Hospitality as Holiness

Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity

Luke Bretherton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351930406
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We live amid increasing ethical plurality and fragmentation while at the same time more and more questions of moral gravity confront us. Some of these questions are new, such as those around human cloning and genetics. Other questions that were previously settled have re-emerged, such as those around the place of religion in politics. Responses to such questions are diverse, numerous and often vehemently contested. Hospitality as Holiness seeks to address the underlying question facing the church within contemporary moral debates: how should Christians relate to their neighbours when ethical disputes arise? The problems the book examines centre on what the nature and basis of Christian moral thought and action is, and in the contemporary context, whether moral disputes may be resolved with those who do not share the same framework as Christians. Bretherton establishes a model - that of hospitality - for how Christians and non-Christians can relate to each other amid moral diversity. This book will appeal to those interested in the broad question of the relationship between reason, tradition, natural law and revelation in theology, and more specifically to those engaged with questions about plurality, tolerance and ethical conflict in Christian ethics and medical ethics.

Part I
The Problem of Moral Plurality

Chapter 1
Alasdair MacIntyre’s diagnosis of the contemporary context

The purpose of engaging with Alasdair MacIntyre’s work is to use MacIntyre as a dialogue partner in the attempt to formulate a conception of how Christians are to engage with non-Christians, which is both rooted in the Christian tradition and attentive to the reality of the contemporary context. As noted in the introduction, MacIntyre offers an account of the contemporary context as distinct from ages past in its inability to resolve ethical disputes. In addition he gives an account of Christian ethical thought and action as constitutive of a tradition that has no immediately available or obvious common measure by which it can resolve ethical disputes with other, non-Christian, traditions. But the question is, is MacIntyre’s diagnosis correct? To answer this question it must be discerned whether MacIntyre paints an accurate picture of the contemporary context of moral debate, whether his substantive theory is sufficiently open to theological development, and whether a conception of relations between Christians and non-Christians shaped by MacIntyre’s moral philosophy can at the same time be faithful to the presuppositions of Christianity.

In this chapter I outline MacIntyre’s diagnosis of the contemporary context. His diagnosis is situated within an assessment of MacIntyre’s first order theory of tradition-guided rationality and his second order meta-theory of how different traditions resolve disputes. Included in the discussion of his meta-theory is an analysis of why MacIntyre believes Thomism is the optimal instance of a tradition and an account of his understanding of incommensurability.

The incoherence of contemporary moral debates

MacIntyre’s position is that, even though different traditions are incommensurable in their conceptions of truth and justice, these traditions can, over time, resolve ethical disputes between themselves. However, according to MacIntyre, the development of liberalism involves, simultaneously, the development of individualism and bureaucratic rationality. These elements – liberalism, individualism and bureaucratic rationality –fragment traditions and the structures of community central to creating a just and rational society. Consequently, the fragmentation of traditions makes resolving disputes between those holding different viewpoints extremely difficult, so that public debate on moral problems is now interminable, highly conflictual (sometimes deadly), and stifles rational deliberation between contending parties.

MacIntyre’s critique of contemporary moral debate is derived directly from his first and second order substantive theories. For MacIntyre, what is rational and just demands some conception of practical rationality at work within a particular tradition’s conception of the common good. An example of this in practice is MacIntyre’s critique of the modern way of achieving translatability and rational debate. He notes that it involves translating all traditions into international English and decontextualizing the tenets of a particular tradition and hence removing the very ground – its social practices, community and history – which make any tradition coherent and rational.¹ Indeed, MacIntyre criticizes contemporary modes of reasoning and notions of justice because they lack the necessary conditions to be rational and just. These modes of reasoning lack the necessary conditions because they are based on conceptions of jus as a property (or dominium) of the individual, whereby rationality becomes the justification of the preference (or will) of such an individual, or of a particular interest group.² Given this situation, social co-operation breaks down, society is highly conflictual, and there is an inability to resolve fundamental disputes. In effect, justice becomes what the strong make it. In contemporary society the strong are the bureaucracies of nation-states and the management of capitalist corporations, both of which inherently tend towards the manipulation of people solely in pursuit of the ‘goods of effectiveness’; that is, profit, power and status.

MacIntyre uses two literary devices to illustrate the process by which he believes this situation came about. The first is a parable of catastrophe and the second is to draw a parallel with anthropological accounts of the Polynesian concept of ‘taboo’. At the opening of After Virtue MacIntyre invites us to imagine that the natural sciences suffered a catastrophe: scientists are lynched, science teaching stops, laboratories are destroyed, and books are burned. After a time, people try to reinvent science. However, all they possess are fragments detached from any knowledge of the contexts that gave them significance. They have bits of theories, instruments whose real use is forgotten, single pages of articles, and half-chapters of books. As a result, they might do ‘chemistry’, or ‘physics’, or ‘astronomy’, in the sense that they would argue about good and bad theories, or debate the theory of relativity, but what they could not do would be real science: for there would be no overall conception of what the point of science was. The crux of the parable is simple. MacIntyre states:

The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess … are fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess, indeed, simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have very largely, if not entirely lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.³

The implication of the ‘disquieting suggestion’ that modern morality is in chaos is that we lack the resources even to recognize the full extent of the disorder, much less extricate ourselves from it.

The process by which this situation came about, and its implications, becomes even clearer in MacIntyre’s discussion of the Polynesian word ‘taboo’. In the journal of his third voyage Captain Cook records how the Polynesians strictly prohibited certain practices, such as men and women eating together, and yet could offer no clear explanation for their prohibition. Forty years later, King Kamehameha II abolished taboos in Hawaii with no apparent social consequences. MacIntyre notes that anthropologists draw a variety of conclusions from this. Mary Douglas suggests that, initially, taboo rules were embedded in a context which conferred intelligibility upon them, much in the same way that Deuteronomy presupposes a certain cosmology and taxonomy to make sense of its prohibitions.⁴ Once deprived of this context and background belief the taboo rules appeared to be a set of arbitrary prohibitions, which were then eventually abandoned. For the rules had been gradually deprived of any status that could secure their authority. In the absence of the status conferred by their original context and background, and of any possible meaningful re-evaluation, such rules resisted both interpretation and justification. For when the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible too.

MacIntyre holds that this is exactly the position of liberal attempts at justification of contemporary moral norms. According to MacIntyre, analytic philosophy sought to justify our own contemporary taboos without reference to any wider context, but failed. It presupposed that morality is an autonomous field of study that does not require an overall context to make sense of it. In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry MacIntyre traces a stage in the process of growing incoherence to late Victorian ‘encyclopaedic’ thinking, as propounded by Henry Sidgwick, Adam Gifford and others. He discusses how the misunderstanding of taboos by such thinkers reveals their own confusion. According to MacIntyre, they misunderstood taboo rules as primarily negative prohibitions, rather than as merely the negative side of enabling prescriptions. He states: ‘They were unable … to envisage the possibility that both morality and rationality ought to be understood in a way which would make much of what they took to be morality appear as irrational and as arbitrary as the taboo customs of the Polynesians appeared to them.’⁵ For MacIntyre, modern moral utterance and practice can only be understood as a series of fragmented survivals from an older past. So for example, the deontological character of moral judgements is the ghost of conceptions of divine law, which are alien to the metaphysics of modernity. The insoluble problems which these ghosts generate for modern moral theorists will remain insoluble until their history and context is properly understood. MacIntyre states that the only true story

will be one which will both enable us to distinguish between what it is for a set of taboo rules and practices to be in good order and what it is for a set of taboo rules and practices to have been fragmented and thrown into disorder and enable us to understand the historical transition by which the latter state emerged from the former.⁶

The task MacIntyre undertakes in After Virtue and his subsequent work is to narrate what he considers to be the true story.

The loss of teleological modes of moral reasoning

The loss of any sense of rational enquiry into morality as taking place in a wider context or framework means we have no criteria by which to judge the gap between what we are and what we ought to be. According to MacIntyre’s account of history, what was eliminated by the eighteenth century was any concept of ‘man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos’. This left an apparently unbridgeable gap between the notion of morality having a definite content, and a certain notion of human nature in its basic or primitive state: that is, there was no way to relate coherently existing moral imperatives to the notion of human nature as it naturally existed because the teleological framework to relate them was abandoned. The ethical injunctions were supposed to nurture and educate human nature into its telos, and so these injunctions could not be derived in reverse from an appeal to the reality of human nature. Yet this is precisely what was attempted. MacIntyre writes:

The eighteenth-century moral philosophers engaged in what was an inevitably unsuccessful project; for they did indeed attempt to find a rational basis for their moral belief in a particular understanding of human nature, while inheriting a set of moral injunctions on one hand and a conception of human nature on the other which had been expressly designed to be discrepant with each other.⁷

In his book analysing MacIntyre’s critique of modernity and capitalism in particular, Peter McMylor concurs with MacIntyre on this point. He comments that the upshot of jettisoning any notion of ‘man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos’ was that: ‘No moral argument could move from factual premises to moral and evaluative conclusions. This is unsurprising since the intellectual material for such a move had been removed.’⁸

The abandonment of teleology lies at the heart of contemporary moral philosophy, which asks not ‘What sort of person am I to become?’ but ‘What rules ought we to follow and why ought we to obey them?’ As outlined in the taboo parallel, the lack of any coherent rational justification leads to a set of rules and principles that appear arbitrary. This is compounded by the lack of any historical context in debates about morality, for history is judged irrelevant to what are conceived of as abstract universal principles. Morality is thereby reduced to a set of rules and principles lacking context and it is in this form that it falls prey to the critics, notably Nietzsche, who argues that appeals to moral objectivity are in fact expressions of subjective will. MacIntyre depicts Nietzsche as a European Kamehameha II who dismisses all attempts to base morality on conscience, the categorical imperative, or moral sentiment, and abolishing natural rights and utility as fictions no longer worthy of being told.⁹ For Nietzsche, morality can be only what the individual will creates. Far from being able to make judgements about what we are and what we ought to be, we can only properly say that morality is whatever passes for morality; that is, justice is what the strong make it. Thus, the contemporary question – ‘what rules ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I THE PROBLEM OF MORAL PLURALITY
• PART II THE NATURE AND SHAPE OF CHRISTIAN HOSPITALITY
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index