Ite ad Thomam: Fr. Busa, Architect of Hypertext and Index Thomisticus, Passes Away

Kozinski responds to Snell

Turning to an Empty Subject: A Reponse to R.J. Snell's God, Religion, and the New Natural Law (via FPR)

Some questions for me to keep in mind when I revisit MacIntyre--

(1) The first point of controversy is on the relation between practical reason and speculative reason. I'll ignore this for now.

(2) The subjectivity-shaping role of social practices:
"For MacIntyre individual men qua individuals can neither know nor possess the goods that practical reason recognizes in and through the natural law."

It is not clear to me that this is so for all goods -- unless one is making a broader point about how our exercise of rationality is dependent upon language. Otherwise, feral humans who somehow manage to survive in the wild without human contact -- they may desire and obtain certain goods, but are morally and intellectual stunted because they were not initiated into a language.

Although one can enter into one’s subjectivity to discover the natural law and the goods and ends perfective of oneself, the self and the goods one finds in subjective introspection are not entirely one’s own, as it were. They are present to the soul’s internal purview only as a result of a dynamical interplay between an intrinsic and necessary human nature and set of inclinations, and an extrinsic and contingent experience of social formation and active participation in this formation.

If one is capable of self-reflection, then one can recognize human goods in part by the sadness one feels in their absence. This makes dialectical defenses of such goods possible. We all have histories, and our understanding of our selves is shaped through the influence of others.

Moreover, the criteria for moral evaluation and judgment (and the goods evaluated and judged), which can certainly be discovered subjectively, are not acquired and possessed subjectively. They are socially participated. Individual judgments and actions can only be judged as good or bad, virtuous or vicious according to the moral criteria intrinsic to social practices, not the subjective self. And, to add to the supra-subjective character of the natural-law, actions and the practices in which they occur can only be made intelligible as part of a social narrative: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what stories do I find myself a part?’”

The link between practice and human actions and narrative. Is MacIntyre overstating the case for narrative? Does a liberal or a radical individualist not have a story of his own? It may be false, in so far as he exaggerates his independence. By what criteria can the narrative one embraces be judged to be incomplete or false? I think it would be more useful to talk about our roles and the duties that we owe others. Only then can such a social narrative be complete. (Or, how can a social narrative not have moral considerations as an integral part of its understanding?) How does MacIntyre deal with someone whose narrative is tied to an intentional community? On what basis, if any, would he say that an intentional community (for lay people) is problematic?

(3) The tradition-constituted-and-constitutive character of practical rationality:
I have an earlier post about MacIntyre's definition of tradition. I need to find it.

Just as individual participants in practices have historical life narratives that characterize their identities, practices have life histories, and these are embedded in the grand narrative of a tradition, including the particular culture(s) in which it developed. To recognize the natural law is to recognize the goods internal to a practice, so we must have participated in that practice for recognition to take place. The turn to the subject is only possible via the good-recognizing power actualized by participation in practices. Moreover, to understand the practice itself, we must participate in the tradition that transmits and shapes that practice.

I think I need some concrete examples for me to grasp this. It's a bit too abstract. (Or I'll have to reread MacIntyre on justice.)

"To recognize the natural law..."  What about human activities that involve very little cooperation with other human beings? Given our social nature, we cannot live well without others, but what is MacIntyre's model for understanding practices? Is there a danger of techne being used to understand hexis?


(4) The indispensability of divine revelation in ethical inquiry and practice.
As he is represented here, I mostly agree with Maritain. But I will have to re-read what he writes about Christian [moral] philosophy.

Because in a practical science ends serve as principles, any practical science that does not know the ends of its subject matter does not possess its own principles. Since man’s ultimate end is unknowable by the light of human reason alone, and since man’s end is the first principle of both moral theology and moral philosophy, then moral philosophy, without the light of divine revelation, does not possess its first principle; therefore, moral philosophy must be subalternated to theology. In this subalternation, moral philosophy makes the data offered to it by moral theology its own, shines the light of human reason on this data, and thus arrives at first principles and conclusions of a philosophical character. In this way, moral philosophy is “superelevated” and perfected so that it can become “adequate to its object,” namely, man’s end.

I don't think subalternation can explain what is going on here -- it seems to me that this new moral philosophy is just theology under another name. The data may be offered to it by moral theology, but moral theology is mediating what is believed through the virtue of faith.

(5) Natural Law and Politics:

Beginning with the natural law is rightly the standard operating procedure for Catholics and other theists discoursing in our relativistic world and deeply pluralistic culture, but this does not mean we should always end with the natural law. Nor does it mean that we cannot or should not offer a compelling, beautiful, reasonable, and coherent supra-rational foundation for the existence, universality, force, and intelligibility of the natural law, the natural law that we indeed discover first by turning within, where, as St. Augustine came to know, God waits for us.

I'll have to read his book, because I don't see what the practical import of this is. Should Christians aim for the conversion of non-Christians, and in doing so transform a polity into a Christian one? Sure. But it is not clear to me that "dialogue" will be such an important tool for bringing this about, exxcept for a certain few.

(6) Turning to an empty subject:

I wonder if the reason for the contemporary popularity of NNL is analogous to the reason for the great, ancient rise and plausibility of Stoicism, another inexorably partial ethics that tended to consider itself the whole. Stoicism became plausible and popular when the ancient Greek polis disappeared, and in the cultural anomie that followed, millions of tradition-and-community starved people felt they could only depend upon themselves for knowledge of their good and to attain virtue. If anything, in our milieu of deeply pluralistic cyber “communities” suffused with zombie-like consumers,[20] we feel even more bereft of the communities and traditions upon which we can depend intellectually and spiritually to shape our subjectivity and communicate truth, goodness, and beauty, and within which we can know and obey the natural and divine laws.

I think it is the claim by NNL theorists for a natural law ethic which can be used in dialogue with non-believers, based on what St. Paul says about the law engraved in men's hearts (Romans 2:14-16). There is also the influence of certain modern philosophers, along with willingness by some theorists to embrace liberalism in their formulation of the NNLT.

Related: A different perspective on St. Paul--St. Paul and Natural Law