Theological Ethics and Moral Value Phenomena

The Experience of Values

Steven C. van den Heuvel, Patrick Nullens, Angela Roothaan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138087774
• eBook ISBN: 9781351615501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The experience of moral values is often side-lined in discussions about moral reasoning, and yet our values define a large part of our moral motives, standards and expectations. Theological Ethics and Moral Value Phenomena explores whether the experience of a meeting point of the immanent and the transcendent, i.e. the moral self and God, can be the source of our values.

The book starts by arguing for a greater theological engagement with value ethics, personalism and the phenomenological method by drawing on thinkers such as Max Scheler and William James. It then provides an understanding of the social and religious dimension of the valuing person, demonstrating the importance of the emotional, as well as the cognitive, dimension of value experience. Finally, this value perspective is utilised to engage with current moral issues such as professional ethics, environmental ethics, economical ethics and family ethics.

Integrating the concepts of religious experience, moral motivation, and subjective and objective value within a broad framework of Christian theology and philosophy, this is vital reading for any scholar of Theology and Philosophy with an interest in ethics and moral reasoning.

Part 1

Return to the classics

1 A pragmatic ontology of religious value experience

A discussion of Charles Taylor, William James and Max Scheler

Angela Roothaan

Why a pragmatic ontology is important

Many of the conflicts of today’s world are inspired by, or at least clothed in the language of, religious difference.¹ Depending on what part of the world one lives in, we see conflicts between Sikhs and Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims, Muslims and Jews or Christians and Muslims. What is at stake seems to be differing values, inspired by different interpretations of religious experience. To understand this phenomenon, we should investigate the sources of religious experience—and the ontological commitments that go with them. The naturalistic anthropology that has been common in moral philosophy in the modern age cannot account for the claims of believers that religious value experience opens up to truly transcendent goods. This anthropology understands belief as mainly a choice, answering a personal need for hope in a bliss that goes beyond this life, thus ignoring the fact that such belief rests on commitments to what is experienced as reality. In this chapter I will discuss three thinkers who have tried to widen our understanding of human motivation to include religious value experience, and who did so in opposition to a naturalist understanding of human beliefs and behavior. At the same time, none of them wants to return to a pre-critical founding of religious belief on what has been called ontotheology, an understanding of reality that already presupposes a specific theology. In my treatment of the three thinkers, I will focus on their respective success in nevertheless adhering to the ontological commitments in religious claims of experienced objective values that motivate moral behavior.

Charles Taylor, in his 1989 work on the Sources of the Self, addressed the problem of naturalism in moral philosophy, and its failing to encompass the role of spirituality or religion in moral motivation. To mend this, he proposed an alternative by approaching moral values phenomenologically, thus creating richer descriptions of value experience. However, his moral ontology remains within the boundaries of understanding commitments as such, without really addressing the ontology to which believers commit themselves. Two earlier thinkers, William James and Max Scheler, who have also addressed the issue of religious value experience and its meaning for moral motivation, have achieved more with respect to the ontological issue by delving deeper into the Kantian roots of naturalist anthropology. In their approach, both Scheler and James have done the preparatory work for a pragmatic ontology of religious value experience which reckons with the fact that values differ according to (religious) cultures, while simultaneously recognizing that these values express experiences of the real—understood as having objective effects in moral attitudes as well as moral agency.

Max Scheler (1874–1928) made an in-depth criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy in his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. In this work he investigated the shortcomings of Kant’s moral philosophy which he saw as residing mainly in its simplistic and dualistic anthropology, reducing the human being to an uneasy marriage of reason and sensibility. This dualism made it impossible, Scheler thought, to articulate how moral agents are motivated by more or less profound values, which are non-formal (material) as well as objective in nature. Thus, Scheler transcended the cleft between universal reason, which had to remain formal on the one hand, and the natural desires of human beings which lacked any intrinsic convincing qualities, as they were cut loose from the idea of an objective good. All the same, Scheler’s ethics of values vows to keep the critical achievements of Kantian philosophy intact, and to acknowledge the necessity to be aware of the conditions of possibility of any treatment of values.

In the works of William James (1842–1910), most well known as the founder of the psychology of religion and as a pragmatist philosopher, we can also trace a profound engagement with the philosophy of Kant. Foregoing Kant’s dualism, as did Scheler, he forged a pragmatic ontology of religious experience, which implies that what motivates human agency has reality, even if it does not belong to the realm of what we can investigate by empirical means. James’s work on religious experience, I will show, can also be brought to bear on the question of value experience—explaining how the experiences that inspire what we do can be understood to spring from a wider reality (than the one that can be studied empirically). In the effects of these experiences, James holds, we can find a position that saves us from relativistic entanglement.

In what follows, we will trace several different answers to the Kantian predicament which divides reality into what is formal, moral and rational on the one hand, and what is empirical, material and purely contingent on the other. This predicament has made it very difficult to understand claims to value experiences that transcend the individual and the empirical, and not have to discard them as ontotheological grasps at hegemony and dogmatic closures of thinking. James and Scheler aim to reflect the pluralistic condition of human existence which highlights certain value systems over others, due to historical contingencies as well as cultural idiosyncrasies. Simultaneously, however, they persist in trying to understand the reality of experienced values as transcending the limitations of the human ego, as well as its social conditions. This reality has to be looked for beyond the duality of facts versus reason, in the realm of the pragmatic—of the orientation on a deep existential level which will motivate the choices that individuals make.

Moral phenomenology: Charles Taylor and his predecessors

When Charles Taylor published his Sources of the Self, he aimed to transform the philosophical discourse on morality. He criticized Anglophone ethics for its naturalist anthropology and (in a certain sense) anti-ontological stance. In his own words: “An important strand of modern naturalist consciousness has tried to hive [claims about the status and nature of human beings] off and declare [them] dispensable or irrelevant to morality” (Taylor 1989, 5). In opposition to this philosophical attitude, Taylor sees the status and nature of human beings to be at the core of morality. Who we are is at the root of what we hold to be good, of the values to which we are committed (Taylor 1982). For Taylor, the ontological and anthropological blindness of mainstream ethics relates to their restrictive purpose of either describing natural propensities of moral agents, or analyzing the meaning of moral concepts. In his own words, both the empiricist and rationalist accounts of morality have been under a “great epistemological cloud” (Taylor 1989, 5). In order to change this situation Taylor proposed a richer description of morality, one which would include reflections on value commitments that express who we are, what we stand for, and thus motivate moral behavior. Thus, he proposed no less than a moral phenomenology (Taylor 1989, 81).

Remarkably, Taylor never referred to the works of those who had written on phenomenological ethics before him. In particular, reference to Max Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values is missed, because in this work we find a thorough phenomenological critique of both empiricist and rationalist approaches in ethics.² Nevertheless, key concepts in Taylor’s new approach, such as ‘hypergoods’ and ‘moral sources’, describe moral reality in ways that echo Scheler’s phenomenology of values. We find another echo, too, in Taylor’s idea of a moral ontology—for it resonates with the pragmatic ontology of William James, who can arguably be called a phenomenologist avant la lettre.³ Values are real, according to Taylor, insofar as they motivate actual moral behavior – —which is a pragmatic criterion of reality. James, earlier than Scheler, developed much of his new approach in opposition to Kantian anthropology and ontology (cf. e.g. James 2002, 310–319).

There is another important point that James and Scheler share with Taylor, to wit, a close connection they perceive between morality and spirituality. Taylor explains his introduction of the ‘vague term spirituality’ by pointing to the need to provide a richer articulation and description of morality than just in terms of “such issues as justice and the respect of other people’s life … , I want also to look at our sense of what underlies our own dignity, … what makes our lives meaningful and fulfilling” (Taylor 1989, 4). Writing in a more secular age, Taylor is more hesitant to use the words ‘religion’ and ‘God’, but one must conclude that he is concerned with the same field of interest that James and Scheler designated with those words. They were not just interested in religion as a social or cultural phenomenon, but rather in how, through religious value experience, our lives get meaning, and orientation.⁴

We can conclude that Taylor revived investigations that had been taken up nearly a hundred years earlier by the pragmatist philosopher William James and by phenomenological ethicist Max Scheler. However, whilst uncovering the idea of a moral phenomenology once again, Taylor’s work left several questions unresolved—especially relating to the ontology of value experience. As I indicated in the introduction to this chapter, the question of ontological commitments has to be addressed in order to better understand the impetus of religious value experience on moral motivation. I will argue that James and Scheler, in their respective works, by returning to Kant can be understood to provide a more substantial moral phenomenology than Taylor’s. They do so by touching on the dialectics between the objectivity of values on the one hand, and culture and history on the other.

The limitations of Taylor’s moral phenomenology

Another chapter in this book (Timmerman) deals with Taylor’s ontology of moral values, as well as the issues of pluralism and relativism raised by it. I will try not to repeat what has been said there, but will focus on those aspects of the ontological problematic that ‘ask’ for a return to James and Scheler. We find these aspects at the end of Sources of the Self. In the chapter on ‘The Conflicts of Modernity’, the limitations of Taylor’s treatment of objectivity versus history and culture become pointedly clear—his views are rooted in his distribution of moral sources for modernity in three domains: the “original theistic” grounding, the “naturalism of disengaged reason,” and “romantic expressivism” and its later successors (Taylor 1989, 495). With these three domains, Taylor articulated, in a grand scheme, a history of Western core values and their roots. The first domain encompasses the immense period of a thousand years which, in hindsight, can be called the Christian era. It is characterized by a belief in the good (God) as the source of being. The second and the third domains both replace the good as the foundation of values with the subject—which is seen as the instance of universal reason in the second domain, and as the instance of creativity and uniqueness in the third.

Philosophically, for Taylor the main mouthpiece of the third domain is Nietzsche who stressed that we humans can never jump across the shadow of our interpretations and instincts to reach a realm of objective knowledge—moral or amoral. For Taylor, all three realms lead in the end to a similar point: that of the inescapable subjectivity of modern morality. Through developments that have stressed the importance of personal intentionality, theism has become a matter of faith, and naturalism is incapable of saying anything objective about morality. Since Nietzsche made the subjectivity (which in itself is not united, as the subject itself is torn to different sides) of morality one of his main points of argument, it is understandable that Taylor focuses on his ideas to answer the questions around moral ontology. In the end, these questions boil down to the possibility that there is a foundation for what humans deem to be good in a ‘real’ (ontological) sense. There, Taylor doesn’t seriously challenge Nietzsche, and accepts, from the standpoint of moral epistemology, that we have to be either relativists (no moral claim can outweigh another in the end) or perspectivists (we have to have faith in some moral claim, as we stand up for something which is of concern to us). The reason for this conclusion is that moral reasoning cannot prove any moral worldview to produce only good. For the religious philosopher, this leads to the position that religion is some inner experience to which one can bear witness (testify),⁵ but it cannot fully enter the realm of philosophical argumentation. Therefore, its ontological commitments remain out of reach.

In the final pages of Sources of the Self, Taylor makes the problem of a possible objective and shared root of our values very acute, when he writes that where history has shown that all possible grand ideals, theistic and atheistic, might at some point lead to evil, to destruction, to killing fields or crusades, it makes sense to modern minds to adopt “a stripped-down secular outlook, without any religious dimension or radical hope in history” (Taylor 1989, 520). This, he says, may be a reasonable way to live with the dilemma that inspired views may lead to contrary acts, but it makes us pay too high a price, as it cuts out the most important part of our humanity—our openness to spiritual inspiration and aspiration. To avoid this conclusion, Taylor proposes to maintain philosophical openness to a spiritual and religious worldview, whilst he cannot say that the one that he favors (Christianity) refers in one way or another to a reality. He concludes by stretching philosophy beyond the knowable, opening it up to hope:

a hope that I see implicit in Judeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and in its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided.

(Taylor 1989, 521)

Even though a philosophy of hope can be of great interest, I think Sources of the Self has left the issue of the ontology of religious values prematurely. Taylor’s conclusion in this work does not move beyond Kant’s recognition of the importance of hope for human beings, while pushing it outside of the domain of reality as well as moral certainty. In the end, for Taylor, hope is nothing other than a placebo for a lack of certainty where values are concerned.

It is here that we should return to the contributions to understanding religious value experience made by Scheler and James. In my view, the reason that they persist in philosophizing about religious experience in its full versions, and not just as a Kantian ‘beyond reason’, lies in their more profound discussion of Kant, touching on the issue of the relationship between a belief in universal reason and the objectivity of values. While Kant tried to separate the two and thus compartmentalized reason on the one hand and a religious value experience on the other, Scheler and James problematized this divorce and questioned whether phenomenology or pragmatism could provide alternative accounts of their potential connection. For one, Scheler provided a critique of the naturalisti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the experience of values
• Part 1 Return to the classics
• Part 2 The validating person
• Part 3 Value ethics in practice
• Index