They are happy whose life is blameless,
who follow God’s law!
They are happy who do his will,
Seeking him with all their hearts,
who never do anything evil
but walk in his ways. Ps. 119:1-3
What is the point of morality? Is it to provide a basis for the laws that serve to govern our societies? Is it the answer to the question, famously asked millennia ago by Socrates, of how one ought to live? Is it the guide to living a good life? Is it just to live by your values, whatever they may be? It really does seem there’s a lot of confusion today about what morality is and what it is for. Even the words morality and ethics are very hard to distinguish from each other in terms of what might be meant by each of them and they are often used interchangeably. One thing that seems clear, however, is that both ethics and morality at the very least ought to serve to provide us with a way of telling right from wrong.
With regard to contemporary America then, how do Americans claim they distinguish between right and wrong? When asked by the Pew Research Center in 2014, 45% of Americans answered that they relied on common sense for such guidance, 33% cited religion, 11% philosophy or reason and 9% relied on science to provide them with an answer to moral questions. Since the decline in religious attendance and the profession by Americans of the Christian faith, which is still by far the most prominent religion in America, has continued unabated since 2014, it’s likely that even fewer people today in 2024 would cite religion as their source of discernment when it comes to morality.
It’s hard to know exactly what people mean when they refer to common sense beyond the idea that some things are just obvious to people without having to think too hard about them. Still, such knowledge has to come from somewhere. In 2002, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor published a paper which provides us with a good description of the source from which common sense can be seen to arise in our modern era. Taylor’s thesis is that in our contemporary society, as a result of shifts in philosophical, political and economic thought occurring over hundreds of years, we have ceased imagining our existence as one wherein man’s place was near the bottom of a hierarchical chain of being with God, or the gods at the top but instead began to imagine ourselves in a flattened, horizontal metaphysical reality.
This horizontal reality, which Taylor termed the background, contains all the knowledge and cultural mores we now deem necessary for us to conduct our lives. Of course, the background still requires authoritative gatekeepers, like academics, scientists, justices, and even, until relatively recently, ecclesiastical authorities, to determine what can legitimately be used from the background in our daily lives. The problem, especially as regards morality, is that we are, as a society, effectively cut off from any divine authority and can only look to one another for the answers to moral questions. Since any kind of common sense we have today is going to arise from this background, as are philosophy and science, we now find the vast majority of Americans are essentially relying on each other for moral clarification.
From a certain perspective, it may not seem so bad to rely on one another to determine what might be morally permissible or not. A problem arises, however, when we consider the possibility that we may no longer even know what we are talking about when we talk about morality. Perhaps the concepts we used when we lived in a world where we believed ourselves to exist under divine authority have been emptied of their previous contents, which have been replaced with something very different? What if words like ‘good’ and ‘justice’, for example, mean something very different now than they did in previous centuries and we largely don’t even realize it? That is, of course, one of the central claims made by Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue. If the words we use to discuss morality can change in terms of their conceptual content that will naturally only add to our moral confusion.
Even setting aside the potential difficulty posed by MacIntyre in his book, modern philosophy as a whole struggles to devise any consistent theory of morality. In 1985, the analytic philosopher and ethicist Bernard Williams published a book in which he asked and attempted to answer Socrates’ age-old question of how one ought to live. Towards this end, he examined all the major ethical theories extant in analytic philosophy at the time and argued they all ultimately failed to produce a satisfactory answer to Socrates’ question. Williams determined that analytic philosophies of morality are simply “not well suited to the modern world,” and that “the ancient world was better off, and asked more fruitful questions….” Still, Williams does not despair, as he finds that objective truth is actually to be found in science and that we will, by way of what he calls “reflective living”, be able to muddle through without the aid of any kind of moral system at all. Williams' conclusion did not dissuade other modern philosophers from continuing their search for a moral system, however, and philosophers continue to work on the project of attempting to “ground morality in something other than God.”
One may wonder why morality might need grounds in the first place? The answer, according to one prominent Kantian moral philosopher, is that ethical standards go beyond merely providing rules in that they aim to regulate our conduct. They are normative in the sense that they are able to make claims on us and our behavior. This is where the ‘ought’ comes from when we say things like “you ought to keep your promises” or “you ought never tell a lie.” The ‘ought’ implies a kind of ultimately authoritative quality that is able to make such a claim on us, regardless of whether, in the end, we choose to acquiesce to it or not. When we ask why when we are told that we ‘ought to,’ the answer, if there is one, must come from the grounds of morality. The grounds must reveal to us the relevant authoritative answer, and that answer must be authoritative enough that to continue to ask the question would seem to be irrational.
If morality is understood to prescribe and proscribe certain behaviors however, that is one of the primary reasons Williams finds to reject it, because no moral system can possibly take into account all of what William’s calls the various ‘projects’ of every person and therefore will always end up violating individual integrity. Williams is famous partly for his argument against utilitarianism in which he puts forth this theory of integrity. This is interesting because it was largely as a result of utilitarianism that the assumption that the goal of life was to maximize pleasure and minimize pain really took root in western culture. Still, Williams didn’t really reject that assumption, he merely claimed that a utilitarian moral system was incapable of ensuring that outcome for every individual person and as a result was too onerous, laudable as it may be to attempt to maximize pleasure and minimize pain within society as a whole.
Williams' insistence that man must ultimately be allowed the freedom to pursue his own projects is consistent with his view that there are no external reasons. This is just to say that a man will never be motivated by anything except his own internal reasons and it’s just accidental when he seems to act due to external reasons. This, by the way, is how he dismisses Kant’s categorical imperative in particular among the other moral theories he examines and sets aside as unworkable. Williams’ arguments against the moral systems which were considered to be live options by the philosophers of his day, and are in fact still live options today, seem valid but they themselves are based on assumptions about who and what exactly man himself actually is.
Like most modern analytic philosophers Williams was an atheist. As we’ve already seen, he did believe objective truth could be found in science and so his beliefs about what constituted man could only have been grounded in the scientific assumptions of our day. Those assumptions are, of course, that our universe likely exists as a result of big-bang cosmology and human beings came to exist in their current form due to some kind of evolution from less complex life forms over time. These are the assumptions that make morality such a vexing problem for most contemporary philosophers.
If we look at the world through the lens of atheistic materialism our conception of man becomes extremely limited. Man is just another animal. He has no real reason to exist and his life has no real meaning. Whatever meaning he can attempt to inject into his own life can only be derived from a conscribed set of nebulous values. Even if one subscribes to the philosophy of humanism, the breadth of what can be reasoned about when using one’s reason will be restricted to the material, and the values one would be expected to adhere to are subject to change as one lives out one’s commitment to leading an “ethical (life) of personal fulfillment that aspire(s) to the greater good of humanity,” as described on the website of the American Humanist Association.
Like Williams, G. E. M. Anscombe also believed that philosophizing about morality in her time was fruitless. In a 1958 lecture, subsequently published as a paper, she argued that it was impossible to do moral philosophy “without an adequate philosophy of psychology” and that the words used to describe moral obligations had become meaningless and as such just served to confuse. While Anscombe is credited with stoking a renewed interest in virtue ethics, which continues to this day, her paper itself contends that the ethics of Plato and Aristotle will actually still leave us with “a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all ‘human flourishing.’”
Ironically, many moral philosophers, reluctant to give up on the project of securing normativity within the secular tradition, rather than attempting to fill the gap Anscombe described, began instead to develop a more “psychologically rich virtue ethics.” This resulted in the development of the thick and thin concepts that Williams relied on while attempting to work out how he thought we ought to live by reflective living. The problem here remains the same however, it can never matter how thick our ethical concepts are if our conception of who man is, and what his human nature is, are disputed, unclear or reduced to the purely material. This is because the point of morality and the point of man himself are inseparable.
Anscombe said that lacking an adequate account of human psychology, modern moral philosophy could have nothing meaningful to say about morality, but it's unlikely that any account of human psychology that is derived from a strictly secular anthropology is going to allow for a robust moral philosophy. As she was a practicing Catholic, it’s likely Anscombe would have realized this, just as she would have likely had an inkling of exactly what could fill the gap in Plato and Aristotle's virtue ethics. Today it would seem that virtue ethics has advanced no further than when Anscombe brought it to the fore again almost 70 years ago, the problem being that few, if any, ethical concepts have been discovered which are thick enough to overcome the relative moralities found in different places and at different times.
We’ve seen thus far via Williams that modern analytic philosophy as a whole can’t get us very far if we seek a definitive answer to Socrates’ question. Before him, Anscombe had said something similar and also prefigured MacIntyre’s thesis that philosophers might just be talking nonsense when they talk about morality in our modern era. Taylor has shown us that in our secular age we have rejected the influence of the transcendent on our lives and so are destined to live a necessarily morally and spiritually impoverished life, as “humanism must find the ground and contours of fullness in the immanent sphere, in some condition of human life, or feeling, or achievement. The door is barred against further discovery.” At least since the Enlightenment, philosophy has failed to produce a compelling account of morality and remains in a state of confusion to this day.
Perhaps, however, what is required for a truly robust morality based on a realistic understanding of human nature is not grounds, but a point. Williams thought that no external reason could ever cause a man to act, but what he failed to see was that there actually is exactly one external reason that explains all action, and even, or perhaps especially in man, it can perfectly explain our individual actions. In Part II of his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us that everything we do in life is in service to our end. We all share the same end, and we all have the same goal. That goal is happiness, of course.
As St. Thomas explains in I-II, Q. 1, Art 1., of all the “actions done by man those alone are properly called “human,” which are proper to man as man.” Man, as opposed to animals, is “master of his actions” because he possesses reason and will, which work together to provide him with free-will. Human actions are those “which proceed from a deliberate will.” Since “the object of the will is the end and the good … all human actions must be for an end.” Simply put, what this means is that when we, as human beings, do anything voluntarily it is because we have formed an intention to do it in order to obtain some kind of tangible good or to achieve some kind of result. We don’t act without a reason, or as St. Thomas puts it “an agent does not move except out of intention for an end.” It’s hard to see how any modern moral philosopher would disagree with this.
It’s interesting to note that St. Thomas begins his “Prima Secundae” with a description of who man is and how and why he is motivated to action, rather than by proposing some kind of moral system by which man ‘ought to live’. The effect is to bring a great deal of clarity to a subject that, as already discussed, becomes hopelessly confused when we begin by looking at morality as a whole and trying to justify it from the outside in. St. Thomas starts from the very beginning and center of the subject with ourselves, our wills and our final end. To point out that we have a single end which we all share is important as well, because apart from that last end there exist “an accidental infinity of ends” which will serve to muddle things even further if we’re not careful to keep our eyes focused on what is actually most relevant to the subject.
It’s probably safe to say that the desire to be happy is just a part of human nature. It would be very odd indeed for someone to claim to want to be unhappy, and one would immediately suspect that such a person may be desiring to be unhappy temporarily in service of some other goal, or may not be being truthful or be in possession of all their faculties. St. Thomas, quoting St. Augustine, puts it succinctly, “that all men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness.” Not only do all of us have the same last end, everything we do is in service of that same end:
Man must, of necessity, desire all, whatsoever he desires, for the last end. This is evident for two reasons. First, because whatever man desires, he desires it under the aspect of good. And if he desire it, not as his perfect good, which is the last end, he must, of necessity, desire it as tending to the perfect good, because the beginning of anything is always ordained to its completion; as is clearly the case in effects both of nature and of art.
So according to St. Thomas, we all, as human beings in possession of reason and will, naturally seek happiness as our last end, and everything we do will be as a result of our desire to ultimately achieve that end. This also, by the way, seems like it would be completely uncontentious to modern philosophers. The crux of the matter will come down to what, exactly, can constitute happiness for every human being. There are eight things St. Thomas considers when working out what our happiness might consist of: wealth, honors, fame and glory, power, bodily goods, pleasure, goods of the soul, or any created good. He finds that none of these can make us happy. This shouldn't be too surprising to most mature adults, even in our era of rampant consumerism and our society’s ongoing and increasing obsession with wealth, power and beauty.
St. Thomas sums it up thus:
It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired. Now the object of the will, i.e. man’s appetite, is the universal good; just as the object of the intellect is the universal (truth). Hence it is evident that naught can lull man’s will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation.
With this we see why modern moral philosophers are not going to follow St. Thomas the rest of the way down the path toward a real, lasting morality.
For St. Thomas, and for Catholics everywhere, man’s happiness lies in the beatific vision and that is our end. This is because as human beings we are created to the image of God. We seek Him and He is the only thing that can possibly make us completely happy. This is the point of morality, to help us find our way to our perfect end. Although St. Thomas picks up the virtues as laid down by Aristotle, without God they’re incomplete. That is the unfillable gap mentioned by Anscombe and the reason why secular virtue ethics can’t get very far. This is also the reason why as we become richer as a society and ostensibly more ‘advanced' we are less and less happy as we move away from our Creator as a society. We misunderstand the nature of happiness itself.
The sad fact is that today fewer and fewer people belong to the Faith in our country, and even those who do are often very poorly formed and don’t know a whole lot about Catholic moral theology. Still, Catholic moral theology remains, and will remain relevant and vitally necessary. As St. Pope John Paul II wrote, “(t)he Church knows that the issue of morality is one which deeply touches every person; it involves all people, even those who do not know Christ and his Gospel or God himself. She knows that it is precisely on the path of the moral life that the way of salvation is open to all.” As faithful Catholics is it our obligation to live out the virtues as an example of how one ought to live, grateful we possess the knowledge of what our end is and that the way toward that end, although not an easy path by any means, has been shown to us clearly. As Pascal said, each of us, believer or no, “must wager. It is not optional,” and what is at stake is nothing less than “an eternity of life and happiness.”
“What can bring us happiness?” many say.
Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord. - Ps. 4:7
Bibliography
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Chappell, Sophie-Grace and Nicholas Smyth, "Bernard Williams", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodeman, (Summer 2023).
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Korsgaard, Christine. “The Sources of Normativity.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 16 & 17 Nov. 1992, Clare Hall, Cambridge University. https://tannerlectures.utah.ed/ documents/a-to-z/k/korsgaard94.pdf. Accessed 12 April, 2019.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue, Third Edition. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Pascal, Blase. Penseees. E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1958.
Pigden, Charles. “Analytic Philosophy.” The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, edited by Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 1-15.
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___. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture, Volume 14, No. 1, (Winter 2002), p. 91.
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nard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1985.
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God's or Christ's Presence and Action in the world only manifests via the actions of human beings which in turn is very much associated with the kind of politics that human beings collectively engage in.
That having been said please check out these references which describe the nature of applied right-wing religious politics and some well known figures and groups associated with such - J D Vance in particular.
http://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2024/03/08/cpac-attendess-america-under-attack
http://www.nerdreich.com/unhumans-jd-vance-and-the-language-of-genocide
J D Vance is much admired by Rod Dreher.
Vance is closely associated with Opus Dei as is Kevin Roberts the number one honcho behind the 2025 project - Vance endorsed Roberts new book.
This 2019 reference provides a comprehensive description of the applied politics of both Opus Dei and the First Things cabal
http://opentabernacle.wordpress.com/2019/03/22/resurgence-of-the-catholic-political-right-under-trump
The current essay on this site provides a 2024 update which includes references to the 2025 project.
It is also interesting to note that Paul Kingsnorth makes much of his association with First Things. He is also closely associated with Rod Dreher.
Re Opus Dei check out this site http://www.odan.org
And then there was/is the religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian Donald Trump who does not have even a molecule of Virtue in his entire body-mind-complex, and who specializes in trashing all of that. And has done so for his entire life.
Referring to the book After Virtue - the barbarians are well and truly inside the citadel!
http://godblesstheusabible.com
Curiously (but not really) millions of right-thinking American Christians pretend that he is "God's" chosen vehicle to re-Christianize America.