On What Matters

Discernment, and Universal Reason

As Christians we tend to think about morality in a different box from the box in which we think about discernment and spirituality. Perhaps that is because morality (in the official Catholic tradition at least) tends to be grounded in the language of ‘objective moral norms’ that apply to everyone, while discernment is more often about a personal search for the will of God in complex situations, where available norms are too general to give an answer. We thus have the impression that we are doing two different sorts of thing in obeying norms and discerning the will of God in our lives. However the objectivity in objective moral norms must be just as closely connected to the will of God as the objectivity in a good, personal discernment. Further, both general norms and personal discernment must be able to be grounded in reason. It is an axiom of Christian theology that if God wills something, it is because that something is good. That is the most general form of an ethical reason. By reflecting on what we can recognize as good, we should be able to understand the reason why norms apply. We can compare this with the language of the third time of discernment in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius writes that our soul should be able to use ‘its natural faculties in freedom and peace’ to work out what it is best for us (as individuals) to do. In Exx §§178 – 188 Ignatius offers several examples of what it means to apply the natural faculties of reason to a particular, personal choice. We could say norms are the foothills of ethics while discernment is the high peak. They are equally tools with which people seek the reasonable will of God, for his greater Glory and for the salvation of their souls. This recognition of the place of reason in the search for the will of God, collectively and personally, is good Christian and Catholic theology, grounded in a theology of the logos, or the divine Reason. Interestingly, and significantly for our own pluralistic age, this is a theology whose roots lie outside the Jewish and Christian traditions, but which nevertheless has grown into an integral part of their self‐understanding. From the third century BCE onwards Jewish thinkers and, much later, Christian thinkers used the language of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and Stoic philosophers to articulate their traditions as a universal philosophy. All human beings are able to reason, therefore all human beings have the capacity to recognize the life‐giving truth in the Jewish or Christian traditions. But the converse also applies. Because all human beings have the power of reason, and are thereby (already) in a relationship with the divine Word, non‐ religious (or differently religious) philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Chrysippus, Seneca, Zoroaster, Buddha, David Hume, Karl Marx and Bertrand Russell can reach valid conclusions about how we should live. In fact, all humans, as reasonable beings, can reach such conclusions. Amongst other things, this would mean that a non‐Christian could arrive at a correct ethical conclusion, not only independently of the official Christian tradition, but even before the official Christian tradition had got there and formulated an objective norm about it. Sometimes this happens. This does not mean that all people do use reason to make their ethical decisions or that all people always agree about their ethical decisions or that people always come to correct ethical conclusions. But it does mean that at the heart of the Christian tradition is a great optimism about humanity’s basic capacity to recognize and do what is good and a great optimism that, with good will and freedom (‘without any disordered affection’ Exx §179) we can converge on ethical truth. This optimism is, of course, counterbalanced by a theory of sinfulness, which suggests that sin can undermine our capacity to reason correctly. This has counterparts outside the tradition. Plato’s theory identifies desires that hamper an individual from seeking Justice. In fact it is just such Platonic language (‘disordered affection’) that finds its way into the passage from the Exercises just quoted. That personal interests can interfere with good, ethical reasoning is also recognized in modern, non‐theistic ethical theories. In a well‐known thought‐ experiment, the political philosopher suggests that in making a reasonable choice about justice in society, we should choose our ideal society only from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ not knowing what place we would occupy in that society. This detachment enables us to choose for the good of all, undistracted by actual personal considerations. We can find parallels in the Exercises, where Ignatius offers us three thought‐experiments (§§ 185, 186, 187) which play a similar role in detaching us from those things in our particular context that could get in the way of good reasoning. In recent times Catholic Christianity has found a narrow subset of its official ‘objective norms’ called into question by Catholics and non‐Catholics alike. This has caused it to retreat to a less optimistic position about the ethical capacities of the rest of humanity, and provoked a tendency to see beyond the Church door a world populated by tax‐collectors and sinners, that needs to be kept safely at arms length. This tendency can generate unhelpful blanket denunciations. One of my favourites is the official rejection of ‘situation ethics’ in the 1952 and passim since. If this were just a critique of Joseph Fletcher’s book of that name, there would be some justification. There are many things worthy of criticism in Fletcher’s text. However, the slogan tends to be used with the implication that whenever our reasoning considers situations we relativise norms, and that this must lead to ethical relativism. Neither of these things is true. Such a broad‐brush response ignores the realities of two thousand years of moral reasoning, encapsulated in English case law and the principle of equity, Aquinas’ elucidation of the principle of double‐effect, and the fact that in most of our daily ethical lives most of us are balancing norms of behaviour in order to work out the right thing to do. It also (dangerously I believe) elevates norms above the reasons for abiding by them. Utilitarianism is a contextual ethical theory with many limitations. It can readily be dismissed under the label ‘situation ethics’. But nevertheless it captures an important element in Western ethical reasoning from the beginning, namely that it is generally a good thing to perform actions which bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Our Ignatian discernment is similarly situational when we try and choose that pathway which is for the greater glory of God. Neither of these pieces of contextual reasoning undermines rules, rather they explain why a particular rule, or a particular course of action might be justified. As it is, however, a dangerous gap seems to be opening up between the two poles of Christian ethics, the obedience to officially‐decreed norms and the individual, reasonable discernment of the will of God. This is an echo of the bigger gap opening up between Christian ethics, understood as obedience to a set of distinctive norms, and the wider culture in which Christians find themselves living. I may well be wrong, but I would regard it as very important for the intellectual life (and perhaps political life) of the Church to recover that sense of the universality of ethical reason, and the ability to recognize where our religious tradition converges with the reasoning of good men and women, thanks to our common humanity. There have been some extreme theoretical divergences between faith‐based and non‐theistic traditions in the twentieth century. Some non‐theistic thought has indeed rejected any possibility of ethical realism (though few (if any) would deny the importance of ethical behaviour). But there has also been plenty of interest in ethical or value realism amongst non‐religious thinkers. Iris Murdoch’s writings, philosophical and literary are one well‐ established example. Sabina Lovibond’s Realism and Imagination in Ethics is another. Alastair MacIntyre’s After Virtue has made an enormous impact on ethical thinking and rekindled the Church’s interest in Virtue Ethics. More recently, Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy has made a secular case for a politically significant realm of irreducible value distinct from the realm of economic value. Even A.C.Grayling, one of the more anti‐religious non‐theists, is trying to go beyond the historical lack of interest in day‐to‐day living in British analytical writing (and his own philosophical comfort‐zone), and to construct a non‐theistic philosophy for life. But what I want to look at in some detail is the work of , who has recently completed a two‐volume work entitled On What Matters. I believe this text can help us think better about ethical reasoning, about how and why rules work, and about the tools of discernment. It may help us recover important ideas that we had forgotten as we reduced our picture of morality to obeying the rules we happen to care about at the moment. But his take on morality also helpfully builds a bridge across one of the larger gaps between religious ethics and ethics without God. To see this more clearly, let us return to some of the issues separating faith‐ethics from the social and political culture roundabout.

Individualism, Subjectivism, Relativism, Practical Materialism

A frequent complaint we make about modern culture in the west is that it has no serious values apart from the values of the market. We are materialist. We believe that whatever we happen to want is what is reasonable to want. We are not interested in the common good, but are focused on satisfying our own needs without concern for others. We are relativists, without any sense of lines that must not be crossed. Like any rumor senum severiorum (muttering of the more strait‐laced old men) this complaint has its limitations. Closer inspection usually reveals that there are a large number of people around who do not fit any of those descriptions. Nevertheless there is some truth in the rumour, insofar as our background political language (not necessarily the language that ordinary people use) contains bits of ethical philosophy that appear to support some of those characteristics. The complaint, applied to modern states, appears most plausible when legislation is being introduced to protect liberties, rather than to constrain behaviour or promote some obvious good (like public health). Behind permissive legislation lies the premise that it is reasonable to allow people to do what they want, provided that they are not harming other people (and thereby interfering with their projects). No other judgment is made about those wants. It also seems plausible when political choices are made for purely economic reasons, in order to maximize success according to the rules of the economic game. Value in economic terms is measured by how much people are prepared to pay for what they happen to want. In principle economic decisions make no judgment about commodities, whether the trade is in oil, vacuum cleaners, sex or armaments. In such cases the state (and the society it represents) can appear devoid of any sense of ethical value, especially to religious and political groups that find their specific ethical concerns ignored or overridden. Yet it is seldom the case that all state legislation is socially or economically libertarian without reference to other sorts of value. Very often, even in the most secular of secular states, there are aspects of life protected by law because they are recognized as valuable for the common life of the citizens. Laws against murder, violence and theft would be an example, as would laws governing marriage, inheritance, equal opportunities and employment rights. Even the most value‐neutral libertarian legislation derives from a principle that values human freedom itself. Still, there is a legitimate concern that a public ethics divorced from a religious (or philosophically transcendent) tradition can have no solid roots, because its essential task is merely to manage a democracy of desires and desires can change. We could recognize here a supporting philosophical principle that desires alone give us our reasons for acting. A fortiori our ethical reasoning is just about balancing the desires that we happen to have. As our desires change, so do our ethical imperatives. If we come from a tradition that recognizes within us deep‐rooted ethical intuitions, we suddenly find them subordinated to this alien calculus and the shifting conclusions of the calculus seem to lack the deep character of the truly ethical. In fairness, we should point out that many of those who explore ethics through the subjectivity of human desires are indeed attempting to establish a basis for agreeing common rules of behaviour. They do this by including in amongst the ordinary things often associated with the word ‘desire’ (for food, for love, for sleep, for sex etc.) other possible objects of desire, for instance a desire to help those in need, or to perform an act of self‐sacrifice for someone you love (or indeed for any other human being). They suppose that in these areas human beings are consistently similar. As a result the conclusions of such reasoning will often overlap with the conclusions of religious reasoners, though the route each takes to any given conclusion may be very different. Some of those who work with desire‐based theories are doing so because, while they appreciate the force and the importance of ethical value, they can find no basis for it in the external world. They have broadly accepted David Hume’s criticism of natural law theories, summarized in the phrase ‘you cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’’. If ethics does not come from out there, it must then come from within, from among the things we happen to think and want. Hume himself suggests that our ethical sensibility is one of a set of emotional motivators amongst others and this is an idea that many people currently work with. But an alternative framework for mediating a relationship between desire and ethics as we might recognize it was provided by in his response to Hume. Kant accepted that we have a desire‐driven self that responds to the things around us in the world we experience. Indeed on the basis of our desires we formulate ‘maxims’ for actions. However, for these maxims to be ethically approved by our (distinct) rational selves, it must be possible to turn them into laws applying to everyone that everyone could will. Thus Kant captures two deep features of the ethical realm, consistency and universality. Several desire‐based theories make use of a Kantian framework in order to generate a universal ethical framework without invoking the transcendent. This already takes them closer to the concerns of religious ethicists, searching for stable norms.

Parfit: Reasons and Reality

Derek Parfit, however, in his massive two‐volume discussion On What Matters goes further. He argues that those who take desires to be our reasons for acting are mistaken. Instead we should acknowledge that we may indeed have desires for particular ends or goals, but our reasons for acting are grounded in facts or states of affairs. These are indeed what often explain why we have specific desires. This takes us a significant step closer to finding common ground in ethical reasoning for those operating out of a faith tradition and those with no commitment to the transcendent. Parfit is seeking to establish an objective theory of ethics that makes use of many of the insights of Kant, but which also accepts that there are things in the world out there which do, in fact, matter to us. There are states of affairs and possible states of affairs which have reason‐giving features for us. It is these that give us reasons to make the choices we do. To identify our desires with our reasons for acting leads to inconsistencies in what we would want to say. Throughout the book he offers very clearly, very thoroughly and very tightly argued thought‐ experiments to allow us, the readers, to agree on what we would say, given a particular set of options. He uses such thought experiments to highlight the logical pitfalls of the approach that supposes our desires are our reasons for acting. Here is one element of a much more detailed argument (I 1.4.12).

We have reasons, I have claimed, to have certain telic [goal‐directed] desires, such as a reason to want to avoid all future agony. We can now ask whether, as Subjectivists claim, our telic desires give us reasons.

Suppose that in Case Two, I want to have some future period of agony… [he discounts cases of masochism or the desire to assuage religious guilt] After ideal deliberation, I decide to cause myself to have this future agony if I can.

Subjective theories here imply that I have a decisive reason to fulfil my desire and act on my decision, by causing myself to be in agony. If there is a fire nearby, and I shall have no other way to fulfil my desire, I would have a decisive reason to thrust my hand into this fire.

Though it is conceivable that someone might want future agony for its own sake, this case is hard to imagine. This fact may seem to weaken this objection to subjective theories.

The opposite is true. This fact strengthens the objection. If we find it hard to imagine that anyone might have this desire, that is because we assume what objective theories claim. The nature of agony, we believe, gives everyone very strong reasons to want not to be in that state.

Those unused to the rigour of line‐by‐line argumentation in the analytic tradition will find the extended argument needs to be assimilated in smaller doses. The conclusion that remains is significant. There are facts about the world such that when we are informed of them, we have reasons to desire (or avoid) them. It is on the basis of such facts and such reasons that we can construct an objective theory of ethics. Parfit will go on to develop, out of the insights of Kant and Sidgwick a framework for ethical reasoning which he calls ‘Kantian contractualism’ and which he believes represents a pathway to ‘discovering’ a common ethical truth that others seek by different pathways.

‘It has been widely believed that there are such deep disagreements between Kantians, Contractualists, and Consequentialists. That, I have argued, is not true. These people are climbing the same mountain on different sides.’ I.3.17.64 p 419.

He adds:

‘It has also been widely believed that nothing matters, since reasons are given by our desires and we have no reasons to have these desires. As I have argued and shall argue further in Part Six, we ought to reject this bleak view’ (ibid)

I will not present here in detail all the arguments that Parfit proposes. What I am most interested in is firstly the framework that he constructs for ethical reasoning and secondly the non‐transcendent metaphysics that he develops to support the principle that things do matter. It seems to me that those of us who come from the Catholic tradition with its astonishing hotch‐ potch of theoretical positions and yet an abiding commitment to ethical realism can learn something from this disciplined and wide‐ranging approach to ethical reasoning which also shares an optimism about ethical convergence. Furthermore we can learn from this work to take seriously the position of those who argue for a recognizable ethics, without the need for God. Too often we are lazy and dismiss such non‐theistic approaches without trying to appreciate their grounding. If we can overcome that laziness, we can perhaps begin to discover that there is far more common ground in what we think about ethics and how we reason ethically than we were once prepared to admit. This in turn can help us overcome the ideological barriers that are slowly emerging in many minds between religious people and the secular states. There may be differences on a number of issues, but there is no fundamental barrier to dialogue or mutual understanding. To illustrate that these barriers arise by choice rather than logical necessity, it suffices, I think to list the things that Parfit, a non‐religious ethicist, thinks matter most at the end of his first volume:

‘What now matters most is that we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life. If we are the only rational animals in the Universe, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants during the billion years in which that would be possible. Some of our descendants might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including those who suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.’ (ibid)

It would be odd if religious people could not be sympathetic to these concerns. And it would be hard for a religious person to argue with his statement at II 5.18.68 (p 155) in response to Wolf: ‘If there is no single supreme principle, that, I agree, would not be a tragedy. But it would be a tragedy if there was no single true morality.’