Can we reason about the good?

Someone posted an AI generated image on X showing a 40-something single woman crying into a birthday cake she had to make herself. Which prompted this response:

I replied with:

Predictably it drew a rebuke:

This is a common mindset on social media and is worth picking apart a little. What it assumes is that there is no common nature to things and that therefore it is not possible to reason about the human good. Once this assumption is in place, others follow, including the belief that anyone who does reason about the human good does so maliciously.

It's not possible to move forward with this attitude. Aquinas once defined law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who has the care of the community". But if it is an act of malice to reason about the good, then law must be understood differently, perhaps as an external imposition. 

Origins?

Why might someone believe that it is not possible to reason about the human good? People who think this way see only one part of reality, namely a uniquely individual calling in life. Of course, this can and does exist. But what they fail to see is the nature we share, from which we can make general observations about the human good.

One possible reason for a person not recognising this shared nature is the influence of nominalism. Nominalism arose a long time ago in the Medieval era. I found the following treatment of it by Robert Reilly helpful:

This change started taking place in the late Middle Ages. William of Ockham is one of the most prominent thinkers who proposed this nominalist and voluntarist way of thinking, that was the obverse of Thomas Aquinas, and the synthesis of faith and reason that he had achieved.

The key to this is theological. As Aquinas said, God’s divine intellect is primary to the divine will. It’s the intellect that conceives, or knows, and it is the will that executes. The reason logos is primary, because it is reason in God’s essence, and will secondary or instrumental, is because it obeys the intellect.

Now, what William of Ockham does is he flips that relationship, he makes God’s will primary, and the divine intellect secondary. It is the will that decides, and there is nothing constraining the will, it can decide anything. The intellect is, then, just an executor, finding the best way for the will to reach its end, its decision, and it is unconstrained. William of Ockham was upset that this Pagan philosopher, Aristotle, who had infected Thomas Aquinas, was constraining the omnipotent God. And Ockham was going to set Him free, you see, by removing these restraints. But he had to do so at the price of reason and nature. Now that the will is primary and God can do anything, what happens to the essences of things?

In other words, things have natures, as Aristotle and Aquinas said, that let us know what they ought to be, what their telos, or end is. What makes a human being flourish, and become more human, and what doesn’t? What is good, and what is bad? Are there things we know through our knowledge of the thing’s nature, of man’s nature? Ockham says that we can’t know any of this, because there are no essences anymore.

[with nominalism]....the words you use for things....don’t relate to anything out there. There’s no correlation between the name you give things and what they are because you can’t really know what they are. There’s no order in nature, because there’s no nature. This is a terribly radical teaching, and you can see how this ontology of the will unmoors everything...There is nothing right or wrong in itself, other than God says it’s right. 

It is possible as well that the mindset derives, in part, from the expressive individualism embedded in modern culture. Robert Bellah defines this as follows:

Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.

In short, the emphasis is on each of us having a "unique core of feeling" that must be socially expressed. There is, again, no room here for reasoning more generally about the human good. After all, we cannot know what the unique core of feeling for billions of humans is. So we have no way of reasoning about what the good might be for each of them. We have to, in one sense, be indifferent to the good of others, as we cannot know it. There cannot be prudence or guidance or social norms or inherited wisdom or learning from past experience. There cannot be any kind of preferring one thing over another at the social or public level. There has to be a learned indifference, in which we do not even register the possibility that someone's life situation may be less than ideal, the assumption being "this is how the person is choosing to express themselves, therefore I must affirm it as legitimate for them". 

Let's say, though, that we do accept the existence of a shared nature. This does not in itself resolve the issue of reasoning about the human good. It is precondition rather than a solution.

There have been a number of approaches to connecting nature to morality in the modern period. In what follows, I'll attempt to sketch some of them, but obviously this is not a complete picture.

One radical approach has been to deny that nature provides any guidance for human behaviour. As a case in point, Yuval Noah Harari has argued that Charles Darwin changed our understanding of morals, because his theory undermined the idea that there are any purposes in nature. If nature has no purposes, then there is nothing that might be considered against nature. The end result is that anything goes:

A different approach was taken by the natural rights theorists. They did not want protections for the individual to be thought of as being granted by governments, but to be inherent and inalienable. This theory has been immensely influential in the modern world, but it has its limitations. It is a defensive approach to morality that sees a potential threat to individual life from governments and seeks to restrict how governments may act toward the individual. It does not, therefore, have a significant focus on how individuals themselves might guide their own behaviour and contribute to the social bodies that help constitute what the individual is. And, although the theory claims to rest on natural law, this has been done somewhat abstractly, with claims, for instance, that such truths are simply self-evident.

There have also been moderns who have sought to base morality on clear and distinct ideas that would be acceptable to all across denominational lines. They wanted a morality that could be grounded according to modern scientific principles. In doing so, they often tried to base their moral theories on some very basic observations about human nature, for instance, that people have a survival instinct and want to stay alive, or that people want to maximise pleasure and avoid pain, or that people have desires and prefer to have their own desires fulfilled rather than someone else's. Some of these thinkers accepted that this starting point led to very unconventional moral positions, but others tried to justify existing moral codes on the new foundations. 

These "scientific" moralities have not borne good fruit. They were too crudely reductionist; and they sometimes had too fixed an anthropology - they identified certain negative traits within human nature, such as people being greedy and selfish, and attempted to leverage these for pro-social ends. Sometimes, as well, the anthropology was based not so much on nature but on a fictional nature, such as Hobbes's theorising about a state of nature in which people begin as individuals and then contract (defensively) to form human societies. 

My own preferred option is necessarily more complex. It's an "order, frame, develop, maintain" approach to morality. The ordering is necessary because human nature has within itself the potential for both higher and lower expressions of who we are. This was a key aspect of the traditional Western understanding of the moral life, namely that we could act in ways that were either more noble or more base. There are qualitative differences, and so the lower has to be made subordinate to the higher. 

Framing is necessary because there is a tripartite order of being. Lawrence Auster explained this as follows:

The order of being means the tripartite order of existence in which we live: the natural order, the social order, and the divine order—the biological, the cultural, and the spiritual. Everything that exists is a part of one or more of those realms, with man in the middle, a part of them all and experiencing them all.

When we consider human flourishing we have to take into account these different orders, so that they are harmonised as much as is possible. It is better, if possible, if they work together rather than against each other. If, for instance, we were to think through what kind of moral norms should apply to family life, it would make little sense to ignore the biological distinctions between men and women, nor basic biological drives involving sexuality and reproduction; but there would also be a consideration of the spiritual, such as the virtue of fidelity and the significance of sexuality as a procreative act; and, finally, there would need to be a realistic understanding of some of the social considerations that apply to marriage and family life, such as the significance of a husband's social status, the need to provide certain kinds of social supports to the wife and so on.

What this means is that a morality has to be framed in such a way that the pieces fit together and the larger framework is able to hold. 

The "develop" aspect of morality acknowledges that we do have purposes given to us, in part, by our nature as men and women, and that part of the moral life is to develop in ways that allow us to give full expression to these purposes. If we are men, for instance, then one of our purposes is to develop the higher qualities of manhood, i.e., to fully express the higher aspects of the masculine, including in our roles as husbands and fathers. 

The "maintain" aspect recognises that one moral aim in life is to preserve our original integrity of being. This is a difficult task as we are all subject to entropy, i.e., that aspect of reality in which an ordered state declines into disorder or chaos. The traditional moral language of the West often reflected this aim of maintaining an integrity of being. We were to avoid being dissolute, dissipated, licentious, decadent, debauched, incontinent, promiscuous, profligate and abandoned. This is the moral sphere in which purity is valued, i.e., being unblemished or uncorrupted. This aspect of the moral life is little valued today, and is sometimes cast negatively as being a denial of fun or of life experience. But it should be understood very differently as holding together our ability to live more fully and freely as ourselves - as not losing any of our capacities and in having a higher level of control over what we choose to do. 

There is a final approach to morality that requires a person to have a religious worldview. It is one in which there is a sense that within the larger given nature of reality there is specifically a Logos, or a divine or sacred order. Again, this is a very longstanding tradition within Western thought. This order can be discerned through reason and revelation. There is an appeal to this approach in the declaration by the Catholic Church on sexual ethics called Persona Humana (1975):

there can be no true promotion of man's dignity unless the essential order of his nature is respected. Of course, in the history of civilization many of the concrete conditions and needs of human life have changed and will continue to change. But all evolution of morals and every type of life must be kept within the limits imposed by the immutable principles based upon every human person's constitutive elements and essential relations-- elements and relations which transcend historical contingency.

These fundamental principles, which can be grasped by reason, are contained in "the Divine Law--eternal, objective and universal- -whereby God orders, directs and governs the entire universe and all the ways of the human community, by a plan conceived in wisdom and love. Man has been made by God to participate in this law, with the result that, under the gentle disposition of Divine Providence, he can come to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth." This Divine Law is accessible to our minds.

Hence, those many people are in error who today assert that one can find neither in human nature nor in the revealed law any absolute and immutable norm to serve for particular actions other than the one which expresses itself in the general law of charity and respect for human dignity. As a proof of their assertion they put forward the view that so-called norms of the natural law or precepts of Sacred Scripture are to be regarded only as given expressions of a form of particular culture at a certain moment of history.

But in fact, Divine Revelation and, in its own proper order, philosophical wisdom, emphasize the authentic exigencies of human nature. They thereby necessarily manifest the existence of immutable laws inscribed in the constitutive elements of human nature and which are revealed to be identical in all beings endowed with reason.

One of my readers once framed modern politics in terms of how people responded to such a natural order:

I have long defined modern liberalism as the denial and the defiance of an immutable natural order of being, which traditionalist conservatism accepts and embraces along with the necessary constraints and trade-offs.

The transcendentals, such as truth, goodness and beauty, could also be included within this aspect of moral thinking.

One final point: I think it's a mistake to think only in terms of a finis ultimus - of the one ultimate end of human life. This is a worthy thing to ponder, but it seems better to me to recognise a range of life purposes. 

For example, if it is accepted that we have a given nature as men, then one purpose derived from this is to develop along the highest masculine lines, so that we are fully formed as men. But this too generates specific purposes: we will need to cultivate masculine virtues; to develop intellectually, physically and spiritually; to become wise and loving as fathers and husbands; to reassure and inspire those around us with the masculine strengths available to us and so on. 

And, if we accept a traditional anthropology, in which we are constituted in part by the social bodies we belong to, then manifold purposes flow from this as well. We must then have regard to the health of those social bodies, and contribute as best we can to them, whether this is family, local community, church or nation.