Abstract
Jean Porter’s natural law theory and my divine command theory differ less than one might expect. Two differences that remain are that, with respect to deductivism, the view that we can deduce our moral obligations from human nature, we agree that human nature is insufficiently specific, but she does not acknowledge the place of revealed divine law in later scholasticism or the role for what Scotus calls ‘dispensations’. With respect to eudaimonism, the view that our choices are for the sake of happiness, I do not agree that life presents itself to us integrated under the conception of a single way of life. Even in Aquinas there is a tension between his eudaimonism and his view that the love of God for God’s own sake is the distinctive mark of charity, and that charity toward the neighbor requires us to promote the neighbor’s good for the neighbor’s sake and not our own.
I am a long-standing admirer of Jean Porter’s work, and she and I have been engaged in dialogue ever since I had a year at Notre Dame in the Center for the Philosophy of Religion. I want to start by saying that even though she is a natural law theorist and I am a divine command theorist, we disagree much less than one might at first think. Two of the great traditional sticking points between natural law theorists and divine command theorists have been what I will call ‘deductivism’ and ‘eudaimonism’. Deductivism is the view that we can deduce from human nature a set of obligations that are both universal and sufficiently specific to allow determinate prescription of action. Jean Porter and I are in agreement about the falsehood of deductivism. This has put her at odds with some influential natural lawyers, and she is to be commended for sticking to her guns. In particular, in the paper for this conference she has distanced herself from Philippa Foot, and I agree wholeheartedly with this. She and I disagree, however, about eudaimonism, the view that reason tells us to do whatever we do for the sake of our eudaimonia, traditionally but inadequately translated as ‘happiness.’
I want to qualify in one way my agreement about deductivism. In the paper for this conference, Porter talks about the need for specification of the generalities given us by reflection upon human nature. I agree with the need for specification. But she thinks the scholastics, while they are of course Christians, make direct appeals to revealed divine law less than we might expect in the formulation of moral norms, even among the theologians. I want to make a historical point about this, and then a philosophical point. The historical point is that she has reached this conclusion about the scholastics because she has attended to the early scholastics, and neglected the developments in scholasticism after Thomas. It is not true of Scotus, or of Ockham, or of the philosophers and theologians who followed them, like Biel, that revealed divine law played a relatively minor role. For Scotus, the second table of the Decalogue is contingent, and is not natural law in the strict sense, because it is not known from its terms. We know it because God revealed it to us, and Scotus thinks God can also reveal dispensations from it; but that is a longer question. Jean Porter’s project is not, however, only or even primarily historical. She thinks these scholastic reflections are useful for us, now, as we reflect about the relation between human nature as evolutionary biology reveals it to us, and the moral law. Here I want to make a philosophical or theological point. Evolutionary biology gives us a picture of human nature, I want to say, that is mixed in its evaluative import. Some of the inclinations we have inherited are to be trusted, and some of them are not. We need principles to discriminate these. I think we should hold to a significant role for special revelation here at two levels: first, in the revelation of general principles about how to live, for example for Christians the revelation contained in the Sermon on the Mount, and second, in the revelation by the Holy Spirit in particular circumstances of what God wills that a person should do in just those circumstances.
Now the other sticking point I mentioned, eudaimonism. Here Jean Porter and I disagree, but she is more circumspect in the paper for this conference than I have seen her to be elsewhere. Nonetheless, eudaimonism emerges, for example in her view that reason operating practically pursues the good, comprehensively considered, and that this can be understood in terms of some conception of a way of life which will integrate diverse particular goods in some coherent way. My problem is that life does not present itself to us integrated under the conception of a single way of life. It presents us with tragic dilemmas in which genuine goods compete, and this is true for believers in God as well as non-believers. In particular, there is the tension between what I call ‘self-indexed’ and ‘non-self-indexed’ goods. Even for Thomas Aquinas there is a tension between his eudaimonism and his view that the love of God for God’s own sake is the distinctive mark of charity, and that charity toward the neighbor requires us to promote the neighbor’s good for the neighbor’s sake and not our own. Jean Porter thinks this tension can be resolved. But I myself think that we should, with Scotus and Kant, acknowledge that the love of the good in itself requires us to subordinate our own good, our own eudaimonia, to something that has no essential reference to us at all.