Why People Matter

A Christian Engagement with Rival Views of Human Significance

Kilner, John F., John F. Kilner

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780801049408
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493406623
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Amid current arguments related to human life and dignity, Christians must be clear about how their faith speaks to such concerns and what other outlooks have to say. This book brings together noted ethicists--Russell DiSilvestro, David P. Gushee, Amy Laura Hall, John F. Kilner, Gilbert C. Meilaender, Scott B. Rae, and Patrick T. Smith--to make a Christian case for human dignity. It offers a robust critique of five influential alternative positions, including the emerging outlook of transhumanism, showing how a Christian view supports the crucial idea that people matter in a way other views cannot.

part 1
Grounding Significance in Humanity

2
Persons Are Not Interchangeable

Utilitarianism and Human Significance

Gilbert C. Meilaender

The principle of utility, at least as it is commonly used in ethical theorizing, is framed in terms of aggregate goods—promoting the greatest good for the greatest number of people. By contrast, the dignity bestowed on persons because of their relation to God is inherently individualizing (which, as I will note later, should not be equated with individualism, as we often understand it). This dignity bestows on each person a singular and unrepeatable identity. As the late Ralph McInerny, a discerning Christian philosopher, once wrote,

The point of a proper name is that it [is] not common to many, and yet many people do bear identical names. . . . But even when two persons have the same proper name it does not become a common noun, like “man.” All the John Smiths that have been, are, and will be have nothing in common but the name; it does not name something common to them all. There is an inescapable nominalism here. God calls us all by our proper name, and He is unlikely to confuse one John Smith with another.1

This contrast—between the aggregating nature of utility and the individualizing nature of dignity—lies at the heart of some of the questions that most trouble us when we think about how we ought to live.

Sidgwick and the Dualism of Practical Reason

One need not be, like McInerny, a Christian philosopher in order to sense the problem. For example, Henry Sidgwick, though little known today outside professional philosophy circles, was one of the most influential British moral philosophers in the last half of the nineteenth century. His book The Methods of Ethics, which he labored over for years and which went through seven (always carefully revised) editions, is still today one of the classic texts in the tradition of utilitarian thought.2

Perhaps strangely, however, although the Methods attends to most of the issues that have been important for utilitarian ethics, it is actually dominated by a somewhat different problem—what Sidgwick called “the dualism of practical reason.” Utilitarians think that when we act we are aiming to produce happiness. For Sidgwick, happiness was reducible to pleasure, but some utilitarians have held that there are other ways of determining the greatest good for human life. At any rate, Sidgwick thought that we should aim to produce the greatest aggregate happiness possible. But, of course, someone else might take a different view, believing that I should aim at my individual happiness rather than the aggregate general happiness. Hence, Sidgwick recognized two forms of hedonism, which he called egoistic and universalistic hedonism. The universal form of hedonism was utilitarianism, the theory to which Sidgwick was committed. But he acknowledged that it might not be irrational for a person to pursue his own happiness rather than the general happiness.

Practical reason seems, then, to speak with two voices. On the one hand, Sidgwick argues at length that it is reasonable for us to seek the happiness of the larger whole (“the universe of sentient beings”) to which we belong. On the other hand, it is also reasonable for us to act in whatever way is most conducive to our own happiness. These two voices cannot be reconciled, or so Sidgwick thought. Utilitarian though he was, and believing as he did that it is our obligation to pursue the greatest happiness for the greatest number, he nevertheless held that ethical egoism was not an irrational position to hold. Why he should have thought this, given his utilitarian commitments, is, as his biographer puts it, “one of the most important and puzzling problems arising out of over a century of commentary on the Methods.”3

Sidgwick was the son of a clergyman, but as a young man he had experienced a crisis of faith. He remained wistfully eager to believe but unable to do so—to the degree that John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said of him, “He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove it wasn’t and hope that it was.”4 It may well, I suspect, have been the lingering vestiges of Christian belief that made it so difficult for Sidgwick simply to dismiss the claims of the self and subordinate them to the general happiness. An important passage in the Methods emphasizes the distinctive significance of individual persons: “It would be contrary to Common Sense to deny that the distinction between any one individual and any other is real and fundamental, and that consequently ‘I’ am concerned with the quality of my existence as an individual in a sense, fundamentally important, in which I am not concerned with the quality of the existence of other individuals.”5 Were persons simply parts of a single whole, this dualism would vanish. But it was impossible for Sidgwick to think of persons that way so long as the remnants of Christian belief continued to shape his thinking.

Thus, writes his biographer, for Sidgwick moral reasoning contains “a potentially explosive contradiction, waiting to emerge, once the religious worldview fades. Put differently, Sidgwick questions, in a way that other secular utilitarians did not, the degree to which the utilitarian evolution of morality may in fact, perhaps paradoxically, have depended on the evolution of Christianity.”6 The problem, at least in Sidgwick’s mind, was a simple one, and it consumed much of his intellectual energy throughout his life: If the world could no longer be believed to be one in which God would ultimately honor the distinctive dignity of each individual, what possible reason could there be for not simply pursuing one’s own good here and now?7

Sidgwick spent many of his adult years investigating the claims of parapsychology. In 1882 he became the founder and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, in which he engaged with others in “an endeavor to reenchant the universe.”8 The sober philosopher found himself consulting mediums at séances. He engaged in careful study of telepathy (that is, transferring information from one person to another in some way other than through any of our normal sensory channels). He had a deep interest in reports of ghosts and haunted houses.

Why was he so committed to this research? Because he needed evidence of an afterlife if the universe were to be re-enchanted. For if the universe lacked moral order, if utilitarian virtue that aimed at the aggregate good of all sentient beings were to go unrewarded, no one could say that it was irrational for individual persons to promote as best they could their own individual good.

That was Sidgwick’s problem: he was committed to a utilitarian theory that seemed to lose the distinctiveness of individuals in its search for an aggregate good. That distinctiveness might once have been defended in Christian terms, and those terms held just enough sway over Sidgwick that he could not discount the fundamental moral significance of each individual person, even though he no longer pictured the world in Christian terms. The only remaining defenders of individual distinctiveness were those who asserted that one’s own good rather than an aggregate good ought to be a person’s aim. Given his vestigial commitment to individual distinctiveness, Sidgwick could not claim that their egoistic view was contrary to reason. Yet given his commitment to utilitarianism, Sidgwick also regarded pursuit of the general good as reasonable and right. Hence the dualism of practical reason.

Christianity and Individual Distinctiveness

For Christians the defense of individual distinctiveness over against aggregate utility will necessarily take a different shape. Sidgwick’s problem was that he could find no answer for those who asserted the reasonableness of seeking to maximize one’s own individual good. Therefore, although committed to utilitarianism, he could find no way to rebut the claims of egoism, leaving him with a practical reason that could go in either of these directions. But Christians, who know that their life is “hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3), are eternally secure and should be freed from the temptation to suppose that they need to seek their own happiness. Hence, for Christians, utilitarianism will be problematic for different reasons, especially two that may be expressed as questions: (1) Do we wrong others in any way if we regard them simply as parts of a larger whole whose aggregate good we seek? (2) Do we wrong ourselves in any way if we think of ourselves simply as agents in service of promoting a general good? As a way to express the wrongs we might do to others or ourselves if we think solely in terms of promoting aggregate utility, the language of dignity has increasingly been used; after briefly characterizing our human nature, I will return to these questions about utility and dignity.

For Christians to explore these topics requires that we think about what we might call the strange two-sidedness of our creaturely nature.9 In The Magician’s Nephew, sixth in the Chronicles of Narnia series, C. S. Lewis imaginatively depicts this. The great lion Aslan creates the land of Narnia and its inhabitants. In the course of doing so, he sets apart some animals as talking beasts, the primary inhabitants of Narnia. “He was going to and fro among the animals. And every now and then he would go up to two of them (always two at a time) and touch their noses with his.” These animals “instantly left their own kinds and followed him,” while the others wandered away. Then Aslan breathes on the chosen ones, and in the “deepest, wildest voice” the children had ever heard says: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. . . . Be talking beasts.” That these are talking beasts points to something more. “Creatures,” says Aslan, “I give you yourselves.”10 They are no longer simply instinctive creatures. They can be other than they are, distancing themselves from themselves; for that is what it means that they are given themselves.

Lewis here imaginatively depicts a distinctive feature of human life, as Christians have understood it. Christians have learned to think of humans as complex creatures, located in time and place but simultaneously able to transcend that location at least in thought. “Man’s involvement in finiteness and his transcendence over it” is, Reinhold Niebuhr suggests, “the basic paradox of human existence.”11

A simple, if unlikely, illustration is one I have used to explicate what Niebuhr characterizes as a paradox.12 If I fall from the top of a fifty-story building, the law of gravity takes over, just as it does if we drop a rock from that building; for we are finite beings, located in space and time and subject to natural necessity. Nevertheless, we are also free and able, at least to some extent, to transcend the limits of nature and history. Therefore, as I fall from that building, there are truths about my experience that could not be captured by any explanation in terms of mass and velocity. Something different happens in my fall than in the rock’s fall, for this falling object is also a subject characterized by self-awareness. I can know myself as a falling object, which means that I can to some degree “distance” myself from that object. Hence, I both am and am not that falling object. I cannot simply be equated with it. I am that object and am freed from it, freed by my capacity to transcend it.

Similarly, I am the person constituted by the story of my life, a story marked in important ways by membership in various communities. I cannot simply be someone else with a different history, nor can I simply be a generic human. Yet I can also, at least to some extent, be any human being in the sense that I can step into another’s story, see the worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Grounding Significance in Humanity
• Part 2: Grounding Significance in Science
• Part 3: Grounding Significance in God
• Conclusion
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover