3. On the Report, you said you wouldn’t join the Catholic Church (which recently offered to open membership up to Episcopalians and Anglicans) because Catholicism defines itself in negative terms. If the Vatican opened its doors to women and gay priests, would you consider rejoining then? Or do you feel that the divide between the Episcopalian and Catholic Churches is an important, necessary one?
I have nothing against the Catholic Church and certainly nothing against Roman Catholics. At the same time, I have no desire to sign up! I was reared as an evangelical (a fundamentalist, really), and my parents once informed me that if I ever married a Catholic I would be disowned. I was convinced, growing up, that Catholics were not even Christians.
I no longer believe that, of course, but at the same time I have no hankering whatsoever to convert to Rome. I’m very content as an Episcopal priest, and I happen to believe that we Episcopalians are addressing some vitally important issues right now, including (but not limited to) homosexuality, same-sex unions, and the role of women. We’re approaching these matters thoughtfully, prayerfully, and with integrity. The decisions we’ve made as a Church may well precipitate a continued diminution of our numbers, but that really doesn’t bother me. Sometimes the price of faithfulness to the demands of the gospel is popularity. In my judgment, moreover, the most effective religious movements throughout American history have positioned themselves on the margins of society, not in the councils of power.
[blockquote] The decisions we’ve made as a Church may well precipitate a continued diminution of our numbers, but that really doesn’t bother me. [/blockquote] So glad you’re on board with that, Randall. However, some of the rest of us are in prolonged mourning over the slow demise of a once great denomination.
The above quote displays the incoherence of his thinking – his reticence to becoming a catholic has nothing to do with ideas or doctrines, but with his experience.
My favorite quote:
Surely that should be Integrity, the lobbying organization. Otherwise, there’s not much integrity to speak of within TEC, whether by logic, consistency, biblical loyalty, adherence to its own formularies, or even canonical precedence.
Oh well, Viva la Revolution, for we will all one day be Guerrillero Heroico.
🙄
I think he’s another data point for my theory that fundamentalist and liberal Christianity are two sides of the same coin. I wonder whether fundamentalists with a predisposition to intellectualism are drawn to the absolutism and antinomianism of contemporary liberalism, as if not being able to have absolute certainty about everything means you have to absolutely no certainty about anything. And yet, politics remains an article of faith. Strange.
The decisions we’ve made as a Church may well precipitate a continued diminution of our numbers, but that really doesn’t bother me.
Because he has no good news to share?
Catholicism defines itself in negative terms.
No, revisionists are definiing Catholics and orthodox Anglicans in negative terms and we don’t seem to be doing a good job of countering that. We have let them dictate the terms in which our differences are seen. I know Dr. Harmon and others have worked hard to change this perception but I don’t think we are successfully countering it. Rome doesn’t have to worry, I think, what revisionist Episcopalians or the New York Times, really, think. But in our position, I think we do.
Interesting interview many thanks for posting it. Professor Balmer seems an honest , thoughtful and rather likeable man. Like a number of Episcopal priests he is a former fundamentalist – so not surprisingly his analytical guns have been turned more sharply towards his former ecclesial “family” and their political entangelments than the political commitments of liberal left Christianity. Indeed his critique of evangelicals seems to be largely not that they are politically involved but that they have supported causes with which he disagrees. Whereas in the past they had sustained a politics more compatible with liberal political views – though I note there no mention in the interview of say the YMCA moral reform movement in the nineteenth century evangelicalism, nor temperance, still less of eugenics – in other words, as is inevitable, there is a slightly selective historical recollection with some causes in the past – it happens causes with which Professor Balmer agrees – being foregrounded to create a contrast with the unhappy state, as he sees it, of evangelical politics in the present.
One possible counter interpretation would be to argue that the contemporary campaign against abortion is the natural heir to the Civil Rights Movement – and it is not evangelicals (despite the initial hesitancy and lateness of their conversion to the cause) – but in fact the liberal left who abandoned the cause of defending “the least” in this matter.
because Catholicism defines itself in negative terms
Ahh, not this old canard again! Reappraisers like to frame the argument like this: Catholics are against women’s ordination and gay marriage, therefore the Catholic Church defines itself in negative terms. I disagree. The Catholic Church has a strong, long-held sacramental and moral theology that is very positive, but that, yes, excludes the possibility of acceptance of women’s ordination and gay marriage. I suppose when the faith is boiled down to embracing 1970s and 1980s theological and moral trends, then Catholicism does seem like the perpetual downer, always saying “no, no, no” when everybody else is doing what is faddish.
This does seem slightly odd as it is itself a negative claim. I take it that such ill defined terms as “negative” and “positive” are largely the cheers and jeers of (ecclesiastical) politics. Yay for my team! Boo for our opponents! I presume that in fact what one evaluates as “negative” or “positive” depends entirely on the vantage point from which one is looking – in other words they are perspectival evaluations that will carry force insofar as one already agrees with the perspective being promoted.
“Negative terms” ? What would he make of all the “Thou shalt nots” of the 10 Commandments ? His real problem isn’t with the Catholic Church. If he were intellectually honest, he’d admit his real problem is with God.
What the realignment of religious identity has meant, not only for the Anglican Communion but more generally, is that it’s increasingly hard to find a space for realist theology in combination with liberal ethics and a progressive social agenda. In fact many conservatives are convinced that more or less orthodox theology entails a conservative social agenda–which is questionable.
By “realist theology” I mean a straight-forward interpretation of claims about the existence and nature of God, post-mortem survival, etc. I.e. “I believe in God” means “I believe that there exists a being, the subject of psychological states, which is incorporeal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent.” NOT, “I believe Being is gracious” or “I am committed to an agapistic way of life” or such.
Mainline churches, the Episcopal Church in particular, once provided a comfortable space for those of us who were theological realists and social/ethical liberals. Now that space has shrunk. We have on the one hand a great many social liberals who just plain don’t believe in God in any straightforward sense and seem to regard churches as political lobbies for promoting a liberal social agenda (with which I largely agree. On the other hand we have social conservatives who are persuaded that the ethical/social liberals have sold out, have rejected theology in favor of political correctness, yada-yada-yada.
So maybe one reason for the decline of the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations is disappearance of the space for a large proportion of the traditional clientele who are more or less traditionally religious when it comes to the theology but liberal on the ethics and social agenda. So that’s just a hypothesis I’m flying to try out if there’s any interest in this since I’m writing something on this and could use feedback.
“The genius of America, in my view, is our determination to safeguard the rights of minorities..”
And our idiocy is the trampling of the rights of the majority in doing so.
You know, I really appreciated your comment because it was theologically serious and thoughtful. I think, if we were sharing a pub conversation, I would want to push you to be specific about the content you would want to give to “liberal” and “progressive”. Anyway, thanks for thinking theologically.
driver8: By “liberal” and “progressive” I’m thinking of socially rather than specifically politically liberal. In particular, not because this is the whole story but because I just wrote a Church Times piece on this, I’m thinking of the role of women and more broadly the social arrangements that hang on that. I wrote on this apropos of the Pope’s offer to conservative Anglicans.
It struck me that there are many conservatives who will compromise or negotiate on what I’d take to be fundamental theological doctrine–metaphysical issues as central as the theology of the Trinity–but will not budge on what they call “Christian anthropology,” in particular the claim that male-female differences are “ontological” or theologically deep. These are the theological sophisticates.
And there are some conservatives, less theologically sophisticated, who don’t seem to care about fundamental theology at all except insofar as they take it to support the social agenda they want to promote. Ironically, this is what sunk liberal Christians–the doctrine that “it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you live right.” Conservatives of course have a very different notion of what “living right” consists in, but some at least, seem to put the social agenda ahead of basic theology.
Well, Balmer may be incoherent and even ignorant. But we should be impressed, it seems to me, that he was a guest on the Colbert Report.
#12 I think I agree that realist theological commitments do not necessarily entail specific valuation of the great variety of social roles that have been undertaken by women or men.
I’m slightly lost by your second paragraph. Is this summary right – you think some theological sophisticates in the conservative world are surprisingly willing to negotiate on, say, divine simplicity or foreknowledge to pick a couple of things often seen as ripe for revision by some evangelical phlosophical theologians – but are surprisingly inflexible about “christian anthrolopology” – which is summarized, perhaps, in a infexible attachment to the doctrine that entails at last some essential teleological differences between male and female (or some such).
If thats what you mean then I agree for some evangelical philosophical theologicans. The lack of authority of the patristic synthesis, or of the medieval councils (e.g. Canon 1 of the Fourth Lateran Council) perhaps creates a space in which, as neither divine simplicity nor forenowledge, are explicitly defined by Scripture – they feel there is scope for exploration. Whereas I guess they take it that some kind of account of the difference between male and female is demanded by Scripture. In other words, it may be that the authority of Scripture is seen to permit discuss of divine simplicity or foreknowledge but leaves little scope for manouvre on “Christian anthropology”.
(Things seem different to me in the conservative catholic theological world. Divine simplicity is to be believed de fide. Natual law thinking seems to predominate when considering the good life for human beings etc.)
Driver8,
Thanks for your calm, sensible comments here (#5, 7, 11, 14). I especially liked your #7, on the irony of Balmer’s negative comment about Catholicism supposedly defining itself “in negative terms.” A typically astute and apt observation on your part.
David Handy+
#14 I was thinking mainly about the Filioque Clause, the focus of a major East-West rift that reflects differences in the way the doctrine of the Trinity was developed in the East and in the West. This is a big deal and has import for notions of divine simplicity. Beyond that as I understand it Orthodox churches rejected scholasticism, which shaped Catholic theology. Yet RC conservatives are dead keen on establishing closer relations with Orthodox churches in spite of major differences in substantive theology and methodology, 1000 years of division, and big differences in liturgy, church discipline, polity and popular religious practice.
By contrast Anglicanism isn’t that remote. But women’s ordination is a deal-breaker. That’s the message the Pope’s offer to conservative Anglicans sent. Not that any of this is a surprise.
#17
1. FWIW has’t the Church of Rome characteristically claimed that the filique is not a substantive alteration to the Nicene Creed? (As I understand, Eastern rite Catholics use a version without the filioque and are in full communion with the See of Rome).
I’m a complete amateur on orthodox/RC relations but I believe at least some Orthodox such as Kallistos Ware have ventured that the difference may be semantic rather than substantive.
2. I think in principle that is right – or at least was thought to be right up until the early 80s. The current debacle has, one imagines, brought into a sharp light the ecclesiology of the Communion (a matter that Stephen Sykes argued was crying out for clarification decades ago). In other words, with whom in the Anglican world should one discuss if one wants an authoritative declaration of Anglican theology? Given that recent ARCIC II texts – such as on Mary or on authority – have been strongly criticized by some of the very Anglican provinces that ARCIC was supposed to represent – the conversation seems to have fragmented in the same way that the Communion has over the last decade and more. Given that we can’t seem to agree amongst ourselves quite what it means to be in a Communion, it’s perhaps not so unreasonable for the RCs to wait and see quite what relationships we want to share amongst ourselves, before seeing how our relationship with them might be clarified or strengthened.
driver8 (#17),
I strongly agree, especially with your last point. The best thing that we Anglicans can do to promote the wider unity of the Church is to get our own house in order. We need to take the log out of our own eye, before attempting to pick the speck out of anyone else’s.
Alas, so much of ecumenical discussion in the latter 20th century was aptly summed up in a cyncial comment of the late Jaroslav Pelikan. He critiqied most WCC-type dialogues as amounting to something like this: [i]”Since no one believes in anything anymore, let’s all disbelieve together.”[/i] BTW, I do NOT think that mocking jibe applies to the best product of the WCC’s Faith and Order Commission, namely the famous Lima (BEM) Document of 1982: [b]Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry.[/b] However, it’s the exception to the general rule.
As for your response to #16, my own impression is that the real significance of the Filioque clause is still unclear and is being debated within both RC and Orthodox circles, at least among the more scholarly and enlightened members of both communions. And the same could be said about modern re-evaluations of the earlier split between the Chalcedonian (Byzantine/Eastern Orthodox) and non-Chalcedonian (Oriental Orthodox) wings of the Eastern Church with regard to the supposed heresy of “Monophysitism.” Or the even earlier split between the “Nestorian” and Orthodox Churches over the putative heresy of “Nestorianism.” There are respected scholars and faithful leaders on all sides of these old church wars who are irenically willing to view that fateful split as more political than doctrinal, and basically rooted in semantic differences as well that assumed a divisive symbolic importance disproportionate to the basic theological agreement that actually underlies the supposedly contradictory positions at stake.
But it appears that we face the opposite problem in Anglicanism. Instead of magnifying mere semantic differences into causes for ecclesiastical separation, we’ve done the reverse historically, and glossed over very real theological differences that are worth splitting over through the use of artfully ambiguous language. And once again, personally I think that this sad condition was the deliberate aim of certain key church leaders in collusion with the worldly powers that be, i.e., in the interests of protecting and sanctifying the unity of the political realm in a state church that was Erastian and Constantinian through and through.
The demise of “Christendom” as a marriage of church and state in the West, or the de facto divorce between Christianity in general and the culture in general (as in the USA), gives us a great opportunity to get things right at last. Freed from the political necessity to keep irreconcilable opposites together, we Anglicans finally have the chance to achieve REAL theological coherence after centureis of a false, artificial, merely institutional unity.
And I for one welcome that. I think +Stephen Sykes was right back in the 1970s, when he bemoaned the utter lack of real theological integrity in Anglicanism as a whole. And I don’t think we’ve gotten any better since then. Indeed, things have actually gotten worse.
David Handy+
Photios certainly thought that Filioque was substantive, and I agree. I know RC Church doesn’t require Byzantine Rite Catholics to say use it but that was itself a political accommodation. Of course, putting it in in the first place was politics–but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t theologically significant. When theology doesn’t matter, or when there are other priorities, doctrines and practices over which blood was shed become adiaphora or merely semantic.
There are of course items on which the RC Church won’t budge. I wonder how long a leash these Eastern Catholics are on. They can have their own version of the Creed and their priests can be married, but I bet that when it comes to money and authority they get no special deal.
The interesting question is: what are the issues on which the RC Church wouldn’t budge, and why. Authority–certainly. But what about some of the fallout of Thomism, like the divine simplicity doctrine? I think they’d bend on that. But I also think that all the sex roles and sexuality issues are unbudgeable. They might though find a way to fudge on the contraception issue. First, declare that the Church authorizes condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. Second, point out that if contraception was a foreseen but unintended consequence of a couple’s use of condoms with the intention of preventing the spread of AIDS–well that’s double-effect: you can’t be blamed.
Maybe I’m just using “theology” in a narrower sense than current usage in these discussions. By theology I mean metaphysics as it pertains to questions about the existence and nature of God and supernatural states of affairs. I mean it specifically to exclude ethics. So when I say that currently theology isn’t of primary concern I mean that precisely that conservatives are willing to debate metaphysical questions concerning the Trinity doctrine, Christology, etc. or dismiss them as merely semantic but regard ethical issues as important and not debatable.
To put theology first would be to say that there’s room for disagreement about, e.g. whether homosexual sex is morally ok or not–the church doesn’t take a stand on these controversial moral issues, but e.g. if you don’t agree with the Christology you can go to that Nestorian church across the street, or the Monophysite one around the corner. The Church’s business is theology in this narrow sense, not ethics, and churches are distinguished by their theological commitments, not their moral/social agendas. This is the kind of view that both liberals and conservatives reject–with the incredulous stare.
The RC church is committed to divine simplicity by what they see as an ecumenical council – namely Canon 1 of the Fourth Lateran Council. (FWIW divine simplicity – that is non-composition in God – in some form seems demanded by the Nicene Creed or at least both the RC theologian Lewis Ayres and the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart think so). Of course fleshing quite out what that means – and how it is coherent with the Palamite distinction between essence and energies is certainly a task for ecumenical discussion with the Orthodox. In addition the RCs think that one may, indeed ought to, speak metaphysically about ethics (thus the significance of natural law thought in RC ethical thinking).
The RC church seems, to me, fairly consistent – they believe there is good reason to think such and such about God, and good reason to think such and such about ethics. Of course thought about both may develop or find re-expression, but consonant with the underlying (metaphysical) realities the church sees itself as having reason to affirm.
The Righter trial did seem to affirm that at least for TEC – the church is committed only to doctrinal affirmations about the being and character of God (that is the Nicene Creed). However as soon as one begins to flesh out the implications of the credal affirmations that God is Creator, or that that Christ became incarnate for our salvation, or that the church is holy (etc.) then I think it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that we must be (for those affirmations about God to have content) committed to views about what “holiness” is and what it begins to look like in human lives, what “salvation” is and what shape it takes for humans etc.
This clarifies the thing for me: much appreciated.
I would take the standard view that you “can’t deduce ought from is”–whether the “is” consists of descriptive metaphysical claims or descriptive empirical claims. The “Bishops Study/Teaching Document” on sexuality committed the naturalistic fallacy by asserting that moral claims about sexual conduct could/should be deduced from empirical descriptive claims of Freudian psychology–made all the worse because most educated people at this point recognize that Freud was a charlatan. Popper cites his theory as a paradigm case of bad science.
But on this account it’s equally illegitimate to “deduce” moral judgements and claims about what the good life consists in from the descriptive claims of metaphysics concerning the existence and nature of God. I don’t see any good reason to believe that it’s impossible to buy the theology in, e.g. the Nicene Creed, without being committed to any views about how we should behave, the character of the good life, what is of value or how societies should be organized.
You could of course hold that there are independent religious reasons to commit to various ethical views, which aren’t derivable from theology-qua-metaphysics but are, e.g. revealed in Scripture or in the tradition on the Church. I don’t myself hold that view either but it seems reasonable, whereas attempts to spin ethics out of theology-qua-metaphysics don’t.
On divine simplicity, the texts are all underdetermined anyway and I don’t think that you can spin claims about divine simplicity out of the Nicene Creed. It isn’t only that divine simplicity puts pressure on Palamas’ distinction between God’s essence and energies. It seems incompatible with an account of the Trinity doctrine that seems to me promising, which assumes that in addition to divine attribute properties which each of the Persons have, each of the Persons has a distinct hypostatic property which the others don’t have and which individuates him. This is the assumption of one of Photios’ arguments against the Filioque Clause. On his account, as I read him, being-the-source-of-other-Trinitarian-Persons is the defining hypostatic property of the Father. Ascribing the procession of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son illegitimately ascribes sourcehood to the Son as well. He has a neat little argument. Either the Father can generate the Holy Spirit on his own or he can’t. If he can’t, he’s inadequate. If he can, then the participation of the Son is unnecessary and redundant.
Thank you again for clarifying this stuff–fruitful discussion!
The “exchange” or “dialogue” on this comment thread between driver8, LogicGuru and NRA which I have just now (11/7; 4:35 pm) read for the first time has me rubbing my eyes in some amazement, as well as bemusement, seeing that this morning I decided to purchase a copy of Frederick Joseph Kinsman’s *Salve Mater* (1920) as a gift for a (RC) friend, and have been reading over my own copy this afternoon, and find here that the many of the same matters that Kinsman discussed in it 90 years ago have become the subject of discussion once again:
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=kinsman&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&sortby=2&sts=t&tn=salve+mater&x=60&y=7
Kinsman (1868-1944) was PECUSA Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919, when he resigned and “poped;” the book is his explanation why. More bemusing still is that my copy of the book once belonged to Reginald Wright Kauffman (1877-1959) who, as a student at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, was a pupil of Kinsman, who returned to that school where he had himself been a student nearly a decade earlier, after his ordination, to serve on its faculty for two years. Kauffman himself was christmated into the Russian Orthodox Church in New York City in July 1920, and he has annotated the book with marginal comments, some of them appreciative and others critical.
1. FWIW I think it’s not some metaphysical condundrum to derive an ought from an is and we do it all the time. It a consequence of instrumentally reasoning about goods. Consider this – “If I want to be downtown by 6.00 pm I ought to catch the No. 68 bus about 5.15 pm.” Indeed it’s defeasible – for someone else might say, “You’ll never get there in time if you do that. You ought to catch the No. 74 bus at about 5.00 pm”. (One might change the good to an ethical one without changing the pattern of reasoning – an ought (you ought to leave at 5.00 pm) is being derived from an is (the time the bus leaves) as instrumentally related to a purpose/good (I want to be downtown by 6.00 pm)).
2. Of course in the form of natural law ethics popular among many RCs – purposes are, so to say, built into the fabric of nature. Thus, very crudely, “I want this oak tree to flourish as an oak tree, thus I ought…to plant it in a place in which it will have nutrients and light” or “I want to flourish as a human being, so I ought…”
3. Very quickly – one reason that Arianism is deemed unacceptable is surely divine simplicity – no composition in the God. (In other words divine simplicity is really about the shape that the transcendence of God takes in Nicene Christianity).
Must go – have to take mass!
#22: No, there really is a vast gap between “is” and “ought.” “If I kick this puppy, I will cause it pain” is an “is” statement. “Therefore I ought not to kick this puppy” is an “ought” statement, and the only way to get from one to the other is to have the notion that one “ought not” to cause pain to others unnecessarily. The “is” simply informs you as to what actions have what outcomes; it requires an entirely different order of judgement to rank these outcomes by some notion of desirability.
C. S. Lewis is very good on this in The Abolition of Man. Given several outcomes, we can apply any number of types of value judgements in order to prefer one outcome over the other — for instance, we could choose whichever one gives us the most pleasure, or whichever one causes the person next to us the most pain, or whichever one has the fewest letters, or anything at all. But we cannot choose between value judgements without applying another value judgement. That is, I might say that I “should” prefer a value system based on the greatest good for the greatest number, but I can only do that if I already have a value system that thinks that “greatest good for the greatest number” is a nifty thing.
Starting only from “is” statements, there is simply no way out of this tangle — you can’t prefer some outcomes over others without a value system with which to judge them, and you can’t prefer one value system over others without another value system with which to judge them, and so on ad infinitum.
The only way out is to transcend the problem in some way. To my mind, this means at some level you have to assert that there in fact are “ought” statements that are also “is” statements — that certain values are true and existent facts of the universe, just like gravity. The question then becomes, “OK, so what are they?” but that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.
Of course, you’ve committed a key part of the syllogism – namely the end or the good being sought, “If I want to become the kind of person who is charitable to animals, I ought not to kick small dogs”.
So oughts are easily derived from facts about what ENDS WE BELIVE WORTHY OF PURSUIT.
Apologies fore CAPS – computer had “a moment”!
But my point is that you can’t derive those “ends we believe worthy of pursuit” from “is” statements about the universe. That’s the gap between “is” and “ought.”
PS Before I sign off – those of you with a philosophical bent will recognize that my claim isn’t original but comes, more or less, from Aristotle and is kind of related to his practical syllogism. My example about in post #22 about transport is, more or less, taken from this discusison here: http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2009/10/on-ought-and-is-ii.html. (Be sure to read the comments or as they are called on Siris “links in the chain”. He also has some great posts on Hume on ought and is – use search to find them).
#26 But our desires (that is, in Aristotle’s terms those ends we are pursuing) are “statements about the universe”.
So if you have conflicting desires, how do you decide which one ought to overrule the other? If I find a lost wallet with $50 in it, I have a desire to have a bonus $50 in my pocket, but I also have a desire to find the person who lost it and restore their lost property, money included. Now, it so happens that I think one of these desires is “better” than the other — but to make that judgement, I have to have something other than my desires to use as a basis for choosing between them.
The original question was simple – is it possible to move from is to ought. I argued not only is it – we do so all the time. (Indeed, as an aside if you accept ought implies can then you’ll begin to see that of course oughts are connected to means). If we remain confused as to our end we will not get to the ought (just as if we remain unsure whether we want to be downtown by 6.00 pm or want to spend the evening watching Simpsons repeats – we won’t get to the point of understanding that we ought to catch the 5.00 pm bus).
Of course underneath you question is about why we might pursue one end and not another. According to Aristotle we fundamentally aim at flourishing (even if our understanding of flourishing is profoundly erroneous). So our ends (goals) will ultimately make sense cast against the light of our goal of flourishing. Of course, as a matter of fact, Aristotle thinks that some ends we might pursue really do tend tend towards human flourishing – in other words some ends really are good relative to the flourishing of the kind of creature we are – (and others, in fact, do not – even if we are mistaken in thinking that they do). Just as, to be barbarously crude, trees really do flourish under certain conditions – such as appropriate light, space, and nutrients – and not so well under others.
Just to take this a step further – one might say, as a Christian – that our ultimate flourishing really is to be found in union with God – in other words we are the sort of creatures who find our deepest fulfillment in such.
#27 My claim isn’t original either–it comes from [url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io]Hume[/url] and Moore [url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#NatFal]Moore[/url]
The substantive question is “What is intrinsically good?” and on the account I think most plausible it would be, crudely, getting what we want–whatever it is. Less crudely, satisfying one’s informed preferences. Considering only what’s good for me, I decide which desire to satisfy by looking at where they figure in my preference-ranking. If I want chocolate but want vanilla more, I choose vanilla; if I’m indifferent between them, I flip a coin.
To adopt the moral point of view is to consider everyone’s preferences, not merely one’s own. Interpersonal comparisons of utility are problematic but supposing we can make these comparisons we weigh our own desires against the desires of others. In deciding what to do (from the moral point of view) we consider not only the direct effects of our actions on others but their effect on social institutions which promote desire satisfaction. So if I’ve adopted the moral point of view, I give the $50 back because I consider the desires of the guy who lost it as well as my own, and because I recognize that giving back the money contributes to maintaining a state of affairs in which people can count on the basic honesty of others–something most people want and which contributes to preference-satisfaction.
OK, but why is “flourishing” a desirable thing? Or why is maximizing “preference-satisfaction” a good thing? What makes them better than stunting and frustrating?
#32
1. It’s slightly bowdlerized Hume – that is, Hume via some twentieth century atheist naturalists. (In other words Hume doesn’t think it is impossible to derive an ought from an is – or at least have a look at the long discusison at Siris and see if that persuades you. You’ll need to search on Hume and ought and is).
Neither preferences nor desires (at least as we use them) quite capture the broadly Aristotelian sense of the directedness that motivates action. Intentionality, perhaps.
Blimey – that’s literally inhuman (!) – adopting “everyone’s point of view” being clearly impossible. No – acting virtuously is to pursue appropriate ends, at appropriate times, in appropriate ways. In other words to pursue the good because it truly is good.
#33 I tried to say where the ought comes in our ethical thinking – that is it is connected to facts about means to ends that we are pursuing. Our ends are pursued because they are good (or at least we think it is true that they are – though we are often mistaken). So it’s a mistake to think that an end is itself is an ought. It is a good.
(I think we’ve now reached the point where further discussion requires more space than blogs really allow. So let me bow out and thank you for the discusison. If you’re interested in the broadly Aristotelian tradition Alasdair MacIntyre is an engaging and thought provoking place to start – especially if you’re disoriented through reading Kant or too many twentieth century atheist interpretations of Hume for the health of your soul! Thanks again).
#34 I’m not interested in doing Hume exegesis–just citing the SEP articles as shorthand to indicate the kind if view I hold.
“Adopting everyone’s point of view” to get at the notion of fairness is standard stuff–e.g. Rawls Veil of Ignorance thought experiment, Harsanyi’s idea of imagining oneself living everyone’s life, etc. This way of going is controversial and there’s huge literature on this but I’m convinced that this is the most fruitful approach. We may not succeed but we can get pretty far in “adopting everyone’s point of view.” Far from being “inhuman” that’s what being human is all about–being able to walk in the other guy’s moccassins. And the more civilized we become the wider our sympathies, the better able we are to recognize the points of view of a wider range of people, to walk in more people’s moccasins–to universalize: to treat others as we’d prefer to be treated.
There’s nothing particularly atheistic about it–any more than there’s anything particularly Christian, or even theistic about the Aristotelian approach. Aristotle wasn’t a theist until Christianized by Aquinas, MacIntyre isn’t a theist, and most philosophers who adopt the Aristotelian Virtue Ethics approach, e.g. Martha Nussbaum, aren’t theists either. And there’s nothing particularly atheistic or unChristian about Utilitarianism (I don’t do Kant–I’m just a plain old Utilitarian).
I’ll sign off too. Good discussion–much appreciated.
Just a factual addendum – Alasdair MacIntyre has been a Roman Catholic since the early 80s.