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On What Matters Discernment, Ethics and Universal Reason As On What Matters Discernment, Ethics 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 John Rawls 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 Derek Parfit, 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.
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