The Common Good and Scale

Thaddeus Kozinski and James Chastek respond to the Robert George-Michael Hannon debate on the common good. Maybe I will eventually write my own post, which will be a rehash of things I've already written before...

A Calvinist Responds to Feser and Kozinski

via TK: TWO ENDS OR TWO KINGDOMS? by Peter Escalante

Related: “We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident”: A Dialogue

Thaddeus Kozinski recommends...

Liberty, the God That Failed
Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama
Christopher A. Ferrara

Along with: On the Road to Emmaus by Glenn Olsen

The first seems to be what one might expect for a traditionalist critique of the American political order, explicating the source of its principles being solely the Enlightenment and liberalism.

The Theological Origin and, Hopefully, End of Modernity by Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Voluntarism, an indifferent will as primary moral agent; nominalism, the rejection of any real reference for universal concepts; disenchantment, the default existential mode of a buffered, self-sufficient “individual”; and desacralization, the “immanent frame” surrounding and conditioning modern social and intellectual life—these were the background assumptions of the Enlightenment, but they seem now foregrounded social, cultural, and political dogmas. The “Regensburg Address” of the Pope, with his account of the three waves of dehellenization, is, I think, a key text for grasping this development. Dehellenized reason closed to intelligible being, a voluntarist God beyond good and evil, a non-participatory cosmos mechanically construed, and a univocal, flattened concept of being supplanting Aquinas’ precarious but precious metaphysics of analogy—these are the metaphysical, epistemological, and theological roots of modernity, and they are deeply planted. As the Pope suggests, these roots have nourished a misshapen cultural tree, nay, a forest; and it cannot be simply cut down and replanted—for it is our home, whether we like our home or not, for, at least for the time being, there is no other domestic domicile into which to move, it would seem.


Now, great fruits came via their heroic attempts: the progress of medicine and human rights; what Taylor calls the “affirmation of ordinary life”; the dignity of persons seen as ends and never means (Casanova); the autonomy of politics, science, and economics from ecclesial control. This represents, as in the words of Maritain, a maturation of the political order and the Gospel seed coming to fruition. This is the true message of Gaudium et spes, when interpreted correctly–that is, not as a replacement of the Syllabus of Errors, but its complement. After Vatican II, no Catholic can interpret the prior social teaching and theology as simply a rejection of modernity, but neither can they reject or dismiss the prior teaching as outdated or simply mistaken.

The question of modernity, again. Kozinski offers a couple of scenarios as to how this all plays out, but I think maybe the analysis starts off on the wrong foot. Was there a rebellion against the authority of the Church? Undoubtedly. Did that rebellion provide the intellectual roots for liberalism? Or merely the occasion for it to develop as a reaction against the wars of religion?

Maybe it is not "modernity" that is the problem, but the power of earthly rulers vying against God; they are the ones who have made of liberalism and a host of other idealogies in order to take power for themselves in the name of liberating the masses.

Tradition-Constituted Theological Rationality and the Possibility of the Non-Theocratic Regime by Thaddeus Kozinski

Now, the liberal state never explicitly affirms “we are God,” for in its official agnosticism, it does not even explicitly deny or affirm the possible or actual existence of a transcendent being. Moreover, it insists that it leaves open the possibility of some such being’s revealing or having revealed himself and his will to man. Secular liberalism, that is, the purportedly non-theocratic state, simply does not deem it necessary to recognize any such being and revelation for the purposes of either political philosophy or political practice. It claims public ignorance about, but does not deny outright the possibility of, an authoritative revelation demanding personal recognition.


Yet, the believer in a being who has clearly and publicly revealed to man his will for the political order could argue that a studied ignorance regarding the existence of such a publicly accessible divine revelation is intellectually unjustified and politically unjust. For a Roman Catholic, for example, the Church exists as a public institution claiming to be the embodiment and spokesman of a publicly authoritative divine revelation bearing directly on morality and politics. Therefore, the Church is at least a possible candidate for a publicly authoritative social institution. Even if one prescinds from the question of the truth of this revelation, the Church’s claim about itself to be the authoritative spokesman for this truth is still an objective, intelligible fact within societies, and while a political philosopher can deny the truth of this claim, it cannot plead ignorance to the fact of the claim itself. Thus, in articulating any ideal political order, the political philosopher must deal in some way with the Church’s claim to have the authority to define the ultimate meaning of goodness and politics, by either recognizing or denying the Church’s public authority to do so. Practical agnosticism to the very possibility of such an authority is, in effect, an implicit moral judgment of the injustice of its ever becoming an actual, living authority, and therefore an implicit theological denial of the authority it indeed has (from the Catholic perspective).

Thaddeus Kozinski has some posts over at ISI reviewing Sertillanges and his recommendations for cultivating the intellectual life.

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

On to Kozinski's piece

The Good, the Right, and Theology by Thaddeus J. Kozinski

I did find this difficult to read -- if his book is like this I may have to reconsider purchasing it. Typical of postmodern American English theological discourse? Does it share something in common with analytic philosophy in this respect? Is it merely style and diction or something more? I had to concentrate in my reading.

The inseparability of faith and reason, in both theory and practice, is one of the main points of Benedict XVI’s encyclical teachings. We can debate the political and philosophical ramifications of the affirmation that we are made in the image of God, that God loves us, and that He commands us to “be perfect as His father in heaven is perfect”; however, in the end, we either affirm these truths or we do not, based upon whether we have or have not encountered the living Christ, caritas in veritate, or perhaps just encountered those Christians who have. So, if human acts are a matter of experience, choice, and grace—not just logic, evidence, and demonstration, whether Aristotelian-eudaimonistic or Kantian-deontological in mode—then any debate about the metaphysical, epistemic, and rhetorical aspects of ethics must invite theology as an interlocutor. And this neglect of theology is the reason that the debate between Arkes and O’Brien is, as it stands, irresolvable.

Would an Aristotelian ethics deny that human acts involve experience (which builds up prudence) or choice? (Aristotle may not talk about voluntas but he does talk about rational appetite and choice.) The key here is grace. If we are oriented to a good that we cannot attain on our own but need of God's grace, then it is not theology that we need first of all, but Divine Revelation and the sacraments. (The witness of the Church in her life in this world.)

The problem is that they are both right. O’Brien is correct that arguments about and declarations of principled moral prescriptions and proscriptions, even rigorous and true ones, cannot ensure a public commitment to and embodiment of Christian or even humanistic values in our post-Enlightenment, neo-pagan, pluralistic political culture. Moral principles are experiential, cultural, and historical in their genealogy and in the subjective apparatus of human recognition. But Arkes is right that we can and must transcend these contingencies to see and act on principles in an absolute, universal, and eternal way. In other words, although reason is tradition-dependent (pace Kant), it is also tradition-transcendent (cum Kant). Somehow we must hold these together, and I don’t think we can outside of a theological narrative and discourse.

In other words, paideia is not accomplished through [academic] discussions of moral questions. One generation forms the next, both within the family and the community as a whole.

"But Arkes is right that we can and must transcend these contingencies to see and act on principles in an absolute, universal, and eternal way." What does this mean? Arkes explains that positive law cannot be based on emotion or ingrained preference, but must be anchored to first principles.

After reading the rest, I find that I don't have much about which to quibble. (Dangling prepositions?) Or do I? I still have to reconsider what MacIntyre says about the relationship between tradition and rationality.

RJ Snell on the New Natural Law Theory

Anamnesis has a symposium on Natural Law:
God, Religion, and the New Natural Law by R. J. Snell and The Good, the Right, and Theology by Thaddeus J. Kozinski.

This post will have my comments on Mr. Snell's essay. Mr. Kozinski's essay I leave to another post.

I find the essay on othe NNLT too short and uninformative. NNLT as an account of Natural Law solely from the perspective of the moral agent, prescinding from metaphysical or theological considerations? I don't have a problem with that and I think the debate about whether natural law has a metaphysical basis or is tied to metaphysics because of the "good" has largely been a pointless one. It depends on the science in which the definition of natural law is being used. (Dr. Berquist gave me this nugget.)

I think the more traditional Thomists would hold that the goods which are assumed in ethics and can be "proven" only through dialectic can be demonstrated in metaphysics.
However, the Natural Law as considered within ethics would only be under the aspect of the first principle(s) of practical reason and what can be elaborated from them?

NNL correctly claims religion as a good knowable to reason, but reason claims religion as a good from within the mode of natural or proportionate reason—religion known according to the mode of the knower. So reason can indicate the desirability of knowing God from the standpoint of reason, and, further, reason also tells us the desirability and goodness of knowing God in a mode transcending our proportionate nature. Aquinas, for instance, is able to argue that beatitude or union with God is our complete happiness and ultimate end, just as he’s able to argue that we cannot attain beatitude without a relationship with God transcending our causal power.

Thus, natural law can tell us that (1) union with God is our final end, and (2) that attainment of this final end transcends what is proportionate to us. We can reasonably distinguish our natural desire to have religion from our desire to have union with God. Our apprehension of the good of religion is a wholly natural desire expressed in our dynamism to know all things; we can, by our own power, seek to know everything about everything including knowledge of God insofar as God is knowable by reason. This desire is human, proportionate, and natural.

Natural law is not identical to human reason itself; human reason can tell us something about God and our orientation to Him. But our natural desire to have "religion" (whatever that may mean in NNLT) is not the same as the natural love of God, or God as our ultimate end. Religion is not merely knowing about God. So what happened to the natural love of God? This is the wound that is forgotten in "purely natural" accounts of the natural law or attempts to explicate a natural morality or comprehensive philosophical ethics. So in that respect, NNL theorists such as Mr. Snell do overlook the Fall. (I believe that the same charge could be levelled at Maritain in so far as he has a seemingly contradictory notion of a Christian philosophical ethics.)

Natural reason can only get us so far in deepening our moral understanding. We can demonstrate that we ought to love God above all other things and that we fail to do so for some reason. If NNLT goes beyond elaborating the precepts of morality that we can know by reason alone, then it is no longer philosophy but theology. As a tool used by Christians for dialogue with non-Christians it is useful, but one should be careful with one's ascriptions, predications, or claims about natural morality.

Thaddeus J. Kozinski, The Relative Absoluteness of Truth

Pertinacious Papist: The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism. PP republishes a review, originally published in Latin Mass Magazine, by Christopher Oleson of Thaddeus Kozinski's The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism. (archive for the review)

Related:
A review at NDPR

Two from Public Discourse

What’s Good? Wherefore Ought?
Thaddeus J. Kozinski, May 11, 2011
Only an ethics rooted in the divinely revealed truth of creation-as-gift and creator-as-love can coherently and adequately make sense of the universal experience of ought.

Thoughts About Oughts
Christopher O. Tollefsen, May 13, 2011
The requirements of natural reason in the pursuit of goods provide a more adequate starting point for moral reflection than the theological considerations in which moral reflection should come to its fruition.

Thaddeus Kozinski, The Good, the Right, and Theology (via Peter Hawthorne)

Jacques Maritain’s "Democratic Faith": Heretical or Orthodox?
By Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Zenit: THE POLITICAL PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
Thaddeus Kozinski Makes an Argument for a Catholic Confessional State