I thank Joe Carter for noticing an essay of mine on Two Bases of Morality in Catholic Theology originally published in Dappled Things, and I thank both Joe and the various others for taking the time to comment on that essay. Before I respond to those comments, let me provide a little background.
In contemporary academic philosophy, there are three main kinds of moral theory. There is virtue theory or eudaimonism, which is the way the Greeks thought about morality and which is nowadays associated with Aristotle. There is utilitarianism, which was invented in the modern period and is associated with Bentham and Mill, although it has roots in Hume. And there is deontology, which was also invented in the modern period and which received its classic expression in Kant.
Thus, Rosalind Hursthouse begins her important book On Virtue Ethics by stating, “‘Virtue Ethics’ is a term of art, initially introduced to distinguish an approach in normative ethics which emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to an approach which emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or one which emphasizes consequences of actions (utilitarianism).” Almost every contemporary introduction to philosophical ethics repeats this classification. See, for example, Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy. This is such standard stuff nowadays that if you type “deontology” into Google and then continue with the letter “u,” Google will suggest “deontology utilitarianism virtue theory” as a possible search for you.
So, when I distinguished Aristotelian virtue theory from Kantian deontology in my essay, I was just repeating a truism of contemporary philosophy. My only original contribution was pointing out that some Catholic moral theologians incorporate concepts from both systems, apparently without realizing that these systems are widely understood to be incompatible. Virtually no one working in philosophical ethics would think that such mixing and matching was a viable strategy.
Thus, the answer to Joe as to why theology cannot use both kinds of concepts simultaneously is that theology, like any other rational discipline, has to be internally consistent. It is not a question of nuance, as Joe puts it, but a question of glaring self-contradiction. In virtue theory, an action is morally right or wrong depending on whether it is appropriately related to the human end (e.g., Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae.18.1-11); in Kantianism, an action is right or wrong entirely independently of the human end (e.g., Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:395). It simply can’t be both ways. You can’t be a free marketeer and a socialist in economics, you can’t be a nominalist and a realist in metaphysics, and you can’t be an Aristotelian and a Kantian in morals.
Joe suggests that Christianity has long believed that human beings have dignity because they were created in the image and likeness of God. Christians of all stripes say this nowadays, but the idea has virtually no basis in the history of Christianity. Certainly the Fathers of the Church do not say such things. The reason is that the concept of dignity as a foundational moral concept was one they didn’t have.
I haven’t checked every reference to Genesis 1:26-27 in the Fathers, but just now I did check every reference in Jurgens’ three volumes of The Faith of the Early Fathers, and not one of these is even about morality, much less an attempt to found morality on dignity and the imago Dei. Only in the modern era, when Christians borrowed the idea of human dignity as a foundational moral concept from the broader culture, has the imago Dei been pressed into service to ground morality.
This brings me to the “Friend of Robert T. Miller” who says that “‘Dignitas’ is used a couple of hundred times in the Summae” and by it Aquinas means “the special worth of creatures who possess the excellence of rational mastery of their own acts.” I appreciate the writer’s friendship, but this is not close to true.
According to the Index Thomisticus, dignitas and its various forms appear 343 times the Summa Theologiae, and I have looked at every one of these passages. In the vast majority of them, Aquinas is referring to the dignity of kings, bishops, priests, teachers, sacraments, virtues, human faculties, gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Eucharist, Christ, the Blessed Virgin, or various other things (see, e.g., Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae.102.1-2, which is typical), but almost never to the dignity of persons as such.
The few references to the dignity of persons as such are concentrated in the articles on the Trinitarian persons and the articles on the person of Christ. They have nothing to do with Aquinas’s moral theory based on the final end for man elaborated in the Prima Secundae, and, moreover, none of these references speak of anything like “rational mastery over [one’s own] acts.” Indeed, in one of the few places where Aquinas does speak of the dignity of human beings as such (Summa Theologiae III.4.1), he expressly explains human dignity in terms of the final end for man, noting that human nature is naturally fit for (nata est) knowing and loving God, which, of course, is the final end for man in Aquinas.
My friend has fallen victim, I think, to certain contemporary authors who have adopted basically Kantian moral notions but want to claim the patronage of St. Thomas. His own texts support no such claims.
January 12th, 2011 | 11:01 am
“Virtually no one working in philosophical ethics would think that such mixing and matching was a viable strategy.”
I’m a professional philosopher myself, and I think readers should know that the above statement is simply false. There are lots of Kantians who have virtue theories (Kant was one of them; see the Doctrine of Virtue) and lots of Aristotelians that want to make use of the concept of dignity. Many see the project of combining elements of virtue ethics and deontology as an exciting and worthwhile project.
I think Miller is right to claim that there is a tension between deontic and aretaic/telic conceptions of reasons but a genuine debate in moral philosophy concerns how these reasons relate to one another. Miller appears to believe that the idea of human dignity cannot ground deontic reasons independently of aretaic/telic reasons. That is a fine and well-worn position. But to my mind, a more interesting view is one that tries to ground both types of reasons without reducing the one to the other.
I also want to dispute the claim that the grounding of deontic reasons in the imageo dei is particularly modern or Kantian. Many medieval philosophers thought that there were deontic reasons grounded in human dignity and agency or in the divine nature (Scotus, arguably Anselm and the late Augustine, who abandoned a purely eudaimonistic account of moral reasons late in life) and such views also appear among many Stoics.
Anyway, I don’t mean to be a bother, but Miller is misrepresenting the views of moral philosophers, present and past.
January 12th, 2011 | 11:11 am
I don’t see the glaring contradiction. Perhaps you just take for granted more knowledge of these differing views than I have; however, I see no reason to think that the following is not possible.
1. Virtue theorist offers normative theory: Act a is morally right if and only if blahblahblah related to human ends
2. Deontologist offers normative theory: Act a is morally right if and only if blahblahblah completely unrelated to human ends
and furthermore, someone studying these theories notes the following truth:
3. blahblahblah related to human ends if and only if blahblahblah completely unrelated to human ends
And, since we’re involved in conceptual analysis here, I really mean to have a wide scope necessity operator in front of these claims, i.e. I’m not talking about accidental coextension in the actual world but something stronger.
Again, it’s not obvious to me that this is impossible.
January 12th, 2011 | 11:34 am
Allow me to jump in again before people point out a certain glaring idiocy in my previous post.
One might say “obviously if it turns out that blahblahblah related to human ends if and only if blahblahblah completely unrelated to human ends is true then the latter theory wasn’t really a theory that is unrelated to human ends (or maybe the former theory wasn’t related to human ends?)”. I’m considering the possibility that this theory, which has for decades been accepted by everyone as a deontological theory, in fact bears this relation to the universally recognized virtue ethics theory. I’m excluding the position where one requires that a properly formulated Kantian theory is incompatible with all virtue ethics theories, or else it can’t qualify as Kantian. On that view Miller’s claim is empty because part of what it means to be a Kantian theory is that it’s incompatible with virtue ethics theories, and I’m assuming that’s not the case.
I’m hoping, as I always do when I write something, that people will read what I meant instead of what I wrote.
January 12th, 2011 | 12:43 pm
As far as Aquinas goes, he does not ground his moral theology on the dignity of humans, but he does ground it on the imago Dei. In his prologue to the entire Second Part (which is his moral theology), Aquinas says that since he has first treated of God as the exemplar that, “it remains for us to treat of His image, i.e., man, inasmuch as he too is the principle of his actions, as having free-will and control of his actions.” That is, the very possibility of human morality comes from the fact that we are made in the image of God with an intellect and free-will. He doesn’t, of course, use the word dignitas here, but what could be more dignified than to be made in God’s image? There is no untoward logical leap from being made in the image of God to finding dignity in humans — precisely because it recognizes that they have intellects and free wills that must be respected as well.
Miller also neglects the deontological aspects of Aquinas’ moral theory. It is true that it is not a Kantian deontology, but why must we assume that Kant’s is the only kind of deontological morality that ethicists may hold? Aquinas, in his treatise on law (I-II QQ. 90-108), sees it working with the virtues by teaching us the correct acts that lead to our final ends (which he recognizes that we need since we are, largely, such bad moral reasoners).
What makes Aquinas’ ethics of virtue and law work well together is that both of them are linked by right reason. A virtuous act conforms to right reason and a law that correctly leads us toward our final end conforms to the divine reason.
One might argue that it is precisely the break between virtue and deontology that has led to the breakdown in much of what passes for moral thinking today.
January 12th, 2011 | 1:17 pm
well put, baconboy.
January 12th, 2011 | 8:40 pm
It seems worth noting one dimension of the debate over human dignity that has so far been overlooked in this discussion: the term itself is used by different authors in different ways. Interested parties would do well to read the last anthology published by The President’s Council on Bioethics, *Human Dignity and Bioethics*. Some defenders of the idea–Leon Kass foremost among them–understand human dignity in ways that are very hospitable to a telos-based understanding. For Kass, the best kind of life, the kind of life that fulfills our nature as _human_ persons, is the dignified life. For others, e.g. Gilbert Meilaender, human dignity is an expression of the inherent worth of the individual person. And then, of course, there are the pro-euthanasia folks and others who think that human dignity means making authentic or autonomous choices.
What I’m getting at, I guess, is the following:
1. Miller’s discussion is too hasty insofar as he doesn’t distinguish between different understands of “dignity” that are employed by users of the term.
2. Catholics–and those of us non-Catholics who are deeply sympathetic to the Church’s moral teachings–would be making a serious mistake if they/we dismissed all recent discussions of human dignity as grounded in a wholly distinct normative theory.
3. It does look like there’s room for both conceptions of dignity in a coherent moral theory. One might simultaneously maintain that the _imago Dei_ grounds humans’ intrinsic worth, while the telos-style conception provides a normative framework for governing how we ought to live. In other words, the two conceptions might recognize two distinct, important, and logically compatible points: an evaluative claim about the value of a person, and a deontic claim about what our obligations are.
January 12th, 2011 | 8:43 pm
Selfreferencing misunderstands me. I am not denying the obvious fact that many philosophers working in ethics want to combine elements of virtue theory with elements of deontology, as when deontologists give deontological accounts of character formation, which is a topic historically associated with virtue theory. Rather, when I said that “virtually no one working in philosophical ethics would think that such mixing and matching was a viable strategy,” the phrase “such mixing and matching” refers to what I had just mentioned in the previous sentence, viz., the fact “that some Catholic moral theologians incorporate concepts from both systems, apparently without realizing that these systems are widely understood to be incompatible.” That, I am pretty sure, virtually no professional philosophers do.
As to GDP, let’s suppose that, for every action A, A is morally right iff V(A) (some virtue-theoretic condition), and for every action A, A is morally right iff D(A) (some deontological condition). Given the actual moral theories we have, it is very unlikely that, for every action A, V(A) iff D(A), but let’s assume that, for whatever versions of virtue theory and deontology we favor, this turns to be true and we can actually prove it. What would follow?
This raises a deep question, analogous to the issue of seemingly different physical theories positing different theoretical entities that nevertheless yield all the same experimental predictions. One plausible view is that such theories are really the same theory, whatever “same” means here. Another is that such theories are actually different, whatever “different” means here. See generally Quine in his book “Pursuit of Truth” at 95-101. The problem is that we don’t have a clear criterion of identity of theories. I’m not sure what to say about such physical theories, and I know even less what to say about two moral theories having the relationship you propose. I reiterate, however, that given the actual moral theories in circulation, it seems unlikely that a virtue theory and a deontology would actually have the requisite relationship.
As to bacon boy, yes, Aquinas does think that man is in the image and likeness of God, and, yes, for Aquinas that means that man has intellect and will, and, yes, having intellect and will is a precondition to being a moral agent. But that does not come close to founding morality on the concept of dignity in the sense that actions are morally right or morally wrong because of how they relate to human dignity—which is the key point here. As to the treatise on law, as you yourself point out, Aquinas explains the moral law in terms of the final end for man. That makes the end basic, not the law. Deontological aspects of a moral theory, if they are explained in terms of virtue-theoretic ones, are not foundational elements of the theory. That’s why the Prima Secundae begins with five questions on the final end for man and doesn’t get around to the law until question ninety.
January 12th, 2011 | 11:25 pm
THe question revolves around the Person of Jesus Christ.
As the Church Fathers attempted to remain faithful to the received Apostolic Faith and answer the Arian heresy, they developed in a new and deep way the notion of “Person”, revealed in Christ and thus in the Blessed Trinity.
From the Person of Christ the dignity of the person came to be discovered. For example our human rights tradition began within Catholic canon law in the Middle Ages as the canonists attempted to describe the dignity of the baptized.
Christ’s identification with ‘the least’ in Matthew 25 brought to Medieval Christians the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. ‘
Perhaps the actual phrase: ‘dignity of the human person’ was not used but the reality indeed is.
January 13th, 2011 | 10:23 am
Robert Miller writes: “But that does not come close to founding morality on the concept of dignity.” I take it that this is the core of his argument, and I accept it. The important word here is “founding” and, indeed, no teleological or recognizably Thomistic argument would found morality on dignity.
At the same time, Aquinas does tie together personhood and dignity, the terms being basically convertible with one another–and this for reasons no persuaded Kantian could accept. So let’s just agree there is Thomistic dignity (rooted in a theistic metaphysics) and Kantian dignity (rooted in a modern theory of practical reason).
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