Some Queries about Theological Ethics

Even the holy one of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before one can recognise him as holy; he says this about himself too: Why do you call me (whom you see) good? No one is good (the archetype of the good) except the one God (whom you do not see).

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4: 409.

On this point, it is pleasant to find that Kant is at one with Hume. The moral of Hume’s great Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is, I think, often misunderstood. On the face of it the Dialogues concern the existence and nature of the deity, and for much of their length this is indeed the topic. But in the final section the focus shifts, to the consternation of many commentators. Hume even seems to give the game to the defender of natural theology, Cleanthes, and in doing so goes sharply against the run of the argument, which has been won throughout by the sceptic Philo. It is especially surprising given that the two preceding sections bring up the problem of evil, and as even the modest Philo says, ‘here I triumph’. He triumphs, obviously, over anyone using the argument to design: Cleanthes does not only have to show that the existence of a perfectly good, just, loving and omnipotent deity is compatible with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves, but that the tearful nature of the vale is actually an argument for the perfection and omnipotence of the deity. It cannot be done. ¹

So why the concessive ending? The extraordinary reversal comes in the final dialogue. This is the sceptical Philo speaking:

All the sciences almost lead us insensibly to acknowledge a first intelligent author; and their authority is often so much the greater, as they do not directly profess that intention. . .to what pitch of pertinacious obstinacy must a philosopher in this age have attained, who can now doubt of a supreme intelligence? ²

Hume well-understood, and at least in that sense sympathised with, the appeal of the argument to design, although as a sceptic he must have been perfectly cheerful about the possibility that it leads us into an illusion. Are we to read this as indicating a residual religious spirit flickering in the depths of the great infidel? We must read on to Philo’s next words:

I ask the Theist, if he does not allow, that there is a great and immeasurable, because incomprehensible difference between the human and the divine mind: The more pious he is, the more readily will he assent to the affirmative, and the more will he be disposed to magnify the difference: He will even assert, that the difference is of a nature which cannot be too much magnified. I next turn to the Atheist, who, I assert, is only nominally so, and can never possibly be in earnest; and I ask him, whether, from the coherence and apparent sympathy in all the parts of this world, there be not a certain degree of analogy among all the operations of Nature, in every situation and in every age; whether the rotting of a turnip, the generation of an animal, and the structure of human thought, be not energies that probably bear some remote analogy to each other: It is impossible he can deny it: He will readily acknowledge it. Having obtained this concession, I push him still further in his retreat; and I ask him, if it be not probable, that the principle which first arranged, and still maintains order in this universe, bears not also some remote inconceivable analogy to the other operations of nature, and, among the rest, to the economy of human mind and thought. However reluctant, he must give his assent. Where then, cry I to both these antagonists, is the subject of your dispute? The Theist allows, that the original intelligence is very different from human reason: The Atheist allows, that the original principle of order bears some remote analogy to it. Will you quarrel, Gentlemen, about the degrees, and enter into a controversy, which admits not of any precise meaning, nor consequently of any determination? ³

At this point Hume is revealing the true point of application of his scepticism. This is not primarily about ‘the existence of God’. The surprise is that this is no longer worth contending. It is about the implications—for practice, emotion, morals, hopes, fears, for the whole business of living—that are usually supposed to follow on from that. In other words for the purpose of scepticism about the practices of ‘vulgar’ religion, Hume realises he does not need to contest the bare assertion of the existence of God. That can be left lying on one side. It becomes a pointless issue so long as the argument to design gets you to no usable conception of the nature of a deity. As Wittgenstein said in a different context, nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can be said.

This is Hume’s transformation of the subject. Natural religion relies on the powers of human reason to deliver belief in the existence and nature of God. It is this that concerns the Dialogues. Hume destroys its importance, and so by the end does not even bother to fight about its bare truth—and that’s the point of Philo’s concessions. If Pamphilius awards the prize to Cleanthes, it is a supreme irony, because the judicious reader can see that by then all Cleanthes’s teeth have been drawn: he has become effectively indistinguishable from the sceptic Philo.

This is of course a very surprising turn—so surprising that very few people who have argued about the existence of God have understood it, then or subsequently. They suppose that with the words ‘God exists’ come a whole crowd of implications: consolations for life’s sufferings, things to expect, things to hope for, instructions how to behave, rituals to go in for, bits to cut off, especially qualified experts to tell you how to keep on the right side of the Supreme Being, and so on. But if the words signify no more than the conclusion of the design argument, nothing whatsoever follows. The most you have is something bearing a remote analogy to human intelligence, and to many other natural things such as planets or turnips, and which caused a world. If we can determine what to expect, how to behave, who to admire, which behaviour to reject, from the world as we experience it, well and good, and Hume presented a naturalist or secular view of ethics arguing that we could. But if you could not do so, then turning your gaze on the supernatural would not help. Either way, we are on our own.

Perhaps the clearest expression of this line of thought comes from part XI (‘Of Particular Providence and Of a Future State’) of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

You find certain phenomena in nature. You seek a cause or author. You imagine that you have found him. You afterwards become so enamoured of this offspring of your brain, that you imagine it impossible, but he must produce something greater and more perfect than the present scene of things, which is so full of ill and disorder. You forget, that this superlative intelligence and benevolence are entirely imaginary, or, at least, without any foundation in reason; and that you have no ground to ascribe to him any qualities, but what you see he has actually exerted and displayed in his productions. Let your gods, therefore, O philosophers, be suited to the present appearances of nature: and presume not to alter these appearances by arbitrary suppositions, in order to suit them to the attributes, which you so fondly ascribe to your deities. ⁴

Hume gives the conclusion:

While we argue from the course of nature, and infer a particular intelligent cause, which first bestowed, and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle, which is both uncertain and useless. It is uncertain; because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human experience. It is useless; because our knowledge of this cause being derived entirely from the course of nature, we can never, according to the rules of just reasoning, return back from the cause with any new inference, or making additions to the common and experienced course of nature, establish any new principles of conduct and behaviour. ⁵

Hume’s transformation of the problem is the discovery that humanity can only check out of Hotel Supernatural with whichever baggage it brings with it. If you or your culture hate homosexuals that is what you will find when you interrogate God’s word, either as it bubbles up in your own brain, or as you read the sacred texts. If you or your culture think women are of less value than men, that is what you will find in turn. If you are fed up with war, you will find instructions to turn the other cheek; if later you are minded to steal your neighbours’ land, then turn the page and you will read God’s word telling you to go right ahead. If you are a slave-owning culture, you will find advice on who to sell or where to buy slaves. If alongside your piety you believe that witches blight crops, you will find a God who tells you to kill witches.

I fear that for the most part this is right (I explain the qualification shortly). Nor would it surprise some kinds of theologian: the apophatic traditions should find little to argue with in Hume. This is why in practice religions take their ethics from traditions and texts rather than direct commerce with the supernatural. But traditions and texts, being human productions, are pretty unreliable guides. We do not have to get very far into the Old Testament, the Psalms, for instance, to discover the qualities that appeal to their authors: ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’. ‘For thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly’. ‘Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest’. And so on and so on with misogyny, slavery, racism, and the glorification of homicide all rampant. ⁶

Again, the persona of Jesus in the Gospels is not as innocent as he is usually painted. He is regrettably sectarian: ‘Go not into the way of the gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel’. ⁷ In a similar vein He refuses help to the non-Jewish woman from Canaan with the chilling racist remark: ‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to dogs’. He wants us to be gentle, meek, and mild, but is himself far from it: ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?’. ⁸ The episode of the Gadarene swine shows him to share the then-popular belief that mental illness is caused by possession by devils: a wicked belief that has been the excuse for untold sadism over the centuries. It also suggests that animal lives—also anybody else’s property rights in livestock—have no value. ⁹ You do not have to be an especially soggy tree-hugger to regret the outrageous events of the fig tree in Bethany. ¹⁰

I said that for the most part we cannot check out of Hotel Supernatural with more baggage than we brought into it. The qualification concerns the overall moral tone or atmosphere that the religious spirit engenders. We might think here of a distinction between theology, with its theories, systems, doctrines and question marks on the one hand, and religious practice on the other. Even if theology must be silent, as Hume argues, is it not possible that with eyes fixed on eternity, the quietly practising religious adept has a different attitude to life and its problems? Religious practices serve various functions, clearly enough, and one of them might be to heighten and intensify a consciousness of morality and its demands, or to steer that consciousness in one direction or another.

No doubt this is true, but, of course, the actual moral tone will vary, while the hubristic sense that the universe itself is on our side gives people a very dangerous instrument: a megaphone through which to bellow the righteousness of their lives or their demands. When they do, as my initial quotation from Kant reminds us, we simply have to test the waters ourselves. Suppose we then find that in some traditions an adept might have been taught to be more stoical, or submissive, or even apathetic; perhaps crippled by the burden of original sin, or abject in the consciousness of what Father O’Donovan calls ‘radical disobedience’. He or she may have taken from their practice a cosier relationship with human suffering altogether, as words like submission or even atonement echo in the chambers of the mind. Nietzsche thought, plausibly enough, that of all religions only Buddhism took on itself the task of actually alleviating human suffering. ¹¹ But if the others offer recipes for putting up with it, perhaps that is enough?

I do not think so. Fatalism is a poor recipe for life, and putting up with suffering a second-best to alleviating it. But I fear that there is certainly evidence enough of Christianity’s cosy relationship with suffering, quite apart from the practices of flagellants or the quasi-pornographic immersion in it that you find, for example, in counter-reformation Spanish art. In a very different climate, Scotland for instance, opposition to any attempt to alleviate pain met with storms of theological opposition until late in the nineteenth century, although by then doctors did not face the fate that befell Eufame Macalyane, a lady of rank, who, being charged with seeking the aid of Agnes Sampson for the relief of pain at the time of the birth of her two sons, was burned alive on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh in 1591.

Here is Hume one final time:

How happens it then, said PHILO, if vulgar superstition be so salutary to society, that all history abounds so much with accounts of its pernicious consequences on public affairs? Factions, civil wars, persecutions, subversions of government, oppression, slavery; these are the dismal consequences which always attend its prevalency over the minds of men. If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of. ¹²

Enough of my general orientation; I now turn to Professor O’Donovan’s thoughtful piece.

I applaud Professor O’Donovan when he says that ‘Reflective observation of moral experience cannot proceed from outside. In reflecting upon it, we invest ourselves in it, extending it towards self-awareness and self-criticism, refining its categories and perfecting its reasonableness’. Ethics is not primarily a reflective as opposed to an existential practice; it requires both. Philosophers are professionally wedded to the provision of theory: ‘Morals themselves’, said Kant, ‘remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly’. ¹³ We need reflection, but then we need immersion for the reflection to issue in our practices and our lives.

I am not sure what Professor O’Donovan is suggesting when he talks of this immersion leading to the ‘renewal and recovery of human agency’. At some historical junctures there may be something like that. Kant, for example, wrote during the great dawn of movements that, for the first time in history, fully respected the dignity and the autonomy and rational agency that we all share, so had some excuse for thinking in terms not of renewal or recovery, for these ideas were being forged for the first time, but certainly in terms of progress, although the imperfect way in which that dawn broke, in revolutions in America and France, immediately showed how hard it is for ideals to filter through to practice. But renewal and recovery imply that things were once better, and I doubt if this is so, unless we take something like the story of the Garden of Eden as literally true.

Those who nail their colours to Kant’s mast are not likely to agree with Professor O’Donovan when he writes ‘that Philosophical Ethics is as such underdetermined, with no conclusions of its own, is, I would think, the verdict of its own most thoughtful self-interrogations’. Certainly the pale sage of Königsberg has been criticised for offering only the empty forms of moral advice. But it is a long business to assess those criticisms, and the contemporary academy is bursting with writers anxious to deflect them.

Even if we abandon Kant to his fate, I am not sure that the charge stands when we look at philosophers more widely. Philosophical ethics does tend to conclusions, celebrating values of human flourishing, happiness, good will, kindness, empathy, and the thousand and one other traits of character that we like to hear attributed to ourselves. Turning to the dark side you would find a fair consensus among moral philosophers that ingratitude, treachery, cruelty, manipulation, deception and dozens of other such traits and activities belong firmly in the catalogue of vices. Of course, one might indeed say that these are not conclusions of philosophy’s own; they are no more than distillates from the common values of the better part of humankind—better in both senses. But for a rational and modest philosophy, such as one might find in Aristotle or Cicero or Hume, that is not a criticism but a virtue. One might also find outlying philosophers such as Nietzsche, who want to drive a coach and horses through the conventional lists. But then I doubt if worldwide theologians are unanimous either. On the face of it some want to kill infidels; others want to pray for them. With or without religion, ethics is an essentially contested subject.

Certainly, we can agree with Professor O’Donovan that ‘to be sure, in this as in other matters we must reconcile ourselves to never saying the last word; but that does not mean there is nothing to be said, only that there is too much’. But a conclusion can be properly so called even if it can be supplemented with elaboration, explanation, commentary and illustration.

I have, no doubt, presented a monochromatic picture of what I take to be the influence of religion upon ethics. I have not dwelt on the word ‘hope’, and I think Father O’Donovan would hold that against me. Thus he writes of ‘a belief in the ultimate coherence of past and future as a sequence of accomplishment of redemption and promise of fulfilment’. I confess, however, that words like redemption and fulfilment, so easy to say within a theological or religious culture, ring very hollow to my ear. ‘Redemption’ I take in its primary sense of the freeing of a captive by means of payment of a ransom; the practice to which the Christian story is analogous. But whether we look at the history of humankind, or the history of our own lives, I see no sequence of redemptions; I see no universal need for ransoms, and nobody who is demanding them. I can, in bleak moments, conceive myself as a kind of captive: a slave to unbidden desires and needs, ‘heteronomous’ as Kant would have called it. But I don’t want anybody to pay to get me out, nor do I believe that anybody apart from myself could do so. And all I can do is to soldier on, trying to suppress the bad bits and to put my best foot forwards.

As for promise of fulfilment, well, taken in general I hope that many human ambitions and aspirations never get fulfilled; I am quite selective about the ones for which I wish a fair wind. Then too, in my own life, I do not know that I lack any particular fulfilment, and I would certainly be deeply suspicious of anything offering the promise of such a thing—a kind of metaphysical L’Oréal advertisement, promising me the earth because I am worth it. I am not sufficiently narcissistic to be the ideal audience for such crude persuasions. I can of course regret the paths not taken, or wish and dream like anyone else. But I have a sneaking suspicion that I would not in general be more fulfilled if my wishes and dreams came true. I am acutely conscious of the wisdom of those fairy stories in which it is catastrophic for people to have their wishes answered.