Virtue Quest

Tomorrow, that is, on the first day of July, I will awaken as a published author.

Sure, this blog is a publication of sorts. But I’m of the old school that believes you’re not really published until someone else – indeed, someone not related to you or biased by friendship – decides your work is worth putting out there. For me, that will happen tomorrow.

Where? you might ask. In a small on-line journal called This Great Society. It’s a quirky little corner of the internet, and well worth a read. I hope that recommendation includes even my own contribution to the issue.

My essay is entitled “Following Distance” and is a kind of meditation on the psychology of driving. I note that the space that separates cars on the road is also a medium of communication, and that giving another driver room is a sign of respect.

This message could not arrive at a more perfect time for me. On Monday, as I was driving home from work, I got in a fender-bender. I rear-ended the car in front of me. Fortunately, no one was hurt and the damage seemed minimal. (I left a pair of dimples on the other car’s bumper in the exact shape of the bolts holding on my front license plate.) And although the other driver called the police, I didn’t receive a ticket. The officer let me off with a warning, for “following too close.”

Just want to roll out the welcome mat to everyone who’s popped over from Mark Shea’s blog! Hope you like what you see here!

First off, I just want to say, “Thank you!” to readers Jeana and bob, who in the past week or so have helped me fulfill one of my goals for this blog: to generate provocative and intriguing conversation. Thanks!

So, in continuing the question of whether there’s any such thing as “natural rights” – or, more generally, what Thomists call “natural law” – the next step is to consider … the Order of the Universe!

Actually, I’m serious. By “order,” I mean specifically teleological order. In non-techno-babble, that means, whether things are in and of themselves directed to an end beyond themselves. The classic example is the eye: the eye is ordered toward the sense of sight, and so an eye that does not see is a “bad” eye.

Order and morality

Now, someone might object that you can’t blame the eye for being blind. And that’s true. So it’s important to distinguish between what’s called “ontological evil” and “moral evil.” “Ontological evil,” or evil in “being,” is simply the lack of full existence or perfection in a thing. A diseased tree, or a collapsed bridge, or a blind eye is “bad” because it lacks the fullness of what it is to BE a tree, or a bridge, or an eye.

“Moral evil,” on the other hand, involves the freedom of the will. Without personal freedom, there can be no “bad” or “evil” except in the ontological sense. For something to be evil in a moral sense, it must be a bad choice

Now, according to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and those who follow their tradition, the mind has several major parts, two of which are the intellect and the will. The purpose of the intellect is to understand things abstractly. The purpose of the will is to choose freely. If the intellect has a problem – for example, my intellect has great difficulty grasping poetry and metaphor, but thrives on mathematics – then we recognize that as a problem in the mind. I tell people that I’m “bad” with poetry, and they know what I mean.

If the will has a problem, it affects a person’s ability to choose freely. Sometimes this is a mental illness; for example, a psychopath is not free to act empathetically, or even responsibly. But often, we limit our own freedom by our very choices themselves. If I choose to insult you, I am no longer free to be your friend.

The slavery of vice

Now, part of the nature of the will is to develop habits. Habits are to the will what memory is to the intellect: they keep us from having to re-invent the wheel every time we hit the road. So, a virtuous habit is one that protects, or even extends the freedom of the will. Vice, on the other hand, increasingly limits the will’s freedom.

But this freedom is not freedom to do anything at any time; it is freedom to fulfill the nature of the person. It is freedom to pursue the good.

The best image I’ve found is that of a piano keyboard. Anyone at any time is free to hit any key or combination of keys on the keyboard. (This is what Pinckaers calls “freedom of indifference.”) But only someone who has practiced a great deal is free to play Debussy, or to compose an original work of music.

Now, every moment of every day, our will faces at least 88 possible choices of what to do next. If we practice making those choices well, with an idea of harmony or rhythm or beauty in mind, then we will develop habits that allow us to make more interesting and more complex and more, well, good choices. The will really does become more free, more fulfilled in achieving its purpose.

But if we simply hammer away at life according to mood or blind emotion, like a piano student who refuses to adopt proper posture or fingering, then we limit our freedom and risk hurting both ourselves and the instrument – that is, everybody around us.

Natural morality

This view of the human person, one who has a purpose or an end in both being and acting, and whose purpose is to pursue greater and greater goods, is the foundation of any theory of natural rights, or natural law, or natural morality of any kind.

Some thinkers have tried to do away with “human nature” without losing universal morality, but I haven’t found any of them (that I’ve read) to be convincing.

Others have noted that it’s incredibly difficult to pin down exactly what’s involved in “human nature” and have accepted that rejecting nature also means rejecting any universal morality. But then why do even they act as if moral questions remained vital? Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment is a brilliant exploration of the problems with this way of thinking.

So that’s largely why I’m convinced that there really is such a thing as human nature, and that the nature of the will is to choose freely, and that virtue is the true path to freedom and fulfillment and happiness.

But I’ve been talking too much. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Jeana left a wonderfully provocative comment on an earlier post. I began to reply in the comments, but I realized that this merited its own post, so here’s a bit of Jeana’s comment, followed by my response:

Perhaps a start would be the argument that there is a natural order to the world, and things work better when we cooperate with it. Plants die without life. Cows were made to eat grass. We live longer if we exercise and eat our veggies than if we sit in front of the TV and eat cookies all day every day. Men’s and women’s bodies each operate in ways that the other cannot.

If you were able to argue that following the natural order is a moral obligation, you could argue that….

This touches on, I think, the different moral roles of virtue and law.

Virtue enables us to realize the full potential of our nature and, according to Catholic teaching, of our supernatural gifts. Law, on the other hand, prevents us from (or at least warns us against) acting contrary to our nature. Virtue motivates us to reach for excellence, but places no obligations, strictly speaking, on us. Law places obligations on us, both positive and negative ones, but only obliges us to a bare minimum.

Law does not ask us to fulfill our nature; it only demands that we not act contrary to it. It does not strive for excellence. It is a stop-gap against excessive vice.

Now, ever since the so-called “Enlightenment” (if I understand my history correctly) western culture has been obsessed with the notion of law, and has largely forgotten the idea of virtue. This is why “morality” immediately brings to mind the idea of obligation.

But virtue sets a higher standard. Or, to put it another way, it opens up a broader field of possibility. Morality is not just about jumping through hoop X and avoiding pitfall Q. Morality is about living my life in a way that fulfills its potential, that brings to reality the potential good that is within me.

And that good is both for me and from me. It is good for me to be healthy. It is also good for me to serve my neighbor with whatever gifts I have. Indeed, serving my neighbor with my gifts is good for me as well, because it exercises and brings to greater perfection those gifts themselves. And it feels good to do so, which is a sign of health in using those gifts.

When we’re focused on obligation, feeling good is taken as a sign of not meeting an obligation. But when we’re focused on excellence, feeling good is a sign of health, of growth.

So much more to say, but I also want to prepare a reply to bob. So, till soon…!

I’m usually such a typo snob, that I considered it inconceivable to have typos in my own posts. Yet, glancing over this post, I discovered not one, but three typos! Lord have mercy! It’s a sign of the end times!

So, to all my other typo-snobby readers, I offer my most sincere and humble apologies. You’ll notice that I have corrected the errors.

And to the normal human beings who read, I point out that the offending post has direct relevance to the conversation I’m having with bob, and is well worth re-reading – if only to disagree with what I say there!

A reader named bob commented on a previous post:

Simply asserting that rights are moral concepts does not make them so, otherwise I could assert anything.

This followed on an argument about whether “I have a right” could imply an “ought”, such as, “you ought to respect my right.”

My point was that it is one thing to say, “I have a right to free speech,” and another to say, “I have a wicked left hook.” Both are assertions of fact. But the first is a moral assertion whereas the second is merely descriptive. This is because (as I stated in my reply to bob) “right” is itself a moral concept: like justice, or love, or honor, the term itself contains “ought” as well as “is.”

Now, I think bob took me to be saying that “right” is a morally good or valid concept. So he gives the following examples:

By declaring “rights” as inherently moral, just because we define them as such, we open the door to use that language to justify anything. I have the right to eat ice cream. I have the right to drink beer.

I had no intention of playing either Tweedle-dum or Tweedle-dee. Rather, I meant that by using the language of rights, we automatically involve judgments about obligations and relationships between persons, because such judgments are contained in the definition of “right”.

That doesn’t mean we have to assent to every claim of a right. It only means we need to take it seriously as a moral claim, and judge whether the claim is true or not.

Natural rights and civil rights

Now, I take it for granted that we can all agree about civil rights. Civil rights are rights granted by the State, such as the right to vote or the right to remain silent. These rights can be revoked. They may be limited to a certain group of people such as, citizens, or adults over the age of 18, and so on. The question of whether so-and-so has a civil right to such-and-such can be determined in a court of law.

What bob calls into question is whether there are (or can be) natural rights, also known as “rights of Man” or “human rights.”

It’s a good question. In my previous post, I stated that a right is sort of the flip side of a duty. If you have a duty toward me, then I have a right to what is due me. If I have a right, then someone has a duty to respect that right. So, even though I think there’s far too much talk these days about rights, and far too little about duty, I’m willing to fight for the reality of rights. If there are no such things as rights, then it seems to me that there are likewise no such things as duties.

Now, a natural right (or a natural duty) is one that follows from nature. That is, the basis and foundation of these rights (and duties) is my human nature.

But a right is a kind of ownership of something, and a duty is a kind of debt. Both are kinds of relationships to other people. They do not exist in an isolated individual, but they necessarily exist in a community. You cannot interact with other people for very long without agreeing about who may or may not do this or use that.

So, the question is, is human nature essentially communal or individual? Are we meant to live together in mutual support, or are we independent and therefore competitive when we encounter one another.

That’s a critically important question, but I’ll leave it for another post.

Anthony Esolen has a fascinating little article at First Things on how out-of-step Bill Shakespeare was with the sexual mores of his contemporaries.

Apparently, Elizabethan times were just as bawdy and lustful as our own, and while Shakespeare liked to make pelvic puns aplenty, he also held the virtue of chastity in much higher esteem than most other writers and entertainers of his day.

That gives me a bit of hope for our own day. All we need is another Shakespeare.

Hat tip to John C. Wright.

I’m cross-posting this both on my personal blog and on the Coalition for Clarity, because it’s the rare topic that fits both topics pretty well.

On Virtue Quest, I’ve been blogging about my reading of Alisdair MacIntyre’s “classic,” After Virtue. At the Coalition, I’ve raised the question of what the basis is for actions permitted to agents of the State that are forbidden to private citizens, such as capital punishment and war. So, toward the end of After Virtue, I ran across this passage:

But my present point is not that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community; but it is characteristically exercised in discharging responsibility to and in such government. … Loyalty to my country, to my community – which remains unalterably a central virtue – becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.

Now, I’m far from being in easy agreement with everything that MacIntyre says – or even with most of it. But his distinction between “political community” and “government” struck me as exactly the sort of thing that I have argued in saying that the State as embodied in modern nation-states is not necessarily the same kind of beast as the State as embodied in the variety of forms known to, e.g., Thomas Aquinas.

Here is how the very modern Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1910) describes the role of the State:

It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies.

I’m still reading through what Thomas has to say about the State, but my impression thus far is that the power of the State derives from its responsibility for goods that are common to society and therefore beyond the power of any single person as such. And the Catechism agrees, at least insofar as its authority is bound to the common good and does not bind whenever an agent of the State acts against the common good. Or, in a saying at least as old as Augustine of Hippo, an unjust law is no law at all.

Now, the first thing that almost everything I’ve read says about the authority of the State is that is “orders” things to the common good. That is, it resolves what is otherwise disordered and chaotic when left to individual persons or families. This is clearly the source of authority for laws and lawmaking. It also is fairly clearly the source of authority to tax or conscript, that is, to call individuals to a duty owed to society.

Now, I myself have to this point held the opinion that war and capital punishment are simply “public” forms of self-defense. In other words, I’ve assumed that the State does not have any “rights” or authority that is essentially beyond what is given to individuals; the authority of the State is simply exercised on a larger scale, with broader consequences. Yet almost everything I am reading implies or assumes that the State’s role of ordering things to the common good extends to acts that are different in kind from the moral responsibilities of individuals.

So I’m left with a couple questions at the end of this rather rambling post:

First, does a radical difference in the structure of government make a real difference in the relationship of individual persons to the State (such that Patriotism is no longer the same thing, for example), and in the role or authority of the State itself?

Second, does responsibility for the common good extend to acts that are beyond the normal scope of morality as applied to persons taken singly?