Virtue Quest

Don’t worry, I’m not going all gushy on myself. Nor do I expect you to.

So one of the things I do to escape from stress is to read about the history of philosophy. So far I have a rough knowledge of Western thought from the Greeks up through about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and a couple bits of Muslim, Indian, and Chinese philosophy from various parts of history.

Anyway, I was reading about John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265 – 1308) in Frederick Copleston’s masterpiece, and I came across the following provocative passage:

Scotus often gave a peculiar stamp or emphasis to the elements he adopted from tradition. Thus in his treatment of the relation of the will to intellect he emphasized freedom rather than love, though he held, it is true, to the superiority of love to knowledge….

This helped me to articulate something I’ve known for some time but have never quite managed to say clearly.

Let me ask you a question. What does your will do? What is the action of your will? What is its purpose?

Okay, that was three questions, or at least, (more…)

I don’t like to talk much about sex, partly because I’m ashamed of my own weaknesses in this area, and partly because any restriction on sexual “expression” or activity is seen as “backward” (and I’m vain enough to want to be seen as progressive), and partly because sex is just plain everywhere already and I don’t particularly want to add to the mess.

But what with the foolish hooplah over Pope Benedict’s out-of-context statement on condoms, and in light of some personal questions from a few different friends, and considering a fascinating conversation over at Just Thomism, I thought I’d toss my tuppence into the ring.

Human nature

The human person is made for love.

That sentence has many meanings, because “love” has many meanings. Love could mean, broadly, (more…)

My good friend Amy said:

The problem here is that you can’t teach people how to think. Not, at least, without heading straight long into [indoctrination] schools (Communist, Nazi, etc). Not a soul on the planet will tell you they don’t know how to think, even if their life is a long string of screw ups. And who gets to judge whose thinking is “right”? (After all everyone must think to act, even if poorly.) Other than practical matters of social order and universal natural law, I think humans might be best to leave that judgment to God.

There’s a lot going on it that. (more…)

A friend pointed me to a post on one of her favorite blogs, The Gnosis of Now. The author makes an excellent point about a primary aspect of the “American experiment”: that our society is, in a sense, founded on pluralism. The U.S.A. is not a single people, but a collection of peoples. Our social and governmental structures are meant to allow persons from any and every cultural background to live together in peace.

The fact that this ideal has never, even from the very beginning, found full realization raises the question of whether it is at all possible. One could ask whether this is an impossible goal that should be abandoned, or rather an ideal to strive for despite the fact that it is always beyond perfect attainment. One could also argue that, over the past two centuries, a distinctive “American people” and “American culture” has in fact grown and taken root, and that the opportunity for this pluralistic ideal has passed (though the constant influx of immigrants – both legal and illegal – provides new opportunities every day).

In any case, it’s a good reminder to someone like myself who is delving into my medieval and Catholic roots that the Founding Fathers had an entirely different set of problems they were addressing. I’m trying to grow toward personal virtue and social unity; they were trying to find peace and safety for their plurality of faith and cultural traditions.

I suppose I should pray that these are not incompatible goals.

Amy noted that some of the posts and comments were becoming “a bit too philosophical for [her] bent.” By that, I think she meant that the conversation had grown so abstract that it was no longer connected to real life.

There’s probably some truth in her observation. I tend toward abstraction – or, as my grade school teachers put it, I’m a space cadet. At the same time, I insist that abstract philosophy is not, or at least should not be, opposed to practical action in everyday life. My goal for myself is to think clearly and live according to what I think.

One of the areas my own thought gets awfully muddy is around the question of what it is to be human. That’s why it’s important to me to make sure my thinking is clear. Otherwise I start acting, well, inhumanely.

The human creature in its native environment

The first thing that I forget about human nature is that I am finite: I am limited, mortal, not self sufficient. Now, all this is normal and natural; it’s actually good, because connection with other people is included in the very definition of humanity. But I find myself awfully attracted to those fantasies of unlimited, immortal, sufficient people like James Bond or Odysseus or Fitzwilliam Darcy. (Granted that none of them are fully self-sufficient or properly immortal, but their stories do not die, and give them the illusion of perfection.)

So when I start acting as if I know everything, or like I am the hero of some grand epic, I wind up looking foolish. I say something stupid, showing the limits of my knowledge; or I do something that hurts either myself or someone else, betraying my lack of heroism.

And the reason this happens is because my actions run contrary to my nature; they defy reality. Reality sets limits to what I can do. Reality demands that I ask others for help, that I admit when I am wrong, that I defer to those more skilled or more experienced than myself. When I refuse to act in accordance with reality, when I contradict my nature, then the inevitable result is failure and harm.

How to know nature

Now, bob (and others) raised a very good point: sure it’s easy to claim something like mortality as a universal aspect of human nature; but seeing how widely human culture varies around the globe, how can we know what really is “human nature” (and therefore what are rights, duties, just laws, etc.) and what is just local custom?

My answer is, basically, not to use the variations as a distraction from what we have in common. All of us are mortal. All of us are dependent on one another. This alone is sufficient, it seems to me, to justify a promotion of community and a prohibition against murder. All of us are dependent on using things: tools, clothing, and other objects; this means that morality has to deal with the notion of property and prohibit theft.

It goes further, though: it is part of human nature to think, to communicate, to engage in relationships that go beyond mere practicality or survival. We have more ways to engage in these human acts than there are grains of sand on the beach, but we all do them. A person who has lost the ability to communicate has lost one of the essential activities that we call “human.” Such a person is tragic, and the magnitude of his or her loss is itself an indication of the centrality of thought, communication, relationship to living a fully human life.

Let me be clear: such a person is still fully human; but handicapped, in the way that an amputee is fully human, but lacking a limb. Morality still applies in a complete way to this person. There is no excuse for considering someone “less than human” or “no longer human” just because he or she is injured or disabled.

But an injury or a disability – by the very fact that we recognize it as “bad” and as a loss – is itself an indicator of where the full nature lies. And this is not something contingent on culture or opinion: there is no culture that recognizes someone with only one arm as “normal,” to say nothing of “privileged.” Whether they treat the disabled with special respect or with derision, the recognition of disability is one of the constants across cultural lines. It is therefore one indicator of the reality and objectivity of human nature.

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.

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.

I was listening to the radio on the way into work this morning and heard a story about how some scientists are afraid they’ll have to throw out the past eight years’ worth of research on human embryonic stem cells.

The reason? It seems that proper consent was not obtained for some of the stem cell lines that President Bush approved back in 2001. I can only assume they were talking about these objections from a UCSF team.

I had to laugh. They can’t do the research because they don’t have a signed permission slip?

Yet these same people pooh-pooh those who object on the grounds that the embryos are human lives being destroyed. Because that’s just not an important question.

Consent: the sole criterion of the good?

My friend Mark likes to point out that our culture seems to have rejected every virtue except tolerance, and every standard of goodness or value except informed consent. He notes that neither of these are sufficient to base a human society on; in fact, they both ultimately lead to a society that collapses upon itself.

I think the problem is that we have, by and large, accepted unquestioningly the myth that we are first and foremost individuals. A nation, a community, even a family, is presumed to be something that we enter into by choice. We have a “social contract,” and all our relationships suddenly have the nature of a contract. They are negotiated, agreed to, and disputes are adjudicated based on the terms of the contract as understood by the parties.

No wonder we have so many lawsuits. No wonder politics has become the common religion practiced by Americans. No wonder the only solutions we can come up with to any problems are legal ones.

No wonder we pay more attention to a medical form than to a human life.

Why human nature is important

On the other hand, all the ancient and medieval thinkers knew that the human person is a social animal. “No man is an island,” as John Donne put it. We cannot be born without other people. We cannot survive without a family. We cannot accomplish any tasks without relying on others to provide what we cannot provide for ourselves.

And we cannot be fully human without other people to converse with, to laugh with, to play with, to work with. We actually are least human when we are isolated as individuals.

When we forget this, when we base our entire sense of goodness on my own individual consent – as if I were utterly independent of the rest of the world – then we lose sight of what is truly good for the human person: love, friendship, collaboration, joy and peace. All these are gifts; they cannot be legislated and are not subject to a contract. We have no right to them. The only consent required is the consent to receive them from those who love us.

Some sectors of the web are astir over Brit Hume advising Tiger Woods to abandon Buddhism and embrace Christianity:

I don’t know Hume and have not followed Woods much. But I have had conversations with many of my friends about whether it matters which faith or religion one follows.

Faith as a noun and as a verb

Some of my friends think that the important thing is to have faith – any faith at all. They think that spirituality is a fundamental part of human life, and that it’s not healthy to neglect or avoid it. But the actual content of that spirituality, whether Christian or Buddhist or Native American or some mixture of anything one finds, doesn’t really matter.

What’s important is to have faith rather than what faith one has; the verb of faith trumps the noun.

At the same time, the recent controversies about politicians (such as Patrick Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi) claiming to be faithful to the Catholic Church while opposing some moral teachings of the Church indicate that content – at least by name – really is important.

In other words, the verb defines the meaning of the noun.

Meanwhile, traditional religions such as the Catholic Church teach that the noun should guide the verb. That is, one’s actions should be based on the content of one’s belief. And, moreover, the quality of one’s belief can therefore be discerned in one’s actions.

But don’t they all teach the same thing?

If the content of various religions was the same across the board, there would be very little conflict between religions, and almost none within religions. But this clearly is not the case. Content matters a great deal to a great many people, and for good reason.

I am a Catholic myself, and have done some academic theological study. I admit to being woefully ignorant about Buddhism or Islam or most other major world religions, but I do know that they differ from Catholic Christianity on a basic level.

Catholic teaching, for example, says that our ultimate destiny is communion in love with God. Buddhism, on the other hand, teaches that our ultimate goal is to end they cycle of rebirth through extinction of oneself. Islam sets forth a paradise including a vision of God, but that seems to maintain an absolute separation between God and the believer.

These different visions of ultimate destiny tend toward different attitudes toward morality: a Catholic approach emphasizes love and hope; a Buddhist approach stresses peace and equanimity; Islam sees morality as duty.

Learning from differences

Now, I’m convinced that no religion could have prospered for centuries on end without some insight into the truth of human nature and the world we inhabit. So I think there’s a great deal that the Catholic Church can learn from other religions, and vice versa.

I also know that, despite the differences, we hold many things in common. Most (if not all) world religions seek to draw the individual out of him- or herself to an attentiveness and care for others and for the world itself. This means we can collaborate on all sorts of philanthropic or environmental projects.

But in the end, reality is one; and different religions describe it in contradictory ways. It really matters whether we reincarnate, or whether we rise again in Christ Jesus. It really matters whether we are allowed to eat pork or any meat at all or only vegetables.

It is theoretically possible that all religions on earth are wrong; but at most, one is right. So I see nothing but good in sorting out exactly which one – if any – is true.

Here’s a gentlemanly rant against what’s commonly known as “relativism”.

I basically agree that there must be truth that we can know – at least to some extent – since A) the alternative is utterly absurd, and B) without truth, there’s no relationship to reality.

Truth, after all, is simply the connection of what we can think or know with what is real. Something, like an apple, is; it exists. What makes it true is that the idea or understanding of the apple is (roughly, at least,) the same as the apple is in its existence.

The trick is when we move from sensory truth – the apple I see and feel and taste really exists and is real, which only the insane or the skeptical extremists question – to moral truth. Lots of people question how we can know that something is “right” or “wrong”.

I don’t have a final answer, but my hunch is that it’s something to do with the fact that we can even think of terms such as “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “evil.” If there weren’t some kind of reality to those notions, how could they even enter our minds – to say nothing of becoming a universal of human life and culture and philosophy?