Alasdair MacIntyre on Thomism and The Status of Modern Moral Inquiry (original) (raw)
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Aquinas, Morality and Modernity. The Search for the Natural Moral Law and the Common Good
2013
This book traces the collapse in the idea of an overarching objective moral framework in a line of development that proceeds from the Protestant Reformation to liberalism, secularism, relativism, and nihilism. The analysis charts the dissipation of objective morality from the intersubjectivism and universalism of Immanuel Kant to the nihilism of Nietzsche. The book identifies Max Weber as a key figure in giving sociological expression to the moral impasse which characterises the modern world. Weber’s much vaunted polytheism is shown to be an heterogeneity of values, the reduction of morality to value judgements, a conflict of irreducible value positions in which there is no objective way of deciding between them. The modern world is not so much a Nietzschean world which is beyond good and evil so much as a world in which objective moral criteria no longer apply. The book proceeds to argue the case for the importance of St Thomas Aquinas’ epistemological realism, rationalist metaphysics of being and natural moral law as supplying the objective foundations capable of resolving the impasse of morality in the modern world. The book considers Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx as key moral and political philosophers undertaking the task of recovering the common good that has been lost with the rejection of rational metaphysics and the natural moral law. To the extent that these thinkers failed, and the key aspects of modernity have remained in place, Max Weber remains the central theorist of modernity. Though profoundly influenced by Nietzsche, Weber’s tough-minded realism led him to reject notions of a ‘gay’ and ‘joyful’ nihilism and draw pessimistic conclusions with respect to the future. I argue that there is a line of development connecting Kant’s achievements and his failure to Weber and Nietzsche. I argue against the common understanding of Kant as a deontologist theorist pure and simple. A Thomist reading reveals that Kant sought not to reject virtue, but to place virtue ethics on a rational foundation. A Thomist reading also reveals Kant to be a teleological thinker concerned that human beings realize their rational nature through the pursuit of the summum bonum, the highest good. The problem is that Kant’s commitment to the highest good is undermined by Kant’s rejection of rational metaphysics, cutting his moral law off from its foundation in ontological nature. Kant cuts mind off from reality, denies causality and as a result comes to be trapped within a series of dualisms which undermine his commitment to universality – ‘is’ and ‘ought-to-be’, moral duty and natural inclination, reason and nature. Kant therefore fails to overcome the diremption of the modern world. Rather than achieve a genuinely universal ethic, Kant supplies an ethic which seeks to constraint the behaviour of agents in the modern world from the outside. Rather than a morality which operates at the level of character, Kant’s ethic takes on a legal form, constraining behaviour from the outside instead of forming behaviour from within natural inclinations and dispositions. As such, Kant’s ethical project fails. Kant’s self-legislation of practical reason amounts to no more than the self-sufficiency of reason. I argue that this fails to supply a secure foundation for Kant’s ethics of the summum bonum . I affirm Kant’s commitment to the highest good. The view is taken, however, that Kant is ultimately agnostic on the good, on account of his separation of reason from ontological nature. In time, Kant’s intersubjectivism and universality degenerates into the myriad relativisms, subjectivisms and nihilisms that inhabit the modern world. At this point, Nietzsche and Weber become key figures, showing the only form that Kantianism could possibly take within the framework of modernity. The book thus argues the case for the philosophical/theological synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas as providing the only secure basis for the objective and universal foundations of the moral law and the common good. I show how Aquinas’ rational metaphysics and natural law theory join reason and nature together on the basis of a necessary ontological connection. I argue that to make good Kant’s moral claims, we need to recover St Thomas Aquinas’ natural moral law, rationalist metaphysics and realist epistemology. I argue that the universal claims of the greatest of the modern moral and political philosophers – Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx - can only be realised by being grounded in the natural law. This book has now been published and is available for purchse.
The End of Ethics: A Thomistic Investigation
New Blackfriars, 2014
Capitalizing on the diversity of ways in which the phrase “the end of ethics” can be interpreted, this article explores how, from a Thomistic perspective, the virtue of prudence might be considered the “end” of ethics. After bringing to light certain problematic aspects of the relationship between ethics and prudence, it is argued that Aquinas’ understanding of the intellectual virtues allows for a clear line to be drawn between the two. In this way, it is possible to say where ethics “ends” and prudence begins. This answer, however, seems to raise a further difficulty which, upon resolution, reveals a sense in which prudence is also the “end” of ethics when “end” is taken to mean its goal.
I study different medieval explanations of moral goodness in relation to its main principles, i.e., the end of the agent and the object of the action. Special focus lies on Thomas Aquinas who considers the end (that which is willed) to be not only the 'origin' of moral goodness, but also its main 'criterion'. Peter Abelard, whose ethics I argue not to be subjectivist, had developed a similar theory, though the vocabulary he uses is not yet very refined. By contrast, for Albert and Duns Scotus the end is accidental to the moral act.
The Erring Conscience: Aquinas on Freedom of Conscience in Pluralistic Society
2017
Today’s political landscape encourages freedom of conscience while maintaining the tolerance of pluralism. But can conscience be wrong? Pervasive emotivism in Western culture defines morality as an expression of opinion elevates conscience to the supreme status of being the only judge of morality. In this view, authenticity is the only criterion for morality and conscience is reduced to peace of mind or reassurance about one’s choices. This view of conscience ultimately undermines the possibility of maintaining basic shared values that are necessary for pluralism. Contrary to the emotivist view, the objectivist view provides a clear and precise definition of conscience that encourages freedom of conscience as well as providing guidelines for its limits based upon a distinction between internal motivation and external objective morality. This position will be presented with recourse to Thomas Aquinas and his advocates as they allow for the possibility of an erring conscience that leaves room to grow and leaves room for society to judge right and wrong behavior. I will cover such questions such as the following: Can conscience be mistaken? Does an erring conscience impose moral obligation? Can doing the right action feel wrong? How can freedom of conscience be encouraged while providing safeguards against moral anarchy?
The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, 1998
LASDAIR MACINTYRE is one of the most important and alked-about contemporary philosophers; his work has pawned, as they say, a cottage industry of thinkers making use of, commenting on, and taking issue with his major theses. In all this it sometimes seems that there has been as much misinterpretation of his work as there has been adequate understanding. Most notable perhaps is the ongoing attempt to cast him as a communitarian, a role he explicitly resists. 1 A more subtle indication of the widespread misinterpretation of his thought is the almost complete neglect of his 1990 Aquinas Lecture, First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues. 2 While his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 3 published the same year, has provoked a great deal of
“ Person and the Tradition of Common Good in Theory of Justice of Thomas Aquinas ”
2015
Thomistic philosophy constituted an extensive reformation that succeeded in the unification and bringing together all aspects of previous intellectual traditions1 being, as a product of a synthesis of Hellenism and Christianity, the supreme expression of Greco–Roman Christian tradition2. The principal position of both thomistic philosophy and theology lies in its affirmation of the ability of human reason to comprehend earthly realities through observation. However, as MacIntyre has correctly noted, having assimilated the whole of past history of research, thomistic philosophy cannot be apprehended simply on the basis of “neutral criteria of rationality”, independently of the tradition to which it belongs3. Thomistic philosophy constitutes a new appreciation of man and the world, re–examining the issue of relations between man and the world and the issue of the nature of justice by focusing on the thomistic idea of a person. This paper will demonstrate that the notion of a person in...
A Pre-Thomistic-Historic Account of Freedom and Virtue
A brief and cursory overview of main positions on freedom and virtue, from the perspective of a follower of St. Thomas Aquinas. In his preface to Fr. Servais Pinckaers’s book, The Sources of Christian Ethics, Fr. Romanus Cessario commends Fr. Pinckaers for providing “an invaluable compendium” of Thomistic moral theology (ix). According to Cessario, one of the great contributions of Pinckaers is that “his esteem for the Angelic doctor is neither exclusive nor blind. . . . [Fr. Pinckaers] encourages dialogue with a variety of traditions, within the Church and outside of it. Far from inducing a fortress mentality in which one would seek refuge in a Thomistic system,” Fr. Cessario continues, “an authentic engagement with Aquinas fosters the solidity and openness needed for ongoing theological enterprise” (xi). The purpose of this lecture is to further the work of Fr. Pinckaers in a realm to which he devoted a significant portion of his book: the issue of moral freedom and virtue from a Thomistic perspective. Specifically, I am interested in exploring St. Thomas’s understanding of the freedom of the human person in light of Fr. Pinckaers’s emphasis on the “freedom for excellence” in contrast to a “freedom of indifference.” Readers of Pinckaers’s book will be familiar with the basic outline of his history of moral theology. St. Thomas Aquinas was the inheritor and systematizer of ancient pagan and Christian thought; along with them, he understood the primary moral questions to be of virtue, happiness, and fulfillment, with an emphasis on charity. Freedom was understood as a freedom in conformity with nature and God’s laws. But before the middle ages were over, this harmoniously balanced theology was upset. William of Ockham introduced his noxious philosophy of nominalism which entailed a moral theory of voluntarism. This, in Pinckaers’s words, was “a new moral structure,” which reduced the good to whatever emerges from the law of God’s will: “Obligation became the very essence of morality” (251). Freedom was understood as a “freedom of indifference” in which the will was completely independent of any external or internal impulse or constraint. Given this background, this lecture has three goals: 1. To round out Fr. Pinckaers’s history of voluntarism by discussing antecedents to Ockham’s theory 2. Contextualize St. Thomas’s unique understanding of human freedom and its relation to virtue. 3. Note the position of the Catholic Magisterium regarding human freedom and morality, including its fundamental continuity with the thought of St. Thomas and Fr. Pinckaers. In addition to primary sources, the two most helpful sources have been Bonnie Kent’s book, Virtues of the Will, and Vernon J. Bourke’s book, Will in Western Thought. A narrower, but directly related topic, is Rito Saarinen’s study, Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From Augustine to Buridan.
Medieval metamorphoses of the 'Nicomachean Ethics': the singular case of Thomas Aquinas
As is known, the insight of ethical thinking of Aristotle in the Latin West was processed at a slow pace. Only in the century XV the three Ethical attributed to Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Magna Moralia) are fully known by Western scholars. The biggest influence is due to the Nicomachean Ethics, known in full in 1246-47 (lincolniensis translatio) and giving rise, then, a philosophical ethics, side by side with a traditional ethics. This is how the medieval ethics (i.e., the mediation of the medieval history of ethics) can be divided into two distinct phases: before and after the dissemination of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle in the schools of the Latin West. The first phase is characterized by the preponderant influence of Augustine, although authors like Boethius, Gregory the Great, Anselm and Abelard have left important contributions. But Aquinas will build, in the Summa Theologiae, a specifically moral theory adopting the Aristotelian approach, giving rise to a new conception of the moral law (moral consideration in the strict sense, i.e., not specifically theological). In fact, the influence of the Nicomachean Ethics gives rise to two distinct streams, namely, the theological current, within the Theological Faculties, for which the key issue is to reconcile Aristotelian ethics with Christian tradition, and the philosophical tendency, present in the Faculty of Arts at the Universities of Paris and Oxford, which aims to recover the Aristotelian tradition of eudaimonia crowned by philosophic contemplation, that the incidence of the syllabus of 1277 eventually confirmed (Ethics is explicitly mentioned in Article 157 in respect of virtue and the theme of happiness). The aim of my presentation, is to recall the originality and novelty of the moral philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. In fact, many scholars of moral philosophy of Aquinas, although consider that ex professo is only in recent writings (Summa Theologiae and his commentary on the X Libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum), that appears a “full body of morality”, do not call into relief enough, the novelty of these later writings, especially the Summa, compared to previous writings. It is true that since the beginning of his intellectual career (i.e., with little more than twenty years), he knew the background text, because he was chosen to collect in writing the course that in Cologne (1248-52) Albertus Magnus gave about the Latin translation of 1246-47 (lincolnensis versio), showing thus, his innovative character. But, together with the importance, attractiveness and novelty of moral text of the Stagirite, Aquinas should have also given account of the problems that such a text could give rise to use it in Theology, problems, openly face in the writting of II Pars of Summa (Paris, 1269-1272). Until then, even the three largest works, Scripturum super Sententiis (Paris, 1253-1255), Quaestiones disputatae De Veritate (Paris, 1256-1259) and Summa Contra Gentiles (Orvieto, 1261-1264), drawing here and there ethical issues do not represent profound novelty compared to traditional Augustinian ethics. In this, the view is of the divine law that guides the action of consciousness that apply the law to particular cases and virtues that facilitate the proper law enforcement − all in order to obtain the Augustinian vita beata. That is, the view is not yet as clearly as it will be later in II Pars, or an ethics in first person, i.e., an ethic of moral subject as author of his own acts, mastering, for the same reason, the perspective of divine wisdom lawmaker. Thomistic ethics, inspired by the Aristotelian ethics is a philosophical-theological analysis of the praxis rational and free human. We will see the specific beatitude or happiness case, fundamental notion of ethics according to Thomas’s understanding of the Ethics. Thomas Aquinas distinguish between imperfecta and perfecta beatitudo. While the first corresponds to the Aristotelian notion of “finis quo” (end by which, i.e., actio humana), the second corresponds to the “finis cuius” (end in itself/final end). The finis ultimus obiectivus is God, while the finis ultimus subiectivus is the happiness. And this fundamental question of all ethics clearly emerge as the contact points and distancing from the Nicomachean Ethics. The second part of the Summa Theologiae introduces, as part integral and articulated, an consideratio moralis, an operative scientia, whose subject (subiectum) are human acts. The object continues being God, but as the beginning and end of human acts. This research, however, takes place within an ethical (moral constitution of a science). Anthropology Ethics of Thomas Aquinas is thus a theology which never becomes an anthropology. Therefore, we can say that Aristotle’s Ethics, such as interpreted by Aquinas, depends on the belief in God, and also excludes any reference to Revelation. In summary we want to highlight two points interrelated: 1. the novelty of Pars II compared to the first works; and 2. a change of course in the last Thomistic ethics against the traditional Augustinian framework − according to the Thomistic receipt of the Nicomachean Ethics.