The Politics of Practical Reason

Why Theological Ethics Must Change Your Life

Mark Ryan

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608994663
  9781498212687
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621893172
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Ought we conceive of theological ethics as an activity that draws from a community's vision of human goodness and that has implications for the kind of person each of us is to be? Or, can students of the discipline map the ethical implications of what Christians confess about God, themselves, and the world while remaining indifferent to these claims? Habituated by modern moral theories such as consequentialism and deontology, Mark Ryan argues, we too often assume that Christian ethics makes no claim on the character of its students and teachers. It is rather like yet another department store within the shopping mall of ideas and ideologies to which advanced education provides access. By arguing that theological ethics is an activity by nature "political," the author endeavors to show us that to do Christian ethics is to be habituated into ways of talking and seeing that put us on a path toward the good. The author thus affirms the claim that theological ethics is a life-changing practice. But why is it so? This book endeavors to display a philosophical basis for this claim, by articulating the political character of practical reason. Through rigorous conversation with G. E. M. Anscombe, Charles Taylor, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Jeffrey Stout, Ryan provides an account of practical reasoning that enables us to rightly conceive theological ethics as a discipline that ought to change our lives.

chapter 1

Elizabeth Anscombe: Practical Reason as Political and Linguistic

The first business of this study is to establish clearly the aforementioned connection between three key concepts: moral anthropology or an account of human agency, practical reason, and politics. If this is, as I claim, the structure of an adequate account of practical reason, or one that avoids the distortions to which we are most susceptible, we must try to lay it out prior to considering its influence in theological ethics. Elizabeth Anscombe allows us to do just this.

In this chapter I will try to display the fundamental connection between the form of practical deliberation displayed in a moral theory and its requisite underlying account of human agency. Simply stated, theories of moral judgment are influenced by the way they conceive of practical deliberation, and accounts of practical deliberation, in turn, are both informed by and rest upon a conception of the psychology of agency. In order to articulate this basic conceptual connection between practical deliberation and its underlying anthropology, I will draw on Anscombe’s influential essay “Modern Moral Philosophy”1 and look as well to her book Intention. As we will see, Anscombe’s biting critique of modern moral philosophy in terms of its inadequate psychology leads her to defend the distinctive character of practical reason as compared to theoretical reason.

Anscombe asserts that the right kind of psychology is something an account of which no current philosophers are capable of providing, herself included. Yet in her critique of the going theories, rooted in great modern figures such as Hume, as well as in her careful study of intentions, I believe that we begin to see an outline of such a psychology.

In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe shows that certain conundrums raised by modern moral theories and their views of the moral life lead naturally to the theme of anthropology, or what she calls “the philosophy of psychology”—i.e., accounts of human agency. These conundrums, she further implies, cannot be addressed any other way. She argues that the sense of “moral” associated with “overriding obligation” is a vestige from a worldview no longer prevalent, and therefore in seeking to explain this sense of “moral” current theories are chasing after a ghost.2 Consequently, it is time to turn to more basic, psychological concepts such as those of human action and practical knowledge—i.e., philosophical psychology. In her book Intention, she gives an extended account of one component of a philosophical psychology—the intentions embodied in human actions—which informs how we understand practical reason itself.

In the first part of this chapter, I will examine the three theses Anscombe defends in “Modern Moral Philosophy.” The examination of these theses will take us through some of her meditations on problems raised by Hume regarding reason, motivation, and human desire. It will ultimately arrive at Sidgwick’s implicit account of “intention” and its relation to knowledge concerning the consequences of our actions. What I will highlight is that for Anscombe the relation between psychology and moral theories is best understood when we pay close attention to the “descriptions” embedded in our language and folkways.

In the next part, I will turn to Intention. Here Anscombe elucidates psychological concepts such as practical knowledge, practical reasoning, and, of course, intentions themselves. We will find that her treatment of these concepts, and in particular that of the form of description associated with intentional actions, provides a therapy for certain among the problems raised in her discussion of Hume and Sidgwick in “Modern Moral Philosophy.” My treatment of Intention here will thus help to clarify psychological problems relevant to moral theory. Her treatment of these concepts also shows that practical reason is distinctive and how.

By all this I hope to, first, locate a principle that will be useful as we turn to assess other thinkers, and ultimately from moral philosophy to theological ethics. This is that all ethics must recognize that it relies on accounts of human agency, and that how a thinker accounts for this can be key to understanding and assessing her work. In modern moral philosophy, anthropology came to play a more and more inconspicuous role. Therefore, the anthropologies implicit in such work were largely unexamined.3 Yet if we do not have a good enough account of practical reason in relation to moral psychology, our attempts to understand “morality” are bound to go astray. In the more polemical terms of Anscombe’s first thesis in “Modern Moral Philosophy,” moral theory should be “laid aside . . . until we have a more adequate philosophy of psychology . . . which we are conspicuously lacking.”4 I call this claim “Anscombe’s challenge.”

Second, and more important, I hope to begin to show that we can best recognize the distinctive form of practical reason by recognizing its connection to politics. Anscombe’s analysis of modern moral theories, especially “consequentialism,” shows that the notion of practical deliberation has been overtaken by abstraction and a theoretical model of reason. Her recovery of the “local” sense of practical reason is accomplished both by a more truthful moral psychology and by acknowledgement of the role of communal speech habits within practical reasoning. She thus helps provide the backdrop against which to read Hauerwas.

The Theses of “Modern Moral Philosophy”

In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe puts forward the following three theses: 1) “[I]t is not profitable at this time for us to do moral philosophy—that should be laid aside, at any rate, until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology”; 2) “[T]he concepts of ‘obligation’ and ‘duty’—moral obligation and moral duty— . . . ought to be jettisoned if psychologically possible”; 3) “[T]he differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick [1838–1900] to the present day are of little importance”—i.e., are inconsequential in relation to their similarities. In interpreting these three theses, I will demonstrate how they all show that moral psychology is an unavoidable component of a moral theory and that practical reasoning is grounded in a form of life.

Thesis 2: The Use of “Moral” and the Lack of Intelligibility

I will begin with the second thesis, both because doing so follows the order in which Anscombe actually proceeds and because the thesis addresses what she sees as the current state of philosophy.

Anscombe suspects that the term “moral” as we are accustomed to using it in order to issue a summary verdict has a profound problem: it is without content. After quickly dismissing the abilities of Butler, Kant, and Mill to provide an intelligible account of our modern use of the term “moral,” she offers an historical explanation. The sense of moral that implies a final judgment or verdict upon an action or policy is a survival from an earlier conception of the nature and origin of the world that we have since rejected. In particular, the reference to “obligation” and “duty” in our talk about what we ought to do is intelligible only in a context of general belief in God as a lawmaker—i.e., within such belief systems as Judaism, Stoicism, or Christianity. She finds that the failure to locate an equivalent of this sense of “moral” in Aristotle’s influential ethical philosophy highlights its cultural particularity. It is natural, she goes on, for a Jew to understand what she or he ought to do as a matter of obeying God’s law, but to bring the notion of being bound by law into Aristotelian language produces . . . a mouthful. In Anscombe’s rendition: “. . . that is ‘illicit’ which, whether it is a thought or a consented to passion or an action or an omission in thought or action, is something contrary to one of the virtues the lack of which shows a man to be bad qua man.”5 The unavoidable clumsiness of translation shows that Aristotle’s system had no need for such a concept.

Yet, even though our culture has largely left behind belief in a Divine law-giver, we have retained certain ways of talking deriving therefrom
—such as the sense of the term “duty” as an overriding concern.

Anscombe’s concern is partly with the efforts of theorists and partly also with a culture that has lost its traditional moorings. As regards the culture, Anscombe’s concern is that a lack of correspondence between our worldview and our ways of talking implies a lack of intelligibility respecting the latter. This gap between what we say and our larger networks of beliefs—symbolized by the empty character of “moral”—then reveals a lack of linguistic resources for giving truthful descriptions of our actions. As regards the moral theorists, when they set out to give sense to the concept of a “moral ought” using the means provided by their theories themselves, Anscombe suggests they tend to exacerbate the cultural problem rather than giving an intelligible account of the relation between our moral terms and their relation to our beliefs.

This I believe sheds light on Anscombe’s seemingly radical recommendations that the concept of a “moral ought” should be “jettisoned from the language . . . if psychologically possible.” One cannot strictly separate the beliefs that help us make sense of our actions and the actions themselves. Insofar as the adjective “moral” used to pronounce judgment on an action or policy lacks a conceptual home, it signifies a problem for our culture. Moral theories that at this point go on while neglecting this problem do so at their peril, and ours.

Thesis 1: Hume on the Logic of Moving from “Is” to “Ought” or
“The Naturalistic Fallacy”

Examining the objections Hume raised to moving from “is” to “ought” allows Anscombe to treat the problem posed by the concept of a moral ought in terms of its basic conceptual components. She particularly focuses on the relation between these components and how more complex concepts, or “descriptions,” depend upon other, comparatively fundamental ones. The nature of descriptions will become clearer as we move on.6

Hume’s objections allow Anscombe to trace the logical relations between descriptions that imply different levels of conceptual complexity. Such descriptions often describe human action and activities. The advantage Hume brings, if indirectly, is to allow the philosopher concerned with morality (“value”) to begin with more simple notions. Reflecting on the “logic” of moving from “is” to “ought” allows Anscombe to begin the quest for greater theoretical clarity on the subject matter to which the term “moral” pertains—i.e., human actions and passions. (This, in turn, leads ultimately to greater intelligibility for our cultural forms.)

The so-called “naturalistic fallacy” is based on Hume’s argument that it is logically illicit to pass from the judgment that something is the case, to a conclusion that something ought to be done—i.e., from “is” to “ought.” The problem has also been articulated in terms of a gulf between “facts” and “values.” While Anscombe claims to be unimpressed by Hume’s argument for such a position,7 she nevertheless believes that reflecting on Hume’s objections can be fruitful.

She uses the following rendition of a Humean claim to illustrate the points she sets out to make:

Suppose I say to my grocer “Truth consists either in relations of ideas, as that 20s. = ₤1, or matters of fact, as that I ordered potatoes, you supplied them, and you sent me a bill. So it doesn’t apply to such a proposition as that I owe you such and such a sum.”8

Anscombe notes that the relation between such facts as “I ordered potatoes, you supplied them, and you sent me a bill” and “I owe you such and such a sum” is an interesting one, and begs further attention. She calls this ...

Table of contents

• The Politics of Practical Reason
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• chapter 1: Elizabeth Anscombe: Practical Reason as Political and Linguistic
• chapter 2: Charles Taylor: Practical Reason as Becoming Articulate
• chapter 3: Stanley Hauerwas: Practical Reason as Performance
• chapter 4: Practical Reason, Justice, and Liberation
• chapter 5: Alasdair MacIntryre and Jeffrey Stout: Practical Reason as Traditioned
• Conclusion
• Bibliography