Re-Enchanting Ethics

The Disappearance of Ethics:
The Gifford Lectures
by oliver o’donovan
eerdmans, 167 pages, $40.99

Twenty years ago, at the moment of its IPO announcement, the most powerful company in the world declared that “Don’t Be Evil” would be the orchestrating principle of its executive strategy. How did Google intend not to be evil? By doing “good things” for the world, its IPO document explained, “even if we forgo some short-term gains.” Eric Schmidt, its CEO at the time, had some private doubts: As he would later explain in an interview to NPR, “There’s no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something.” But Schmidt came to believe that the absence of an authoritative definition was in fact a virtue, since any employee could exercise a veto over a decision that was felt not to involve “doing good things.” It took ten years for the company’s executives to realize that the motto was a recipe for total corporate paralysis and quietly retire it.

The episode captures the central paradox of a hyper-liberal age that combines intense moral fervor with an equally intense skepticism concerning any shared conception of good and evil such as might override the private moral judgment of a software engineer. We are as morally indignant at the condition of marginalized groups as we are at the idea that what underpins our indignation is anything other than a social construction. There is, to be sure, plenty of chatter about the good: Effective altruists focus on “doing good better,” postliberals extol “the common good,” and so on. But in a pluralistic society, the moral lexicon of the past is simply too freighted with contested presuppositions about the nature of the good to command consensus. One reason for the hyperinflation of rights discourse, surely, is that it licenses a convenient agnosticism about the metaphysics of human worth.

Few thinkers have offered a theological explanation of this strange synthesis of fervent moralism and moral nihilism. But that is the task Oliver O’Donovan sets himself in The Disappearance of Ethics, a lightly edited version of the Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of St Andrews in 2021. This luminous little book is a lament for the slow unraveling of “Ethics” (capitalized to refer to the discipline itself, a field in which its author has labored for more than half a century). In the first half of the book, O’Donovan offers a diagnosis of the discipline’s disappearance; in the second he sketches strategies for its recovery.

In O’Donovan’s telling, Ethics is no longer equipped to resist the colonizing influence of other disciplines, whether the reductionism of the natural sciences or the positivism of the social sciences. The fragility of Ethics is partly attributable, he claims, to its peculiarity as a mode of human reasoning. “Ethics,” he notes, “reflects on the living of human life, not, like anthropology or sociology, from a third-person observational point of view but from the point of view of agents who ask deliberative and evaluative questions about their practical undertakings.” Yet moral judgment and deliberation cannot do without empirical inquiry and standard canons of rationality. If my inner conscience urges me to combat some injustice in society, I will first have to determine, and to some extent defer to, some matrix of sociological or economic facts. This necessity makes Ethics uniquely vulnerable to capture by disciplines that take the third-person perspective for granted.

But the chief cause of the demise of Ethics is its loss of three elements that are indispensable to the structure of moral reasoning. It is missing its object (goodness), its frontier (a temporal and eschatological vantage point on the moral life), and its subject (the acting person).

O’Donovan traces the first loss back to Immanuel Kant. Kant divorced nature from normativity, separating our “theoretical” knowledge of things from our “practical” knowledge of actions: My knowledge of what would happen to Auntie Mae if I laced her tea with arsenic is different in kind from my knowledge of whether or not I should lace her tea with arsenic. Whether or not it is entirely fair to pin so much blame on Kant, it is hard to deny that his three Critiques marked the final demise of the ancient notion that being and goodness were “convertible,” because the critical turn excluded theoretical knowledge of any of the “transcendentals.” Whereas the medieval mind identified them as the deepest dimensions of reality, for Kant transcendentality was merely a feature of human cognition.

The older idea, roughly speaking, was that, as Augustine puts it, inasmuch as something exists, it is good. Before the dawn of early modernity there were vanishingly few metaphysical schemes that did not assume that nature was shot through with the normative. For Plato, goodness was hyper-being, variously refracted in all existing things. For Aristotle, to establish the essence of a thing was to stipulate the conditions for its flourishing. Even the Stoics, hard-boiled materialists one and all, saw nature as interwoven with a normative thread that none of its denizens could have sewn themselves.

As for Abrahamic monotheism, the claim that goodness and being are a single reality is simply the logical outworking of its creationist metaphysics. Once one grants that God is both the ultimate source of all goodness and the sole cause of all created reality distinct from himself, it is hard to evade the corollary that goodness subsists in all existing beings as such. Goodness, then, is a wholly general property, or “transcendental.” Rebarbative as this idea is to many today, its abandonment makes inevitable the dislocation of value from reality. Once God comes to be viewed as a celestial mechanic and reality as a cosmic machine, good and evil come to be seen as redundant additions. From that point on, it was all but unavoidable that value and obligation would become a matter of private judgment and Ethics would seem less and less intelligible as a field of shared inquiry.

If the genealogy O’Donovan charts is not quite commonplace, anyone familiar with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre or Charles Taylor will be fairly well acquainted with a similar narrative. Today’s ethical conflicts, it is hard to deny, appear so intractable because we cannot even begin to agree on a workable account of the philosophical tectonics of our moral life. More striking and subtle is O’Donovan’s account of a second element in the demise of Ethics. “[We] cannot disentangle moral thought from the thought of future time,” he argues, “and that is because a practical disposition is inseparable from a future-directed intention.” Deliberation is horizontal: Deciding what I ought to do is conceptually inseparable from scanning the options available to me for future action. Ought implies will.

Up to this point, O’Donovan’s diagnosis could in principle appeal to a secular philosopher. One might share his lament for the loss of goodness from the purview of Ethics, while denying that its recovery requires belief in a divinely created order. Any sufficiently robust moral ontology might do just as well. But the argument that futurity is intrinsic to moral reasoning leads O’Donovan to a more provocative conclusion: that the shape and coherence of ethical reasoning depends on a theological stance. To deliberate is to discern a point in future time from which one can judge oneself to have acted correctly. But since the future cannot be known, and since for O’Donovan (as for Kant) the mere fluctuations of nature and history could never yield dispositive moral determinations, only faith in some ultimate future vindication of ethical action that transcends nature and history can authenticate our moral life.

It is not always obvious when O’Donovan’s arguments are intended to appeal to a secular readership or, alternatively, to one with confessional commitments. When designating “Ethics” as a disciplinary field, O’Donovan is never quite clear whether he is referring to Theological Ethics (his own métier) or to the field that encompasses both theological and secular modes of moral reasoning. The equivocation can be unsettling. If Ethics is Theological Ethics, then his diagnosis implies that the object, frontier, and subject of Ethics construed theologically are disappearing. That would imply that (Theological) Ethics no longer orients itself towards divine goodness (that is, God) as its object, that it is increasingly oblivious to the eschatological guarantees of revelation, and that it is forgetting to conceive of the human agent as a bearer of the divine image. If that is the case, then the disappearance of Ethics is merely a symptom of the slow capitulation of theology as a discipline to secular presumptions, and the situation is even more troubling than he has led us to believe—at least for those who continue to see theology as sovereign among the sciences.

Suppose, on the other hand, that O’Donovan understands Ethics to include secular ethical discourse. How might secular moral philosophers respond? Some of his diagnosis would, I suspect, attract a surprising degree of consensus. Recent decades have witnessed a growing recognition that reducing the good to utility or happiness or adaptive fitness has been a philosophical failure and a cultural catastrophe. That recognition in turn has motivated a flurry of sophisticated challenges to the dominance of scientific naturalism: Derek Parfit and Thomas Scanlon, among others, have argued for the reality and irreducibility of value. These attempts have much in common with Max Scheler’s largely forgotten effort to recast the good as an objectively existing set of “values,” an account to which O’Donovan devotes lengthy and sympathetic attention in the book. Although these recent attempts, in my view, fall short much as Scheler’s intuitionism did (and for similar reasons), they do at least begin from the recognition that Ethics is missing its object.

Secular moral philosophers are less likely to countenance O’Donovan’s more theological remedies. Many would insist that moral realism does not entail religious commitment, and skeptics would argue—by way of reductio ad theologiam—that one should steer well clear of belief in the objective reality of the good if theism is the price we must pay for it.

Those familiar with his other writings will find O’Donovan’s style as dense and pregnant as ever. But its origins in a lecture series make the book a good deal more accessible than the forbidding register of his major monographs. And the book still showcases its author’s many virtues as a thinker: dialectical concision, conceptual power, arresting exegesis, wry humor, and intellectual generosity. O’Donovan ranges across the patristic and medieval traditions with a deftness and command that few can match and effortlessly distills the intricacies of French and German phenomenology. Every page of the book repays rereading and, given his fondness for highly filigreed argumentation, usually requires it. His argument is animated by an evangelical wonder at the instructive power of Scripture, and he will often illuminate an abstruse point with a strangely plausible application of a scriptural text, as when he interprets Jesus’s reply to the young man in Matthew 19:17—“There is only One who is good”—to mean that although there are many tokens of goodness in the world, there is a single source of ultimate goodness that underpins and unifies it.

O’Donovan ends the book with the proposal that the recovery of Ethics requires the recovery of existential wonder. That conclusion may strike some readers as somewhat bathetic, given the range and quality of the analysis that preceded it. Still, few will deny that The Disappearance of Ethics makes a fitting capstone to O’Donovan’s half-century of theological meditation on the moral life. It is an exemplary coda to a body of work whose range, influence, and authority may in time raise it to the status of an Anglican encyclical canon.

James Orr is associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge

Image by Philippe Oursel, licensed via Unsplash. Image cropped.