An often-heard complaint is that people no longer know how to reason, debate or communicate successfully. Jordan Peterson has deplored this state of affairs in best-selling self-help books. He continually urges his audience to read Nietzsche as a way of understanding the nihilism which engulfs society in the 21st century. While approvingly citing Nietzsche’s dictum that “truth should serve life”, he nonetheless bemoans the displacement of reason in contemporary society. This trend can be the result of an over-preoccupation with the power and scope of religious sentiment, from which Nietzsche and others certainly suffer.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in his book The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote, “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow too.”
Nietzsche held that the “death of God” would have enormous consequences for our metaphysical and moral worldview and he has only contempt for those who try to carry on as though this calamitous event does not undermine many of their most basic assumptions. For Nietzsche, liberalism, egalitarianism, socialism, utilitarianism, Kantianism and talk of humanitarian values are merely feeble shadows of Christianity and no more justifiable than their predecessor. For even these beliefs presuppose a certain value attaching to the nature of man, something Nietzsche sees as question-begging.
In speaking of the “death of God”, is Nietzsche recording a “fact”, namely that European man no longer finds the Christian God believable? Or is he saying that Christianity is indeed unbelievable, or adopting a stance of scorn towards it as a matter of taste?
Scholars will continue to argue over this, but there can be little doubt that Nietzsche finds the prospect of mass unbelief both exhilarating and disturbing. He was very much aware that the casting aside of the Christian God and the metaphysics that went with belief in Him removed the core of a great many fundamental beliefs, without which man was liable to lose all sense of life’s profundity. In the light of his “non serviam” he sought and failed to develop an alternative, and in a later book will refer to the “Last Man” – a passive consumer focussed on security – as a product of the nihilism the death of God has brought about.
Are our moral beliefs really dependent on a theistic framework in order to have any validity at all? Many Protestant thinkers did seem to hold this, perhaps influenced by Martin Luther’s flamboyant faith-based denigration of our natural reason, especially as exemplified in philosophers such as Aristotle. Luther’s exaggeration of the effects of Original Sin distorts the reality of our natural reason and moral experience.
But Catholic thinkers have sometimes seemed to take a similar line – at least as regards the specific moral concept of “obligation”. Elizabeth Anscombe, while a firm believer in natural reason and an adherent of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, tells us, “the concepts of obligation and duty – moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say – and of what is morally right and wrong and of the moral sense of “ought”; ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals or derivatives of survivals from a conception of ethics which no longer generally survives and are only harmful without it.”
She assumes, as does Nietzsche, that if “moral oughts” possess a “mesmeric force” it can only be because of a law-like conception of morality, which she thinks is unavailable to those who do not ultimately believe in a Divine Lawgiver. That force is the fading ghost of an earlier, theistic conception of the world.
In the widespread absence of belief in a Lawgiver, the Catholic Anscombe proposes that we should instead focus on “virtue” as fundamental to ethical thought – in other words, move away from talking about moral obligations in a secular context, and focus instead on what sort of person is morally admirable.
Virtue ethics appears to be more concerned with the character of the person acting and what makes them morally admirable and less on the person’s ability voluntarily to fulfil moral obligations. As with Nietzsche, the concern is with the kind of person who performs a certain action. The question becomes: does action X flow from a morally virtuous character and is it conducive to the perfection of man as man?
For Aristotle, the emphasis is on people who act in accordance with “the good” – who habitually express the good in their actions, are motivated by it in all they do, permeated by it, so to speak, in their thoughts and emotions. A good spouse is one who feels genuine affection for his wife and whose acts of love are second nature to him, not one who has no such disposition and yet scrupulously and possibly grudgingly “does his duty”.
This attractive picture of the moral life is, however, one which de-emphasises those forceful moral obligations which trouble both Anscombe and Nietzsche, even if the former seeks to account for them in terms of her belief in a Divine Lawgiver.
Nietzsche reserves his especial contempt for the Victorian English and their law-like godless ethics when he writes, “In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.” For Nietzsche, the English moralist, forever talking of absolutely binding moral obligations, is merely a post-Christian who hopes to make up for his abandonment of that worldview by over-emphasising the ghostly remnants of it.
Virtue ethics is indeed a good thing: focus on the inner life and what motivates people in doing what they do and how their actions can achieve ends perfective of their nature gives moral thinking a shape and a grounding which is anything but arbitrary. Catholic moral theology, following Aquinas, certainly bears the mark of Aristotle’s concerns with the perfection of human beings through virtue. Prudence is a crucial virtue in this picture, where morality is essentially seen as “right practice” in the conduct of our lives.
Yet it is a mistake to think that the area of morality in which we confront moral imperatives – often through judgements of conscience about particular acts – is somehow separate from the virtues and only grounded in Divine commands. The confessional places front and centre the dictates of conscience, which surely have less to do with prudential self-perfection and more to do with violations of particular moral obligations. And such obligations are often experienced as “cutting across” our (in this case, fallen) nature in some way – not as moral imperatives that go with our grain as smoothly functioning prudential actors.
Thomas Pink, a philosopher with extensive knowledge of late scholastic thought, has convincingly argued that Anscombe’s mistake was to overlook the view of natural law thinkers such as Francisco Suarez that moral obligation possesses “a justificatory force identified by a distinctive kind of negative appraisal”.
In other words, the “virtue ethics” of appraisal of character includes within itself the idea that reason has a force of its own, which can take the form of practical advisability or the form of moral obligation – the latter of which it is morally blameworthy to violate or ignore. And the force of the latter is not primarily determined by Divine command.
As Francisco Suarez puts it, “in a human action there is indeed some goodness or badness by virtue of the object positively aimed at, in as much as the object is compatible or incompatible with right reason, so that by right reason the action can be counted as bad, and a fault and blameworthy in that regard apart from any relation to law proper”.
So, conceptions of natural law should not be too closely modelled on conceptions of positive human law or even Divine law. Natural law should rather be seen as a force of reason in our lives, including a distinctive category of reasons from which we can’t beg off on account of their distinctive force.
The relation between Divine commands and moral obligations is of course crucially important for the Christian and there is much more to be said. But over-hasty identification of moral obligations with Divine commands denigrates the natural law tradition that shows we have reason to be moral even before we recognise the Divine Lawgiver. Nor should focus on virtue and moral appraisal be opposed to moral obligation, which can be accounted for in terms of a particular kind of negative moral appraisal.
Nietzsche and to some extent Anscombe moved too quickly when they overlooked the scholastic tradition of natural law, which despite its name was really talking about the variegated power of reason in our lives to motivate moral action without over-hasty recourse to a crude legislative model. Dismissal of reason’s power in our lives paves the way for the irreason and nihilism we see all around us, for ultimately dismissal of reason’s power is the first step to diminishing the possibility of recognising the nature of God as Logos.
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