtuous.

The alternative to the Stoic conception of happiness and morality in light of the fragility of external goods is Aristotle’s way. Aristotle said that we need more than just a virtuous character to be happy. As humans, we need food and shelter, we need a certain degree of wealth and life success, we need good health, and we need relationships. No amount of virtue will create a happy life if we are missing any of these things.

The Stoic tendency shows up a lot in history, Christianity included. Christian morality is often caricatured as teaching the saints live an austere life, indifference to grief, joy, pleasure, or pain. I want to argue, however, that the Christian conception of happiness is much closer to the Aristotelian notion than the Stoic, namely, that we need certain external goods to be happy.

Enter Job. Job is a righteous man, and blessed by God. He has a big family, robust health, a huge estate with lots of animals, and quite a bit of wealth. Not only is he a happy guy, he’s virtuous as well.

But then he gets tested. He loses his animals, his children die, his home is destroyed, and eventually, even his health goes. Poor Job is sitting on the ash heap covered with boils and sores, and he is miserable. Not only is he miserable, but he wants answers from this alleged “good” God that has allowed him to suffer so.

And God gives an answer:

Then the LORD addressed Job out of the storm and said: Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance? Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers! Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone, while the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:1-7)

I heard my husband preach on this text this weekend, and he brought Job into dialogue with Paul in 2 Corinthians 6 who is not, unlike Job, complaining about his suffering, but actually boasting and rejoicing in it. My husband pointed out that there is a major difference between Job and Paul when they confront the contingency of external goods, and the terror that comes with losing them. The difference is that Job has something to lose, but Paul, as well as the other apostles, have already given everything up. They have left their homes and their families, and given up any hope of being rich. With nothing to lose, suffering does not present the same sort of problem for the disciples of Christ as it does for Job.

The moral lesson of the story, according to this sermon, was to be preemptive when it comes to losing the external goods that cause so much suffering by giving up these goods voluntarily. If you don’t want to be afraid of losing your money, give most of it away. If you don’t want to suffer badly when you lose your job, don’t get to attached to it.

That sounds nice in theory, but Paul’s boasting in his suffering and the disciples’ total renunciation of worldly goods is not the way most Christians live. And it sounds a little too Stoic for my taste. Plus, it is fine to talk about the renunciation of external goods like property and wealth, but what about external goods like relationships and health? Surely Christians are meant to have at least some attachment to these external goods. So how are Christians to make sense of external goods that the world offers, and which sometimes are cruelly taken away?

Thomas Aquinas is Aristotelian in his approach to the question of external goods. This means that he is not going to recommend detachment from externals, like the Stoics or some Christian interpretations of the command to “hate the world.” Instead of detachment, Aquinas recommends “ordered love.” External goods can be loved, but they have to be loved in the right way. This means that goods like a nice home, a reliable car, a big family, and a sound bill of health are all goods that we can and even should desire. We just may not desire these goods as ends in themselves. Ordered love prefers always the greatest good, which is God, to all other lesser goods.

We pervert the proper order of love when we either love lesser things inordinately, like loving someone loving their car so much that they go bankrupt in taking care of it, or we pervert the proper order of love when we don’t love greater goods enough. The greatest good being God, all other goods should be subordinated to Him. This means that it is disordered to love your friends so much that you skip worship to spend time with them. It is disordered to love our health so much you spend all of your money on gym memberships and supplements and health food, to the neglect of other financial pursuits like charity and tithing.

But what is important to note about this idea of ordered love is that according to Aquinas, Christians can still love the goods of this world, and be attached to them, and mourn them when they are lost. It is good and proper to mourn for a lost loved one, and it is appropriate to worry about losing your home and possessions during tight economic times. Aquinas recognizes that we need these things to be happy, that is, to lead full and flourishing human lives. Aquinas’ way is not a way of detachment, but rather of proper attachment. Aquinas recognizes that becoming a Christian disciple does not necessarily prevent you from becoming Job yourself, sitting on top of an ash heap and mourning the fact that you’ve lost everything against your will.

Life on this earth is full of contingents. Sometimes things work well for us. Sometimes, we get to marry the person of our dreams, land a dream apartment in a cool city, get a job that is not only a career but a vocation, and surround ourselves with friends and family that love and care for us. At other times, we may have to deal with the mess of losing our job, or having a spouse lose their job. We may have to face a debilitating illness or watch a loved one succumb to a terminal disease. We may lose our home to the force of nature, become victims of violence, or find that the love we once thought was strong has grown dim or even disappeared. A good ethical response to the fragility of life on this earth is not detachment from external goods, but rather, fostering the sort of attachment that allows you to desire and love and mourn properly, without losing your desire and love for the greatest good—the God who is the source of all good things.

How Should Christians Make Sense of the Theory of Evolution?

In John Paul II’s message to the Pontifical Academy of Science on Evolution in 1996, he finely summed up the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on evolution, reaffirming the statement made by his predecessor Pius XII in 1950 that “there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation.” The conflict among theologians over evolution according to the pope was not whether Darwinian theories were compatible with Christianity, but rather “the true role of philosophy and, beyond it, of theology.” Some, like Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn in this NYTimes Op-ed, claim that John Paul II’s support for evolutionary theories are overblown. Pope Benedict XVI said in his 2005 inaugural mass that “We are not some causal and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” But this should not be taken as a Catholic hostility to the theory of evolution, per se. For both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, science and religion are ultimately compatible, each with different questions, tools, and spheres of influence, but at certain points, mutually enlightening.

Evolution is a materialist theory, meaning that it is a theory concerned with matter. It explains the reorganization of matter over time. As an empirical theory, it is based on observations and measurements. The job of the natural sciences is to explain such natural phenomenon like the differences between the species or the biological development of organisms over time.

But there are other disciplines that study phenomena that are not natural, not concerned with matter, and not empirically observable. For example, the soul, according to Christian theology is immaterial. Thus, it cannot be explained by a materialistic theory like evolution. Rather, the question of the soul is a metaphysical question. Metaphysics simply means “beyond or above physics.” Whereas physics and the other natural sciences are concerned with nature, that is, observable and measurable phenomena, metaphysics is concerned with that which cannot be observed, with those deep and abiding questions of why. Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the soul?

It is concerning the question of human evolution, particularly when it comes to humans having an immortal soul, where evolutionary theories and theology really seem to conflict. It seems directly contrary to the Biblical account of creation to say that human are the process of natural selection. Moreover, it seems repulsive to the idea of human dignity rooted in the belief that human beings are created in the image of God to say that human beings and monkeys descended from a common ape-like ancestor. How can human beings bear the divine image if one accepts that they are descended from an animal?

Thomas Aquinas offers us one such solution. Thomas Aquinas adopted Aristotelian biology to explain the biology of the human being. Aristotle thought that human beings were animals, and Aquinas affirmed him on that. According to both, the organizing structure (or form) of the human being was the soul, which was both immaterial and inseparable from the body (unlike Plato who thought the soul was imprisoned in the body). In the Aristotelian view, the human soul had three levels. The most primitive level was the vegetative level that allowed the human being to do plant-like things like grow through cellular division or use energy. The next level of the soul was the animalic level, which allowed the human being to do animal-like things like hunt down food, attack in self-defense, and mate with other human animals. But where humans were distinct from their fellow animal kingdom members was that they had a third level of their soul—the rational part–which allowed them to do things like think, ponder, form communities, create moral codes, resist animal instincts, and wonder about God. Most importantly, it is the rational part of the soul that allows the person to have free will, that is, the ability to act voluntarily and intentionally. The idea of the soul as having multiple levels allowed Aristotle and Aquinas to conceive of the human person as both an animal and more than an animal.

According to Aquinas, it is in the rational part of the soul that we find the image of God. This is an important point to emphasize: for Aquinas, being in the image of God means being able to act (1) voluntarily and (2) with intention or purpose.

So this gets to why the Roman Catholic Church, which is heavily influenced by the theology and philosophy of Aquinas, can accept evolution. It is because the church sees the realm of philosophy and theology to be concerned primarily with the rational dimension of the soul and with the human being as a free and intentional creature, capable of conceiving a realm of reality that is not material, a realm of reality that is concerned with immaterial, or metaphysical phenomena like the true, the good, and the beautiful.

It is not the job of philosophy and theology to explain functioning of the other parts of the soul that control things like cell division and appetite. This is the job of the natural sciences like biology. Theology, since it is based on revelation, cannot explain the exact observable mechanisms of the way the world works or the way God creates. Saying that God created the earth is one thing; explaining how is quite another. Science, on the other hand, cannot explain the deep and inescapable existential questions that arise in human existence. Why are we here? Where are we heading? How do we lead a good life?

There are reductionist tendencies on both sides of the debate. There are some religious folk who say that everything we need to know is in the Bible. This sort of Biblicism (sometimes called fundamentalism) is ultimately self-defeating. The majority of even the most stringent Biblicists or fundamentalists will go to a doctor when they are sick. The Bible talks about healing, so why not turn to the Bible for answers to an illness? Because the Bible does not give us those answers. The Bible does not tell us how to set a broken bone or how to cure strep throat. To think that the Bible provides all the answers is an example of reductionism.

The reductionist tendencies on the scientific side of the debate try and use science to provide all the answers. We said before that religion can provide answers to the deep-seated metaphysical questions that emerge in each of our lives, but scientific reductionists will say that science provides answers to these questions. To the question, “why are we here?” scientific reductionists will say that we are not here for any reason, but are rather the products of chance. To the question, “what happens when we die?” scientific reductionists will say that nothing happens when we die besides the fact that our biological mechanisms cease to function. To the question, “how do we live a good life,” scientific reductionists will say something like “there is no such thing as a good life, only as much subjective pleasure as possible.” But like the religious reductionist position, this scientific reductionism is also ultimately self-defeating. There is no scientific (i.e. empirical) evidence to prove that there is no God or that chance, not God, is the force behind the evolutionary processes. You cannot use the tools of science to examine metaphysical questions like the meaning of life, the nature of God, or the question of final causality.

This is why Darwin’s theories have never been officially condemned by Vatican. Darwin sought to explain a physical question, whereas the church seeks to explain metaphysical questions. Now, metaphysical explanations are partially dependent on physical phenomena, but metaphysics goes beyond what physical theories like evolution can tell us. Theologically, it would be devastating for the acceptance of evolutionary theories if they embraced a view of human beings as wholly material, and indeed, some evolutionists believe this. But Darwin did not, and strictly speaking, evolutionary theories do not contribute to such a view of mankind.

Should Christians Want to Pay More Taxes?

Today, on Divine Mercy Sunday for Catholics and the first Sunday after Easter for Protestants, the Lectionary presents us with a challenging reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need. (Acts 4:32-35)

This is a challenging reading because it smacks in the face of typical American economic sentiments that are based on the rights to private property and capitalism and a strong aversion to anything that smacks even remotely of communism. Moreover, this passage goes against sheer pragmatism. How could society function if this is the ideal?

The type of sermon you might hear on this passage depends heavily on what type of church you attend. Many choose not to preach on it, especially since the Doubting Thomas gospel passage offers an opportunity for a more irenic message from the pulpit. But this passage also presents the opportunity to give a heavy-handed political message, a message that is especially relevant in light of the dire state of the economy right now, and followed so closely on the heels of tax day. What I am referring to is an argument akin to the one Diana Butler Bass makes in this piece for Sojourners Magazine.

<blockquoteWednesday morning, at 9 a.m. sharp, I took my tax payment to the local post office. When I handed it to the clerk, she said, “I hate tax day.” I replied, “Not me. I don’t love parting with the money, but I kinda like it. That check is a bargain — roads, schools, medical care, social security, and the freedom of living in the greatest country in the world. It is patriotism by checkbook. Why should I hate it?” She replied, “Why, I’ve never heard anybody say that! It isn’t such a bad deal when you put it that way.”

No, taxes aren’t such a bad deal. Nor are they, as might have been heard at the ersatz “tea parties” around the country, at odds with Christianity. Indeed, tax day is a day that progressives should celebrate — as we participate in one of the greatest social reforms of the 20th century: the progressive income tax.

Her argument is essentially that a progressive tax is an expression of Christian love and a fulfillment of the economic demands of Jesus. Moreover, a progressive tax is a way of taking care of the poor, of providing relief to the suffering, of instituting reform that all Christians should be on board with, like universal health care, welfare reform, and education. What true Christian would not want to pay more taxes?

The problem with Bass’ argument on this point is that she has a view of the government which is thoroughly unscriptural. As I heard so aptly expressed today in church by someone who I am sure will not mind me borrowing his words, people like Bass want to “separate Jesus’ ethics from his apocalypticism.” Jesus’ ethics were beyond progressive. They were radical, even if for Christians they are so familiar as to be paradoxically comfortable.

• “Go, give everything you have to the poor.”
• “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
• “Blessed are you that are poor for yours is the kingdom of god, but woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort.”
• “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”

But Jesus’ apocalypticism is a little harder to swallow. Apocalypticism is a way of explaining the state of the world and why so much suffering seems to exist. According to the apocalyptic worldview, God had temporarily relinquished the world to the evil forces that opposed him, a situation which would in some future eschatological battle be reversed and God’s sovereignty restored. Apocalypticism is closely associated with dualism, with the division of the world into light and darkness, good and evil, the realm of Satan and the realm of God, the present age of wickedness and suffering and the age to come of glory. In this apocalyptic worldview, there is no middle ground, no neutral territory. People are either on the side of the Good, or they are opposed to it. If you are on the wrong side of things, you had best repent and turn your attention to walking in the light, or else be vanquished in the coming eschatological battle where God’s kingdom will be restored.

Jesus’ apocalypticism is a little hard to swallow because it makes him out to be a little less nice, a little less civilized, a little less progressive than we typically think of him:

• “Therefore everyone who confesses me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven.” Matt. 10:32-33
• “So it will be at the end of the age; the angels will come forth and take out the wicked from among the righteous” Matt. 13:49
• “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I choose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” John 15:19

Jesus thought the world was under the dominion of evil. His coming was not only to usher in the Kingdom of God, but also to set apart some who would be “children of the light.” Jesus’ ministry was not about changing the structure of the government or about initiating a political revolution. If anything, Jesus expected the governments to be a source of persecution for his followers, not a source of godly support. He says to his disciples in Matthew: “Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves. But beware of people, for they will hand you over to courts and scourge you in their synagogues, and you will be led before governors and kings for my sake as a witness before them and the pagans. . . You will be hated by all because of my name.” (Matthew 10:16-22).

So let’s return to this passage in Acts and the question of a progressive tax. It does not say in Acts that the community of believers sold all they had and gave it to the emperor. It does not say in Acts that the community of believers put the welfare of the poor into the hands of the government. It says that the community of believers would sell their property or houses and bring the proceeds at the feet of the apostles. The community of believers was not clamoring for government reform. Rather, with “one heart and mind . . . [they] bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” The community of believers is at odds with the government, not collaborating with it. Earlier in this chapter of Acts, we read that they are citing Psalm 2 which in no way indicates that the apostles or their burgeoning community think that Christian reform either starts or ends with the government: “the kings of the earth took their stand and the princes gathered together against the Lord and against his anointed.”

So what about taxes? If the government is wicked, should Christians just stop paying taxes? Jesus seemed to think the question of taxes was secondary. “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.” (Matthew 22:21). The government uses our tax dollars in a lot of good ways that, of course, Christians can and should support. It is through tax dollars that our roads get built, our public schools get funded, our poor and homeless and handicapped get helped. But our tax dollars get put toward funding an awful lot of wickedness as well. The biggest chunk of the federal government’s budget goes to the military. We have bases all over the world, and two wars (maybe three) raging in the Middle East, wars which Christians have good arguments for thinking are unjust. President Obama’s administration has just bailed out the flailing General Motors with billions of dollars of loans that may never be paid back and a CEO making 1.3 million dollars. And earlier this year, Obama allotted 10 billion federal dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research, which he does not think of as a matter of ideology, even though millions of Americans do.

The point is, Christians have to come to terms with the fact that our tax dollars go to both good and evil things. There is no way to reconcile this fact by saying that your tax dollars go to support only the initiatives that you support—welfare reform, for example, but not the war. No, your tax dollars are sullied by all of the many unethical things that government gets involved in, financed by you, the American people. This does not mean that you should stop paying taxes, but only that you should realize that you do so with dirty hands.

“The community of believers was of one heart and mind . . . with great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. There was no needy person among them.” Christians cannot expect the government to provide for the poor, to cure the sick, to offer succor to the suffering. This is the task that has been given the Christian community, which, in a sinful world under the control of forces of evil (what Walter Wink called “the Powers that be”) can only be accomplished through the powerful grace of Christ. It is the power of Christ that heals, and the power of Christ that knocks down the sinful and oppressive structures of the world that cause innocent people to suffer. It is the power of Christ that enables sinful and selfish human beings to give all that they have to the poor because it is in doing so that we realize our freedom to follow our Lord.

The Christian should pay their taxes with a heavy heart, not because of money lost, but because of how that money is spent. And with new zeal, the Christian should offer everything else they have—their heart, mind, soul, and possessions to the Christian community, laying all this at the feet of the apostles, and “bearing witness to the resurrection of the Lord . . . [and] distributing to each according to their need.”

Is Christian Realism a Non Sequitur?

In light of the inauguration of Barack Obama who cites Reinhold Niebuhr as one of the most influential theologians on his way of thinking about politics, and in light of the fact that my students have been studying Reinhold Niebuhr, I have been thinking a lot about Christian realism recently. Lots of people, it turns out, have been pondering the meaning, scope, and contemporary relevance of Christian realism. I was assigned a question on my comprehensive exams examining the theological coherence of Reinhold Niebuhr’s political stances, and last week Boston College hosted a conference with Jean Bethke Elshtain, Andrew Bacevich, and Bryan Hehir on the subject of Realism, Ethics, and US Public Policy. So it seems a fitting time for Everydaythomist to explain what Christian realism is, delineate a little bit of its history, and raise a few questions about just how “Christian” it is.

First, we must understand what realism is. Realism is a political theory that views politics as a realm shorn of all moral and ethical constraints. Sometimes called “power politics,” a realist politics is not motivated by concerns for the common good or virtue, but rather by self-interest, necessity, and most of all, maximization of power. According to realism, politics is seen as limited only by power constraints, not by ethical constraints about what may or may not be just. As Michael Walzer puts it, who dedicates the first chapter of his book Just and Unjust Wars to arguing “Against Realism,” realism can be summed up as “they that have odds of power exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can get.”

Some big names are attached to a realist ethos: Thucydides, who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thomas Hobbes, and Machiavelli. In some ways, realism is a kind of pre-Christian philosophy. It is the politics of Athens and Sparta and Rome, not of Christendom. In fact, pre-modern and modern advocates of reviving realism have seen Christianity as a threat. Rousseau, for example, said that Christians were wretched citizens, that politically, they were like lambs being led to the slaughter. In the public square, Rousseau wanted Christianity replaced with a hearty civic religion, which espoused virtues more in line with a realist agenda than a Christian one. Christian virtues, of which Nietzsche was so critical, were effeminizing virtues that encouraged citizens to be weak, passive, and unfit for civic life or political leadership.

So how do we get from Christianity being the enemy of realism, to a political theory called “Christian realism?” The first place to look is in the political theory and public theology of Augustine. According to Augustine, the moral vision of Jesus could not provide the basis for a viable political and social ethic. Rather, Augustine argued that the gospel ethic such as found in the Sermon on the Mount (love of enemies, non-resistance, etc.) were rather intended for an interior ethic that would no doubt influence Christian behavior but not wholly dictate Christian participation in the world. In other words, Christian morality sets certain limits on behavior, but the moral vision of Jesus was considered an impossible ideal, not achievable in this world.

The place we see this form of Christian realism playing itself out is in the doctrine of just war. Although it seems as if Jesus’ ethic, and Paul’s as well, would prohibit Christians from participating in war, or any form of violent resistance, Augustine argued against the pacifists of his day that Jesus was actually only talking about one’s inner intention, not one’s behavior when he said to “resist not an enemy.” Augustine thought that Christians could participate in war and kill enemies of Rome, but they had to do so with a inner disposition of love, not of revenge or hatred. Christian realism thus becomes a kind of “ethic of compromise” between the strong realism of the secular order and the non-violent perfectionist ethic of Jesus.

In the contemporary period, the phrase “Christian realism” immediately brings to mind the Protestant Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. According to Niebuhr, conflict and violence are pervasive features of human life. The ethics of Jesus, what Niebuhr called an ethic of agape or Christian love can never provide the basis for a political or social ethic, but an ethic of agape can inform the social and political realm, curbing the inevitable conflict and violence and providing the baseline for a minimal ethic of justice. Like Augustine, Niebuhr thought that Christian ethics could set limits on a stronger realist ethic based solely on power, but Christian ethics could not expect to totally obliterate violent struggles for power. In fact, Niebuhr strongly supported certain struggles for power, such as those between the USSR and the USA as the “lesser of two evils.”

Christian realists are unanimously convinced that Jesus’ standard of morality is an impossible ideal. You simply cannot love your enemy, resist all evil, or go the extra mile in our sinful world. Moreover, Christian realists are unanimously terrified that if Christians did try and live out Jesus’ ethics, the consequences would be horrible. Luther thought, for example, that if Christians tried to live as pacifists, the “ravenous wolves” of the world would take over the Christian church and herald in the reign of Satan. Augustine was terrified of the chaos that accompanied war and other social upheaval and considered such chaos to be antithetical to the Christian life. Thus it was better for Christians to compromise their ethic in order to prevent the greater evil of social chaos than it was for them to live out the moral vision of Jesus. Reinhold Niebuhr was a little more fatalistic. He thought that human beings simply could not live as Jesus had commanded them and to try to do so, like the liberal Protestant followers of the Social Gospel in his day were doing, were setting themselves up for disaster.

In an oft-cited David Brooks’ op-ed from the New York Times, then presidential candidate Barack Obama listed his reasons for loving the realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. When asked what he takes from Niebuhr, Obama responded,

I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.

The idea is that you cannot rid the world from evil, but you also cannot be afraid of getting your hands a little dirty (as Michael Walzer) says fighting what evil you can. Moral compromises are necessary if you expect to achieve any sort of moral victory, however small it might be.

This all sounds fine and good, except for the fact that it really does not seem consistent with what Jesus expected of his disciples. Reading the Sermon on the Mount, for example, I do not get the impression that Jesus was laying out an impossible ideal for Christian morality, but really and truly telling his followers how to behave. Moreover, Jesus seems to acknowledge that his ethic, while not impossible to live out, will not be an ethics of power, that is, a realist ethic. We see this especially in the reading from Mark 8:27-9:1 where Jesus asks the question, “Who do men say that I am?” Peter gives the correct answer, that Jesus is the Messiah, but errs in assuming that Jesus will be a powerful Messiah, indicated by Jesus’ harsh rebuke to “Get behind me, Satan. For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” As Stanley Hauerwas, one of the most famous Christian advocates of non-violence alive today, writes, “Jesus insists it is possible, if God’s rule is acknowledged and trusted, to serve without power.”

The coercive struggles for power that form the status quo for the world’s political activity, which we have defined here as realism, are not the ways of the Christian. Rather, the cross is the only basis for a Christian realism. The cross reveals the reality of the world, namely, that sin is real and that sin has usurped the rule of God. And the cross also reveals what Christians can expect from the world if they are faithful to their call of discipleship. Faithful Christian disciples have to be prepared to sacrifice themselves, to stretch out their arms and say “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”

But as Stanley Hauerwas notes,

Jesus’ cross . . . is not merely a general symbol of the moral significance of self-sacrifice. The cross is not the confirmation of the facile assumption that it is better to give than receive. Rather, the cross is Jesus’ ultimate dispossession through which God has conquered the powers of this world. The cross is not just a symbol of God’s kingdom; it is that kingdom come.”

Jesus does not play power politics. He does not fight the evil of the world on evil’s terms. He does not use violence, power, and coercion to fulfill his mission. Nor does he expect his disciples to. Jesus invites his disciples to his own non-violent love, a love that will indeed overcome the powers of the world, but not through coercion and force.

How Neuroscience is Influencing the Bioethical Debate About Compulsory Treatment for Anorectics

Anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric disorder characterized by excessive preoccupation with body size and weight as well as self-deceptive attitudes toward the nature of thinness and emaciation. Treating anorexia is replete with challenges. First of all, treatment is often unsuccessful. Less than 50% of anorectics recover within ten years of the onset of the disorder. About 25% of cases develop into chronicity. Oftentimes, anorexic behavior is replaced by bulimic behavior.

Anorexia is a classic case where the tension between preservation of liberty of the patient and the imperative to treat a severe illness becomes quite acute. In most cases of anorexia nervosa, a well-structured therapeutic program, administered by a multidisciplinary staff experienced in treating eating disorders, is adequate. Even with the best of treatment options, however, avoiding treatment is part of the condition of anorexia. Anorexia is characterized with the obsessive pursuit of thinness and treatment is always aimed at thwarting this goal. The refusal may not be total: many patients accept psychotherapy or family therapy, but may refuse components of treatment likely to increase food intake, reduce physical activity and induce weight gain. In severe cases where anorectic patients categorically deny all treatment oriented toward weight gain, compulsory treatment is usually pursued.

A patient who refuses nutrition despite severe emaciation is generally thought to be behaving without autonomy and is deemed incompetent to consent to treatment. The Mental Health Act Commission allows, “that in certain situations, patients with severe anorexia nervosa whose health is seriously threatened by food refusal may be subject to detention in hospital and further that there are occasions when it is necessary to treat the self-imposed starvation with measures such as involuntary naso-gastric feeding to ensure the proper care of the patient.”

As a rule, most treatment programs resort to compulsory treatment only as a last resort. Compulsory treatment seems to be justified only by immediate mortal danger to the patient, but may also be pursued based on motives of beneficence within the health care system. Nevertheless, the ethics of compulsory treatment of anorectics is hotly contested issue.

Compulsory treatment for anorexia as well as other conditions assumes that the doctor is right about what is in the patient’s best interest. However, in medicine, prognostic ability is a far cry from an exact science, despite the fact that prognoses are usually given in percentages. Moreover, the prognostic difficulties are complicated in psychiatry, with psychiatrists very often incorrect in their identification of danger to the patient.
Moreover, the pursuit of compulsory treatment usually implies that treating the patient against her wishes will help her. A general principle of compulsory treatment is that one must be reasonably confident that the treatment is going to bring about some beneficial effect. In the case of anorexia, the ethics of compulsory treatment are complicated by the fact that the patient must at some point submit to either treatment or resuming somewhat normal eating patterns. An anorectic cannot spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric ward or on a feeding tube involuntarily. At some point, she must cooperate with therapeutic efforts if she is to recover. Compulsory treatment must both aim for, and have a reasonable likelihood of success achieving a state of voluntary cooperation with the anorectic.

New developments in neuroscience are changing our understanding of the role of the brain in mental illness, as scientists rapidly discover minimally invasive and benign techniques for exploring and altering the brain. Brain mapping technologies like positron emission tomography (PET scans) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs) serve to identify the brain areas involved in certain behaviors like self- starvation or performing a given task like consenting or refusing to consent to medical and psychiatric treatment.

Neurotechnology offers more advanced scientific data related to specific cognitive deficits relevant to consent, which has a direct impact on psychiatric diagnostic criteria, providing objective bases, derived from the structure and processes of the brain, for classifying a brain as “abnormal.” Standards for determining competence right now in the clinic are unreliable and based on what is called the “reasonable person standard.” With new neurotechnologies, it may become clearer both clinically and legally what constitutes a reasonable person.

Neuroscientific data is also leading toward a richer understanding of the nature of consent which is based on the idea of “degrees” of competence, rather than a simple threshold. Basically, neuroscience is pointing away from a model of consent that views the capacity to consent as an “all or nothing” sort of thing, and towards a model that accepts more or less capacity. That is, capacity to consent lies on a continuum. On a degree notion of competence, patients are never said to be either fully competent or totally incompetent, but rather, as displaying various and changing degrees of competence to consent at various different times.

Most contemporary models and tests for mental competence do not make adequate provisions for the positive influence of emotions in the determination of competence. Recent advances in the neuroscience of emotion provide compelling evidence that the decision-making process, including the act of giving consent, is not exclusively cognitive, nor can decisional capacity be assessed by purely cognitive means such as the Mac Arthur Competence Assessment Tool (MacCAT-T). Integrating more neuroscience studies on the complexity of the consent process is leading to a “multifactorial and qualitiative account of the components of capacity” which could lead to clinical developments that enhance the necessary components to improve decision-making. For example, fear and anxiety may impair an anorectic’s ability to consent to treatment, which may be enhanced by introducing a known and trusted confidant to the consent process who can engage the patient more successfully on an emotional level.

Although the issue of compulsory treatment, including forced-feeding, for anorectics has been greatly debated on the theoretical in bioethical circles, as Simona Giordano rightly identifies in her book Understanding Eating Disorders, the question of compulsory treatment is also, and perhaps primarily, an “empirical” problem:

People with eating disorders are typically intelligent, and are not at all the stereotypical ‘insane’ person, detached from reality. People with eating disorders are generally skilled, intelligent, and able to run their life in many important ways, like everybody else. It is hard to believe that all of them, when they refuse treatment, are incompetent. Given that we are dealing with intelligent and generally competent people, it seems that one cannot assume a priori that every time a person with eating disorders refuses treatment, she is incompetent. It seems that their incompetence should be assessed, not presumed (193).

Neighbor Love, Natural Law, and Universal Moral Norms

Last Thursday, Barack Obama spoke at the Annual Prayer Breakfast about his faith and what he sees as the role of religion in public life. Judging from the fact that President Obama referred to unbelievers as “humanists,” it is pretty clear what Obama thinks religion is there to do: help us love one another.

“Whatever our differences, there is one law that binds all great religions together. Jesus told us to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’ The Torah commands, ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.’

” In Islam, there is a hadith that reads ‘None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.’ And the same is true for Buddhists and Hindus; for followers of Confucius and for humanists.

“It is, of course, the Golden Rule -– the call to love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.”

The interesting thing about this claim our president is making is that it rests on anthropological and metaphysical principles that we all do not actually agree on. Conservative Christians, for example, lost no time in pointing out the hypocrisy of President Obama’s insistence that there is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being when he has one of the most consistent pro-choice records of any politician around today. This is because Barack Obama does not think that the fetus is a full human being with full moral rights; Conservative Christians do.

Turns out, in the history of humanity, we have never been all that clear about what it means to be human or what counts as a full human being. Metaphysically, the question is “what is the essence of humanity?” Some people think we can resolve this question through practical reasoning and consensus. Jacques Maritain, for example, thought that natural law reasoning could provide the philosophical foundations for an anthropology that would support the drafting of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Maritain thought we could get all nations together and agree on such rights even if we did not agree on their metaphysical presuppositions. But as post-1948 history has illustrated, we might like the rights when they apply to ourselves, but it still isn’t all that clear who counts as human and gets to benefit from them. Our progressive-minded president draws a line in the womb somewhere. Peter Singer draws the line at infants. Aristotle drew the line at barbarians, women, and natural slaves.

A lot of people, many of them Catholic but not all, think that natural law can provide a fixed understanding of human nature. The idea is basically that human beings can rationally derive what it means to be a human, and what is normative for human nature, based on rational discernment about what is “natural.” Some have described this as an unwritten law on the human heart, and it is normally not thought of a religious way of thinking about humanity and morality. The Founding Fathers in the United States were deists, and were very influenced by natural law reasoning from the Enlightenment that led them to the American Proposition that “all men are created equal.” Because of its characteristic “unreligious” nature, natural law reasoning has been dismissed by many Protestants like Karl Barth who claim that God’s will, not human reason, is up to the task of figuring out what human beings are and what they are supposed to do.

Natural law, as defined by Aquinas (though Aquinas’ definition in no way exhausts all the different ways natural law has been conceived from the time of the pre-Socratics to the present) is the rational creature’s participation in the Eternal Law (I-II, Q. 91, art. 2). The natural law is a capacity to distinguish between good and evil that rational creatures are endowed with. This capacity is expressed through moral precepts like the Golden Rule. The natural law can yield more specific precepts and includes a fundamental capacity for moral judgment, but there is considerably less certainty on the level of particular norms. Basically, the Golden Rule might be absolute and universal, but how to apply it is not. Rather than thinking of the natural law as a series of universal norms, it is better to think of it a rational principle of discernment–a built-in mechanism human beings have to discern between good and evil.

What the natural law does not give us, despite what some people think, is a fixed understanding of human nature. Natural law does not allow us to grasp absolute, fundamental, and universal aspects of human nature. Rational discernment gives us an idea of what is fundamental to human nature, but our ability both to know these elements and to express them is limited, not only by our inability as finite creatures to grasp the absolute and the universal, but also due to sin which clouds our intellect and veils the truth. Moreover, human nature is not something that exists in a fixed way prior to becoming embedded in a culture, but is rather a political or social thing. God may know the essence of human nature, and what should be normative for human beings to do in any given situation, but human beings do not have access to such knowledge. As Reinhold Niebuhr said, the one absolute is that human beings do not know the absolute.

What we get from natural law reasoning are a lot of different norms and a lot of different ideas about human nature. Aristotle, Aquinas, Peter Singer, and Barack Obama are all using the natural law to make judgments about what is good and what is evil, and I am betting that none of my readers agree with all of them. Although modern natural law theorists have attempted to provide a universal moral code based purely on practical reasoning, I think this is an impossibility. Natural law reasoning, rather, is always embedded in a particular belief system and a particular metaphysical conception of the good. You cannot separate the work of practical reasoning from the political, social, and religious environs in which such reasoning occurs, nor can you present a definition of human that is detached from such an environs. At least, not an absolute or universal definition.

So what are we to do in this global environment where we are desperate, as President Obama illustrates, to find commonalities, or the universal among all the particularities? Does natural law provide us with any way of generating universal norms or a universal definition of what it means to be human? Jean Porter has argued convincingly that people like Thomas Aquinas thought of natural law as a Scriptural concept, that his understanding of human nature was guided by scriptural and theological principles of interpretation. Consequently, Aquinas’ idea of human nature was not grounded in the conclusions of pure practical reasoning, but rather in the image of God in the person of Jesus Christ. For thinkers like Aquinas, natural law reasoning occurred at the locus where reason and revelation occurred, and this allowed him to construct an elaborate, virtue-based ethic delineating not only what was possible but also what was desirable for human nature under the aid of grace. What is normative for the human being under such specifically Christian natural law reasoning is not just the Decalogue and the two-fold command to love God and love your neighbor as yourself, but also the call to perfection in the Sermon on the Mount, the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians, and that ever-tricky love of enemy.

The consequence of this idea of natural law is that Barack Obama cannot just say that everybody across the globe knows to “love their neighbors as their selves.” I’m sure the Hutus bought into that as they were slaughtering the Tutsis. Good thing the Tutsis weren’t neighbors. The British probably bought into as well as they were legislating apartheid in South Africa to keep the non-neighbor Africans in their place. The German National Socialists, many of them good Lutherans in their free time, undoubtedly thought love of neighbor was important, but Jews and Communists and homosexuals were fair game. And Barack Obama can cite the universality of the command in front on the National Prayer Breakfast with a clear conscience, even though he thinks that partial birth abortion is okay, and has done all he can to make sure it stays legal in this country.

For Christians, who counts as the neighbor cannot be separated from what revelation through Scripture tells us. For the hard-core biologist, the neighbor will be defined differently, probably based on some scientific standard for who counts and who does not. For the philosophical humanist, we will get another definition. Barack Obama is right to point out the universal nature of the Golden Rule, but the Golden Rule tells us practically nothing. As the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10 indicates, the juicy part of that question is “who is my neighbor.”

Obama’s Pledge to Reform Ethics and the Principle of Epikeia

Liberals and conservatives are outraged at Barack Obama’s apparent contradiction of his campaign promises to clean up Washington and initiate sweeping ethical reform. The most recent complaint is over President Obama’s unwavering support for Tom Daschle’s nomination as the new head of Health and Human Services, despite the fact that Mr. Daschle has failed to pay $128,000 in federal income taxes (and the questionable ways in which Mr. Daschle spends his money).

The problem people have with President Obama is that he is making exceptions to the rule, despite the fact that he presented on the campaign trail an uncompromising message of ethical reform. Those who defend Obama say that the exceptions are necessary because certain people who the rule would exclude (lobbyists, e.g.) are needed for their expertise and skill set. Jody Powell, Obama’s press secretary, puts the conflict nicely: “If you set standards, you’re going to fall short on occasion and you’re going to have to compromise on occasion. But you’re probably also going to get more done.”

Seems like a perfect opportunity to talk about the principle of epikeia. Laws, says Aquinas, deal with human actions. As such, laws are about “contingent singulars,” meaning particular situations with particular circumstances. Because laws are about the particular, it is impossible to make laws that can exhaust the possibilities for moral action in every single conceivable case. Legislators, rather, make laws according to what usually happens.

However, there will be cases where even the best law, if applied to a certain case, will do harm to the common good than would be considered just. And since it is the law’s job to protect the common good, the application of the law in the particular questionable situation would be antithetical to its purpose. The example Aquinas gives is the law that all deposits should be returned. It is a good law–if I put a deposit in the bank, I expect to get it back. But, posits Aquinas, what if a madman gives his sword as a deposit, and if he gets it back, plans on going on a murderous rampage? To give him the sword back would be contrary to the common good. The law about returning deposits is still a good law and will have good effects in the majority of cases. In this case, however, applying the law would be injurious and so it is probably better not to follow it.

Another classic example is the person hiding Jews from the Nazis who is confronted by a Nazi and must either lie (and break the rule against lying), or tell the truth in accordance with the law and risk the death of a number of innocent people.

In situations like this, Aquinas says the letter of the law should be set aside in favor of following the dictates of justice and the common good. This decision to set aside the letter of the law is called epikeia, and with Aristotle, Aquinas calls it a virtue. Specifically, it is a subjective part of justice (meaning that it is a part of justice but doesn’t fully encapsulate the meaning of justice) and its object is equity.

Now, epikeia does not set aside the application of a law that is just in itself because of inconvenience or severity. Epekeia, for example, does not allow a person to set aside the letter of the law regarding lying because if he tells the truth, he is going to lose his reputation or suffer some other punishment. Aquinas recognizes that following the law will often be arduous and sometimes will have unpleasant effects. Epikeia simply assures that we see the purpose of the laws as serving the common good and justice, rather than viewing obedience to the law as a good in itself.

To return to Obama. He might have made a rule that no lobbyists would be given political positions in his administration, but if the application of that rule would harm the common good, it would be consistent with epikeia to break it. The burden of the question, therefore, is if the nomination of William J. Lynn III, an ex-Raytheon lobbyist he nominated as deputy defense secretary, is really for the common good.

In a political leader, a healthy sense of epikeia is a good thing, and Obama seems to have it. In fact, his ethics reforms, especially those regarding lobbyists, were not as hard-lined as you might have assumed based on his campaign rhetoric. His rules regarding lobbyists in reality do not ban all lobbyists outright, but rather set conditions on their employment. Obama seems to have been aware that a hard-lined rule against lobbyists would have been counter-productive.

So I think that all the claims that Obama is a hypocrite are unfounded. I think that our president is simply trying to do what all people do–find out how to apply a rule in any given situation so that it is conducive to the common good. As Aquinas says, “Without doubt he transgresses the law who by adhering to the letter of the law strives to defeat the intention of the lawgiver.” However, I think it prudent that President Obama make as few concessions as possible, especially this early in his administration, in order to keep the hope in his constituents alive, and keep people believing that goodness and politics are not antithetical. Is it really necessary for the common good to select Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn for deputy defense secretary, or are their others, less questionable candidates just as suited to the job? I’m betting on the latter. Similarly with Tom Daschle. Obama pledged his “absolute” support for Daschle’s nomination, but I think the common good demands that Obama exercise epikeia here . . . And reverse his support for a far-too questionable candidate.

Introducing Thomas Aquinas

Today is the feast day of Thomas Aquinas. In honor of him, and his goal “to instruct beginners according to the Apostle (As until little ones in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not meat)” I have decided to write a post introducing Aquinas to those who don’t know him.

Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) is one of the greatest Christian theologians who ever lived. He was born at a time of great change and uncertainty, a time much like our own. The Church was trying to deal with all sorts of potentially threatening cultural development: the expansion of the Muslim empire in Europe, the decline of feudalism, the repercussions of the Crusades, and the discovery of Aristotle’s corpus. At such a tumultuous time, Aquinas was an innovator. He wanted to take what was good from what was new and use it to serve his project, a project he saw as a quest for truth, a quest specifically for divine truth.

Aquinas wrote an awful lot that nobody reads these days. He started his studies in Paris writing commentaries on different books of the Bible as well as a commentary on the major textbook of the time called The Sentences by Peter Lombard (who he refers to as “the Master”). He wrote some other works (On Truth, On Evil) as well as some commentaries, most notably on Aristotle’s works. Aristotle (who he calls “the Philosopher”) was just being introduced into the curriculum of major European universities and he was very controversial at the time.

The biggest work, however, that Thomas wrote is called the Summa Theologica–the sum of theology. He started writing it for young seminarians who were having a difficult time learning the truths of the faith because the theological textbooks at the time were so atrocious. Thomas sought a better organized and more easily understandable textbook that would systematically and coherently teach the faith.

His method can be difficult for beginners. He did, after all, live 800 years ago. If you are interested in reading Aquinas, I would say you should have a handy guide to accompany your studies. I recommend Thomas O’Meara’s book called Thomas Aquinas Theologian which does a great job outlining the basic structure and methodology of the Summa as well as identifying some of the major themes of Aquinas’ work.

The Summa is divided into three parts. These are called the Prima Pars, Secundae Pars, and Tertia Pars (first, second, and third part respectively. People reading Aquinas still like to use a lot of Latin). The first part is about God and deals with natural theology, the wisdom of God, predestination, God’s creative work, and His governance of the universe. The second part is about God’s image, human beings. It is divided into two parts, known as the Prima Secundae (first part of the second part) and the Secundae Secundae( second part of the second part). The Prima Secundae talks about human beings generally–their end, acts, passions, habits, virtues, sin, and grace. The Secundae Secundae talks about the specific virtues beginning with the three theological virtues faith, hope, and love and the four cardinal virtues prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The Tertia Pars talks about Christ and the sacraments but Aquinas died before completing it.

The Summa is largely divided into questions which are further divided into articles. When you see citations from the Summa, you usually see the book, the question, and the article listed in order. I-II, Q. 9, art. 2 or I-II, 9.2 refers to the first part of the second part, ninth question, second article. Each question is on a general topic and each article is in the form of a question like “whether sacred doctrine is a science” or “whether religion is a virtue. Thomas usually cites somewhere around three opinions from either scripture, the tradition, or reason giving an apparent answer to the question. Then Thomas presents what is called the Sed Contra (on the contrary) giving his answer to the question, citing some authority like Augustine (who he sometimes calls “the Theologian”), Paul (the “Apostle”) , or Aristotle. Then he gives what is called the Respondeo, the body of his argument where he explains his answer to the question, usually by making distinctions and explaining terms. Then Thomas responds to each of the objections he raised in the first part of the article.

In his response, he is always thoughtful, thorough, and systematic. He does not treat these opinions as errors but as stimuli for discovering some new aspect of truth. His is always a spirit of dialogue, of careful listening and of response. Whatever has an intimation of truth he keeps. And he strives to reconcile different views by making distinctions, by figuring out the essence of the question at hand.

The Summa is often said to have an archetectonic structure and unity and it is most often compared to a cathedral. All the parts fit beautifully together. All of the parts are integrated and co-dependent. That being said, I think it important to emphasize that Aquinas saw himself first and foremost as a theologian, and by placing his project at the service of divine truth, he recognizes that he is completely dependent on grace. Without grace, Thomas says, man could know no truth.

A great resource for reading the Summa is New Advent site which has the entire text online and makes searching easy. Joseph Pieper has a good book on Thomas Aquinas, and G.K. Chesterton has a wonderful book called The Dumb Ox. These are helpful if you want to know about Thomas’ life. But Thomas O’Meara’s book is by far the best guide for actually reading the Summa. And, of course, there is always my blog which tries to put Aquinas into dialogue with contemporary questions and concerns.